Pew Research ... finds this week that public support
has dropped; only 45% support a "government plan to invest or commit
billions to secure financial institutions." 38% say they're opposed;
the rest don't know. Independents are the least likely to support it
(42%); Republicans are the most likely (49%) Two thirds say they're
"angry" about the plan, which independents being the angriest and
Republicans being the least angry.
You could argue that this props up my suggestion that anti-bailout sentiment is unlikely to redound to the GOP's benefit in a future campaign, since the people who are maddest about it are Democrats and independents. On the other hand, you could argue that it undercuts my prediction - and any other prediction, for that matter - by demonstrating just how fluid and unpredictable the politics of this issue are, since the partisan gap on the issue is extremely slim by the standards of contemporary politics and the landscape is no doubt shifting even as I write. It would be nice to know which Democrats support the bailout, and which Republicans do the same: At the moment, my instinct is that the bailout is supported by self-conscious moderates of all stripes, whether they call themselves Dems, Repubs or independents, and that anti-bailout sentiment unites talk-radio-listening conservatives, Nation-reading lefties, and the radical-center types who rallied around Ross Perot. This dynamic would seem to make it an ideal issue for a primary-season insurgent in either party, or for a third-party candidate in a general election - but somewhat less ideal as a wedge issue for the purposes of the national GOP, or the national Democratic Party. But all of this could change, obviously, depending on what happens in Washington in the next week, and then what happens to the economy after that.
Dispatches From The Culture War
Steven Waldman has a lengthy and judicious take on Barack Obama and the born-alive controversy. And Mollie Ziegler Hemingway has a lengthy and judicious takedown of the L.A. Times' report on Sarah Palin and her "fundamentalism." (And no, the fact that Palin looks more and more like a disastrous choice does not justify lousy religion coverage.)
So does yesterday's rejection of the Paulson plan by House Republicans serve as the electoral knockout blow? Well, maybe among McCain supporters on Wall Street. I've heard from plenty of those folks, professional money managers and such, who are furious that the bailout/rescue plan went down to defeat yesterday and claim to be washing their hands of the GOP, at least for this election cycle. (But maybe longer.) They might not like the title, but Democrats are the party of Wall Street. Longer-term, this could portend a political realignment in which a more populist GOP becomes more focused
on policies that directly help families, even if they aren't necessarily considered "pro-growth" by economic conservatives. (Note that Hispanics of both parties voted against the Paulson plan.) In that regard, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee might well be the future of the GOP.
But I am not convinced that the bailout bungle plays so badly in the Rest of America, despite the 777-point drop in the Dow Jones industrials. That decline, though painful, was hardly another Black Monday, though we may still get a Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday, Black Thursday, or a Black Friday if it looks like the rescue plan is stuck in suspended animation on Capitol Hill. (Maybe a couple of them.) So far, this still looks like mostly a Wall Street problem to much of America, most of whom have the bulk of their investment in retirement plans that they don't keep a particularly close eye on ... even if people come around to the belief that the Paulson plan is necessary, it will forever be one of the most unloved pieces of legislation in American history--right up there with the establishment of the income tax. Many GOPers see their pushback against it a key element of rebuilding the Republican brand and comeback in 2010.
So what does this all mean for John McCain? A great communicator could present a compelling narrative where corrupt Big Government (symbolized by Fannie and Freddie and its paid enablers in Washington) created the financial crisis and now, amazingly, claims to want to solve the problem through even Bigger Government that could cost American trillions of dollars. In a way, it is the issue John McCain was born to campaign on. I think McCain tried to clunkily begin that process during the debate, but it all came out as sounding like the same old stump speech that he could have given 18 months ago (and probably did). There is still time left, but not much ...
Barring a massive, massive economic collapse that seems to result from Congressional inaction - Tyler Cowen's worst-case scenario, in other words - I imagine that opposition to the bailout will probably be a political winner within the Republican Party over the next couple of election cycles, though anti-bailout sentiment seems more likely to translate into a straightforwardly libertarian populism than into the pro-family conservatism that Pethokoukis mentions, and that I'd obviously like to see. (I think a fusion of the two is possible, but that's topic for another day.) It's harder for me to see the bailout being used as a political weapon by Republicans against the Democrats, though, because it doesn't feel as though the Dems have sufficient ownership over the current bill, and the current mess that's produced it, for the national GOP to profit from any future anti-bailout backlash. Even if it ends up passing with way more support from Dems than from the GOP, I think this is George W. Bush's bailout more than it's Nancy Pelosi's or Barney Frank's, because, well, this is still George W. Bush's economy. Republicans who think the public will blame the Democrats, and specifically a President Obama, if the bailout is massively unpopular come 2010 or 2012 are almost certainly kidding themselves. Whether it succeeds or fails, the bailout seems likely to be remembered as the last great fiasco of the Bush Era, not the first big-government fiasco of a new liberal moment, and there's very little the Republicans can do to change this.
It's true that the landscape might look different if John McCain had come out against the bailout a week ago, tried to tie the whole thing around the neck of Freddie and Fannie Mae and the Democrats, and urged the entire GOP to vote against it. But I don't think there's any way at this point for the McCain campaign to execute the kind of anti-bailout pivot Pethokoukis has in mind, given that just last week McCain basically put all his political capital on the line in an effort to get the thing passed. In a sense, McCain's "I'm going to Washington" gambit last week was his campaign in a nutshell: Instead of taking a big policy gamble and opposing the bailout, he played it safe on substance and gambled on the symbolism and/or gimmickry of suspending his campaign and asking to postpone the debate instead. Since I'm a nervous nellie who basically wants the bailout to go through, this is a rare case where I'm glad he played it safe on substance - but the fact remains that having gambled that he could swoop into Washington and take credit for rescuing the bill, and having apparently lost that bet, he can't just switch sides and try to play the anti-bailout populist from here on out. The McCain campaign can still play the Freddie and Fannie card, up to a point - and sure enough, they're trying - but the anti-bailout ship has sailed, and there's no way for McCain to get on board.
Why McCain Lost (The Debate, That Is)
It feels somewhat irrelevant given how quickly economic events seem to be overtaking the campaign, but here's a quick final thought on last Friday's debate, and why the great and good American people (at least judging by the pollsto date) emphatically disagreed with my conviction that McCain came out on top. I saw the debate as an evening in which the policy differences between the two men were muted, and McCain was able to steer the conversation around, again and again, to his experience and record, which on paper is easily his biggest advantage over Obama. If this election were being decided on the candidates' resumes alone, independent of ideological considerations or the state of the country, McCain would win in a walk, and so a debate in which he kept Obama on the defensive and flaunted his experience at every turn seemed, to me at least, like a best-case scenario for the McCain campaign.
Obviously, though, that's not how the public saw it. I think Nate Silver's point, about McCain's advantage being confined to a set of issues that voters just don't care that much about at the moment, does a lot of explanatory work here, but I also think I underestimated the dynamic that Ambinder and Fallows have gestured at: Namely, the extent to which the average independent voter really, really wants to vote for Barack Obama, which in effect makes these debates about Obama's performance, rather than McCain's. Thus it's not enough for the GOP nominee to advertise his own virtues, as McCain did relatively successfully last Friday; he needs to sow deep, deep doubts about Obama, and ideally goad the Democratic nominee into saying or doing something that saps the public's confidence in his preparedness or competence. That didn't happen: On points, McCain may have won a lot of the exchanges, and I still think his attacks on Obama were stronger than Obama's attacks on him, but nothing he dinged his opponent on - from pork-barrel spending to meeting with Ahmadinejad to being slow to come around to the same position as McCain on Russia's invasion of Georgia - was big enough or immediate enough to undercut the basic respectability of Obama's performance, and the air of moderation, caution and sanity he projected. If the two men had gone into the debate on equal footing, I suspect my read on the evening would have been on the money (he said, defensively). But they didn't, and it wasn't: Obama needed to seem like a reasonable man and plausible President, and McCain needed to make Obama seem like a neophyte, and incompetent, and/or a lefty radical, and only one of the two of them got the job done.
September 29, 2008
A Fourth Scenario
Per Kristol: John McCain flies back to Washington and finds a way to get the bailout passed. The markets recover; the papers trumpet McCain's heroism, and he's elected by a thin margin in November.
Unfortunately, I'd place the odds against this happening at roughly - oh, what the hell, I'll just choose a really large number at random - seven hundred billion to one.
Three Scenarios
The best case: This is an example of America's democratic institutions reasserting themselves in the face of the attempt by a panicked technocratic elite to prop up reckless institutions that richly deserve to fail.
The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm without 1930s-style suffering; the Republican Party is not so fortunate. Even though most Americans claim to oppose the bailout [update: not anymore], the House GOP's obstructionism is widely viewed as having worsened the economic situation; the fact that these are contradictory positions does not faze an electorate that wraps all of the country's current troubles up, ties them with a bow, and lays them at the feet of the Bush-led GOP. John McCain loses by a landslide in November. The Democratic Party regains years or even decades worth of ground among the white working class, consolidates the Hispanic vote, and locks up a large chunk of highly-educated voters who might otherwise lean conservative. The much-discussed liberal realignment happens. And a politician running on a Ron Paul-style economic platform does very, very well in the GOP primaries of 2012.
People have been cajoled into submission through fear and intimidation,
and above all by the threat that life might become less comfortable.
In other words, advocates of the bailout are quite happy to say
that liberty has a price and they are very happy to pay it so long as
it avoids most of the unpleasantness. "Give me liberty or give me a
comfy retirement!" is not exactly a phrase that will live forever.
Thus an abject abandonment of liberty is here being implausibly dressed
up as a defense of liberty ...
It is easy to talk about principle when there is no crisis happening
and no risk attached to standing on principle. The real test comes
when holding fast may actually cost something. Holding to a principle,
if it means anything, means that you value it more than mere
self-interest, satisfaction or comfort. A lot of Americans want to
have it all-the pretense that they are free, with none of the
responsibilities or dangers that go with it. In reality, you can
either have the latter and remain free, or you can cease being free and
then be kept free (temporarily) from responsibility and danger.
I don't think there's any question, at this point, that the bailout being considered will do real damage to the principles of free markets and limited government: The only question is how severe what Jim Manzi terms the "ideological costs" end up being. But as a layman in these matters, with no way of judging independently how materially awful the costs of inaction might be, I'm sitting here watching the House vote and the market drop and drop and thinking exactly what Larison's hypothetical American is thinking: If the defeat of the bailout is a victory for liberty, it's a victory whose costs I'm not prepared to bear.
McCain and Obama are two of the most
exceptional political figures of their generations, so expansive in
their own visions of what they represent. But you wouldn't have known
that if you were, say, a Martian tuning in to this campaign for the
first time. Neither of them really faced the bailout head-on, sharply
differentiated themselves from the other, or (most disappointing of
all) tried to offer a big argument or central narrative about what's
wrong with the country. Sometimes, their positions even seemed to
converge. The two of them reminded me of a bickering older couple
that's lived in the same familiar space so long -- the campaign -- that
they've stopped arguing about the big things (do we move? have a baby?) and are now litigating the color of the salt shakers.
The whole debate was weirdly imitative. You brag about your soldier's bracelet, I'll brag about my
soldier's bracelet! Obama was more afflicted with this imitation
disorder -- he called for giving Georgia and Ukraine NATO Membership
Action Plans "immediately," a stance Sarah Palin was derided for taking
in her interview with Charlie Gibson, and McCain has already released a
post-debate ad
featuring clips of Obama agreeing with the senator from Arizona. But
what happened to the aggressive, hot McCain who loved to rib
Ahmadinejad? McCain sounded awkward and reined-in on Iran, while on
meeting sketchy heads of state -- a question on which McCain's and
Obama's instincts seem naturally and sharply opposed -- the two men
sounded as though they'd nearly converged (yes, you reach out; no, you
don't get on a plane as soon as Kim Jong Il sends you a text message).
"I'm not parsing words," said Obama. "He's parsing words, my friends,"
retorted McCain. "I'm using the same words your advisers used," huffed
Obama.
He's parsing words, he isn't parsing words, let's call the
whole thing off. The two guys fought all night in the weeds, tussling
Talmudically over Henry Kissinger, the difference between a "strategy"
and a "tactic," Obama's exact earmark request, and our official
designation for the Republican Guard, without stepping back to explain
what was really at stake in their differences of opinion ...
The only part of this I'd quibble with is the "sometimes": I think their positions converged a lot more than that. Jim Antle and Daniel Larison wentafewrounds on the question of whether the McCain-Obama convergence on foreign policy is unique to this election, or whether it represents the same kind of thing that we've seen in elections past; either way, though, the convergence is real - on Russia and Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, the two candidates are largely debating (ahem) tactics rather than strategy. And the same goes for the bailout (for it) and earmark reform (for it), which took up the bulk of the remaining time on Friday night. No doubt we'll see more significant clashes in the debates to come, since the two candidates' positions on health care and taxes do actually diverge considerably. But the first debate had the advantage of focusing on the most immediately pressing issues facing America - whether we should bail out the financial industry, and then what we should be doing about the quadruple problem of Iraq, Iran, Russia and Pakghanistan - and on those fronts, the candidates' positions offer us more of an echo than a choice.
