Will McCain Ruin Palin?

A reader writes:

If I were as big a Palin fan as you have admitted to being, I'd be pretty upset with John McCain right now.  Fallows put it best this morning; there's just no way anyone, even someone of considerable intellect and political skill, can come out looking good after being slingshot into the international spotlight so quickly.  The intricacies of national and international politics are just way too overwhelming, it takes months to years of careful study to be able to operate on that big a stage without making huge, potentially game changing gaffes.

John McCain just took one of the Republican party's top prospects (if not the top prospect) and shot her into a situation in which she (or anyone) is all but bound to fail, all for his own selfish hope that it might help him win this election.  

I'm about as big an Obama fan as you are for Palin, and if John Kerry had tapped him as his running mate following Obama's 04 convention speech, I'd have been furious.

I wouldn't say I have quite the same Palin-love that progressives had for Obama in '04 ... but yeah, I'm sure this is part of the reason I'm pulling so hard for her to succeed: She's a politician I've liked for a while who's been thrust onto the national stage perhaps before her time, and there's a chance she'll crash and burn in service to a losing Presidential campaign. But I can't say I didn't ask for it! As far back as the winter - in a post responding to Josh Patashnik's argument that in veep-picking, "far and away the most important question is: Is this somebody you want closely identified with your party brand for the next two decades?" -  I had this to say:

As far as the GOP's (rather thin) roster of rising stars goes, I think this argument would militate against picking Bobby Jindal and in favor of picking Sarah Palin. Jindal already has a national profile (and a movement-conservative cheering section), and having him as the whiz-kid Republican Governor of post-Katrina Louisiana is arguably better - both for the party and for him - than having him as the (very) junior partner in a weak Republican administration that's facing off against an ascendant Democratic Party. Palin, on the other hand, has no such national profile, and absent unforeseen developments is unlikely to obtain one so long as she's occupying a governor's mansion that's just south of Yellowknife. Like Jindal, she's a great political story, but it's hard to see how that story gets told unless the Palin brand gets taken national somehow - and it might be worth risking subjecting her to the "losing veep's curse" to give her a place on the national stage.

An Admission

At the moment, I'm probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you're reading my commentary.

Palin and McCain's Judgment

Andrew's more substantive attacks on the Palin pick have circled around the idea that this is a devastating indictment of McCain's judgment, since even if Palin helps put him over the top in November McCain will have triumphed by putting his own short-term political interests over the country's need for a steady hand on the tiller should he keel over during his first year in office. Well, maybe. Another way to look at it, though, is that Palin will only help McCain politically if she shows herself to be a quick study and a plausible vice president over the next sixty-six days; if she's as ludicrous a pick as Andrew thinks she is, then McCain will look like a fool and his already none-too-high chances of winning this election will drop lower still. If she's a Quayle-type choice or worse, the odds are good that she'll never occupy the Naval Observatory: She only helps him (and he needs help!) if she turns out to be a case study in his ability to size up political talent on the fly, and if that's how things shake out, nobody will be talking about how McCain put "country last" with his VP pick.

I would add, too, that there's a lot more to running a successful administration than having a President with decades of foreign policy experience. You wouldn't know it from listening to John McCain of late, admittedly, but that's because foreign policy experience is his trump card against Barack Obama, so he's playing it as often as he can. But an effective administration needs to be able to communicate and charm and finesse its way through difficulties, to appease its base and reach out to the middle, to talk fluently about kitchen-table issues and appear in touch with the hopes and fears of the average voter. This is not, to put it mildly, the sort of politics and governance that John McCain excels at. And consider, for a moment, the political landscape that he wakes up to every morning. He's running for the Presidency at a time when the Republican brand is in the toilet, with a party that seems unable to excite its hard-core supporters or woo swing voters, and a leadership - McCain included - that gets the heebie-jeebies when called upon to discuss any topic save terrorism, 9/11 and the Surge. Even if by some Jeremiah Wright-aided miracle he edges out Barack Obama, he'll limp into the White House as a John Major-in-the-making - an aging politician who won an election that belonged by rights to the other party, facing Democratic majorities in both houses, a media that will be primed to treat Senators Obama and Clinton as the default co-Presidents for the next four years, and a conservative base that's just waiting for an opportunity to turn on him. Does this sound like a recipe for a successful Presidency? And if it isn't, wouldn't it be better for McCain, who at present seems like the last candidate of a fading party and a dying generation, to sweep into Washington with a popular, dynamic, female politician as his junior partner, rather than a dull white male like Ridge or a Romney or a Pawlenty? And wouldn't it be better, frankly, for America as well?

Now maybe Palin isn't a dynamic leader in the making. Maybe she's Quayle meets Eagleton meets Geraldine Ferraro - the last gamble of a reckless politician who cares more about winning the news cycle than keeping his country safe. But I think it's worth reserving judgment, both about her and about what she says about McCain's judgment, until we've seen how she performs on the national stage.

Adama-Roslin '08

Jonathan Last comes through with the perfect pop-culture analogy.

Update: Except, as a reader notes, that Tigh-Roslin is even more perfect - though rather less reassuring.

All Class

For months and months, all through Hillary Clinton's losing campaign for the Presidency, my colleague Andrew Sullivan insisted over and over again that his furious anti-Hillary partisanship was in fact a defense of authentic feminism, since Hillary's ascension to the White House would represent the worst sort of pre-feminist, second-hand success - a woman marrying her way into power, that is, rather than attaining it on her own. Well, now John McCain has picked as his running mate a woman who embodies all the post-feminist virtues Andrew insisted were absent in Hillary Clinton's ascent - she's risen from working-class obscurity to govern a state dominated by an old boys' network (where the other prominent female politician is a classic legacy pick), while successfully juggling motherhood and her career and never, ever, piggybacking on any of her husband's achievements. (Though admittedly, Todd Palin would probably kick Denis Thatcher's ass in a snowmobile race.) Obviously, there are serious questions about the wisdom of the Palin pick, and as an Obama partisan Andrew has ever reason to go on one of his characteristic blogging tears against her candidacy. But given his primary-season insistence on his own credentials as a feminist, you'd think that Andrew would confine his attacks on Palin to critiquing her record and mocking her lack of experience, rather than, say, posting emails accusing her of being a bad mother for accepting the nomination, snickering over her children's names, and razzing her as a bimbo and a "trophy candidate."

Or, you know, not.

Sarah the Commoner

A very good point, from Nate Silver:

... we are in completely uncharted territory here. Palin is the most manifestly ordinary person ever to be nominated for a major party ticket. In this year of bittergate and Britney-gate and McCain-has-seven-houses-gate, that could conceivably be a virtue; it's certainly less tone-deaf than a selection like Mitt Romney would have been.

But Palin isn't merely playing at being ordinary, the way that Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) or George W. Bush (son of a president) or Hillary Clinton (wife of a president) might. She really, really comes across that way -- like someone who had won a sweepstakes or an essay contest. Her authenticity factor is off-the-charts good; her biography sings. But do Americans really want their next-door-neighbor running for Vice President, or rather someone who seems like one?

It's going to be an interesting fall ...

Palin vs. Obama

I'm getting a lot of email grief for writing: "There's a not-implausible case to be made that Sarah Palin has more experience than ... Barack Obama!" And maybe rightly so - blog in haste, repent at leisure. At the very least, there's no question that Barack Obama has spent more time preparing for high office than Sarah Palin: He's been prepping himself for a race like this since he first entered politics, in some sense, and he's just endured the rigors of a long Presidential campaign - which forces you, as Ezra rightly notes, to get up to speed on a host of issues that most state-level politicians don't spend very much time thinking about. So what was I thinking when I wrote the line above? Just this: That in terms of actual governance, as opposed to the mix of issue-studying and campaigning that Obama's been immersed in, Palin's resume and Obama's aren't wildly dissimilar. She ran her first race in 1992; he ran his first race in 1997. She was a city councilor for four years, then a mayor, lost a race for statewide office in 2002 then won the governorship in 2006. He was a state senator from Chicago for seven years, lost a House race in 2000, and then won the Illinois Senate race in 2004. The argument for her having more experience, then, would be relatively simple: She's been in government five years longer than Obama, and has twelve years of executive experience to his zero.

But yes, there's more than a touch of sophistry to this line of reasoning. I think you can take the argument that running a successful Presidential campaign qualifies you to be President too far, but where the Obama-Palin comparison is concerned, David Frum's point is obviously well-taken:

Yes, if I had been a Democratic donor back in 2006, I'd sure worry about whether Barack Obama had what it took to be president. That was before he took on the toughest political operation in America, before he beat Bill and Hillary Clinton, before he won 18 million primary votes.

Obama's nomination was not handed to him. He fought hard for it and won against the odds. "Qualifications" predict achievement. Once you have achieved, it doesn't matter what your qualifications are. Who cares whether the guy who built a big company from nothing didn't have much of a resume when he started? But if you are applying to run a big company built by somebody else, the resume matters ...

So let's concede the resume war to Obama. Then the question, going forward, is twofold: First, to what extent can Palin demonstrate that she's capable of closing the preparedness gap and the experience gap, by getting up to speed on a host of issues in a very short time and proving herself a capable actor on the national stage? (If she can't, her candidacy will rapidly turn into a joke, and McCain will have sacrificed one of his party's rising stars on the altar of his own ambitions.) Second, does the fact that McCain has "violate[d] the contemporary understanding of the role of the Vice Presidency," as Yglesias notes, by picking a leader-in-training rather than an experienced hand, undercut his argument that experience matters at the top of the ticket? My first instinct, as yesterday's post suggested, was that it doesn't - that if you're an old Washington hand yourself, you can afford to pick an understudy and groom them in office; that voters care vastly more about the President's experience than his running mate's qualifications; and that the more Democrats call attention to inexperience at the bottom of the GOP ticket, the more voters will find themselves thinking about the inexperience at the top of the Dem ticket.  But it's quite possible that I'm overly influenced by the blaseness that comes with never having seen a President die in office or resign from it during my lifetime, and that my comfort with the idea of filling the veep slot with a talented young politician who needs to learn on the job isn't (and shouldn't be) shared by the voting public.

The Experience Question, Cont.

Peter Scoblic for the prosecution, Noah Millman for the defense.

Update: See also Tyler Cowen:

Around the blogosphere you will see many left-wing writers criticizing Palin for lack of experience. Maybe this criticism is correct, but these commentators are falling into The Trap. Most American voters do not themselves know much detail about foreign affairs and their vision of an experienced leader does not require such knowledge. Was it demanded from Reagan? Doesn't everyone agree that Cheney and Rumsfeld knew plenty? Rightly or wrongly, many American voters will view Palin's stint as mayor of small town, her background in sports, her role in a beauty contest (yes), her trials raising teenage children, and her decision to stick with her priinciples and have a Downs Syndrome baby as all very valuable and relevant forms of experience. The more the word "experience" is repeated, no matter what the context, the more it will hurt Obama. Palin needs to appear confident and capable on TV and in the debates, but her ticket is not going to lose votes if she cannot properly spell Kyrgyzstan or for that matter place it on a map.

Palin and Pitchfork Pat

Hmmm - could McCain-Palin be the neocon-paleocon fusion ticket we've all been waiting for?

My Obama Problem (But Maybe Not Yours)

Now that Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she can speak fluently on the biggest stage of her life - one hurdle down, a lot more to go! - I thought I'd turn back to Obama's speech for a moment. Here's Isaac Chotiner, echoing Jon Cohn's comment that "the agenda Obama laid out tonight is bolder than anything Democrats have seriously proposed since the 1960s":

Indeed. I was (not unpleasantly) surprised by the boldness of Obama's proposals and the degree to which his campaign--and Democrats more generally--feel that they are free to move sharply to the left on economic issues and the role of government. As the speech wore on, Obama talked more about personal responsibility, but his fundamental message on the necessary role of the state in providing for its citizens struck me as remarkably bold, and rhetorically distinct from the Clinton years...

...Which leads me to a related point: I imagine this speech was frusturating for conservatives. All of Obama's moves to the center were symbolic, while the policies he actually outlined were decidedly liberal.

Yep, that's about right. In a related vein, Rod Dreher does yeoman's work comparing lines and phrases and paragraphs in Obama's speech to Gore's 2000 address and Kerry's '04 acceptance speech - and finds, as I more or less expected, that the nuts and bolts of last night's address were roughly the same kind of Democratic talking points that we've heard many times before.

Now that's not a huge surprise - he was addressing the Democratic Convention, obviously - and it may not be a bad thing politically. This is, after all, the most favorable political climate that Democrats and liberals have enjoyed in years if not decades - and yet Barack Obama is currently running behind the generic Democrat on the ballot. Given that reality, why shouldn't he present himself as an acceptable Dem, as a Gore or a Kerry with bigger plan and more charisma, rather than trying to play the post-partisan, national-unity candidate and run the risk of being unable to even consolidate his own base? If the public wants to vote for a generic Democrat, there's definitely a case to be made for just being a generic Democrat - especially when your biggest liability is your perceived exoticism and celebrity status.

But from where I sit, to the right of the political center, Obama the generic Democrat is a big disappointment. He started this campaign with two promises: That he'd tell us what we needed to hear, rather than what we wanted to heart, and that he wouldn't be captive to the old left-right divide in American politics. But there were no tough choices presented in last night's speech, no hard truths told. There was just the promise that we can have it all: Energy independence (within ten years, no less!), universal health care, an army of new teachers, tax cuts for the middle class, the working class, and the upper-middle class, zero capital gains taxes on small business owners, a perpetually solvent safety net, plus a dose of protectionism - and all of it paid for by (unspecified) spending cuts, and tax hikes on just five percent of America. Meanwhile, the speech's concessions to conservatism were largely pro forma - an acknowledgment that fathers matter, that programs can't solve every problem, and that government "can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework" - and its proposals for common ground (reduce unwanted pregnancies, keep AK-47s out of the hands of gang members, etc.) were equally thin. 

Again, if you're a liberal, none of this is going to sour you on Obama's speech, or on the candidate: Why should he concede anything to the Right, you might say, given the disasters of Bushism, and given that the political wind is finally blowing liberalism's way? Which is fair enough. But for those who aren't liberals, but who have been drawn, in varying ways, to Obama's transformational promise anyway, his claim to stand for "new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time" looks a lot more hollow today than it did a year ago.

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

The Experience Question

Obviously, it's a potentially potent problem for Palin, especially where foreign policy is concerned. But I'm not sure Andrew wants to be skating out onto this ice:

The first criterion for a veep - and I'm simply repeating a truism here - is that they are ready to take over at a moment's notice. That's especially true when you have a candidate as old as McCain. That's more than especially true when we are at war, in an era of astonishingly difficult challenges, when the next president could be grappling with war in the Middle East or a catastrophic terror attack at home. Under those circumstances, we could have a former Miss Alaska with two terms under her belt as governor. Now compare McCain's pick with Obama's: a man with solid foreign policy experience, six terms in Washington and real relationships with leaders across the globe.

One pick is by a man of judgment; the other is by a man of vanity.

She may be a fine person, but she's my age, she has zero Washington experience, and no foreign policy expertise whatsoever.

McCain has just told us how seriously he takes the war we are in. Not seriously at all.

Read this once, and it sounds persuasive. Read it twice, though, and it starts to boomerang. Yes, Joe Biden has more experience than Sarah Palin. But there's a not-implausible case to be made that Sarah Palin has more experience than ... Barack Obama! (As Jeff Goldberg notes, she has more executive experience than Obama, McCain and Biden combined.) It's possible that adding Palin to the ticket will take away McCain's ability to attack Obama's inexperience. But it's also quite possible that any conversation that ends up happening about whether Sarah Palin is ready to be Vice President after ten years in local government and two years in statewide office can only end up hurting the Obama campaign - by raising, indirectly, the Democratic ticket's biggest liability.

Update: Clearly, the Obama camp disagrees, because they're going there right out of the box.

Grand New Palin

Noah Millman likes the pick:

Count me as one of the people who was deeply underwhelmed by Obama's speech last night, and underwhelmed as well by the entire convention. McCain's choice of Sarah Palin (assuming it's confirmed) is a brilliant first counter-stroke. She helps the ticket on so many different fronts: she gives women who are angry about Hillary being passed over another reason to vote McCain; she gives fence-sitting whites who feel they "ought" to vote for Obama because of the historic nature of his candidacy an excuse to find history on the other side; she burnishes McCain's credentials as an independent, reform candidate; she restores McCain's credibility on energy and environmental issues, where Obama personally feels most comfortable going on the attack; she will generate enthusiasm among evangelicals among whom Obama was hoping to make inroads; she absolutely locks down the gun-rights vote (where McCain needed to play a bit of defense against Barr); she helps McCain in the Mountain West (Colorado and Montana) where he cannot afford to lose any states (except New Mexico); she neutralizes Biden in the debates (if he comes out zinging, he'll seem ungentlemanly); and, most important, she makes McCain seem bold, future-oriented, and in control of his Administration, where Obama has seemed timid, defensive and unable to control his own party.

I'm pretty excited, I have to say. This could, of course, turn out to be an enormous debacle if she isn't ready for prime time. But for now, Sarah Palin looks like a perfect face for the sort of Republican Party I want to support: She's a pro-life working mom; she's tough on corruption and government waste without being a doctrinaire Norquistian on taxes; she's more supportive of gay rights than the current GOP orthodoxy (while stopping short of backing same-sex marriage); she has a more conservationist record than your typical GOP pol, but supports drilling in ANWR; she's an evangelical but she isn't a southern evangelical ... and if McCain loses, she can run at the top of a Palin-Jindal ticket in 2012!

With apologies to Andrew: Know hope.

Obama's Night (II)

So far, the reaction to the speech seems to be breaking down along partisan lines  - which makes me mistrust my own "it was a letdown" response, but ought to make Obamaphiles mistrust their enthusiasm. I think Peggy Noonan's tempered but ultimately negative take is the best thing I've read so far; I also think she's right to say that we won't be able to judge the speech's effectiveness for days or weeks, as the impact of this convention, and next week's GOP rebuttal, slowly sinks in.

Palin??

Well, if so, I guess I can't complain anymore about the McCain campaign playing it safe ...

Obama's Night

Only a moral cretin could fail to be inspired when the speech rolled around, in its closing moments, to Martin Luther King Jr. But that inspirational moment was just a moment, and I think that the pundits and advisers who urged Barack Obama to temper his soaring rhetoric and produce a more workmanlike, down-to-earth speech did him a disservice: The speech had good lines and good sections, but for the most part it felt surprisingly banal and jury-rigged, and it suffered throughout from a failure to cohere around any single theme or rhetorical style. There was a lot of liberal boilerplate (recruit an army of teachers, tax the rich, etc.) that could have fit easily into any Democratic acceptance speech of the last twenty years; there was a series of swings at John McCain that, while often effective, seemed more appropriate to a veep's speech than to an address by a Presidential nominee; and then there was a half-hearted attempt to return, in the speech's final third, to the themes of post-partisanship and national unity that defined his '04 convention speech. The whole thing felt schizophrenic - part Clintonian laundry-list, part McCain-bashing polemic, part "beyond red and blue" peroration - and watching it I was left with the impression that Obama would have been better off just sticking with the high-flown inspirational style that got him here, and waiting for the debates to recast himself as the meat-and-potatoes guy who can throw a punch and get down into the policy weeds. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and you can see what Obama and his speechwriters were trying to do - namely, have the best of both worlds, by being soaring and substance-oriented, combative and post-partisan. But the substance was predictable, thin, and rife with pandering, the combativeness felt faintly inappropriate, and the speech didn't soar nearly as much as it should have. It was a historic evening, for Obama and for America, and there were moments that gave me shivers just watching on TV - but if you didn't go in sold on the Democratic nominee, I think it was ultimately something of a letdown.

My Pick For Veep

A friend writes: "If you think a Romney pick would be a mistake and that McCain can do better, I think you have some obligation to give your faithful readers a name." Which is fair enough. Since I still think, even now that the polls have tightened, that the race is Obama's to lose, I'm in the camp that views "playing it safe" - whether Romney counts as "safe" or not  - as the wrong tack for McCain to take. For a few months now, I've inclined toward Sarah Palin as a gamble worth taking: She's a charming unknown with a great story, both politically and personally, and the potential upside of having the media fawn all over her for a week or two might outweigh the risk that she undercuts McCain's experience narrative and/or gets carved up by Biden in a veep debate. (Especially since I suspect Biden is more likely to come off as an obnoxious bully if he's up against a likable woman.) However, I assume that the possible scandal involving Palin's brother-in-law has taken her out of the running - if she was ever being considered at all - and I'm not sure that any of the other dark horse possibilities have nearly so much potential upside, not least because most of them (from Ridge and Lieberman to Meg Whitman, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Condi Rice) are pro-choice or something like it. When I think of the veep pick purely in terms of the party I'd like to see the Republicans become, I suppose I'd be happiest with Tim Pawlenty or Eric Cantor, both of whom seem much more in sync with the broad thesis of Grand New Party than your average Republican pol, even if neither of them are running around screaming about wage subsidies or the weighted-student formula. So out of the options on the table, I guess I'm pulling for one of them. But from a purely political point of view, I think McCain could use a pick that sparks more media excitement than either Pawlenty or Cantor probably would; I'm just at a loss to come up with someone who fits that bill and passes my own ideological litmus tests.
 

How Safe Is Romney?

Regarding my post on McCain and veepstakes, Andrew writes:

McCain-Romney = "do no harm"? Not in the part of the universe I'm aware of.