This doesn't mean that they won't be radically different Presidents, especially where foreign policy is concerned: Obama might turn out to be the passive ditherer that right-wingers fear he'll be, standing idly by while Iraq slides back into chaos and a nuclear-armed Iran bestrides the Middle East, and McCain might prove just as much of a Russophobe warmonger and "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" nutjob as lefties (and paleocons) expect. But if you're a voter trying to weight the likelihood of either scenario, you have to make the judgment based on style and personality; on substance, the two men are showing very similar cards.
It Is Designed To Break Your Heart
Last year, the New York Mets lost to the Florida Marlins at Shea Stadium on the final day of the season and missed the playoffs by one game. 365 days, 162 games, a new ace and a new manager later, the Mets lost to the Florida Marlins at Shea on the final day of the season and missed the playoffs by one game. Baseball is a hard game.
As for the bigger picture ... once again, the wild card (and revenue-sharing) era produced a pretty damn good regular season: Four teams playing for their life on the final day (which turned out to not quite be the last day, after all), a famous dynasty falling on (semi-) hard times, and the Brewers and the Rays taking over the feel-good, drought-ending role the Rockies played last year. Now the question is whether, once again, the wild card-era postseason will turn out to be a bust. Here's my litany of complaints, from last year:
... the expanded playoff system, while it's had its moments, comes with an
awful lot of built-in problems: The 3-of-5 first round is engineered to
produce sweeps and injects an enormous crapshoot effect into an already
overly-random system; the sheer number of teams that make the playoffs
prevents postseason rivalries from taking shape (not just the
ancient Dodgers-Yankees rivalries, I mean, but also the great '70s
battles between the Orioles and the A's, or the Yankees and the Royals
or the Phillies and the Dodgers); you end up with too many series where
a mediocre team, having lucked into a victory in the preceding round,
is wildly overmatched against its next opponent; the built-in off days,
which increased this fall for no good reason, create enormous amounts
of momentum-sapping dead time (hello, Rockies!); the plethora of games
makes each individual contest and series less memorable, even if it's
really good; and finally, the whole thing just seems too damn long ...
Regarding the issue of days off and dead time, the fact that the Red Sox and Angels will be only three games deep into their best-of-five series a Sunday doesn't exactly suggest that the higher-ups have any plans to fix the problem - or that they consider it a problem at all. The rest, though, is up to the players. Here's hoping for something special, before summer finally goes out.
September 27, 2008
If Obama Won ...
... with undecideds, I think Nate Silver's explanation makes the most sense:
My other annoyance with the
punditry is that they seem to weight all segments of the debate
equally. There were eight segments in this debate: bailout, economy,
spending, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, terrorism. The pundit
consensus seems to be that Obama won the segments on the bailout, the
economy, and Iraq, drew the segment on Afghanistan, and lost the other
four. So, McCain wins 4-3, right? Except that, voters don't weight
these issues anywhere near evenly. In Peter Hart's recent poll for NBC,
43 percent of voters listed the economy or the financial crisis as
their top priority, 12 percent as Iraq, and 13 percent terrorism or
other foreign policy issues. What happens if we give Obama two out of
three economic voters (corresponding to the fact that he won two out of
the three segments on the economy), and the Iraq voters, but give
McCain all the "other foreign policy" voters? ... By this measure, Obama "won" by 14 points, which almost exactly his margin in the CNN poll.
If these numbers show up in wider polling, it seems like awfully bad news for McCain. If he can't get a bump from last night's showing, which struck me as a
pretty strong, I think it's going to be awfully difficult for him to get a
bump of any sort across the run of debates. It's hard to envision him turning in a vastly better
performance where the focus is explicitly on domestic
policy (if you thought we heard a little too much about earmarks last
night, just you wait ...), and of course there's the looming Palin-Biden fiasco for his campaign to weather as well. If undecided voters didn't like what they saw from McCain last night, I don't know what, exactly, his campaign can do - given his range and limitations as a politician, and the obvious weakness of his running mate - to win them over going forward.
September 26, 2008
A Win For Obama?
So says Mark Halperin, and so say some focus groups. Honestly, there's no reason to trust my impressions on these things at all: I remember being convinced that Al Gore just demolished George W. Bush in the first two debates in 2000, and that Bush turned the tables on him in the third, when all the world ended up agreeing that it was precisely the reverse. But I still think McCain won tonight.
This is a pretty traditional debate performance for Obama. Strong on
substance. Few mistakes. Little in the way of killer instinct or
decapitating lines. McCain, by contrast, is offering an uncommonly
strong performance powered, as far as I can tell, by his raging
contempt for Obama. He won't look at him. He's using "what Senator
Obama doesn't understand" the way Joe Biden uses "ladies and
gentlemen." His constant refrain is the places he's visited, leaders
he's befriended, aging advisers and presidents he's known. Obama is
conveying the fact that he thinks McCain wrong. But McCain is conveying
the fact that he thinks Obama an unprepared lightweight. One of these
is a stronger claim than the other.
John Podhoretz notes that some analysts are spinning this against McCain - he was disrespectful, wouldn't make eye contact, etc. I'm pretty sure that isn't how it's going to play, but I guess we'll have to wait for the inevitable SNL skit to know for sure ...
A Win For McCain
That's my insta-verdict, at least. Obama had quite a few effective moments: On middle-class tax cuts, on health care, and on the original decision to invade Iraq, he made points that went unrebutted, and sometimes I thought McCain laid it on a little thick with his lists of countries visited, shout-outs to ancient legislation he supported, and so forth. But the spectre of fiscal calamity blunted Obama's edge on domestic policy, and on foreign affairs McCain set the tempo and kept his rival on the defensive almost throughout, I thought: The Democratic nominee found himself alternating between me-tooism and defensiveness, albeit without making any serious missteps. The Obama camp's spin is that McCain talked endlessly about the past, and Americans want the election to be about the future - which is a fair point, in a sense, and if Obama ends up with a bounce in the polls from this debate, McCain's insistence on invoking his record and his experience at every opportunity won't look like a good strategy. But in the moment, in a debate that focused on foreign policy, I thought it wore well: Obama seemed smooth enough but also somewhat callow, and McCain just seemed like someone who's, well, "ready to lead," as all his campaign ads have it.
Gravitas
McCain is rambling a bit on foreign policy, but he seems immensely more Presidential than his rival at the moment. And the "I have a bracelet, too" rejoinder from Obama felt weak, weak ...
Update: No! Not the League of Democracies!!!!!
Earmarks, Earmarks, Earmarks
In case you didn't know, John McCain is against them. And against them. And against them.
A Republican strategist told me, "John McCain is not capable of
carrying an economic message on anything other than spending." Tonight
that strategist is being proven right.
That being said, the realities of the fiscal situation - I'm listening to Jim Lehrer press both candidates on how they'll adjust their plans to deal with the post-bailout landscape - does lend McCain's tendency to answer every domestic-policy question by promising to "cut spending, cut spending, and cut spending" slightly more resonance than it would have enjoyed if this debate had been held even two weeks ago.
Breaking Sarah?
Chris Orr has an interesting and semi-sympathetic take on Palin's CBS fiasco. Here are some excerpts:
Put yourself in her shoes for a moment.
She was an ambitious, confident young pol with some impressive
political accomplishments in her home state who, one can guess, had
aspirations for taking her brand national at some point but not for at
least a few more years .... She's unexpectedly plucked
from obscurity by the McCain campaign and, after a couple of rough days
of media vetting, she gives a speech at the GOP convention--the first
speech she's ever given with anything approaching this level of
prominence--and is universally declared to have hit it out of the park ....
Now, I don't know Sarah Palin (obviously),
but at this point I suspect she envisioned the next several weeks as a
continuation of her coming-out-party/victory-tour. She'd do packed
events before cheering members of the GOP base (something she has in
fact done), but she'd be a superstar in all the other typical ways,
too. She'd be ubiquitous on the tube, doing the "Tonight Show" and
"Good Morning America," and, who knows, maybe even the political shows.
She'd be so forthright and funny and charming and genuine that the
whole country would fall in love with her. She'd be followed by a media
throng that hung on her every word.
Instead, she hasn't been
allowed to give them a word to hang on: no press conferences (until one
yesterday that hardly merited the term), a couple of scripted,
softbally interviews, and an ongoing effort by the McCain campaign to
have her vice presidential debate postponed indefinitely. The obvious
implicit message her preppers and coddlers and protectors in the
campaign are giving her is: You're not ready. We don't trust you.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Don't ever open your mouth
unless you've cleared it with us or you might destroy the whole
campaign. These are not pleasant things to hear, and Palin has
presumably been hearing them (again, by implication) every day for
weeks now.
... I'm reminded of the situation you see
every now and then in sports, when a talented athlete--which,
conveniently enough, Palin was--gets a taste of heavy duty coaching
and, rather than being built up, is broken down, losing confidence in
his game, becoming tentative, second-guessing himself even to the point
of paralysis. I don't know whether that's what's happened to Sarah
Palin. But from where I sit, it sure looks like it.
If you watch her pre-nomination interviews - withCNBC, say, or with C-SPAN - and then compare them to the Couric performance, the difference is staggering. Obviously a lot of this just has to do with the difficulty of talking about national issues she doesn't know that much about, versus state issues she knew extremely well, and doing so under the kind of microscope that most national politicians spend months and years preparing for. But the marked decline in her coherence and fluency just from the Gibson interview - where she was bad, but not epically bad - to this one suggests something like the confidence-destroying dynamic Chris describes is playing out as well.
Weird Al and Me
My pre-teen years were spent at something of a remove from American popular culture (which may explain my somewhat unhealthy interest in celebrity gossip as an adult), and my first exposure to a lot of the Eighties and early-Nineties music that my peers took for granted as the soundtrack of their youth came through the various Weird Al Yankovic albums that a fellow dork pressed on me in middle school. So when most Americans hear certain song hooks and think "Michael Jackson!" or "Aerosmith!" or "Red Hot Chili Peppers!," my first thought tends to be: "Eat It!" or "Livin' in the Fridge!" or "the Bedrock Anthem!"
I'm not terribly proud of this fact, but there it is - and suffice to say, I very much enjoyed Wired's new Weird Al profile, and I think that you might too, even if you didn't have the bizarre experience of listening to his parodies before you listened to the original songs.
September 25, 2008
Sarah The Unready (II)
And now, an excerpt from my inner monologue, as transcribed while watching various clips from Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric (I can't link to them; they're too painful):
And that, Douthat, is why nobody's ever going to hire you to helppick their running mate.
But hey, maybe it's all just effing brilliant rope-a-dope for the Biden debate ....
An Election About Something
One the other hand, if John McCain is really planning to oppose and/or torpedo the bailout, instead of just trying to swoop in and claim credit for getting it through Congress ... well, then we'll have something substantive to talk about.
An Election About Nothing
If you're wondering why I was writing about baseball yesterday instead of leaping into the debate over whether John McCain's decision to suspend his campaign and call for the delay of tomorrow night's debate was a bold act of leadership, a brilliant piece of political theater, or a pointless, vote-losing stunt, it's because the baseball season suddenly seems a lot more interesting than Presidential politics. McCain's gamble may be politically smart, or it may be politically stupid, but like almost everything that's happened in this campaign since the two candidates locked up their respective nominations, it's primarily interesting on a tactical level; its substantive import is close to nil. Both McCain and Obama are almost certain, at this point, to end up supporting whatever bailout compromise is hashed out in Congress, which means that we'll be able to add the current economic crisis to the list of issues where the two candidates have managed to avoid anything like a sustained argument about policy. It's the Russo-Georgian War all over again: McCain responds boldly/impulsively, Obama responds carefully/overcautiously, but they both end up saying roughly the same thing, and the pundit class goes back to obsessing about whatever shocking poll or web ad has been released that day.
Both campaigns have clearly decided that they have an interest in keeping this pattern going. From the McCain camp's point of view, substantive debate could be fatal to their candidate, since he isn't all that comfortable talking about the issues - the economy and health care chief among them - that voters claim to care the most about, and the Democrats are trusted more than the Republicans on most domestic policy questions anyway. If the election is going to be won, McCain and Co. have decided, it's going to be won on trench warfare and intangibles, not substance. From the Obama camp's point of view, meanwhile, the election is theirs to lose, so why take any chances when you can just meet McCain blow for blow and run out the clock until November? With substance comes opportunity, but also risk - does Obama really want to talk about the costs of, say, the cap-and-trade program he officially supports? I think not! - and why would you take any risks at all when the Presidency is within your grasp?
So Barack Obama, who once claimed to embody sweeping, once-in-a-generation change, has ended up running a cautious, negative, and deeply generic Democratic campaign, while John McCain, who's supposedly all about honor and service and aching nobility, has offered a mix of snark, stunts, and manufactured controversies week in and week out. And the pundit class, deeply invested in the notion that the stakes in this election are stunningly, awesomely high, has responded to the fundamental dullness of the race itself with wild hyperventilation, unable to accept that this campaign just hasn't lived up to their round-the-clock hype - and that it may not even turn out to be the most important election of this decade, let alone of a generation or a lifetime.