Just to clarify, I think that picking Romney would be a mistake, and that the GOP ticket would be weaker for his presence on it - for some (though not all) of the reasons David Frum's friend lays out here, and for others as well. But Romney doesn't come with anything like the risks and/or unknowns associated with some of the other names that have been floated as potential veeps - names like Joe Lieberman, like Tom Ridge, like Bobby Jindal, like Meg Whitman. True, picking a Mormon might depress evangelical turnout, but a McCain-Romney ticket wouldn't risk a serious intra-party civil war the way McCain-Lieberman or McCain-Ridge might. True, Romney is an epic flip-flopper, but he isn't an ideological black box with no governmental experience like Whitman. True, he's got a phoniness problem, but he isn't twelve years old like Bobby Jindal. True, he has some rich-guy liabilities ... but he has a real record of achievement both in and out of government, he isn't a D.C. insider, he won't get embarrassed by Biden in a debate the way, say, a Sarah Palin might, and his strengths dovetail reasonably well with McCain's message, as Yuval Levin argues. Again, I'm no Romney fan and I think McCain can do better (though I'm damned if I know who he should pick - or who he has picked, I guess I should say at this point). But Mitt, for all his slew of weaknesses, is much more of a known and tested quantity than most of his apparent competition for the slot, and I think that's enough to make him one of lower-risk options available, even if he's considerably lower-reward as well.

Biden's Speech

He bellowed, he rambled, he stumbled over his words - but he got the job done. It wasn't as smooth as Clinton, but it was more of the anti-GOP red meat this convention desperately needed. All in all, tonight was a reminder - the first in what seems like a while - that this is an election that the Democrats really, really ought to be able to win.

The Natural

So Bill Clinton, tonight as always, makes it all look sooooo easy. But here's the thing: America is a country of 300 million people and just two political parties. You would think that out of all those millions, the parties would be able to find at least a few dozen politicians with a Clintonesque gift of gab - at least enough to fill up four nights' worth of prime-time speaking gigs once every four years. And yet, and yet ...

The Weaker Party

Generally, I don't think much of the persistent liberal handwringing about how much tougher and meaner the Republicans are, how much better the GOP tends to be at political hardball, etc. etc. But watching this convention so far, I'm inclined to agree with Ezra Klein:

Say what you will about the 2004 Convention, it had a theme. Conversely, the first night of the 2008 Democratic Convention had Michelle Obama bring the warm and fuzzies, Ted Kennedy calling forth tears and hankies, and Jim Leach speaking quietly and pedantically without any serious promotion from the Obama campaign. The second night of the 2004 Convention saw Barack Obama tearing apart the arena. In 2008, we had Mark Warner with a well-crafted speech that fell flat because it was an attack structure that refused to name the politician it was attacking. You had Hillary Cinton giving a powerful address, but it was an address that was broadly aimed at problems in the Democratic Party, not the problems with the Republican Party.

The first two days of the convention were wasted, or seemed so from my vantage point. Tonight, Joe Biden will rip into McCain. And tomorrow, Obama will do whatever he does. Then on Friday, at noon, John McCain will announce his vice presidential nominee, strangling any convention bounce in the crib. Then the Republican Convention will begin, and you can be assured that they will remember Barack Obama's name. They will remember how to make fun of him, how to mock his celebrity and inexperience. And the media will not cover Ron Paul's protesters with the vigor or attention they gave to Hillary Clinton's diehards. Instead, they will cover four days of straight attacks on Barack Obama, culminating with a grave address about sacrifice and service from John McCain. And unless Obama's convention makes a sharp turn tonight and tomorrow, they will have done nothing to soften the impact of these attacks and themes or create a counternarrative for the media to cover.

The Democrats are holding their convention at a time when the GOP nominee is reasonably popular, his party is reasonably unpopular, and the current President, a Republican, is extremely unpopular. It's easy to say when you don't have to actually organize the damn thing, but I think that they could be doing a far better job than they are so far of using Denver as a four-day clinic on how John McCain will be just as bad as Bush, if not much, much worse. There's still time to make hay on this front, obviously, but so far I think the convention has been a big fat missed opportunity.

McCain-Excitement '08?

It's worth noting that by playing it safe and vanilla with his VP choice, Barack Obama has given John McCain a real opportunity to make a splash with his pick: A surprising selection, whether of the Jindal-Palin sort, the Lieberman variety, or something more left-field still, would look even more striking in contrast with Obama's "generic Democrat" choice of a running mate. I don't expect the McCain camp to go this route: I think they're probably feeling pretty good about their position at the moment, and the same "first, do no harm" impulse that produced Obama-Biden will probably produce McCain-Pawlenty or McCain-Romney. (I imagine that the chances of a high-risk, high-reward one-term pledge have likewise dropped toward zero.) But by picking Biden, Obama left a lot of free media coverage on the table, and there's a case to be made that McCain's veep choice should be made with an eye toward scooping it up.

The Obamessiah Revisited

Jon Chait claims I'm misreading him:

Ross Douthat sarcastically points out that many people do, in fact, regard Barack Obama in overheated or even quasi-messianic terms. I agree with this. What I don't understand is why Douthat thinks this is a rebuttal to the argument in my latest TRB column about Obama and the charge of messianism. Since my argument apparently was not clear enough, I'll sum it up:

1. The Cult of Obama is no stranger or kitschier than the Cult of Reagan or the (short-lived) Cult of George W. Bush. Indeed, Bush, unlike Obama, literally believed he was called by God to lead the world. Ross is more theologically inclined than I am, so I'll leave it to him to decide whether that's less messianic than Obama's primise to ameloriate the effects of climate change upon global sea levels.

2. The notion that Obama is holding himself up as a God-like figure rests upon a series of distortions. 

3. It's true that a lot of Obama supporters have unrealistic expectations of what he could accomplish as president, but that is not a good reason to vote against him.

I appreciate the clarification. I think that Chait might have made his original argument just slightly more difficult to misinterpret if he hadn't kicked it off by writing that "the image of Obama as a messianic figure rests upon an endlessly repeated litany of bogus particulars," and then cited, as two of his four examples of the "particulars" in question, the claim that people faint at Obama rallies, and the notion that Oprah Winfrey once referred to Obama as "The One." These aren't examples of the Democratic nominee "holding himself up as a God-like figure" - they're examples of other people treating him as some sort of God-like figure, and by trying to debunk them at the outset of his piece Chait gave the strong impression that he intended to take on a lot more than just the question of whether Obama himself has a messiah complex.

I would also add that while Chait is of course correct that other politicians have inspired icky messiah-like adulation, his examples - Reagan and the post-9/11 Dubya - don't necessarily make the current wave of over-the-top Obamaphilia appear quite as benign as he thinks. I'm certainly no defender of Reagan kitsch or Bush busts, but it's worth noting that the reason Reagan inspires such ardor among conservatives is that they think he was an amazing, world-historical President - the whole "bringing down Communism" thing and all that. The shorter-lived cult of George W. Bush, likewise, blossomed at a time when conservatives (and some liberals) were persuaded that Bush was acquitting himself impressively in the face of the world-historical challenge posed by Islamist terror. As Ramesh points out, the lionization of Obama is weirder than these cases because of how little the Democratic nominee has actually accomplished to date - unless, I suppose, you think of beating Hillary Clinton as a world-historical achievement, in which case it makes a certain sense. That possibility aside, the Obama cult is the equivalent of messiah-hungry right-wingers making busts of Bush in 1999 - which would have been odd, to say the least.

As for Chait's third point, that the over-the-top adulation he inspires isn't a reason to vote against Obama, I would associate myself with Ramesh again: "The point of the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama as a celebrity is not to make people vote against him in disgust at his supporters. It is to suggest that once the halo is taken off him, he isn't a very compelling figure." (Though I would also add that a politician whose supporters overstate his virtues so drastically before he even takes office is being set up for failure in ways that your typical Presidential candidate isn't.) And as for Chait's claim, near the end of his original piece, that liberals "don't like personality cults, which is why you never see any bronze busts of Clinton in anybody's den" - I mean, seriously? A couple of guys named JFK and RFK say hello ...

The Pathos of Bill Clinton

These comments will get the most attention, but I wanted to highlight this quote, from a Byron York conversation with a Friend of the Clintons:

I asked whether Team Clinton appreciated Michelle Obama's mention in last night's speech.  "Yes, the line was appreciated," I was told.  "It was only one sentence, it could have been a bit more than one sentence, but it was appreciated."  

"However," the source continued, "we had a two-term president who left with a 65 percent approval rating, who Barack Obama forgot to mention when he described Ronald Reagan as a transformational figure, and who was not mentioned at all by Michelle Obama."

It isn't the bitterness about not being mentioned by the Obamas that's striking; it's the insistence on reminding us all exactly where Clinton's approval rating stood when he left office. At 65 percent! Higher than Truman! Higher than Eisenhower! As high as Reagan and Roosevelt! We'll never be allowed to forget it: Clinton will be on his deathbed, with the obituarists circling, and he'll reach out and grab a flunky's wrist and hiss: Remind the Times that I was up over 65 percent, dammit! And the Times will duly remind its readers of the figure. And nobody, then as now, will care.

Dept. of Head-Scratchers

Like Jon Chait, I don't have the foggiest idea where someone would get the strange, strange notion that Barack Obama is being depicted with language and images usually reserved for a millenial cult leader. Obviously, those fiendish Republicans have made the whole thing up!

Obama-Dullsville '08

I was feeling a little bad that I'd abandoned Washington (and this blog) during the week when Barack Obama was due to announce his running mate, but I shouldn't have worried, since he went and made the dullest of all possible Vice-Presidential picks. Not that Joe Biden is personally boring - he has a major tragedy and a deeply bizarre scandal in his past, and a garrulous barfly persona that makes him by turns entertaining and insufferable, but rarely dull. But as a political figure, he's one of the least interesting veep picks in recent memory. He's white, male, and late in middle age, and he looks like Central Casting's idea of a U.S. Senator. He doesn't embody the future of his party, or hearken back to its glory days: He isn't a rising star or a grizzled veteran of Presidencies past. He's an insider who's never been that far inside (Senator is basically the only job he's ever held), and his Senate record is defined largely by its middlingness - he's neither wildly impressively nor strikingly undistinguished as a legislator, and he blends extremely easily into the Levin-Dodd-Leahy ranks of Dem elder statesmen. He doesn't offer Obama a chance to expand the map - his native state is small, blue and boring, and he hasn't generated any political excitement outside Delaware in twenty years - or co-opt an up-for-grabs constituency (the notion that he's going to be the candidate of Joe Lunchbucket seems mildly implausible, working-class roots or no), or mollify those Democrats who are still wary of their nominee. As far as the politics of the pick goes - and again, his personality is another matter - Biden is unlikely to alienate anyone, and unlikely to attract anyone either.

This doesn't mean he's a bad choice for Obama; indeed, his boringness is no doubt precisely what recommended him. And Poulos is right that there are worse qualities in a veep than being a political party's "best second-rate career politician." (Certainly, having a second-rate career pol as your veep nominee makes way more sense than nominating one for the Presidency itself, as the Dems managed to do the last time around.) But from the point of view of the pundit class, there's very little of interest to be said about a pick that takes the "first, do no harm" principle of running-mate selection nearly all the way to its logical extreme.

Gone Fishin'

I'm headed off for a (truncated) vacation, so posting will be light-to-nonexistent until early next week - you'll have to go elsewhere, alas, for instant reaction when Obama, desperate to reverse his slide in the polls, picks Joe Lieberman (!!) as his running mate. When I get back, I hope to respond to a thoughtful critique of Grand New Party from my former Atlantic Media colleague Conn Carroll, but for now I'll direct you to Reihan's response, and to this post on related themes as well.

Also, if you see one movie this week, make it Tell No One. That is all.

Tippecanoe and Lieberman Too

Ron Brownstein, fresh off pondering Obama and McCain's potential for bipartisan governance in the latest Atlantic, explains why bipartisan tickets are a bad idea:

... only two presidents have actually taken the leap of choosing a vice president who was not firmly attached to their party. And their experiences suggest that in practice, a fusion ticket is the wrong means to a worthwhile end.

For starters, Obama or McCain would probably see their life insurance premiums soar if they made such a selection. The two previous presidents who choose running mates not clearly identified with their party both died within weeks of taking the oath of office. The aged William Henry Harrison, a Whig elected in 1840, died of pneumonia one month into his term; Abraham Lincoln was assassinated six weeks after his second inauguration in 1865.

Each man's death elevated to the presidency a vice president not solidly committed to the program of the deceased president's party. Over time it turned out that the new president was, in fact, closer to the opposition party in which his roots were planted. Perhaps this should not have been a shock, but in each case it provoked a political civil war.

Brownstein goes on to recount the cautionary tales of John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, whose presidencies foundered amid vicious conflict with the party they technically represented, but didn't really belong to. God willing, a Vice President Lieberman wouldn't end up thrust into the Presidency, but the fates of the Tyler and Johnson Administrations do make for cautionary tales as McCain ponders his choice.

I would add, though, that Brownstein's analysis offers a reasonable case for a pro-lifer to actually feel at least slightly better about a McCain-Lieberman ticket than about, say, a McCain-Ridge (or McCain-Rudy!) pairing. Lieberman's record on domestic issues and partisan affiliation more or less guarantee that he would only succeed McCain if McCain died in office, and the examples of Tyler and Johnson, as well as common sense, suggest that in that eventuality he wouldn't be embraced as the GOP's standard bearer for 2012. As veep, his most likely role would be as a Cheney-style partner in power, with a strong foreign policy portfolio and no plausible post-Administration ambitions of his own. By picking Ridge and Rudy, by contrast, McCain would be selecting a semi-plausible successor figure, and one with the capacity, however small, to move the GOP in a pro-choice direction in a way that a Vice President Lieberman almost certainly couldn't. Not that McLieberman isn't still a bad idea, mind you - but from a pro-life perspective, McRidge and McRudy seem a whole lot worse.

The Case of Jerome Corsi

Redeeming Dubya, Revisited

And so it begins: Fareed Zakaria only wants to redeem the second-term, realist-friendly Bush; Edward Luttwak, though, goes the whole Truman. Next month, David Frum and Robert Kagan take their turns at bat. It'll take a bit longer for Thomas Friedman to bite, of course, but give it time ...

Above His Pay Grade?

Andrew tries to defend Obama's response to Rick Warren's abortion question at the Saddleback Forum by suggesting that that the Democratic nominee was being asked about ensoulment, or the nature of conception. But Warren, to his credit, didn't pose a metaphysical question, or a biological one. He asked a legal question: "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?"  Obama tried to dodge by saying that from a "theological perspective" or a "scientific perspective" the issue is "above his pay grade." But Warren asked a more narrow question, and one that any politician who votes on abortion laws should be able to answer. And of course, as a supporter of Roe and Casey, Obama does have an answer: He thinks that a baby acquires rights when it's born - well, perhaps depending on how and why it happens to be born - and lacks them at every juncture before birth. He just didn't want to come out and say it.

Not-So-Isolationist America

Abe Greenwald, on America's conduct toward Georgia:

Victim status doesn't get you what it used to. There was a time when an American friend or a strategically critical state under attack got more than color commentary from the White House and a boat full of Ace bandages. When Russia rolled into Afghanistan in 1979 we didn't give Afghans our sympathy; we gave them guns-big ones. When Saddam tried to annex Kuwait, we went in and sent him back home. Today a real invasion will get a symbolic vote, a high profile condemnation, and a Facebook group.

But it's the old America that friends and states with democratic aspirations remember, and they continue in vain to appeal to us. I am currently in Azerbaijan and if I've been asked once I've been asked a hundred times: "What does America think about the Armenian occupation of our country?" Whether it's a reporter or a graduate student doing the asking, their desperation is a little heartbreaking and I answer honestly: "You're conflict isn't even a blip on our radar." Inevitably they respond: "Will you write about it when you get back home?" "Yes, I will," I tell them. This provides some visible hope. Luckily they don't go on to ask me if such attention will make any difference.

Armenians are not the only concern of Azeris these days. They, like Georgians, live in a post-Soviet territory. Their capital city, Baku, is the starting point for the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline-the only oil route out of the Caspian that bypasses Russia. It goes without saying that this is a conflict on Moscow's radar. The Deputy Foreign Minister told me that since last week's Russian aggression, he feels like it's 1920 again. 1920 is when Azerbaijan's two-year break from oppression gave way to seventy years of Soviet rule. 1920 also heralded a period of American isolationism. I agree with the Deputy Foreign Minister. It does feel like 1920 again.

Greenwald's right, of course, that there's something tragic about the hopes that small countries repose in the idea of an all-powerful United States swooping in to solve all their problems. But the tragedy is that a unipolar world breeds these kind of unrealistic expectations for what American power can plausibly do for the Azeris; it's not that the United States has grown too soft and weak to actually swoop in and solve the problems bedeviling every small state and put-upon people. And it takes a strange view of global politics, to put it mildly, to accuse America - a power that's presently conducting massive counter-insurgency operations in not one but two strife-torn Muslim-majority countries, while patrolling the world's sea lanes, maintaining garrisons from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim, engaging in delicate counterproliferation efforts in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, and running secret anti-terror missions in God knows how many countries - of lapsing into 1920s-style "isolationism" because it's unwilling to simultaneously police every border dispute in the Caucuses.

Locke, Machiavelli and Rick Warren

Rick Warren, who's about to interview Obama and McCain, gets interviewed by our own Jeff Goldberg:

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion. Faith is simply a worldview. A person who says he puts his faith on the shelf when he's making decisions is either an idiot or a liar. It's entirely appropriate for me to ask what is [the Presidential candidates'] frame of reference.

To which Andrew splutters:

The entire basis for Western secular government, which rests on the capacity of people to distance absolute truth from political affairs, is based on idiocy or lies? I wonder if Warren has ever read Locke, or Hobbes, or Machiavelli or would even understand the term secularism if t knocked him square off his pedestal.

You know, I can pretty much guarantee that Andrew has read a lot more of Locke, Hobbes and Machiavelli than Rick Warren - and of any relevant political philosopher you care to name, for that matter. Yet oddly, the bumptious Warren seems to have a stronger grasp of what separation of church and state has actually meant in the American political tradition, both historically and philosophically, than my vastly more erudite colleague.

No Party For Pro-Choicers?

Nicholas Beaudrot (along with several emailers) wants to know why I'm calling out the Democrats for being rigid and unyielding on abortion when the Republicans have just as rigid a posture on the issue, if not more so. Certainly he's right about the two parties' respective platform language; on the other hand, I think that some of what Beaudrot describes as the Democrats' bigger tent on abortion (the presence of notional pro-lifers in the House and Senate leadership, for instance) is just a function of the fact that the political action on abortion tends to happen on ground that's extremely favorable to pro-lifers, because that's the only ground where the Supreme Court allows legislation of any sort. So yes, there are more Democrats who vote for partial-birth abortion bans, for the born-alive laws, and for limits on government funding of abortion than there are Republicans who vote against the pro-life cause on these issues. But saying that the Democrats are a big-tent party on abortion because they tolerate members who vote against partial-birth abortion is like saying that the Republicans are a big-tent party on the environment because they tolerate members who would vote against, say, dumping radioactive waste in drinking water: It implicitly accepts a very pro-choice reading of what counts as the middle on abortion, and what counts as the extremes.

Such a reading of the abortion issue is, of course, the law of the land, thanks to Roe and Casey, which is why the real action on abortion happens in court appointments and the Presidential elections that produce them. And on that terrain, I do think that there's slightly more space for pro-choice politics in the GOP than there is space for pro-life politics in the Democratic Party. The most important abortion votes that the "pro-life" Harry Reid has cast have been his votes against John Roberts, Sam Alito, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas; no pro-choice Republican Senator took a similar stand against Bill Clinton's high court nominees, needless to say. Meanwhile, it's true that the Republican Presidential primary is inhospitable to pro-choice candidates, but the reverse is true in spades: It's awfully hard to imagine a reliably pro-life Democrat getting the kind of traction that Rudy Giuliani temporarily enjoyed, and even poor daft Dennis Kucinich felt the need to flip-flop on abortion when he ran for President in 2004. Likewise, it's hard to imagine Barack Obama toying with the idea of a staunchly pro-life running mate, the way John McCain seems bent on toying with the idea of Tom Ridge (or even Joe Lieberman) as his veep. And serious GOP presidential contenders generally keep the pro-life lobby at arm's length to a much greater extent that Dems do with NARAL and Planned Parenthood.

There are good political reasons for this disparity: When the abortion debate turns from specific restrictions to the question of whether to uphold or overturn Roe, the ground shifts in the Democrats' favor. But it's a disparity nonetheless: When the stakes are highest and the potential consequences for abortion law are sweeping, as opposed to marginal, the GOP tends to have a weaker litmus test (though a stronger one than the party used to have) on the issue than the Democrats.

Of course how you approach this question depends in large part on your personal biases about abortion. If you're like me, and think that any middle-ground, "compromise" position on abortion would have to entail returning control over abortion policy to the legislative branch, and implementing, at the very least, more European-style restrictions on second and third-trimester abortions, then the GOP looks like a bigger-tent party than the Democrats. But if you're a pro-choicer who believes that the Roe-Casey settlement is already a middle-ground take on abortion - a sensible-centrist alternative to the anti-abortion extremists who would have the government ban the practice and the pro-abortion extremists who would have the government actively promote it - then I suppose that yes, Democrats are going to look like the bigger-tent party.

In any case, the main point of my original post wasn't to argue that the Democrats are way more inflexible than the Republicans; it was just to highlight the Dems' inflexibility in the context of claims from figures like Douglas Kmiec that it's possible to advance a serious pro-life agenda within the Democratic tent. I don't think that there's really any pro-choice equivalent to the handwringing that regularly takes place among pro-life Catholics (and evangelicals, to a lesser extent) over whether they can legitimately vote Democratic, and it was that handwringing that I was addressing - by arguing that yes, pro-lifers can legitimately vote for Democrats, but that such a vote shouldn't be accompanied by self-deception about the compromises that it entails.