All Presidential elections are important, of course, and they're
usually important for reasons that nobody sees coming during the
election itself. But given the evidence presented to date - the enormous constraints on American action abroad, a fiscal situation that more or less ensures that
neither candidate's boldest ideas are likely to get off the ground, and the unimaginative, substance-averse politicking of the candidates themselves - there's good reason to think that the outcome of this election won't be nearly as transformational as many people seem to think. Partisans on both sides claim that we're staring into the abyss: If you listen to some conservatives, you'd think that John McCain and Sarah Palin are all that stands between turning over U.S. foreign policy to William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright; if you listen to some Obamaphiles, you'd think that a vote for McCain is a vote for fascism, or theocracy, or the Putinization of America. But if you watch the candidates themselves, and listen to them, the stakes seem much, much lower.
September 24, 2008
Damn Yankees
A reader points out that while the Yankees outperformed their regular-season Pythagorean record during their golden age of 1996 to 2001, they outperformed it even more during the six-year age of silver that followed - which suggests, in turn, that the effect is a combination of statistical noise and the impact of Mariano Rivera (a constant across both eras) on close games than the any roster-wide "we know how to win" killer instinct. Henceforward, then, I pledge to confine my mythologization of those late-nineties teams to their astonishing postseason record, and I'll leave their ability to beat the "runs scored versus runs allowed" odds out of it.
Also, another reader notes that the '01 World Series ended in November because of 9/11-related delays. So Olney's "last night" was a November night, not an October one as I suggested below.
Finally, here's John Schwenkler's midseason meditation on the end of the Yankee era.
The Last Night of the Yankees Dynasty
According to Buster Olney, the dynasty's real "last night" came seven years ago, in October of 2001 - the night that Luis Gonzalez fisted a Series-winning single over Derek Jeter's head, ending the Yankee streak of consecutive World Championships at three and ringing down the curtain on a particularly indomitable era in Bronxian history. And Olney's right, in a sense: The Yankee teams of 2002-2007 felt at times like a waning shadow of the terrifying squad that came before them - the team of Scott Brosius and Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez, of El Duque's leg kicks and David Cone's pinpoint control, of Bernie Williams' effortless center fielding and the nasty middle-relief work of Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, and Ramiro Mendoza. The pre-2001 Yankees weren't as talented, strictly speaking, as some of the squads New York has fielded in the last five years - O'Neill didn't hit like Gary Sheffield, Brosius was no Alex Rodriguez, El Duque's regular-season record never matched Mike Mussina's - but they were vastly harder to beat than the jury-rigged teams of recent vintage, with their uneasy mix of over-the-hill superstars (Kevin Brown and Randy Johnson, Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon) and unready twentysomethings (Melky Cabrera, Philip Hughes, etc.). The Nineties Yanks were the great exception to the Moneyball rules - the team whose numbers didn't tell the whole story, the team that consistently outperformed its Pythagorean record, the team that you knew was going to find a way to beat you when the chips were down. You knew Derek Jeter would drive in the tying run in the seventh and Williams would homer to win it; you knew Paul O'Neill would get the clutch bloop single and that Mendoza would wriggle out of the bases-loaded jam the following inning to save the game; you knew that they'd capitalize on your team's errors and stifle your last-ditch, eighth-inning comeback attempt. You just knew it. And God, how I hated them.
Those days are long gone. But the streak of post-season appearances went on: Even when the Yankees would struggle early in the season, and people would murmur that this, this at last was finally the year when they wouldn't be playing in October, they always found a way to right the ship, to leave the Jays and Rays and Orioles in the dust and lap the Red Sox - and even last year, when they finally didn't catch us, they still cruised into the playoffs, claiming it as their birthright yet again. And crucial pieces from those old, terrifying teams remained in place - Jeter prancing around shortstop, Posada's hangdog face behind the plate, Andy Pettitte (back after an exile in Houston) sweeping curveballs across the plate, and Mariano Rivera, deadly and elegant, there at the end of every Yankees win. Joe Torre endured as well, until this year, and even then his replacement, Joe Girardi, was a fixture from those great mid-nineties team, Posada's platoon-mate turned Posada's manager, the wheel of Yankee history coming full circle yet again.
And so attention must be paid: Last night, on fields in Boston and Toronto, the amazing run that began when Don Mattingly was still the Yankee first baseman finally ended, and baseball's twentieth century - which was, more than anything else, a pinstriped century - finally, irrevocably, gave way to its twenty-first, in which the role the Yankees filled for generations is very much up for grabs. They will be back, of course, but in a different stadium, under different leadership, and in a different era. And now is the time for their fans and their enemies alike to salute the way they were - a team, and a dynasty, the likes of which we may not see again.
September 23, 2008
In The Future, All Movies Will Be Superhero Movies
Peter Suderman wants Steven Spielberg to make a Superman movie. Moriarty at Aintitcoolnews wantsthe Coen brothers to make a Superman movie. I want to weep.
The writers revere Melville's original text, but
their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is
the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes
how Ahab's obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his
good judgment as captain.
This change will allow them to depict the whale's decimation of
other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab's Pequod, and Ahab will be
depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.
"Our vision isn't your grandfather's 'Moby Dick,' " Cooper said.
"This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on
the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an
action-adventure revenge story."
As long as Tugg Speedman is available to play Ahab ...
The Wire and the Newspaper Industry
I would, of course, second Yglesias' observation that The Wire's lack of award-show recognition, this year and every year before it, represents a minor travesty. But since he brings the subject up, I think it's also worth observing that the show's much-criticized final season, and especially that season's newsroom plot, looks even worse - or at least even more out-of-touch - today than it did when the show aired six months ago. Since Simon decided that his big statement about the state of American journalism would be a score-settling retread of Shattered Glass, the newspaper industry's fortunes have gone from worse to awful, and the Baltimore Sun, in particular, has endured a truly punishing round of buyouts and layoffs; last week, the paper's managing editor resigned in order "to spend more time with his family," which strikes me as code for "he just couldn't take it anymore." I could go on and on about the Tragedy of the Sun or the larger Tragedy of American Newspapers in Middle-Sized Cities - yes, I'm a conservative who thinks the press often has a liberal bias, and yes, I don't think it's the end of the world if a more freewheeling and partisan style of journalism replaces the old model of studious and semi-spurious impartiality, but papers like the Sun aren't being replaced by less-liberal, more-balanced versions of themselves, or by competing, hard-charging papers with more explicitly partisan slants; they're being replaced by crap or by nothing at all, and it's a damn shame - but as you can probably tell I'm way too close to the subject (wife worked at the Sun, friends work at the Sun, friends work in other newspapers, etc) to be anything save a tedious bore on the subject. Suffice to say that I think that David Simon, former newsman and great truthtelling prophet of the decline of the American Empire, could have done just a little better by the failing, flailing industry he supposedly loves than a long narrative arc about how the biggest problem facing journalism is venal, Pulitzer-obsessed editors who coddle fabulist reporters.
Oh, I know, I know - the fabulism really happened (well, some version of it did, at least) when Simon was at the Sun, and besides the real story, the one all the haters missed, wasn't the fabulism; it was the meta-story about how the Sun never covered the real story of what was going on in Baltimore! And the economic crisis was in the season, somewhere - there were buyouts and anxieties, and the fabulist wouldn't have been promoted, probably, without the older, better reporters giving way, etc. etc. But look, the bottom line is this: At a moment of maximum crisis for American newspapers, with daily paper after daily paper collapsing into mediocrity under the pressure of collapsing revenues, David Simon decided to use his HBO soapbox to rail against ... the newspaper industry's obsession with Pulitzer-bait stories. It's the equivalent of doing an entire season about the plight of the American inner city in which the drug war was a presence, but way in the background, and the story focused primarily on the evils of, I don't know, check-cashing services or something.
September 22, 2008
A Note On The Economic Situation
I'm refraining from commenting on what's obviously the most important story of the last week, and possibly the most important story of the next decade or more, because I have no expertise on a subject that requires real expertise to discuss intelligently, and thus nothing useful to add to the reams of commentary beingproducedbypeoplewhounderstand the situation - to the extent that anyone does - far, far better than I do. Like James Poulos, I stand ready to offer vaporous commentary on American culture and society that may or may not relate to the current crisis - but only after the crisis itself is at least some distance in the rearview mirror.
A Tale of Two Outsiders
As a early Palin-booster who's expressed disappointment with what we've seen from John McCain's running mate to date, I think it's reasonable for me to explain what, exactly, I was hoping for from the Alaska governor - who has, after all, been placed in an excruciatingly difficult situation over the last few weeks. The answer, I think, is something along the lines of what we saw from Mike Huckabee during the primary season. Huckabee was just as much of a political outsider as Palin (albeit one with more years in statewide office), he had the same sort of non-elite background - the degree from Ouachita Baptist University, the distinct non-yuppie family life, etc. - and the same dearth of foreign-policy experience, and he absorbed some of the same snobbish slings and arrows - from conservatives more than liberals - that have been hurled in Palin's direction. But in a highly-charged political environment, he also demonstrated enough of a facility for talking about politics and policy - which is an imperfect way to judge a potential President, but nonetheless one of the more important ways to judge that we have - to make himself a credible contender for the highest office in the land. Or at least I thought so. Yes, of course, he had all sorts of weaknesses, and one of his big policy ideas was daft, and he wasn't at his best talking about foreign affairs, and he favored cornpone humor over substance, and so on and so forth. But by the midpoint of the primary season, he was at least in the same ballpark as Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson or, yes, John McCain when it came to the question: Is this man a plausible President?
Now you may disagree - and if you do, you're probably either a disgruntled Romney backer or the sort of person who would never cotton to the notion of a one-term governor of Alaska as vice president anyway. (I exaggerate, but you take my point.) And even if you agree, you may say that the comparison is unfair - first, because Huckabee was unusually glib and charming, as politicians go, and second because he had a long primary season, much of it spent in relative obscurity, to achieve this effect, whereas Palin has only two months, all of them spent in the full-on glare of an obsessed and hostile press corps. Which is true enough! But Palin is where she is, and eight weeks is all she gets: The fact that she has a tougher challenge than Huckabee doesn't absolve her from the obligation to rise to meet it, and thus far she has not. I'm more inclined to reserve judgment on her present (and future) prospects than the disillusioned Noah Millman, whose reasons for being initially enthusiastic about her almost precisely match my own, and more likely to place the responsibility for the way she has been used to date with the uninspired, trench-warfare-plus-nothing McCain campaign. But the fact remains that she has given one fine speech, and two lackluster interviews, and has otherwise dodged the sort of rough-and-tumble venues and conversations that Huckabee welcomed, and which he used to make his candidacy for president seem more plausible than it initially appeared. Palin needs to at least approach the standard Huckabee set; she hasn't yet; and that failure is showing up in her approval ratings. There's still time for her to turn it around, and as you might expect, I'm pulling for her to do it. But at this point, there's an awful lot riding on that one vice-presidential debate.
Palin and Her (Conservative) Critics
Over at TNR, Michael Schaffer argues that conservative pundits can't have it both ways: You can't simultaneously defend Sarah Palin from liberal snobbery and critique her for seeming unprepared to be vice president, he suggests; either you're in favor of elitism, or you're against it. Of Palin-doubting conservatives (myself included), Schaffer wonders "what, exactly, these bright folks think will help her
do better, or hasten the day when a national candidacy is not in fact 'too much.' The answer is obvious: exposure to the worldly people,
issues, and institutions of Washington and the world beyond it." And then, riffing off David Brooks' line that a lot of Palin's liberal critics object to her on the grounds that "she has never summered in Tuscany" (which I think was meant as humorous hyperbole), Schaffer suggests that actually, if Palin did summer in Tuscany, she'd probably have "an easier time"
with conservative pundits "than the Italy-free version currently on the hustings."
In some cases, he may be right: Conservative elites aren't immune to straightforward class-based snobbery, especially when it dovetails with their own allegiances; witness, say, the contempt for Mike Huckabee's general Dogpatch air among certain Romney, McCain and Rudy-supporting members of the right-wing punditocracy. And Schaffer's certainly right that the line between an elitism that holds politicians to high standards and an "elitism of snobbery and style" can get blurry quickly. But that doesn't mean the line itself isn't worth drawing. It should be possible to believe that Palin's resume and background don't disqualify her from holding high office, that someone can be a fine President without prolonged exposure to life inside the Beltway, and that "elite experience" is not the only experience that's germane to governing the United States ... while simultaneously believing (as I do) that Palin's interviews to date haven't instilled confidence in her readiness to govern. The belief that populism has a place in American politics does not require a belief that every populist candidate should be uncritically supported; and the belief that one can acquire political wisdom outside Washington does not absolve an outsider candidate of the obligation to demonstrate that they have wisdom, as well as talking points, to fall back on.
Like Michael Gerson, I would rather be governed by a "backwoods, religious no-name" like William Jennings Bryan than by many of the sophisticates who baited him; like Ralph Peters, I think it's good for American democracy to throw up leaders whose life experience encompasses start-up churches and strip-mall suburbs, and who attended schools like the University of Idaho rather than the upper-crust institutions that have produced every President since Reagan. But supporting "Great Commoners" when they appear, and pining for them when they don't, doesn't mean that any candidate who happens to be a commoner and a conservative merits automatic support from right-wing pundits (which is more or less the subtext of a rant like this one, which takes a sledgehammer to "northeast corridor conservatives" for their Palin-skepticism), or that conservatives are hypocrites - and snobs who just don't want to admit to the designation - if they support the idea of candidates like Sarah Palin while remaining skeptical about Palin herself.