No Party For Pro-Lifers

Speaking of Linda Hirshman, her Slate piece crowing over the absence of the "safe, legal and rare" formulation from the Dems' platform language on abortion ought to provide some clarity for pro-lifers hopeful that an Obamafied Democratic Party might provide any kind of an opening for advancing anything resembling a pro-life agenda. So should David Freddoso's reporting on Obama and the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. For that matter, so should Steven Waldman's analysis of the platform fight, which notes that pro-life liberals were thrilled just to be "included in the process," even though they didn't really accomplish much of anything.

As I've said before, I think there can be legitimate reasons for pro-lifers to vote for pro-choice candidates. But they shouldn't delude themselves, Doug Kmiec-style, about what it is they're doing: The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics, and at least for the foreseeable future, pro-lifers who vote Democratic will always be casting votes that cut against their convictions on abortion, rather than with them.

Georgia and Democratic Realism

Charles Krauthammer's '04 Irving Kristol address calling for "democratic realism" as the touchstone of conservative foreign policy seems worth quoting this week:

The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.

Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts.

Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.

Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why? Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.

Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.

... [American foreign policy] must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.

To my mind, it overstates the case to call the Islamist threat "existential," which is one reason why I think that were I suddenly given control over American foreign policy - a horrifying thought, to be sure - I would be somewhat less likely than Krauthammer to accept the commitment of American "blood and treasure" to operations in the Arab-Islamic world going forward, and somewhat more likely to accept their commitment to crises that don't directly relate to the struggle against Islamism. But at the moment, American foreign policy is deeply invested in precisely the framework he describes, with ongoing and difficult operations that need to be seen through to success. And this has to place limits on what we can and cannot do for a country like Georgia. We can do what the Bush Administration seems to be doing, if perhaps somewhat belatedly - support Georgia's government with humanitarian aid and shuttle diplomacy, and (depending on the decisions Moscow makes this week) with sanctions of various sorts as well. But committing ourselves to "coming ashore" for Georgia - whether through a proxy war or the security guarantees that come with with NATO membership - just doesn't strike me as realism of any sort, given the strategic necessities facing America elsewhere in the world.

Validation

Frankly, if the reliably-ridiculous Linda Hirshman hadn't been inspired to write an absurd attack on Grand New Party, I would have been pretty disappointed.
 

Unrealpolitik

If Russia doesn't halt its advance into Georgia, here's what Max Boot would have the U.S. do:

It is also important to give Georgia the wherewithal to defend itself. It has a small but capable military which has received lots of American training and equipment in recent years (and has paid us back by sending a sizable contingent to Iraq). But it may not have two key weapons that would enable it to wreak havoc on the Russian advance. I am thinking of the Stinger and the Javelin. Both are relatively small, inexpensive, handheld missiles. The former is designed for attacking aircraft, the latter for attacking armored vehicles. The Stinger, as we know, has already been used with devastating effectiveness against the Russian air force once before-in Afghanistan. The Javelin is newer, and the Russians haven't yet seen its abilities demonstrated. But there is little doubt that it could do a great deal to bog down the Russians as their vehicles advance down narrow mountain roads into Georgia.

If Russia doesn't call off its offensive right away, the Pentagon should rush deliveries of Javelins and Stingers to Georgia. If the Russians insist on committing acts of aggression, at least let their victims defend themselves properly-and make the Russians pay the kind of price they paid once before in Afghanistan. As we've learned recently, with Iran supporting anti-American attacks in Iraq, proxy warfare is a fiendishly powerful way of fighting. If it is used against us, it should also be used by us.

To his credit, Boot goes on to note the obvious objection that Russia might be in a position to make life miserable for us if we started treating Georgia as '80s Afghanistan, take two. Here's his rebuttal, starting with the Iranian front:

On Iran ...Russia has been more hindrance than help. It has helped Iran to develop its nuclear program and it has been selling Iran high-tech surface-to-air missiles. Russia has gone along grudgingly with weak sanctions at the UN but, along with China, it has blocked more robust action. If Russia delivers important aid in the war on terrorism or other areas, I'm not aware of it. Increasingly the Russians have adopted a confrontational tone with the West, and they have backed it up with bullying of our allies. The Bush administration and other Western governments have tried their best to get along with Russia. That has been interpreted by Putin not as a sign of goodwill but as a sign of weakness. It is time to send a different message by making clear that Russia has crossed a red line in Georgia.

Then, Afghanistan:

Will Russia send high-tech munitions to insurgents fighting American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq? ... Given the problems that Russia has had (and continues to have) with Islamic extremists within in its own borders, if I were running the Kremlin I would be extremely careful about handing out missiles that could be used to bring down Russian aircraft. Al Qaeda, the Mahdist Army, and the Taliban are not exactly Russian allies at the moment, and it is doubtful that they could ever be reliable proxies.

Finally, economic warfare:

Will Russia disrupt fuel supplies to the West--in particular the natural gas supplies on which Germany and so many other European nations rely? ... Perhaps. It has certainly flexed its muscles in the past by disrupting energy supplies to Ukraine and other customers. The problem with that strategy is that it costs Russia a lot of money and runs the risks that its customers will find alternative suppliers in the future. Russia might well try this tack, but I doubt it would be a long-run success.

Now these arguments have a certain surface plausibility, but I would find them much more convincing if Boot were not simultaneously arguing that Russia's ambitions (and capabilities)  run as follows: "Today, Georgia; tomorrow, Ukraine; the day after, Estonia?" It's hard for me to believe that Putin's Russia is both an aggressive, expansive power poised to rebuild the Soviet Empire at tank-point and that the Russians would be more or less helpless to retaliate against us in their own neighborhood if we decided to start a proxy war with them in the Caucuses. Sure, maybe Moscow wouldn't have a strong countermove, but do we really want to dare them to make things harder for us where Tehran's quest for nukes is concerned? Or dare them to foul up our ongoing counter-insurgency in Afghanistan? Is the fate of Abkhazia and South Ossetia really worth escalating the already-substantial risks we face in the Middle East and Central Asia?

This comes back to the point I tried to make a few days ago, about grand strategy and trade-offs. Russia is not quite the resurgent global powerhouse, I think, that Boot and other hawks seem to suggest it is: Rather, it's a potent regional power whose lousy long-term prospects have been offset, for now at least, by booming energy revenues and extremely savvy leadership. Whereas the Soviet Union could project power into Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia with relative ease, Putin's Russia can project power against its smallish neighbors, and even then only within limits. (Moscow's difficulties in merely holding onto Chechnya suggest that maintaining an actual occupation of Georgia, as the Tsars and Soviets managed to do without much hardship, would probably be beyond the current Russian regime's capabilities.)

As a general post-Cold War rule, Russia's relative weakness on the global stage means that  the United States doesn't need to take a kid-gloves approach to the Kremlin when their interests and ours diverge. But at this specific moment, the U.S. is engaged in extremely costly, extremely important nation-building, counter-insurgency and counter-proliferation efforts involving countries that border on the Russian near abroad. And as long as the locus of the War on Terror (or the struggle against Islamist extremism, or whatever you want to call it) remains in Iran, Iraq, and Central Asia - as opposed to, say, the Andean highlands, or some other place where Russia's influence and capacity for mischief are pretty negligible - it seems imprudent, to put it mildly, to simultaneously launch ourselves into a proxy war with one of the largest countries in the region. Diplomatically, we should of course be taking Georgia's side right now; militarily, not so much.

Assessing Putin's Russia

I'm pretty sure I've linked to it before, but Perry Anderson's LRB essay from early last year on Russia under Putin remains the best long-form analysis of the subject I've encountered recently - allowing, of course, for Anderson's own Marxist idiosyncracies. Anderson emphasizes Putin's undeniable talents as a practitioner of machtpolitik, both at home and abroad, but he insists on Russia's overall weakness as a world power as well, and both emphases seem worth pondering during this week of Russian aggression, and Western uncertainty about how best to respond.

Manzi And His Critics

This Cato Unbound exchange on global warming promises to be stimulating.

How Do Religions Spread?

The most interesting post you'll read today - well, at least if you happen to be interested in the spread of Christianity, the impact of state sponsorship and the consequences of a "free market" in religion, and the crucial question of whatever happened to Babylonian paganism? - is right here, courtesy of Razib.
 

Obama-Carpathia '08

That's the RedState response to Amy Sullivan's Time piece. Andrew, no doubt, is not at all amused. He wrote, in response to this post (and this shirt):

Ross thinks it's "(ahem) a joke," which it is. A harmless joke, given the legions of evangelical Christians waiting for the Rapture and convinced that only the Republican party represents the will of God? I guess it's just as well that Ross thinks the religious right is entirely a function of the liberal media's imagination.

Um ... I don't recall ever making the ludicrous claim that the religious right is "entirely a function of the liberal media's imagination," though I suppose I do think that some of the particular dangers supposedly posed by religious-conservative activism - an American theocracy, for instance, or a foreign policy based on premillenial dispensationalism - are manifestations of liberal and secularist paranoia. Of course Andrew is right that there are millions of Americans (I've known more than a few myself) who hew to an end-times narrative that approximates the events depicted in the Left Behind saga, or similarly-fanciful attempts to read the Book of Revelation literally on to contemporary affairs. And no doubt a small and paranoid minority of these believers will be susceptible to the suggestion that Barack Obama might be the prophesied Man of Sin, in the same way that a deluded minority of Christians was taken with the notion that Mikhail Gorbachev (with that Satanic birthmark!) was the Antichrist. But I think that once you drill down through the large group of believers who tell pollsters they believe in an imminent Second Coming (a group, as Anthony Gottlieb points out, that apparently includes a fifth of non-Christians!) to the much smaller group for whom the belief is a very important part of everyday life (and voting-booth conduct), to the even smaller group prone to fantasies about the Carpathian potential of Democratic nominees for President, you've reached a demographic too tiny to have any significant impact on American politics at all, let alone be the secret target of subliminally-messaged campaign ads.

There's a lot of subterranean craziness in American life - always has been, always will be - and Obama's candidacy is bringing quite a bit of it bubbling to the surface: The "he's a Muslim" chain emails are the break-out conspiracy theory of this election cycle, but I'm sure that lots and lots of paranoiacs will see an Obama President as confirmation of their darkest fears. (All of the books I just linked to, alas, are currently outselling Grand New Party on Amazon.) But I'm also pretty confident that the "Antichrist" meme will remain sufficiently marginal, even within the world of marginal memes, that I won't regret treating RedState's horned "O" as the satire on Obamaphile hagiography it's intended to be, rather than as marching orders for the humorless legions of Christianists currently massing in the hinterland.

A Collision of Narratives

The conservative response to the Russo-Georgian conflict, I think, has exposed an important tension in the post-9/11 Right's approach to foreign policy - namely, the tendency for its two organizing foreign-policy narratives, neo-Reaganite democracy promotion on the one hand and the War on Terror on the other, to cut against one another in not-insignificant ways. The war in Georgia arguably represents a test case for an agenda of democratic enlargement, broadly construed - a vision of twenty-first century foreign policy that George W. Bush and John McCain have both gestured at, to varying degrees, and that gets its most thorough airing in Robert Kagan's new book. If we actually had a League of Democracies, a concert of liberal states "designed both to promote democracy and to strengthen cooperation among the democracies," as Kagan has put it, then the Georgian conflict would be a defining moment for the body, and a chance to see how well it could exert pressure against "autocratic" powers like Russia and China. And even in the absence of a League, many conservatives are urging the U.S. to behave, in the present crisis, as if it stood at the head of one, with Georgia as a member state and South Ossetia cast as the equivalent of the Sudetenland.

The trouble is that conservatives are also committed to a grand strategy aimed at combating Islamic extremism, disrupting potential nexuses of terrorism and WMD, and preventing the nuclearization of volatile, Islamist powers like Iran. One can overstate the extent to which we need Russia's assistance in these endeavors, and the extent to which they're willing to lend us aid, but one can understate things as well, as I think Bill Kristol does today. Even if you believe that there is no diplomatic solution of any sort to the Iranian problem, and thus that Russia's cooperation on that front isn't worth compromising our commitment to democratic  (and NATO) enlargement in the Russian Near Abroad, there are quite a few other fronts in the War on Terror where Russia matters a great deal - not only because we may need cooperation of the sort we received from Moscow after 9/11, but because we emphatically don't need Russia setting out to deliberately sabotage our efforts, the way we so effectively sabotaged their efforts in Afghanistan twenty-five years ago.

This is not to dismiss the importance of democracy promotion, or the reality of major-power rivalry: I agree with the broadest strokes of Kagan's argument about the return of traditional power politics, and the salience of regime types and political values to international competition. There are certainly places where our ideals and our interests align, places where a vision of democratic enlargement makes real and practical sense, and places where the pro-dictatorship mischief-making of powers like Russia and China ought to be met by pro-democracy pushback. Sub-Saharan Africa springs to mind, as does Latin America. But there are also places where American policymakers have to choose: They can try to forge major-power cooperation against the threat of terrorism joined to WMD, or they can try to unite a democratic bloc to oppose the interests of the Chinese and the Russians. And to my mind, the Russian Near Abroad, whether in the Caucuses or Central Asia, is a place where conservatives would be better served making the War on Terror our lodestar; the alternative has the potential to leave America's national interest hostage to the territorial ambitions of the government in Tbilisi, which is not a position in which a superpower ought to lightly place itself.

In Defense of George Lucas

Well, sort of. Ann Hornaday has an essay in the Post this weekend making the uncontroversial point that Lucas's recent movies, up to and including the animated Clone Wars feature hitting theaters this month, often feel like little more than "software to demonstrate or advertise his visual effects, sound, game, TV and animation businesses." I have no disagreements with her critique of the late-career Lucas; indeed, if anything, I think she goes a little far congratulating herself for pointing what's been obvious to any thinking moviegoer for a decade now. ("Lucas ... has become such an ingrained presence on the cinematic landscape, such a brand unto himself, that he's attained the pop-culture equivalent of elemental status," she writes. "To question what he does and how he does it is tantamount to questioning the air we breathe or the water we drink: George Lucas just is." Um, really? Has she read the reviews for the Star Wars prequels?)

But then Hornaday does something that every disillusioned Star Wars fan has been tempted to do, during a long Dooku night of the soul: She reads the prequels back into the original trilogy:

Similarly, the "Star Wars" space opera consistently demonstrated Lucas's limitations as a storyteller, even as it tapped into the mass audience's most fundamental hunger for archetype and myth. As refreshing as the initial 1977 installment was -- an escapist, retro thrill ride in the midst of a grittily realist era -- the "Star Wars" movies were more about plot than story, with Lucas far more interested in mechanics, spectacle and marketing than capturing the beat of the human heart. (Although the difference between plot and story may seem arcane, it's quite crucial: The plot is merely a sequence of events, whereas a story limns those events' deeper motivation and meaning. The plot gets characters from point A to point B; the story makes us care.)

One need only watch Hayden Christensen awkwardly declaim in Lucas's last directorial outing, "Revenge of the Sith," to be reminded of how important actors like Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness were to giving the famously leaden "Star Wars" dialogue even a shred of believability. Once "Star Wars" became a multi-billion-dollar economy unto itself, when the movies increasingly served not "the story" but the games and the sound systems and the effects business and the lunch boxes, Lucas's weakness became his greatest strength. Who needed story when the audience would be satisfied with spectacle? He got rich, and we got Jar Jar Binks.

Now, look: Certainly the original Star Wars movies were not exactly masterpieces of storytelling on par with The Godfather and Chinatown. Certainly their dialogue was not up to the standard of, say, All About Eve. But as far as sci-fi blockbusters go, they were pretty damn good - I know that I cared about what happened to Han and Leia, and to Luke and his heavy-breathing father - and they were about, oh, seventy times better than Attack of the Clones and its companion pieces. Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness made a difference, sure, but Ewan MacGregor, Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee and yes, even Natalie Portman aren't exactly chopped liver, and they couldn't do anything with Lucas's craptastic prequel scripts. (And while the whinging Hayden Christensen was overmatched as Anakin Skywalker, the original trilogy had Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in lead roles, and they were hardly master thespians.) It's fine to say that Lucas's weaknesses were present, in embryo, in the original trilogy - and especially in the mediocre, weakly-plotted Return of the Jedi, whose Ewoks anticipated some of the worst excesses of the prequels. But we shouldn't let the dreadfulness of the late Lucas obscure the fact that the early Lucas birthed a pop-culture classic: If we do, the Gungans will have won.

The Remission Defense

You stay classy, John Edwards:

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Also, he made a point of telling Woodruff that he remained the son of a mill worker throughout the entire affair.

Anyway, the important thing is that it's not as bad as Chappaquidick, right? Edwards in 2012 - the dream will never die!

Obama the Antichrist?

And speaking of the rapture ... actually, no, I don't think I have much to say about this nonsense, except that the people who think Obama might be the Antichrist and the people who think the McCain campaign is cannily designing its campaign ads to exploit fears that Obama might be the Antichrist deserve each other. (The difference, of course, is that the former group consists of minor-league kooks, obscure bloggers and chain-email peddlers, whereas the latter consists of Democratic strategists and writers for Time Magazine - the same Time, one might note, that has not once but twice put Barack Obama on its cover with a halo around his head.)

Update: Oh, for God's sake. No, Ezra, Amy Sullivan's piece is not "compelling and unsettling." Unless you find yourself compelled by arguments like this:

The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than McCain's "Celeb" ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several Left Behind books. But they're not the cartoonish images of clouds parting and shining light upon Obama that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah. Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.

Um ... the light in the ad is not "sinister," it's heavenly and golden - a burst of sun piercing the clouds, a staple of kitschy religious paintings the world over. Throw in the cheerful (i.e. non-sinister) gospel choir playing in the background, and you have exactly the kind of images and music "that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah."

Unless you're a brilliant Democratic cryptographer, that is:

Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign's red-white-and-blue "O" logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

Sapp knows that the phrasing and images could just be dismissed as a peculiar coincidence. After all, it was Oprah Winfrey who told an Iowa crowd that Obama was "the one!" But, he insists, "the frequency of these images and references don't make any sense unless you're trying to send the message that Obama could be the Antichrist."

Really? They don't make any sense? So inserting Obama's quasi-presidential seal - which has the Democratic nominee's name prominently displayed on it, whether the viewer knows about the seal's back-story or not - into giggle-inducing footage of Charlton Heston parting of the Red Sea makes no sense in the context of Obama's declaration that his nomination would be remembered as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow," which is the clip immediately preceding The 10 Commandments shout-out, but it does make sense in the context of a subtle allusion to the dream of the four beasts in the seventh book of Daniel. But of course!

Meanwhile, a reader points out that the gang at RedState are selling "Obama as the Antichrist" t-shirts and stickers in their online store. And so they are - along with shirts that say "The Enemy of My Enemy Is McCain" and "Cheney-Bush '08" and "United Embittered Gun-Toting Jesus-Loving States of America." This pattern would seem to suggest that they're calling Obama the Antichrist as (ahem) a joke - one that's far closer to the "Frodo Has Failed" gag than to, say, the endless, non-joking Bush-Hitler comparisons (which, for the record, have a stronger Google presence than the Obama-Antichrist meme), and one whose humor depends entirely on the well-documented tendency among journalists and Obamaphiles (but I repeat myself) to portray the Democratic nominee as some sort of messiah figure. This strikes me as just ever-so-slightly different from using subliminal messages to persuade nutty fundamentalists that Obama really is Nicolae Carpathia, which is what the McCain campaign stands accused of doing.

Update (II): See also Andrew Stuttaford.

Evangelicals, Catholics and Abortion, Cont.

This Pew survey from around the '04 election provides some useful insights into the question of why evangelicals are more pro-life than Catholics. The study breaks down Catholic and evangelical voters into "traditionalist," "centrist," and "modernist" camps: Traditionalists of both religious persuasions are much more likely than modernists to attend church regularly, to have a personal as opposed to impersonal view of God, and to favor "preserving" tradition over "adapting" it, while centrists fall somewhere in between. And this divide spills over predictably into abortion politics, where traditionalists are more pro-life than modernists, and centrists fall into the muddy middle.

But here's the crucial finding: Both in percentage and in absolute terms, there are many more traditionalist evangelicals than there are traditionalist Catholics. Almost half of the evangelical population falls into the traditionalist camp, compared to less than a fourth of the Catholic population; indeed, there are actually more modernist Catholics in the American Church - using the term "in" a bit loosely, I admit - than there are traditionalist Catholics, whereas there roughly four times as many traditionalist evangelicals in the U.S. as there are modernist evangelicals.

These numbers seem to buttress my thesis that evangelicals, as a very general rule, tend to take their religion more seriously and practice it more intensely than do Catholics. But that being said, even when you compare traditionalist Catholics to traditionalist evangelicals, the latter are still slightly more likely to be pro-life - and modernist evangelicals, tellingly, are much more likely than modernist Catholics to support restrictions on abortion. So even allowing for the difference in religious intensity between the two groups, there's room for other explanations as well - like Ed Kilgore's suggestion (which Daniel Larison expands on a bit) that the countercultural aspects of American Evangelicalism tend to amplify skepticism about the current abortion regime in a way that the more assimilationist mentality of post-Vatican II American Catholicism does not. (And see Steven Waldman and Rod Dreher for more thoughts on this subject as well.)

Dept. of Unpersuasive Arguments

Speaking of evangelicals, I've been meaning to take note of this passage from Daniel Gross' Times review of Kevin Phillips' Bad Money:

... [Phillips] also argues that the hostile takeover of government by finance was made possible by evangelicalism. The popularity of the "prosperity gospel" and the fact that at least 30 percent of Bush voters were said to be end-time believers caused the increasingly down-market Republican coalition "to accept a period of speculative indulgence and conspicuous favoritism to the upper income brackets." (Who cares about income distribution when we could all, rich and poor, be raptured tomorrow?)

I'd heard the rapture thesis advanced (by Kevin Phillips, naturally) to explain the Iraq War, obviously, and I'd heard it advanced (by Bill Moyers, among others) to explain conservative indifference to global warming. But the rapture as an explanation for the Bush tax cuts is a new one on me.
 