September 21, 2008
Superstitious Minds
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway looks into the bold, heroic rationalism of unbelievers, and finds - well, something slightly different:
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for
Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to
gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced
civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it
possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and
the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and
the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong
belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship
more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those
belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former
denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of
those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former
denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the
respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the
possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
Hat tip: MBD, who has the requisite reference to the most famous aphorism G.K. Chesterton didn't actually coin.
Another Country
If you read one story this weekend, make it Dexter Filkins on his return to Iraq after two years away.
September 18, 2008
What Should McCain Be Saying?
A couple days ago, I suggested a few ways that John McCain could have put together a more ideological creative campaign - running as a Sam's Club candidate, running as a Rockefeller-Repub centrist on issues like health care, or running as a Perotista deficit hawk and entitlement reformer. Now Daniel Henninger has his own suggestion - more porkbusting, but with greater specifics than McCain has offered to date:
The problem isn't standard political corruption. The problem is that
the $2.8 trillion federal budget is a vast ocean of Beltway pilot fish
feeding off scraps from the whale -- lawyers, lobbyists, ex-Members of
Congress. No one runs the Sea of Washington. It's too big, too deep.
Barack Obama wants to dig a deeper hole. John McCain should ask the
American people if they want this to go on, because it's nonsense to
vote for government to do "more" and then whine when it doesn't work or
degrades into sweetheart-deal hell.
Unfocused "reform" rhetoric from Mr. McCain isn't enough. The public
has been there, heard that. Sen. McCain should talk about what he knows
-- fat Fannie and Freddie, farm-bill bloat, the ethanol subsidy fiasco,
the federal procurement mess. Show people Gov. Palin's 18 single-spaced
pages of 2007 vetoes. Then identify Congress's bipartisan supporters of
the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act and ask the voters' support. Appear
with GOP congressman from Sarah's new generation who want to help --
Eric Cantor of Virginia, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Kevin McCarthy of
California. There are others.
Promise to spend the first two years on this historic political
reform effort, and if a Democratic Congress laughs, promise to
barnstorm in 2010 for a Congress willing to act, from any party.
George Will, meanwhile, thinks that McCain should be making the case for divided government, by running against the awful things the Democrats might do:
The 22nd Amendment will banish the president in January, but
Congress will then be even more Democratic than it is now. Does the
country really want there to be no check on it? Consider two things
that will quickly become law unless McCain is there to veto them or
unless -- this is a thin reed on which to depend -- Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell has 40 reliable senators to filibuster them to
deserved deaths.
The exquisitely misnamed Employee Free Choice Act would strip from
workers their right to secret ballots in unionization elections.
Instead, unions could use the "card check" system: Once a majority of a
company's employees -- each person confronted one-on-one by a union
organizer in an inherently coercive setting -- sign cards expressing
consent, the union would be certified as the bargaining agent for all
workers. Proving that the law's purpose is less to improve workers'
conditions than to capture dues-payers for the unions, the law will
forbid employers from discouraging unionization by giving "unilateral"
-- not negotiated -- improvements in compensation and working
conditions.
Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the
equally misnamed "fairness doctrine." Until Ronald Reagan eliminated it
in 1987, that regulation discouraged freewheeling political programming
by the threat of litigation over inherently vague standards of
"fairness" in presenting "balanced" political views. In 1980 there were
fewer than 100 radio talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than
1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not
satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the
mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been
unable to dent conservatives' dominance.
I agree with Will and Henninger on the policy substance here, but with the exception of Henninger's mention of Fannie Mae - where McCain is already trying to make hay - all of these ideas seem like classic examples of the contemporary conservative tendency to offer answers to questions Americans aren't asking. Voters are worried about the financial crisis, the broader economic downturn, and the rising cost (or unavailability) of health care - and McCain is supposed to talk about the farm bill? About the menace of the Fairness Doctrine? Really? The GOP nominee is up against a candidate who's promising near-universal health care and a middle-class tax cut, and while that may well be an unaffordable combination, it's a one-two pledge that at least addresses itself to the issues that voters are most concerned about. Whereas line-item vetos and stopping card-check are red meat for a slice of the electorate that John McCain already has all locked up. I can see some of these issues - especially the attacks on corporate welfare - being woven into a broader populist narrative, but the notion that the McCain-Palin ticket is going to vault over Obama by attacking ethanol subsidies and defending Rush Limbaugh from as-yet-hypothetical regulation seems fanciful at best.
Politics Ain't Beanbag, Special Obama Edition
Why, it's almost as if the Obama campaign shared my annoyance with the ridiculous "John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonorable campaign in All Of World History" line that was going around, and decided to come up with the sleaziest, most dishonest anti-McCain ad imaginable, just to shut the scolds in the liberal commentariat up:
September 17, 2008
Why Is Palin Falling?
Sarah Palin's approval numbers have dropped pretty steadily over the past week or so, which prompts Yglesias to opine:
In the wake of Sarah Palin's nomination, a surprising number of people
-- some of whom weren't even operating in bad faith -- suggested that the
smart thing to do when faced with a popular political opponent would be
to avoid attacking her, lest the attacks cause a backlash. Looking at the Research 2000 tracking poll data, however, confirms common sense -- when you attack someone, she becomes less popular.
I was one of the people who urged the Obama campaign not to attack Palin (if I was arguing in bad faith, I wasn't aware of it) in the wake of the convention, and I still think it was good advice; in fact, I also think it's advice that the Democratic ticket has largely taken over the past week-to-ten days. Palin's fall, I suspect, has been driven primarily by negative press reports on her Alaska career (with the anti-Palin notebook dumps in the Times and the Post leading the way), ongoing coverage of the still-simmering Troopergate scandal - and especially by her widely-watched, none-too-impressive interview with Charlie Gibson, which aired the day her slide in the polls began. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has busied itself going after McCain - for lying in his ads, for being out of touch on the economy, etc. etc. - and avoiding the "she's just a small-town mayor" attacks that they trotted out immediately after the Palin pick was announced. Or at least that's been my impression - it's possible that there's been a barrage of anti-Palin fire from the Obama camp that I've missed, but by and large it seems like they've been doing a decent job of just getting out of the way, and leaving it to the media (and Palin herself) to undo her initial spike in popularity.
Porn and Adultery, One More Time
If you spend any time on the rest of the Atlantic's site (as well you should) you've probably already noticed the piece, but anyone who's weary of reading my commentary on the election and really misses mycommentary on pornography's place on the infidelity continuum is in for a real treat this month.
Palin, Bush and the Establishment
I thought that David Brooks' column on populism, elitism and Sarah Palin was quite good (even if I'm not sure my qualms about Palin's preparedness have been expressed strongly or frequently enough to merit my being placed on a list of Palin-skeptics that includes, say, a hardened doubter like David Frum). But I agree with Poulos that this Brooks line deserves to be unpacked a bit:
In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the
nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest
offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of
professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.
I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through
the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it
was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.
To which Poulos responds:
Regrettably, I have not an inkling of how Bush's management style
embodied anti-establishmentarianism. Bush simply tried as hard as
possible to ignore, brush off, and sideline criticism. It just so
happened that the establishment media was one such source of criticism,
and Paul O'Neill was another, and there are lots of examples to draw
from of 'insidery' voices being silenced and establishment dissent
frowned upon. But these things are like peas clustered at the base of a
mountain of evidence that Bush had no problem at all with
establishmentarianism so long as it suited his basic purposes. For
every Scowcroft that was left out on the doorstep there was a Cheney
given the run of the house. We can try as hard as we like to insist
that cronyism, secrecy, and vindictiveness are anti-establishmentarian,
but as a rule they are the products of establishments, and the pathologies of bureaucratic institutions.
Let me split the difference, and suggest that the Bush Administration has displayed a distinctive ability to merge the worst features of establishmentarian and anti-establishmentarian politics. Those establishment figures to whom Bush bent a ready ear - the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds, certain members of the military brass, etc. - were relied upon to the point of immense folly; meanwhile, any establishment figure, institution or organ that found itself outside the Bushian inner circle, and that offered criticism (constructive or otherwise), ended up ignored, attacked, or dismissed as out-of-touch. This "worst of both worlds" problem had something to do with Bush's own limitations as an executive, but I think it may also be a structural difficulty with anti-establishment politics in general: As a politician, you can run against the establishment all you want, but whether you're a traitor-to-your-class figure like Bush, or a more genuine outsider (like Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin), you're going to need to co-opt at least part of the establishment if you're going to actually govern. The danger, then, is what we saw with Bush: An overreliance on the establishment figures whom you've co-opted - or, just as likely, who've co-opted you - joined to a doubling-down on the hostility and suspicion you direct outward, toward the rest of the political, intellectual and media elite. (Which is a sobering thought, to say the least, for observers like myself, who are drawn to outsider candidates out of the belief that American politics - and especially conservative politics - needs to be dramatically shaken up.)
In The Thunderdome
If you'd like to watch me discuss many of the same issues I've been discussing lately, but on video instead, the brutal, no-holds-barred, blood-and-thunder bloggingheads I just taped with Ezra Klein might be the thing for you.
September 16, 2008
McCain and the Conservative Future
James Poulos, responding to these twoposts, and dilating on the McCain campaign's crumminess:
The trouble isn't that McCain's campaign is the worstest of all
times. (Indeed, part of the problem is that attacks don't seem to
register anymore unless enemies and opponents are framed with maximum
hyperbole, with everything they say or do or don't presented as the
ultimate in the crappiness of whatever kind of thing they are saying or
doing, etc.).
The trouble is that regardless of whether McCain's campaign
even cracks the top ten sleaziest campaigns in American history, it
simply sucks. We know that much. We are on a need to know basis, and it
is all we need to know. At this point, I don't see much point in
prevaricating over the truth: this campaign is flying beneath the pride
of conservatives and Republicans. Even those who might give it a pass
on general principles of hardball must realize that under circumstances
like these it could do permanent damage to the reputation of the
Republican party as a storehouse (or at least a forum) for credible and
conscientious conservative ideas.
Well, yes - it might. But then again it might not. George H.W. Bush ran a pretty content-free campaign against Michael Dukakis, and earned a reputation (partially justified, partially not) for sleaziness in the process ... but I don't think he did permanent damage to the GOP's ability to advance conservative ideas, and I don't look back and wish that Dukakis had been President instead, the better to jump-start a conservative revival in 1992. I'm definitely underwhelmed by the McCain campaign (nearly everything I've written about their efforts has been lukewarm-to-negative, I think), and I can rattle off a long list of reasons for conservatives to greet a McCain defeat with something less than wailing and gnashing of teeth. But the fact that this isn't a campaign for the Right to be proud of doesn't mean that its defeat is necessary to the future prospects of American conservatism. It's possible, as James goes on to write, that "Obama's the softest landing the GOP is likely to get, at a time when a hard landing could smash it into a fiery wreck of pieces," and that a McCain Presidency would be the equivalent of John Major's PMship - the victory snatched from the jaws of defeat that sets you up for a longer exile later on. That's a scenario I've been wrestling with all year. But being something of a cynic about "honor" among competing political campaigns, I'm very, very resistant to the notion that the degree of truthiness on display in McCain's late-summer attack ads provides anything like a dispositive resolution to the question.
Getting Culture War Ads Right
A few days ago, Jim Geraghty complained that my critique of McCain's sex-ed ad relied more on how the ad "feels" than on what the ad actually said. Today, Byron York marshals an extended defense of the ad's accuracy. And Rich Lowry writes that McCain's ads "are no worse than Obama's spots ...Obama
just ran an ad saying McCain would cut education funding -- with no
evidence. His response to McCain's supposed out-of-control negativity
is a new negative ad misleadingly creating the impression that McCain
aides are currently lobbying for special interests."
Here's the thing, though: The reason that the sex-ed ad touched such a nerve, and helped create the current "McCain is a lying liar" narrative in the press, is that it's a culture war ad. It isn't about funding or lobbying or any of the other issues where truth-bending ads get cut all the time without the media freaking out; it's about values, and children, and sex. Obviously, I think such topics are completely fair game for attack ads, but a large slice of the commentariat doesn't, and a conservative campaign that runs a culture-war ad has to expect that it will come in for a higher level of scrutiny than your typical attack ad - and a higher level of blowback if it shades the truth at all. In its relationship to the facts, the sex-ed ad wasn't all that different from, say, Obama's semi-mendacious education ad - but given its subject matter, it needed to meet a higher standard.
This ad, meanwhile, seems to meet those standards, while taking up an even hotter-button subject. It'll be interesting to see if and how the press reacts:
The Uncreative McCain Campaign
Writing in response to my suggestion that the McCain campaign has wanted for creativity, I think Rich Lowry makes a strong case that they've been quite tactically imaginative, and I agree with Rich that they wouldn't be where they are today if it weren't for some brilliant improvisations. What I had in mind, though, was ideological creativity - the sort of creativity, for instance, that might have provided stronger talking points for your new-minted veep nominee to trot out when the subject turns to, say, the state of the economy. The McCain camp has found exactly one good domestic-policy talking point to call their own - namely, offshore drilling - and that one was more or less forced on them by rising gas prices and pressure from right-wing talk radio. They have a potentially decent health care plan that they don't want to talk about because they don't know how to sell it, and a grab-bag of tax proposals that they don't want to talk about because there's not much for the middle class and the numbers don't add up ... and then, of course, they have earmarks. (ZZZzzzzz ...) Which is why they're spending most of their time trying to tear down Barack Obama - because the case against the Democratic nominee is the best case they really have.