Why Paris Matters

"The scariest part of the whole thing," Jim Manzi writes of Paris Hilton's campaign video, "is that her energy plan kind of made sense. It was certainly more coherent than anything put forward by either major campaign." Meanwhile, James Poulos says what we're all thinking:

Paris Hilton is clearly more articulate about energy than George W. Bush: she's a professional and a quick study. While Bush can barely manage in a suit at the Presidential desk, Hilton can hold forth -- or do something like a lifelike replica of holding forth -- on offshore drilling in a cutaway onesie and heels. If the marginal benefit of having a leader who's the brains of the operation keeps diminishing, why not go for the gold-plated bimbo? All she has to do is perform well, and Hollywood culls the weak.

Paris, of course, is merely preparing the way. But for whom? James proposes Kristanna Loken for President: If we've got the T-1 as governor of California, why not put the T-X in the White House? But this confuses art and life: Loken played an upgrade on Ah-nuld, but as far as celebrities go she's way downmarket from the governator. No, if you're want a celebrity candidate who's simultaneously Schwarzeneggerian and sexy, with everything you'd need to make John McCain's celeb-bashing look as antiquated as a Victrola or a hansom cab, I think we all know exactly where to look.

Though of course even a President Jolie would only be preparing the way for the day when the entire world is governed by the superhuman offspring of Seal and Heidi Klum ...

Evangelicals, Catholics and Abortion

Ed Kilgore asks a good question: Why are evangelicals more pro-life than Catholics?

There are variable measurements of this phenomenon, but no real doubt about the basics.  A September 2007 Pew survey showed white evangelical Protestants agreeing that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases by a 65-31 magin; Catholics favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases by a 51-44 margin (with no appreciable difference between Hispanic and non-Hispanic Catholics) ... Moreover, the evangelical-Catholic gap on abortion looks likely to increase in the future. An April 2004 Pew survey providing generational breakdowns showed that white evangelicals under 35 favored abortion restrictions by more than a two-to-one margin (71% among those under 25), while those over 65 actually (if narrowly) opposed more restrictions.  The generational trend lines among white Catholics moved in exactly the opposite direction.

As Kilgore notes, there's nothing obvious or inevitable about this breakdown:

Catholic anti-abortion views, after all, are undergirded by a long series of increasingly emphatic papal encyclicals; a natural law and bioethics tradition stretching back all the way to Aristotle; an overall theological position making church teachings on matters of faith and morals binding on believers; a relatively low level of tolerance for individual dissent; and a teaching and disciplinary system that can be (and in some parts of the country, is being) deployed to influence the views and behavior--personal and political--of the laity.

Not one of these is a significant factor for Sola Scriptura Protestants. And unlike other moral issues ranging from gay and lesbian rights to divorce to adultery, the belief in scriptural inerrancy common among evangelicals doesn't really explain the vast gap between evangelicals and their mainline brethren on abortion. I've yet to read or hear a purely scriptural justification for banning abortions that doesn't ultimately come down to circular reasoning based on the condemnations of homicide from the Decalogue onward. 

Evangelical hard-line views on abortion are not a matter of an unbroken tradition. In 1971, before Roe v. Wade, when nearly all states maintained abortion bans, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for abortion laws that would recognize exceptions not only in cases of rape and incest, but where the "emotional, mental and physical health of the mother" might be endangered.  Needless to say, that would be considered a radically liberal position among evangelicals today. 

Kilgore proposes a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon - perhaps evangelicals are more "radically alienated from contemporary American culture" than Catholics and thus more likely to read America's abortion laws as "a symbol of a depraved society"; or perhaps they are more likely than Catholics to reject the arguments about "church-state separation and protection of individual conscience" that tend to undergird the case for a laissez-faire abortion policy. But I suspect that there's something simpler going on as well: Namely,  that describing oneself as an "evangelical" tends to be a proxy for religious intensity in a way that describing oneself as a Catholic isn't. Many evangelical churches subsist within mainline denominations, attracting a self-selected pool of the denomination's most devout churchgoers; many others, especially in the megachurch sector, rely heavily on spiritual seekers looking for a more intense experience than their mainline upbringing (or Catholic upbringing, more often) provided. If you're a member of an evangelical church, chances are your congregation demands more from you - and you demand more from your congregation - than even the minority of Catholics who fulfill their Sunday obligation every week, let alone the lukewarm, once-a-month variety. And if you're born and raised evangelical, you're getting a very different experience of religion than the typical cradle Catholic, since evangelical youth ministries tend to emphasize the necessity for personal conversion - of making an active choice for Jesus, and being "born again" - much more heavily than your average Catholic confirmation class. American Evangelicalism is thus at a deep level a religion of converts and enthusiasts in a way that American Catholicism - which of course includes its share of converts and enthusiasts - simply isn't. And it's hardly surprising that this difference would manifest itself in polling on abortion and related matters, since as a general rule (with, of course, myriad exceptions), the more seriously a given Christian takes their faith, the more likely they are to come around to some variant on the pro-life position. I suspect that if you polled Catholics based on their religious intensity, the most intense RCs would resemble the average evangelical on life issues: It's just that the average evangelical, by virtue of being an evangelical, is more religiously intense than the average Catholic.

Willie Nelson, Crypto-Racist?

Where will the madness end?

Gopnik on Chesterton, Yet Again

Sorry, I'm not quite done with the topic yet: I haven't said anything substantial about Gopnik's critique of Chesterton's approach to Catholic apologetics:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.

Of course it's a truism that the zeal of a convert can be irritating and over-the-top at times, and the realism of a cradle Catholic is sometimes the better part of wisdom. And it's no surprise that a liberal ironist like Gopnik wouldn't be much taken with a convert's enthusiasm for his adopted faith. But it's not as if Chesterton's approach to apologetics represent some radical break with the rest of his oeuvre: He applied to the Church precisely the same romantic spirit he brought to everything else as well, which encouraged his readers to see the wonder of the world through fresh eyes - the eyes of a convert, yes, or the eyes of a child. Here, for instance, is a characteristic passage from Orthodoxy:

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Elsewhere in his essay, Gopnik seems to praise this tendency, calling it "the romance of everyday existence," and noting aptly that "Chesterton's mysticism always resolves in the close at hand: in a signal light at Paddington station, not in a sunrise over a beach in Tahiti." It's only when Chesterton applies it to Catholicism that Gopnik turns snide, complaining that his subject is "overglamorizing" what is, after all, just "a normally bureaucratic human institution" - a post office with incense and fancier vestments. But Gopnik himself has just allowed that the appeal of Chesterton is precisely his willingness to take even an institution like the post office and find the glamor buried in it, the wonder that routine and familiarity often blind us to. There are writers enough to catalogue the failings of the USPS; you turn to Chesterton to be reminded that there's something miraculous about it even so, something worthy of the "leap of interest and amazement" that a child might feel when confronted for the first time by fruit trees and running water.

And if this reminder is important where the post office is concerned, how much more important is it when you're dealing with an institution like the Church of Rome, where something rather more important is at stake than the swift delivery of mail? Gopnik isn't convinced by Catholicism's truth claims; fair enough. But it's rather obtuse to admire Chesterton for emphasizing the romance inherent in Paddington Station while criticizing him for emphasizing the romance inherent in an institution that Chesterton believes to have been founded by God for the salvation of souls. Especially since nobody doubts that we need a railway system or a postal system, whereas there are many people - Gopnik among them - who actively doubt the "necessity" of the Catholic faith, seeing it as superfluous at best, malignant at worst. Of course not all of these doubters will be moved by Chesterton's style of apologetics, which asks them to approach Catholicism like a man from, say, 1355 entering a FedEx store for the first time - that is, as though they'd never even conceived that an institution like the Church might be possible, let alone an enduring player in human affairs. And perhaps some would be convinced by the more jaundiced, world-weary, "it's horribly flawed but it gets the job done" approach to apologetics that it seems as though Gopnik might prefer. But you don't turn to Chesterton for jaundiced world-weariness, and complaining that his enthusiasm for the Church is akin to a child's enthusiasm for a post office or a railway station is like complaining that Schopenhauer is too pessimistic, or Waugh too savage: If you don't like childlike enthusiasm, you don't have any business liking Chesterton.
 

Silly Season

Did Bob Herbert really go on MSNBC to insist that the "celebrity" ad deliberately juxtaposed its shots of Britney and Paris Hilton with gratuitous phallic symbols - per Herbert, the Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa; per reality, the Victory Column in Berlin, where Obama was giving his speech - in order to hammer home its miscegenation theme? Why yes, apparently he did. Did Timothy Noah really pen a column for Slate arguing that a fluff piece for the Journal about Obama's skinniness "can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race," and calling for a journalistic moratorium on discussions of Obama's personal appearance? Why yes, apparently he did. Do Herbert, Noah et. al. really think that they're helping Obama by putting this sort of hysterical nonsense into circulation? Apparently so.
 

You Say Goodbye I Say Hello

Now that Matt and I have rung out the "Yglesias at the Atlantic" era with a Bloggingheads spectacular, let me (belatedly) welcome Ta-Nehisi Coates to the Atlantic's mini-blogosphere. You may know him from his scintillating Bill Cosby profile in our pages, or from his just-released memoir, or from all the times Megan has linked to him over the last couple months - but now you should get to know him right here.

Also, the man does multimedia like a pro:

Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn and Liberalism

Isaac Chotiner makes some fair points in response to my remarks on Adam Gopnik's essay on G.K. Chesterton, so let me try to clarify my beef with the essay, and by extension with the style of criticism it embodies. My complaint was not that Gopnik brought up Chesterton's anti-Semitism, or that he deplored it. Rather, I objected to the disproportionate weight he placed upon it, which felt more appropriate to an essay on, say, Ezra Pound than to a figure like Chesterton, whose conduct in the shadow of totalitarianism compares relatively favorably to an awful lot of his intellectual contemporaries. And I especially objected to the way that Gopnik used the taint of anti-Semitism to dismiss nearly everything in Chesterton that a contemporary liberal might find challenging or troubling. His essay starts by reassuring the New Yorker's readership - whose familiarity with GKC is presumably extremely limited - that Chesterton "has a loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner" (so it's okay to read him, folks), while simultaneously promising to rescue the Good Chesterton from his reactionary admirers - those "conservative preVatican II types" whose admiration for GKC makes him "a difficult writer to defend." And Gopnik ends, predictably enough, by suggesting that the Good Chesterton, the one New Yorker readers should admire, is the Chesterton who doesn't challenge any of their pieties or prejudices - Chesterton the anti-imperialist, Chesterton the critic of utopianism, and above all Chesterton the literary stylist, with his wonderful apothegms and allegories and "Catholic koans." The Bad Chesterton, meanwhile, is the one whom Gopnik's readership could be counted on the dismiss even without his saying that they should: Chesterton the Catholic apologist, that is, and especially Chesterton the reactionary radical. This Chesterton's arguments, sez Gopnik, are always tainted by "the spirit" of anti-Semitism even he isn't actually being anti-Semitic, and this Chesterton's politico-religious thought, with its radical challenge to the contemporary left and right alike, can be dismissed as just a way station to Falangism and Franco.