Obviously, I have my own set of prescriptions for the kind of ideological creativity McCain could have displayed. But my preferred avenue isn't the only one he could have taken. He could have run as a Rockefeller Republican, version 2.0 - campaigning harder against his own base on issues like immigration reform or the environment, embracing the Wyden-Bennett health care plan to undercut Obama's advantage on the issue, and generally casting himself as a "just to the right of center" candidate of national unity. Or he could have aped Ross Perot's 1992 campaign, talking up entitlement reform and running as the candidate of real fiscal austerity (as opposed to the notional austerity of porkbusting), gambling that a difficult economic climate would produce middle-class support for belt-tightening, as it did '92. Or he could have combined elements of a Sam's Club agenda, a Rockefeller agenda and a Perot agenda to create something potentially new and interesting (or, yes, potentially new and idiotic).
Instead, the McCain campaign decided that they didn't want to take the kind of risks that real ideological experimentation would entail - that despite the difficulties, short and long-term, facing the GOP as a whole, there's was too much potential downside in trying to imitate Bill Clinton in 1992 and George W. Bush in 2000 (both of whom ran genuinely creative campaigns at a time when their parties desperately needed them). I had hoped that the Sarah Palin pick was a sign that they were open to rolling the dice a bit more on policy; at the moment, though, it looks like Palin herself was the roll of the dice, and it's just going to be down-and-dirty politics from here on out. There's no question that anti-Obama hardball makes sense as a strategy given the limitations of McCain's message; it's just that a lot of those limitations are self-imposed.
September 15, 2008
Misunderestimating Sarah
That's what the Republicans may be doing, Tyler Cowen argues, in the provocative Palin-related post of the day.
Politics Ain't Beanbag, Cont.
I should note that Alex Massie was considerably more eloquent - and less overtly cynical - over the weekend on some of the same points I just made below.
Politics (Still) Ain't Beanbag
In the post I just mentioned, Ezra eventually reverts to standard-issue anti-McCain dudgeon:
None of this, of course, absolves McCain of what he has done. He has
sacrificed his honor and dignity with astonishing enthusiasm. He has
become much worse than "just another politician." He is a politician
who was once more than that, and used that reputation to go lower than
the rest.
I'm a terrible cynic, I think, because I just can't get worked up about the kind of stuff Ezra and others have mind here. (Even when I think a given attack ad crosses a line, I'm thinking as much about the line between productive attacks and counterproductive ones as the line between honor and dishonor.) For much the same reasons that I never hated the Clintons, I can't bring myself to worry about whether McCain has kept his "dignity" sufficiently intact while slugging it out for the Presidency: The point of being in national politics is to win elections and govern the country in accordance with whatever goals led you into the arena in the first place, not to please columnists who disagree with you on ideological grounds but appreciate a finely-tuned sense of political principle. And anyone who believes that McCain is running a uniquely dishonorable campaign for the presidency just doesn't have enough historical perspective - or enough distance from their own passions - to comment sensibly on contemporary politics. Every successful politician and political movement has to master the art of below-the-belt, us-versus-them political engagement, because that's how democratic politics works: You can appeal to the electorate's reason all you want, but you have to appeal to their passions as well, and that means making them dislike and fear the other side as often as it means making them love you.
So if you're a liberal and you think FDR, LBJ and Bill Clinton didn't play the same game - and play it damn well, which is why they won elections and the other side lost - then you're kidding yourself. If you think John McCain hasn't been playing this game for his whole career, then you're kidding yourself: It's just that he used to fight dirty against his enemies within the GOP (social conservatives, for instance, or immigration restrictionists, or Mitt Romney), and how he's fighting dirty against a candidate that the punditocracy supports, rather than disdains. And if you think that many of the same people who bleat the loudest about the evils of "Rove-style" politics aren't happy to similarly dirty their hands for the sake of their own causes and candidates - well, you need only look at some of the coverage of Sarah Palin's family to see how quickly principle gives way to expedience when power is at stake.
Michael Brendan Dougherty's response to the liberal handwringing that greeted the GOP's "disrespectful" convention sums up my thoughts on this front, I think:
If you are in politics for "uplift" you are in the wrong business. Obama learned about politics from reading Saul Alinsky, not Chicken Soup for the Soul. Can we grow up and talk about politics as the enterprise of obtaining and exercising political power?
How much did Obama really learn from Alinsky? We're about to find out.
What The Media Covers
Amid the mounting liberal hysteria about how John McCain is running the most despicable campaign ever etc. etc., Ezra Klein deserves credit for this (relatively) cool-headed observation:
The McCain campaign's decision to lie about, well, everything,
really needs to be understood as more than the outcome of John McCain's
consuming ambition. It is a rational and obvious response to the rules
laid down by the media. Indeed, McCain's spokesperson Brian Rogers says this directly to The Politico's
Jonathan Martin. "We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared
about us. They didn't cover John McCain. So now you've got to be
forward-leaning in everything."
And it's true. Earlier this year McCain made poverty tours and
offered policy speeches. No one cared, Obama retained his lead. It was
only when he began offering vicious attacks and daily controversies
that he began setting the pace of the coverage. The McCain campaign
learned something important about the media: It's an institution that
covers conflict. If you want to direct its coverage, give it more
conflict than your opponent. And so they have.
In broad outline, I agree with this point. (It's also worth noting that McCain wanted to do a long and unprecedented series of town-hall meetings with Obama, which would have given the campaign a very different feel - and Obama, seeing no upside at a time when it looked like he might coast to landslide, said no.) But I also think Ezra is a little too hard on the media here. Yes, the press feeds on conflict and flees from policy substance, but to a large extent that's because the public feeds on conflict and flees from policy substance, however much wonks and watchdogs would like to think otherwise. (I make this observation with the awareness that Megan and Glenn Greenwald - and Greenwald's commenters - went about sixty rounds on this issue earlier in in the year: Start here, if you dare.) I have as much contempt for the way the media initially reacted to Sarah Palin's nomination as Ezra has contempt for how the press covered, say, the "lipstick on a pig" controversy or the "celebrity" ad. But I also know what's going on in the newspaper business these days, and I can read those Times "most e-mailed" lists and see what stories get read and circulated, and as appalled as I was by the three front-page stories America's newspaper of record ran on Bristol Palin the day after the news of her pregnancy broke ... well, I can see why they did it. And if the high-information voters who read the Times wanted "all Bristol all the time," imagine if you're a paper or a TV show trying desperately to reach an audience of low-information voters - like the swing voters Chris Hayes so memorably profiled here:
Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the
greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because
of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy,
they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they
also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter
undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured--a couple who was
fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example--but such
cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked
undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made
up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them
to name their favorite prime number.
The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single
issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about
it: The "issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns,
candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes.
It's what makes up the subheadings on a candidate's website, it's what
sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it's what every
candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it's what we always
complain we don't see enough coverage of.
But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.
If you haven't, read the whole thing. And then let me say something else in the press's defense, which is that John McCain's attempt to run a "different kind of campaign" earlier in the year was largely a matter of symbolism and procedure rather than substance, and to a certain extent the media gave it the treatment it deserved. McCain went to places Republicans don't usually go, and proposed a series of informal debates that represented a departure from what presidential candidates usually do ... but when it came to those policy speeches, he didn't seem interested in taking big risks or making hard choices, and this no doubt affected how (and how often) the press covered his campaign. In their first races for the presidency, both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton promised to take their parties in new directions, and both offered substance to back these promises up; the press treated them like new-model candidates because there was actually good reason to think that they were. McCain, by contrast, has promised to take his party in a new direction, but the centerpiece of his reform agenda is ... cutting earmarks. Maybe that's a laudable goal, but "compassionate conservatism" or "ending welfare as we know it" it sure isn't, and you can't fool reporters into thinking that it is. The press is allergic to policy detail, but they do respond, at least to some extent, to innovation and unconventional proposals - and if McCain's agenda had been bolder, his attempt to run a more high-minded campaign in the early going might have earned him more press coverage than he ended up receiving. Any politician can claim to be running as a new kind of a candidate - but unless you're Barack Obama, who wears his newness in his name and on his skin, you need to prove it, and then prove it again, before the media will take you seriously.
September 13, 2008
Sarah The Unready
Now that we've seen the entirety of the Palin-Gibson tete-a-tete, I concur with Rich Lowry and Rod Dreher. The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there's no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it's just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.
September 12, 2008
Channeling Dubya
Apart from the "regurtitate your talking points" aspect of the evening, there were other things to find troubling in the Gibson-Palin interview. Here's Kristen Soltis, on Palin's habit of giving forceful answers to questions where nuance, or even an outright dodge, would be more appropriate:
No doubt Palin has been prepped by Steve Schmidt (Rove's protege),
Nicolle Wallace (former Bush staffer). So maybe that's why I'm so
sensitive to Bush-sounding language ... But something about it all just made me feel uneasy, like I'd seen it all
before in an exchange between President Bush and Helen Thomas ... and I
didn't want to see it all again.
A president does not need to know everything. In fact, it's
certainly impossible for him (or her) to know everything that he might
possibly need to know. That's what the White House staff - and beyond
them the whole vast apparatus of the US government - is for.
Collectively, the US government knows a lot. And all of that knowledge
is at the service and disposal of the president. All the president has
to do is - is ask.
But that's not as easy as it sounds.
Somebody who knew President Bush well once remarked to me. "You'll notice he never asks questions."
"Why not?" I said.
"Because he doesn't know what it's okay for him not to know."
**
Again
and again through the ABC interview with Sarah Palin, Gibson asked
questions to which an evasive answer would have been perfectly
appropriate ... But
Palin never punted. She tried to bluff her way through, pretending to
know what she obviously did not know. It's an understandable impulse,
and in the context of a single interview, not so very terrible. But is
it an impulse that she'd lay aside once in office? Or is it a deeper
habit? A lot may turn on the answer to that question.
Will McCain Ruin Palin, Revisited
At this point, I'm no longer that all that worried about Sarah Palin crashing and burning, Quayle-style, because John McCain plucked her from obscurity before her time. Now I'm worried about one of the GOP's most interesting talents being absorbed, and formed as a national politician, by a McCain campaign that's been deeply unimaginative on every front except the wars to win the weekly news cycle - and that seems happy, after the brief burst of risk-taking and creativity that produced the Palin pick and McCain's strikingly post-partisan acceptance speech (and gave them a big bounce in the polls, not coincidentally), to slip back into a cynical and deeply unimaginative style. I know that the people who've decided she's Monica Goodling with a shotgun aren't going to be persuaded by me on this point, but I think Palin really does have the potential to embody the kind of change the GOP desperately needs: In a party that's dominated by entrenched interests, she demonstrated that it's possible to take on the establishment and win; in a party increasingly riven by ideological feuds, she's demonstrated that it's possible to be a populist and a pragmatist, a social conservative on some fronts and a libertarian on others. But a vice-presidential run isn't the ideal place to develop that potential in the best of times, and a vice-presidential run under the tutelage of the McCain campaign is likely to produce a lot more of what we saw from Palin in her interview last night: Rigorously memorized, carefully regurgitated talking points, a determination to avoid making enormous gaffes, and not much else. Like Jonah Goldberg, I want to see Palin operating outside her comfort zone; like Ed Morrissey, I want to see a more fleshed-out vision of what McCain-Palin reformism would mean; like Noah Millman, I've been less than enthused with how the McCain camp has used her thus far. But based on the kind of campaign that McCain - or Steve Schmidt, more aptly - has run to date, I think what we've seen is exactly what we're going to continue to get: They've taken their one "different kind of Republican" risk, it's given them the boost they'd hoped for, and now it's just going to be a war of talking points and spin from here on out.
If Palin's smart - if she's the politician I hope she is, rather than an Alaskan Goodling with snazzy glasses - she'll push back against this tendency, and try to use the next two months as an opportunity to define herself substantively as something more than a careful memorizer of the briefing books she's handed. That's more or less the advice I offer her in this week's NR - but with the recognition that it's much, much easier said than done.
It's been a good week for the McCain campaign, to put it mildly, but I think yesterday's "lipstick on a pig" faux-outrage was "win the news cycle, undercut your long-term appeal" mistake, for exactly the reasons Ramesh outlines:
... there may have been good ways to take shots at Obama over the "lipstick
on a pig" comment. But the Republicans are coming across as whiny
grievance-mongers. Don't they realize that this harping on ambiguous
slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad
enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are
trashing her brand. They're undermining the basis of her appeal as a
different, tougher kind of female politician.
And then there's the sex-ed ad, which feels more appropriate to a failing, flailing right-wing campaign than a confident, rising conservative ticket. Jim Geraghty marshals the strongest defense of the ad here, which you can compare to Factcheck.org's critique. The bill that Obama supported did, in fact, seek to amend the school code so that the state guidelines for "comprehensive sex education" would apply to grades K-12, rather than grades 6-12 (as had previously been the case); on the other hand, it also required that "course material and instruction ... shall be age and developmentally appropriate." The Obama campaign has argued, and the press has reported, that the only age-appropriate sex ed the bill envisioned for kindergarten involved the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate touching. I'm not sure I quite buy that, since the bill includes provisions like the following: "Whenever such courses of instruction are provided in any of grades K-12, then such courses also shall include age-appropriate instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections." This could be read to suggest that STDs as well as "good touch, bad touch" were being treated as a potentially appropriate topic for kindergarten, which ups the measure's creepiness factor in my book. But the language is somewhat ambiguous, and certainly there's no reason to think that the bill envisioned five-year-olds putting condoms on a banana, which is the image that the McCain ad seems designed to summon up. Moreover, Obama didn't write or co-sponsor the legislation (he voted for it in a party-line vote) and it never became law, so calling it "his one accomplishment" on education is just false. And even if aspects of the sex-ed claim are technically defensible, the whole thing just feels bullshitty and gross - like a parody of a culture-war ad. I have no problem with campaigning on culture war issues, and God knows Obama has vulnerabilities, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and this ad falls into the second category.
There's a creeping incoherence in your continued struggles to find
where, exactly, you and other social conservatives really stand on sex,
abortion, family and sex. It's exactly the sort of thing that you used
to be so good at, genuinely considering those conflicts within your
faith and your politics. And it's very sad for me to see that it's been
lost in your hard partisanship that's developed lately. Isn't it at
least possible that, in fact, you've become in the tank entirely for
Sarah Palin, and that you've suspended your critical capacity
completely when regarding her? I read these latest posts and there is
absolutely no question in mind that, no matter what, you will turn any
question or controversy around until Sarah Palin is on the side of the
angels. No question at all.
But I haven't been writing about Sarah Palin herself all that much this week - I've been writing about liberals who've used her daughter's pregnancy as an excuse to attack social conservatives for being hypocritical, racist and insufficiently enamored of abortion. Now maybe I'm in the tank for social conservatism: I'm certainly deeply committed to certain aspects of that agenda, and while I really, really don't think the Bristol Palin controversy has exposed the deep tensions and wild hypocrisies in the pro-life movement, I'm by no means an impartial observer on the question. (But then who is?)
As for Palin the politician (as opposed to Palin the culture-war rorschach test), I'll try to offer more thoughts in the days to come (and in the forthcoming NR), but in general not that much has happened or been revealed in the past week to change my general read on her candidacy: She's promising conservative politician with an impressive if limited record and a great personal story; her level of experience is neither ideal nor disqualifying for the vice presidency; the political boost the pick has provided speaks well of McCain's instincts, but his campaign's lack of preparedness for last week's media feeding frenzy reflects poorly on his judgment and leadership ability; I'm still instinctively rooting for her to succeed; I'd like to see more substance and more evidence of non-Alaska-related creative thinking from her; I'd like to see her give some interviews; and I'm happy to rebut smears against her character and record. These were my views a week ago, and they're essentially unaffected by the argument about whether her claim to have had said "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere counts as a barefaced lie or a normal political exaggeration that reflectsunderlying truths about her record in Alaska, which apart from the unresolvable debate over her qualifications seems to be the only truly substantive controversy about Palin-the-politician ongoing at the moment.
Alec Baldwin's Second Act
I've always liked Alec Baldwin (yes, yes, as an actor, not as a political commentator), and his mid-career reinvention as a rumpled, heavyset character actor has been wonderful to watch. So I was sorry to see he doesn't feel the same way:
Turning back to me, he said of the film, which he was helping to
produce, "This kind of stuff, it's so hard"--the tiny budget, the tight
schedule, no more than two or three takes. "It's a domestic drama, and,
as you might suppose, I've had my fill of that subject. This is the
last time, in this movie, I assure you, you're ever going to see me
arguing with a spouse." For a moment, he imagined life at the center of
a big-budget drama, and remembered watching Leonardo DiCaprio at work
in the lead role in Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," in which Baldwin
had a supporting part. "To be Leo!" he cried out. (Baldwin can be quite
earnest, even as he keeps an ironic eye on his earnestness.) "To have a
huge role like that! To play the role that is the fizz in the drink,
you know what I mean? You are the movie! I wish I could play
the lead role in one movie, one great movie." According to Baldwin,
"The Insider" was the most recent "great opportunity" for an actor of
his kind. "It was smart, it was relevant, it was topical," and the part
went to Russell Crowe.
Read the whole thing. It made me like Baldwin even more, actually. And his self-awareness is appealing:
"Do you want to know the truth?" Baldwin said to me not long ago. "I
don't think I really have a talent for movie acting. I'm not bad at it,
but I don't think I really have a talent for it." He described the film
actor's need to project strength and weakness simultaneously.
"Nicholson's my idol this way. Pacino. There's a mix you have to have
where the character is vulnerable, the character is up against it, but
there's still a glimmer of resourcefulness in his eye--you look at him
and the character is telegraphing to you this is not going to last very
long. 'I'm down'--Randle McMurphy, Serpico, whatever it is--'but it's not
going to last, I'm still going to figure my way out of this.' " In
contrast, he referred to Orson Welles. "Welles was a powerful actor,
but he wasn't always a great actor," Baldwin said, with, perhaps, a
faint nod to his own career. "Even when Welles was lost, he was
arrogant."
This is a fine description of why Baldwin will never be a great leading man. But there are other virtues for an actor, whether in film or television, and he has quite a few of them. I only wish they made him feel better about himself.
Some commentators have detected moral relativism in the untroubled,
even edified conservative response to the obstetric developments in the
McCain campaign; but I see something even more sinister. I see the
teleological suspension of the ethical. You remember the teleological
suspension of the ethical. It is the recognition that, whereas there is
morality in religion, religion is not the same as morality, and may
justify an exemption from morality. I know of no religion in which this
handy power of extenuation is not used. The telos, in the case of
Bristol Palin, is life; and a fine telos it is. The casuistry goes
something like this: since there are no unwanted babies, there are no
unwanted pregnancies. "It can sometimes result in the arrival of new
life and a new family," Gerson cheered. For "evangelical Christianity
(in most modern forms) is not about the achievement of perfection." If evangelicals are so exquisitely conscious of our creatureliness, why
have they devoted so many decades to reviling the imperfections of
others? If they are, as Gerson says, "about the acceptance of
forgiveness," why do they diabolize difference? The fecundity of
Bristol Palin is a windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black girls
is the doom of the republic.
This makes it sound like social conservatives are sitting around reading Lothrop Stoddard in their spare time, and perhaps Wieseltier thinks they are. In reality, when it comes to African-American "fecundity," pro-lifers are more likely to talk about abortion's disproportionately negative impact on the black birth rate than they are to fret about the rise of the colored empires. Yes, I'm sure you can find the odd racist crank who fits Wieseltier's stereotype, but for the most part isn't the fecundity that worries social conservatives; it's the fatherlessness. Which is why our side, to Jacob Weisberg's dismay, doesn't usually talk about reducing the birth rate when the subject turns to teen and out-of-wedlock births; that's Planned Parenthood's bailiwick, and always has been. We talk about maintaining (or increasing!) the fecundity, and raising the marriage rate to keep up with it.
And again, for the moment fatherlessness doesn't seem like an issue in the Bristol Palin pregnancy. If Levi Johnston doesn't live up to his obligations, though, I'll happily write a blog post denouncing him, if that will improve Leon Wieseltier's opinion of pro-life consistency on this front.
September 9, 2008
Weisberg vs. Me
He writes:
It's beyond the pale - and frankly, pretty vile
of you -- to claim that I've said Bristol Palin should abort her baby. If
anyone here wants to dictate reproductive choices to women, it's you. I
believe that members of the Palin family, like the rest of us, should be able
to decide what to do with their bodies themselves. As to what I take to be your
larger point - pfff. Teen pregnancy rates have been falling since 1990,
for a variety of reasons. Fewer teen pregnancies have led to fewer births and
to fewer abortions. But this has all happened while abortion has remained legal. There's no logical inference
to be drawn that banning abortion wouldn't result in more out-of-wedlock
births. Speaking of simplistic models of human behavior, do you really think
that banning abortion would cause American teenagers to revert en masse to
1950s morality and stop having pre-marital sex? Some might, but illegitimacy
rates will surely be higher than otherwise if you deny girls who aren't
ready to run families (or who have been raped, or are victims of incest) the
last-resort option of an abortion. I don't advocate abortion for anyone
- safe, legal and rare describes my position. I simply recognize that
there are moral trade-offs here, and wish intellectually honest conservatives
like you, Ross, would face them more squarely.
I don't recall claiming that "banning abortion would cause American teenagers to revert en masse to 1950s morality and stop having pre-marital sex." It was Weisberg who was advancing a specific claim - namely, that the goal of reducing teen and out-of-wedlock births is inherently in tension with the goal of ending abortion. In response, I arguedthat the evidence doesn't really support that claim at all. It doesn't support a simplistic "ban abortion and everyone will stay a virgin till marriage" theory, either, but I never said it did. All I said was that the evidence is a lot more murky than his overly simplistic model would suggest, and that there's at least some evidence that legalized abortion had the opposite impact on out-of-wedlock birth rates that Weisberg's theory would lead one to expect.
As for my "pretty vile" suggestion that Weisberg's piece was making an implicit case that Bristol Palin should have aborted her fetus instead of carrying it to term - well, read the piece and judge for yourself. Writing in the context of Palin's much-publicized pregnancy, and the supportive response from social conservatives to her decision to have the child, Weisberg makes the following claims: that "the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family
structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents
raising children in a stable relationship"; that "teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish
their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream"; that "the Bristol Palin option [marrying the baby's father] doesn't promote family happiness, stability, or traditional structure, either"; that by allowing "a pregnant, unmarried 17-year-old and her boyfriend ...
onstage in St. Paul" conservatives were privileging their "pro-life absolutism" over real family values; and that those conservatives who would praise teen and unwed mothers for choosing life, rather than just condemning them for embarking childrearing in less-than-ideal circumstances, are being "morally irresponsible." It's true that nowhere does he explicitly say: Conservatives should have encouraged Bristol Palin to get an abortion. But I think it's quite fair, and not at all "vile" or irresponsible, to draw that implication from his argument.
September 8, 2008
Lion of the Day
Because everyone could use a hug right about now:
Murphy Brown and Bristol Palin
Just one more point on this front, and then I'll let it drop. Here's Weisberg's concluding paragraph:
Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground
when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the
TV character's resources to embark on child-rearing on their own. In
today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to
the stage and salute her for choosing life.
First of all, Murphy Brown was a television character, whose pregnancy - and the message it sent - was manufactured by the show's writers, making it a slightly more appropriate target for public criticism than an actual pregnancy being experienced by an actual teenage girl. Second, and more importantly, Dan Quayle's actual complaint was that Murphy Brown was "mocking the importance of fathers" by having its heroine decide to bear her child on her own rather than marrying the father, and treating that decision as a "lifestyle choice" worth celebrating. Whereas Bristol Palin, as you may have heard, is engaged to marry the father of her child. Not only are the two situations not parallel cases, from the point of view of the issues Quayle was highlighting they're actually the reverse of one another.
Jamie Lynn, Bristol and Hypocrisy
A reader writes:
You don't suppose, even for a second, that people are angry at the
social conservative movement for choosing this one particular person to
rally around? Show me James Dobson praising Jamie Lynn Spears
pregnancy, for example, or any other social conservative declaring her
pregnancy to be a great and wonderful thing.
Um, first of all, James Dobson didn't call Bristol Palin's pregnancy "a great and wonderful thing." He issued this statement:
"In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer,
counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and
children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have
always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and
always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though
there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the
Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just
talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out
even in the midst of trying circumstances.
"Being a Christian
does not mean you're perfect. Nor does it mean your children are
perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we
confess our imperfections to the Lord. I've been the beneficiary of
that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I'm
sure the Palins have.
Challenges along the way ... trying circumstances ... confess our imperfections ... Sounds like he's saying teen pregnancy is a bad thing, but that it's important to choose life when confronted with the challenge. Now let's see what some prominent social conservatives had to say about Jamie Lynn Spears. Not much, so far as I can tell: Rush Limbaugh remarked on the pregnancy, and the hypocrisy glove seems to fit in his case, but calling Rush a prominent religious conservative is a little bit of a stretch. James Dobson didn't have any comment on Jamie Lynn that I can find, but Bill Maier, a vice-president at Focus on the Family, told the press that "we should commend girls like Jamie Lynn Spears for making a courageous
decision to have the baby. On the other hand, there's nothing glamorous
or fun about being an unwed teen mother." The same article that quoted Maier also quoted Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, saying that "too often, sex is presented as having no
consequences ... In both of these cases [the Spears pregnancy and the movie Juno, which manypro-liferspraised], the girls are pretty
much admitting that they made some wrong choices, yet they are acting
responsibly now that they're facing the consequences." And then there's Mike Huckabee's statement on Spears:
"It's a tragedy when a 16-year-old who is not really prepared for
all the responsibilities of adult life is going to be now faced with
all the responsibilities of honest-to-goodness adult life," he told CBS News in Iowa.
"Apparently, she's going to have the child and I think that is the
right decision, a good decision, and I respect that and appreciate it,"
Huckabee continued. "I hope it is not an encouragement to other
16-year-olds who think that is the best course of action."
"But at the same time I'm not going to condemn her," he said. "I
just hope that she will make another right decision and that's to give
that child all the love and kindness and care that she can."