The problem with this approach is that of course there was only one Chesterton, however many multitudes he contained, and those aspects of his thought that contemporary liberals find congenial often flowed from precisely the sort of premises that Gopnik deplores as reactionary and medieval. Gopnik begins the essay by praising Chesterton for his anti-imperialism, his skepticism about capitalism, and his criticisms of the "fatuous materialist progressivism" associated with H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and others; he ends it by caricaturing Chesterton's underlying philosophy as the royal road to Franco's Spain, while allowing, with a touch of condescension, that of course we should still read him, because if "obviously great writers were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to the current consensus of liberal good will - voices of tolerance and liberal democracy - we would probably be down to George Eliot." But it's precisely because Chesterton, though a self-described liberal, didn't conform to the liberal consensus - both of his time and of our own - that he was able to keep his head while many of his contemporaries were falling over one another to embrace imperialism, or Social Darwinism, or Marxism, or eugenics (a topic, like distributism, that somehow fails to make its way into Gopnik's essay, despite being crucial to understanding Chesterton's importance as a writer). True, the things he was wrong about - the Jews chief among them, though the list stretches on to include a host of other matters as well - illustrate the weaknesses inherent in his sort reactionary radicalism. But the things he was right about, when the bien-pensant types of his day were badly, badly wrong, illustrate the weaknesses inherent in certain strains of modern liberalism, and if you rush to dismiss his premises as inherently tainted by anti-Semitism and crypto-Falangism, then you don't get to blithely congratulate him for his conclusions.

I think the problem with Gopnik's approach is thrown into relief by the embarrassed and/or dismissive way that many of the obituaries for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have treated the Russian giant's more politically incorrect ideas - his mix of Christian humanism, Russian nationalism, and deep skepticism about modernity, which made him something of a curiosity both during his sojourn in the U.S. and upon his return to Russia. From the Times complaining about his "hectoring jeremiads" and puzzling over his willingness to criticize "democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers" as well as Communists, to Christopher Hitchens griping absurdly about the "ayatollah-like tones" of his famous Harvard commencement address (the equivalent of comparing Chesterton to Franco), the coverage has often involved a Gopnikesque attempt to seal off the Good Solzhenitsyn from the Weird Solzhenitsyn, and to insist that the eloquent foe of Marxist tyranny can be celebrated even as the mystical reactionary is dismissed.

But as with Chesterton, the two faces of Solzhenitsyn were really one face: His witness against Communism emerged from the same ground as his critique of Western liberalism. When Hitchens writes that the great dissident's "mixture of attitudes and prejudices puts one in mind more of Dostoyevsky than of Tolstoy," he's absolutely right. But it's not a coincidence that Russia's two most eloquent and prophetic critics of utopian radicalism - Dostoevsky who attacked it in its infancy, and Solzhenitsyn who helped usher it into extinction - were both standing outside Western liberalism, while so many people inside liberalism busied themselves making apologies for terror and mass murder. Which is why Solzhenitsyn, like Chesterton, isn't important despite his deviations from "the current consensus of liberal good will." He's important because of them - because his deviationism allowed him to see things that others were blind to, and because reading past giants who stand foursquare outside the current New York Times/New Yorker consensus provides an opportunity to interrogate one's own premises, and ponder the ways in which contemporary deviationists might be right, and the contemporary consensus wrong.

Politico: A Cautionary Tale

It's a success! Well, almost ... and even it's almost-success doesn't seem to bode all that well for the media business. Ezra has it exactly right:

Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to create a political news organization that marries old-school reporting values to the speed and the immediacy of the web and it actually works. A year-and-a-half after launch, it's getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn't come even close to figuring out how to monetize it. So they're reliant on the Congress-section of their print paper, which can extract huge rates from lobbying organizations and pressure groups. Were they actually web only, they'd be losing catastrophic amounts of money. If The Politico was an experiment to see if people would read more stuff about politics, it was a success. But insofar as it sought a new business model that would bring economic viability to online reportage, it's as adrift as everyone else.

Getting To Fifty Percent

With Gallup showing the race tied as of Friday (Obama has a three-point lead in today's tracking poll), Marc writes: "The McCain strategy seems to be: be mean now so we can be magnanimous and nice when more people are paying attention." I don't think this is a crazy approach: You have to make some effort drive up Obama's negatives (and energize the conservative base), and late summer is as good a time as any to do it. The danger for the McCain campaign is that their ability to pull Obama down in tracking polls with snarky ads in August will translate into overconfidence about their ability to push their own candidate up come September and October. It's true that McCain has stayed pretty consistently within striking distance of Obama over the last month, but it's also true that McCain never manages to break 44 percent in the Gallup tracking poll; in the RCP average, likewise, even his recent upward surge has only brought him to ... 44 percent. Which means that McCain needs to win over an awful lot of voters who are currently fluctuating between Obama and "undecided," rather than between Obama and McCain - and I really don't think that making fun of Obama for eating protein bars or demanding that he mention Latin America in his speeches is going to get the job done. Races can be close without being all that fluid, and the fact that McCain rarely drops more than five points behind Obama may be precisely the thing that keeps his campaign from taking the kind of gambles - like, say, a one-term pledge - that he needs to get to fifty percent, or to 270. And when I read in Bill Kristol's column that Team McCain is leaning toward playing it white, male, and boring with the VP pick, with the terrible twosome of Tom Ridge and Mitt Romney (about whom more anon) among the leading contenders, I have the sense that McCain's staff is going to wake up the morning after election day congratulating themselves on having held Barack Obama to "only" 51 percent of the vote.

The Myth of the Independent

I think these two quotes go well together. First, from the Lemann essay I just mentioned:

Pluralism, in the tradition of Bentley, requires that one see one's own political passions, and those of such unimpeachable actors as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and members of the Concord Coalition, as representing something other than the promptings of pure justice. That does not come naturally. One has to see that sincere talk of the public interest and the general good can be dangerous tools in the hands of people one disagrees with, if not in one's own ... One has to get over the habit of assuming that "interests," and, worse, lobbying and corruption, are the province only of one's political opponents, and not one's allies. Pluralism means dialling down the moral stature that we attach to universalist arguments, and dialling up the moral stature of particularism.

And then Larison, on the commentariat's disappointment that the once "fiercely independent" McCain has turned to partisanship:

Of course, the "fiercely independent" McCain spent the bulk of 1999 and the early months of 2000 (and many years after that) trying to please other people. The difference then was that Ignatius and other members of the Washington press corps were the ones he was trying to please ... During the 2000 campaign, he referred to the GOP establishment as the "evil empire," which seemed perfectly fair and satisfactory to his boosters in the press because they thought this was simply a description of reality and not a slur.  Pretty much every "maverick" episode in McCain's career has involved staking out a position in opposition to his party in the interests of attracting good press and cultivating a reputation as one of the "good" Republicans-the "noble, tolerant" McCain that Conason refers to in his piece-and he has done this by adopting a haughty, self-righteous tone as a champion of reform fighting against the forces of corruption (campaign finance) and bigotry (immigration "reform") within his own party.  By endorsing the worst prejudices about his party held by his party's political opponents ... he became renowned for his integrity, just as Republicans have been lauding Joe Lieberman for his character and courage for denouncing liberals, his own party and that party's nominee in terms that perfectly fit GOP talking points.

I think it would be an excellent discipline for pundits deeply invested in the ideal of the "independent" politician to attempt, at least once a year, a column praising a public figure for taking an independent, maverick position with which they disagree.

The Process of Government

Nicholas Lemann has a rich essay in the latest New Yorker, contrasting Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew - and the "first, kill all the interest groups" style of political outrage more generally - with a forgotten classic from 1908, Arthur Bentley's The Process of Government, which depicts American politics as "a never-ending, small-bore struggle for advantage among constantly shifting coalitions of interest groups." By channeling Bentley, Lemann doesn't just provide a welcome rebuke to Frank's theory of American politics; he offers cautionary advice for the entire pundit class, and especially anyone who's peddling a grand new agenda for one of the two political parties - so read the whole thing.

Dreaming of Hitler

Daniel Larison makes a good point:

Besides being paranoid, the idea that McCain's genuinely weak "Celeb" ad draws from Triumph of the Will is remarkable for something else: its implicit contempt for modern Germans.  It is not much better than the pro-war German-bashing that took place during 2002-03 when war supporters frequently complained that the Germans had lost their former enthusiasm for conflict.  Both treat Germans in an essentialist way and try to reduce them to the most cartoonish stereotypes, as if a cheering throng of Germans in Berlin, c. 2008, must necessarily conjure up associations with Nazi rallies.  To assume this says more about the critics of the ad than about the people who made it.  As for the notion that the images from the ad resemble the techniques of Riefenstahl, one might as well accuse the television news directors who covered the event of imputing Hitlerism to Obama, since the footage and camera angles are all taken from the news broadcasts of the speech.  Obama supporters haven't been this good at embarrassing their candidate with hysterical commentary since Orlando Patterson felt compelled to compare Hillary Clinton's "3 a.m." ad to Birth of a Nation.

I agree, and I think my remarks on this point were badly-put. I should have said that the only similarity between the footage in the ad and Triumph of the Will is the presence of German landmarks and German crowds, and thus that if liberals are silly enough to see overtones of Hitler they should blame the organizers of Obama's itinerary - rather than implying, as I think my phrasing seemed too, that there actually are overtones of Nuremberg in the footage.

Is Slate Conservative?

Apropos of the launch of LibertyWire, which promises to be a general-interest website along the lines of Slate, but more conservative, Matt writes:

This is a bit bizarre. Slate and The Atlantic are already center-right publications (I know my soon-to-be-former colleagues at The Atlantic don't necessarily see it that way, but it is).

I'll refrain from commenting on my own publication's politics and just say that describing Slate as "center-right" strikes me as more than a little weird. True, Slate publishes some writers whose politics Matt would probably describe as right-of-center - from Emily Yoffe and Mickey Kaus to Christopher Hitchens and maybe Will Saletan, among others. Personally, I would describe some of these people as either center-left or - in the case of Hitchens, especially - entirely unclassifiable, but for the sake of argument let's accept Yglesias's progressive-centric premises about who's right and who's left. Even then, it's awfully hard for me to see how a publication where Fred Kaplan is the go-to guy on foreign policy, where Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon cover law and social issues, where Timothy Noah writes about domestic policy and politics, and where everyone from David Greenberg to Stephen Metcalf to Meghan O'Rourke to Amanda Schaffer to Dana Stevens can be counted to provide a center-left (or just plain left) take almost anytime they touch on politics, can be reasonably described as "center-right."

Update: While I was writing this post, Matt clarified himself a bit: "I'll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I'm not a particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in my mind." I think if the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in your mind, then you're probably reading Mickey Kaus way more than you read Slate. (Which is easy to do, admittedly, if you spend most of your time reading blogs ...)