So, to recap: Teen pregnancy, bad; carrying the child to term, good; Spears-Palin hypocrisy, not so much.
Update: Here's Bill O'Reilly, falling into the Limbaugh category.
Second Update: And here's Jonathan Last, over at the First Things blog, praising Spears for choosing life; Lisa Schiffren, meanwhile, waxed slightly more judgmental.
A Thought Experiment
Suppose that social conservatives hadn't rallied around the Palin family after news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy broke. Suppose James Dobson had taken to the airwaves to denounce, say, "permissive parenting" and "teenage promiscuity," and that a host of religious-right pooh-bahs had joined him. Suppose that Rick Warren had remarked to reporters that of course, abortion was a terrible thing, but teenage pregnancy was just as bad or worse. Suppose further that the Palins then decided to immediately ship Bristol back up to Alaska, to hide out, far from the media, until her disgraceful pregnancy was carried to term, and never mentioned their daughter in public during the campaign again. Do you imagine for a moment that we'd be reading liberal essayists opining about how impressive it was that social conservatives were willing to put the good of the American family above their pro-life absolutism? About what a relief it was to see to that the family-values crowd still cared about values besides the importance of not having an abortion?
Of course not. If anything remotely like this had happened, all we'd hear is satisfied chirping about how the response to Bristol Palin's pregnancy proves, once and for all, that social conservatives don't give two figs about the rights of the unborn; what they really care about is controlling women's sex lives and reinforcing patriarchal norms, full stop. Hence the weird anger emanating from social liberals at the religious right's failure to tar and feather the Palins and run them out of GOP politics on a rail: They're mad that religious conservatives aren't fitting neatly into the stereotypes that liberals have spent years cultivating.
Abortion and the Two-Parent Family (III)
I should note that the strongest case against the argument I mounted in theseposts - that the relationship between abortion and out-of-wedlock births is too murky to draw any real conclusions - is a version of the famous Levitt-Donohue argument about abortion cutting crime. This theory holds that abortion has reduced out-of-wedlock births (to teenage mothers, at least), but over generations rather than immediately, by culling away children conceived by unwed mothers who would otherwise have been statistically likely to grow up to be unwed parents themselves. Here's a recent paper on the subject (its conclusions are - I imagine - as opentodebate as the Levitt-Donohue thesis); meanwhile, here's an older paper from the 1990s making the case that legalizing abortion raised the illegitimacy rate, at least over the short run.
Conservatives and Inequality
Speaking of Frum, his Times Magazine piece on inequality and the decline of the GOP is very much worth your time.
As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the
United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies
born out of wedlock -- now reaching almost 37% --and a striking decline
in the incidence of abortions.
In 1981, 29.3 abortions were
carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United
States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.
The
experience of the Palin family symbolizes the effect of the pro-life
movement on American culture: Abortion has been made more rare; unwed
motherhood has been normalized. However you feel about that outcome, it
is not well-described as either left-wing or right-wing.
I'm obviously not the most trustworthy person to evaluate these claims, committed as I am to the goals of reducing and restricting abortion and shoring up the two parent family. But again, I just don't think this argument holds up. There is a correlation, seemingly, between the teen birth rate and the abortion rate, but it's roughly the opposite of what Frum and Weisberg's argument would suggest - the two rose together into the Nineties, and have basically declined together since. Meanwhile, there's no obvious correlation at all between the abortion rate and the out-of-wedlock birth rate: The two rose in tandem until the beginning of the Clinton era, at which point the out-of-wedlock birth rate continued to rise, but more slowly than in the '70s and '80s (see Figs. 12 in this report), while the abortion rate fell precipitously - too precipitously, I think, for the post-1990 increase in out-of-wedlock births to account for the post-1990 drop in abortion, though I'm obviously no statistician.
As I've written before, I suspect that serious restrictions on abortion would lead to a short-term increase in out-of-wedlock births (and thus any serious pro-life politics would have to accept the need for serious experimentation with the American welfare state in response to the challenge). But my supposition is just that - it's unsupported by the existing evidence, which suggests that the relationship between abortion law, sexual conduct, and out-of-wedlock births is far more complicated than any simple "more abortions = less illegitimacy" equation. That equation was plausible in the late 1960s, and indeed represented an important line of argument for advocates of legal abortion. But the evidence of the last few decades hasn't been kind to it.
September 7, 2008
The Times and Christians, Cont.
Kevin Drum, echoing several emailers, argues that I'm reading liberal condescension into what's actually a "painfully straightforward" Times article on Sarah Palin's church and her religious beliefs. He may be right: There's a fine line between condescension and painful literal-mindedness, and sentences like "her foundation and source of guidance is the Bible, and with it has come a conviction to be God's servant" and "Mr. Kroon ... a soft-spoken, bearded Alaska native,
said he was convinced that the Bible is the Word of God, and that the
task of believers is to ponder and analyze the book for meaning" could be read either as attempts to make totally banal Christian beliefs sound exotic and peculiar, or as attempts to convey, well, totally banal Christian beliefs in the most literal terms possible. On the first read, I inclined strongly toward the former interpretation, but it's quite possible that I'm letting the bizarre hysteria with which reports like this one are being greeted elsewhere on this site color my reaction to the reports themselves, and I'll try to control that impulse.
Venom, Abortion, and Bristol Palin
A reader takes me to task for the "venom and sarcasm" laced into my response to Jacob Weisberg's piece on how social conservatives have supposedly sold out family values for the sake of pro-life absolutism. It's true - I was a bit venomous. Hopefully it won't become a habit. I generally try to steer clear of overheated rhetoric where abortion is concerned, since I know my own views on the subject are somewhat outside the American mainstream, and I suspect that many (if not most) of my readers don't share them; given these consideration, I don't think there's to be gained for anybody if I write about the topic in a constant state of moralistic dudgeon.
But sometimes a touch of venom is appropriate. Many defenders of the current abortion laws want to make a distinction between being pro-choice - a position that treats abortion as a tragic practice that can't be regulated without violating a woman's fundamental right to privacy - and being actively pro-abortion. That's fair enough. But Weisberg wasn't making a pro-choice argument; he was making the case for abortion as a positive social good, a necessary building block of a healthy society, a practice that makes stable families possible. Worse, he didn't have the cojones to come right out and say it; instead, he wanted to pass the pro-abortion buck to the pro-family Right, casting his argument as something conservatives ought to believe if they were really serious about the importance of the nuclear family. Worse still, he was using an actual, ongoing and very public pregnancy, as opposed to hypothetical one, as the context for his pro-abortion argument - which means that stripped to its essence, this was a piece about why Bristol Palin should have aborted her unborn child/fetus/whatever you want to call it, and why conservatives and liberals alike should have cheered her for doing so. I'm sure that child will be just delighted to learn, when he grows up enough to understand the circumstances of his birth, that the editor-in-chief of a major national magazine publicly argued that he should have been vacuumed out of his mother's womb during his first trimester of existence - all for the sake of family values, of course.
They pray! They read the Bible! They think God has a plan for their lives, and try to conform themselves to it! John Podhoretz has all the scary details.
Abortion and the Two-Parent Family
Jacob Weisberg explains how conservatives supposedly sold out their pro-family principles for the pro-life cause:
... these two conservative social goals--ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family--were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates
have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of
high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate
reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term
drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or
the American, dream.
... Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles.
If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's
political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear
for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But
Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is
politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over
everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most
valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for
children and for the foundation of a healthy society.
Let's boil this down to its essence: Weisberg is saying that if conservatives were really serious about wanting more intact families, we'd want young women to have many more abortions, not many fewer. After all, the steady rise in abortion rates from the '70s to the '90s correlated with a steady drop in teen pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births, and divorces, while the slow fall of abortion rates from the Clinton era to the present correlated with a spike in divorce rates and births to teens and unwed mothers.
Oh, what's that you say? In fact, roughly the oppositehappened? Divorce rates, abortion rates, and teen pregnancy rates all peaked around the same time (1990 or so) and then fell together, while out-of-wedlock births have inched up much more slowly in an era of falling abortion rates than they did in an era of rising abortion numbers? Why, maybe that's because the incredibly simplistic model of human behavior Weisberg is sketching out here bears very little relationship to reality. Maybe it's because the availability and perceived moral acceptability of abortion has an impact on how and when and with what degree of caution teenagers and unmarried people have sex. Maybe it's because lots of people who think of abortion as the birth control of last resort, and let that thought inform their sexual conduct, don't actually want to have abortions when it comes right down to it. Maybe it's because the availability and acceptability of abortion makes men, in particular, more cavalier about sex, even though the women they're having sex with may not share their "just get rid of it" mentality.
Or maybe Weisberg is right, the evidence of the last thirty years should be thrown out, and we should just persist in the assumption that the two-parent family can only survive on a foundation of large-scale feticide - starting, one presumes, with Bristol Palin's unborn kid.
September 5, 2008
The Importance of Being Interviewed
I don't have any problem with the McCain campaign steering Palin away from hard-hitting interviews and press conferences for a little while, but David Frum is spot-on about this:
A question I am often asked when I give talks or lectures is: Why
did the Bush communication effort end so badly? How did an
administration that once commanded such public support end by losing
all ability to make its case?
My answer is that the ultimate
failure was encoded into the initial success. The president's
communication team - of which Nicole Wallace was an important part -
shared the same disdain of "elites" that permeates so much of my
pro-Palin correspondence. It was not just the media elite that they
disregarded. (Who could blame them for that?) It was the policy elite
too. When the president wished to advocate, eg a tax cut, he did not
argue his case before the Detroit Economic Club or send a surrogate to
Jackson Hole. He made a rally speech before cheering supporters. That
made for effective soundbites and exciting images. But it abdicated any
effort to make an argument that could convince people who were not
predisposed to be convinced.
At first, this abdication did not
much matter. The president was popular, the public was united. But once
the administration encountered trouble and adversity, it discovered -
it found itself disarmed. It had no advocates other than its own
in-house communicators and the most committed partisans. There were
pitifully few respected independent voices ready to join the discussion
on behalf of the administration's policies. They could not convince,
because they had not been convinced.
... If you want to win a debate, you have to come prepared to debate for
every audience at every level. We can all understand that it is unwise
to refuse Oprah. But it is equally unwise to do only Oprah. It's not
just Jay Carney who wants more. As President Bush's current numbers
suggest, so does Oprah's audience.
Lion of the Day
You've probably seen this video, but I hadn't - and we could all use a mental health break, I suspect:
Sarah Palin, Hypocrite?
Sarah Palin, as you may heard, is pro-life. You may have also heard that Sarah Palin's unborn child was diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, and that Palin went ahead with the pregnancy rather than procuring an abortion. This, of course, makes her ... wait for it ... a hypocrite:
We could ask, given that Palin had no doubts about seeing her
pregnancy through, why she bothered to take a genetic test. Why not, as
you might expect a woman in her position and with her outspoken beliefs
to do, decline any testing or counseling? Of course, it seems very
reasonable to want to know about the health of your baby and to have
time to prepare (emotionally and otherwise) for a baby that may have a
genetic disorder. But that doesn't negate the fact that by having a
blood test, Palin was given a choice about what to do.
... Her supporters say that Trig signals that she
practices what she preaches. But her decision to have him is also a
sign of her hypocrisy.
... what was most impressive was her speech's freshness. Her words
flowed directly from her life experience, her poise and mannerisms from
her town and its conversations. She left behind most of the standard
tropes of Republican rhetoric (compare her text to the others) and
skated over abortion and the social issues. There wasn't even any
tired, old Reagan nostalgia.
Instead, her language resonated
more of supermarket aisle than the megachurch pulpit. More than the men
on the tickets, she embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed
up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the
cheerfulness of someone confident about the future.
Which gets me to the most important element of the
speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern
conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not
a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from
the America of 1980.
It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too
big, Obama will "grow it", Congress spends too much and he'll spend
"more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private
sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it
was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.
This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The
speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the
floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old
America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that
room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is
a wild card, because America is a wild card. It is not as it was in
'80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not know where this
country that never stops changing is.
Can they both be right? Well, no, not entirely, and to the extent that their readings can't be reconciled I incline slightly more toward Noonan's take. But I think these dueling interpretations capture a real duality in the speech. Palin's tone, her self-presentation, were as Brooks describes them - fresh, unpretentious, cheerful, forward-looking, and blessedly unencumbered by the burdens of Reagan nostalgia that hung so heavily over the GOP primary campaign. Her substance, though, was much more as Noonan describes it: Palin mainly hit old-time conservative notes on taxes and size of government, and it was left to John McCain to talk, with his characteristic uncomfortability, about health care and education, globalization and job retraining, and the other issues the party's base doesn't want to talk about, and the Democrats do. This may have been the right call for the convention; going forward, though, I don't think that division of labor plays to the two candidate's strengths. And for the sake of Sarah Palin's long-term prospects, especially, I hope the Vice-Presidential debate showcases a different side of her conservatism.
September 4, 2008
John The Fighter
As written, I thought it was a strong speech - striking chords of economic populism that the McCain campaign desperately needs, repeatedly promising bipartisanship and distancing the ticket from the last eight years of GOP rule, balancing hawkishness with promises of wisdom and caution in foreign affairs, and building to a moving climax. As delivered, I thought it was somewhat flat, at least until the end - stepped-on by too much applause at times, running up against the convention hall's desire for redder meat at others, and hampered by McCain's own halting, none-too-fluid style of speechmaking throughout. It'll be interesting to see whether it draws as many viewers as last night's Event (doubtful), and how it plays with voters overall; for now, though, to bed.
I've heard a fair amount of morning-after caviling from conservatives
that Sarah Palin didn't spend more of her speech talking about public
policy and issues. David Frum,
for one, asks: "Where does she stand on immigration - an issue to which
a President McCain will surely return? How reliable is she on free
trade?"
Okay, let's grant there is natural curiosity about her political
philosophy, particularly among people who care about political
philosophy. But, as Gov. Palin might phrase it: Here's a little
newsflash for all those reporters and commentators: She's not going to
Washington to implement her political philosophy and her
agenda. She's going to Washington to serve as John McCain's vice
president. And the position of any good vice president is that he (or
she) supports the president.
George H. W. Bush didn't give a convention speech in 1980 on how
Reaganomics was Voodoo economics, even though that was where he stood
on that issue, as everyone had learned earlier that year.
My prediction: Sarah Palin will stand on immigration and free trade
where John McCain stands on those issues, and if she disagrees with
him, I can imagine a spirited, private discussion between the two of
them in the Oval Office. But it would be highly unusual, not to say
inappropriate, for her to be announcing any positions on issues except
the positions of the McCain-Palin campaign.
This is all very true. But Palin didn't have to make the case for her own positions last night in order to talk about policy; she could have made the case for her running mate's positions, especially in those areas where voters want to hear something from the candidates, and where McCain seems uncomfortable talking about his actual stances on the issues. As I said, I can see why the speech needed to tack in a different, more combative directions. But as much as this suddenly feels like a culture-war election, all of those kitchen-table concerns are still out there, and so are the Obama campaign's issue-by-issue advantages on domestic policy. The nomination of Palin, who's a potential kitchen-table candidate in a way McCain can never be, ought to be a clarifying moment for the McCain campaign - a chance to hit reboot on their domestic agenda, and find a way to at least poach some of the domestic-policy terrain the Democrats currently own. The McCain health care plan and tax plans, in particular, should be either defended or rewritten - and either way, the subjects should find their way into Palin's speeches going forward, if not into McCain's. (Though no, I'm not holding my breath ...)
I've watched Palin's address on television twice now, after seeing it live last night, and I think that it's being just slightly overestimated - out of relief among conservatives, and perhaps out of guilt among the cable-news talking heads and CW purveyors. It's not that it wasn't a good speech; in fact, I think it was precisely the kind of speech that Sarah Palin needed to give at this juncture. It helps her immensely, and it makes me more confident about her future in national politics than I was 48 hours back. I'm just not entirely sure how much it helps John McCain.
A lot of people have commented on Palin's smilingly sarcastic style, her willingness to go straight after her ticket's opponents, her "I'm not giving an inch" approach to the firestorm of the past few days. If you leave aside the extraordinary hubbub surrounding the evening, this was in certain respects a very conventional speech for a veep nominee - albeit one delivered with a steel-in-velvet style that Spiro Agnew would have given anything to be able to project. And for a female candidate who's been brutalized in the media for the last few days, I think that this was exactly the right approach. As I tried to suggest the other day, there's no greater danger for Sarah Palin, Polician, Mother and Soon-to-be-Grandmother than the impression, stoked by days of breathless media coverage, that she isn't in control, that she can't handle pressure, and that she somehow does not have her shit together. And there's no better way to undercut that impression than to give the kind of tough, combative speech that a male veep might have given - except to do it better than any male veep has done in a long, long time.
But John McCain didn't pick Palin because he needed an attack dog for the stretch run. He picked her because he has a domestic policy problem, because he needed to shore up his reputation as a reformer, and because he needed to chart a new direction for his party, and suggest a GOP future that isn't just a parade of old white guys and a re-run of Reagan's greatest hits. As far as symbolism goes, this speech helped him on that front; on substance, not so much. Instead of opening new vistas for conservative politics, it reinforced the perception - which is unfair, but not all that unfair - that the only thing John McCain's GOP has to offer on the domestic front is a big yes to drilling, an end to earmarks, and a big no to Obama's tax increases. It's possible that this is enough of a message to win this Presidential election; it's definitely not enough of a message to rebuild the GOP over the long haul. Sarah Palin gave the kind of speech she had to give, and good for her. But I hope she has some other kinds of speeches in her.
Free Advice For Democrats
I'll have more to say about Sarah Palin's speech at some point tomorrow - I saw it live, from the press stand in St. Paul, which was perhaps not the ideal venue from which to judge its television impact - but based on the reactions I've heard and read to date, let me just reiterate the advice that Reihanoffered to Democrats when she became McCain's pick for veep: Do not attack her. Stop referring to her as a just a small-town mayor and a neophyte governor who's unqualified to be President; in fact, stop referring to her at all. Attack John McCain, John McCain, and John McCain. Attack him all day, all night, and on weekends too. Behave as though Sarah Palin does not exist. Pray that the media will find some Palin-related scandal even more shocking than the perfervid theories aired this week (they'll be looking for one, no doubt), and in the event that they fail to do so, do not under any circumstances allow yourselves to be drawn any deeper into a debate (which the McCain campaign plainly wants to have) over the relative qualifications and accomplishments of Barack Obama and the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Nothing that's happened this week has changed the fact that it's going to be very, very hard for the Democrats to lose a race between Obama and McCain - and as a result, the Obama-Biden ticket has vastly more to gain from changing the subject away from Sarah Palin than they do from placing her candidacy, her qualifications and her background front and center in this race.
September 3, 2008
McCain's Judgment
Does the storm over Sarah Palin call John McCain's judgment into question? You bet it does. The McCain campaign should have seen at least some of this coming, and if it didn't persuade them not to pick her in the first place, they should have been better prepared for the inevitable press frenzy. Trying to keep her daughter's pregnancy secret was folly; having GOP spokesmen claim that Palin's role as CinC of Alaska National Guard's qualifies as real foreign policy experience was a terrible idea, etc. etc.
But this does not excuse, say, Richard Cohen comparing Sarah Palin to Caligula's horse. My God.
Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become
President?...Or where is it written that mere representatives aren't
qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens?...Where is it written that
governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too
local, too provincial?...Presidential candidates have always chosen
their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized
democracy.... What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes
little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow
into statesmen. . . . Why shouldn't a little-known woman have the same
opportunity to grow?. . . .the indispensable credential for a Woman Who
is the same as for a Man Who - one who helps the ticket.
I'm not sure, but believe there were some foreign-policy issues at play in that election as well ...
A Further Note On The Palin Coverage
Judging by my email, a number of readers seem to be under the impression that what we've been witnessing in the media and online over the past couple days is a very serious, nuanced and thoughtful exploration of Sarah Palin's record in Alaska politics, a comparison of that record to the record of her Democratic opponents, and a sober discussion of whether she has sufficient experience to step in and run the country should John McCain, God forbid, die in office. If that's what you seriously, seriously think has been going on lately, then you should probably look elsewhere for analysis of the media's Palin coverage, because you and I are living on very different planets.
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories,
because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the
How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style,
history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American
feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup
and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine
put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and
pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who
is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for
one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and
present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
She could become a transformative political presence.
So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.
The issue
is finally about class, yes? But class defined in a peculiarly elastic
way. If the Palins were Democrats, it would be pathbreaking stuff. Of
course, it would have required at least one, preferably two, abortions
along the way to prove themselves worthy of their social betters and
show that they, like the Obamas, understand what Proper People do when
their Daughters Make Mistakes. Could one imagine my daughter's elite
private schools, bastions of upper middle class progressivism - and
what will be, certainly, the Obama's schools if they come to DC -
Sidwell Friends or National Cathedral School making accommodations for
a pregnant girl: all anyone would be asking, openly or not, why are you
putting us in this embarrassing position, why didn't you do the decent
thing and quietly have an abortion; Schools Like This don't have Girls
LIke That. Anyway, doesn't she have some brothers or male cousins to
supervise her honor and haul her off to the abortionist? We're feminists, after all, and while we don't care about virginity, by golly, and are especially in favor of Unconventional Families and all, we sure do care about inappropriate pregnancy.
But, that bits-down-the-memory-hole done, a Democrat version of the
Palins would be great for the party, a bit of genuine working stiff,
union family, small town - all good.
Since they're not Democrats,
however, this is like sending the Clampetts to the White House. Sarah
Palin might accidentally squirt breast milk in the eye of Sarkozy or
Gordon Brown. The nation might learn, heaven forfend, that women, even
women politicians, have nipples and secretions from nipples. Women,
even on Capital Hill, might wear nursing bras. As for Trig, he might,
well, exist, rather than having been (just for example) put on
a hospital shelf to die, as the other guy proposes, at least, as he -
He - might say, under the presumably narrow circumstances of having
tried to kill him but missed.
Am I feeling polarized today? You bet your life.
Publications I Normally Admire
A reader writes, regarding this post's reference to "publications I normally admire":
Can you share with us ... which publications have disgraced themselves in your eyes?
I normally have great admiration for the New York Times, which decided to run threeabove-the-fold stories about a seventeen-year-old girl's pregnancy yesterday (we all remember, of course, the zeal with which the Times pursued the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter scandal during his Presidential campaign), while publishing (and then retracting) the claim that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party. I normally have great respect for the Washington Post, which trumpeted the claim that Palin - "the Republican vice-presidential nominee who
revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant," in the words of the item - used her line-item veto to "slash funding" for a program
"benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live." (This is true enough, if by "slash funding" you mean "reduce a sixfold increase in the program's funding to a fivefold increase.") I normally have great admiration for Slate, which decided to kick off a reader contest to "name Bristol's baby" after the news of her pregnancy broke.
I could go on, but I think you get where I'm coming from on this.
Grand New Party, Sarah Palin and the Culture War
One of the most common readings of Grand New Party, from liberals and conservatives alike, was that Reihan and I were proposing that the Republican Party tack toward the center, becoming more moderate on economic issues in order to appeal the American middle, rather than to the conservative base. Sometimes I agreed with this reading of our proposals: Certainly, the book breaks with conservative orthodoxy on a variety of fronts, and draws on some of the smarter work being done on the center-left in some of the policy ideas it advances. But I also shared the take of a highly intelligent friend, who read the book in galleys and remarked to me over lunch one day that if our ideas were ever operationalized - if the GOP became, more explicitly than it already is, the party of working-class America, and wove a pro-family thread through its economic as well as its cultural agenda - nobody in the media would end up calling the result "moderate" or "centrist." The chattering classes are already inclined to treat the Republican Party as a gathering of gun-toting yahoos with too many damn kids; if the GOP made its working-class populism more explicit, adding economic as well as socio-cultural elements, and found standard-bearers who embody the background and aspirations of the Sam's Club demographic more completely than a son of privilege like George W. Bush, the results would lend themselves to even greater hysteria, condescension and demonization than the Republican Party's current incarnation.
I think the coverage of Sarah Palin to date - by colleagues I used to respect and publications I normally admire - at least partially vindicates this theory about the reception that would greet the kind of GOP I'd like to see. Which is a sobering thought, to say the least.
September 2, 2008
Sarah Palin's Baby Problem
One of the biggest hurdles for women in politics, I suspect, is the unspoken fear (among male and female voters alike) that they'll be prisoners of their biology in ways that male politicians aren't. Historically, successful female leaders have resolved this problem in one of two ways - either by presenting themselves as desexual or post-sexual (see Elizabeth I, or Margaret Thatcher, or Condi Rice) or by presenting themselves as so commanding, so masterful, that sex and pregnancy and childbirth simply have no effect on their ability to govern (see Maria Theresa, who ruled an empire while bearing twenty children). For obvious reasons, the Elizabeth I model, in all its permutations, is far more common in modern political history than the Maria Theresa model - and this, in turn, explains at least some of the wild confusion and hysteria that's greeted the nomination of Sarah Palin. Nobody really knows how to respond to a prominent female politician who's actually a mother, rather than a celibate or a grandmother.
This dynamic, I suspect, may ultimately make the news of her daughter's pregnancy more damaging to her political prospects than it otherwise would be. The whole Maria Theresa model of female politics depends on projecting an air of command - a sense that yes, you're a mother, but you've got all that family stuff completely under control. Palin's "no sweat" approach to her recent pregnancy, while weird in certain respects, actually dovetails with this model: If we're going to elect a mother of five to high office, we probably want someone who can fly eight hours after her water breaks and be back on the job a few days after giving birth. Her daughter's pregnancy, though, raises the idea of sex and reproduction in a very different context - it presents female biology something that's wild and unpredictable and beyond the Palin family's control, and I suspect that's a bad association for a female politician to have.
This is especially the case because in modern America, out-of-control reproduction is something that's associated, to be blunt, with white-trash culture - with Jerry Springer and the trailer park. Sarah Palin has the potential to be perceived and portrayed as a working-class heroine - as an impressive working mother who has both her personal and professional spheres under control. But she and her family also have the potential to be perceived and portrayed as something straight out of reality television: As a sideshow act, rather than as role models for working America. That's the line that her candidacy is walking: We'll know soon which it's going to tip.
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
