Ross Douthat: October 2008 Archives

Too Soon To Tell

I've written before about Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity) - and I've argued before with Will Wilkinson about whether it's possible to envision a successful society in which the liberal impulses dominate completely, and the conservative impulses are stigmatized and/or essentially disappear. Haidt, for his part, thinks that it probably isn't; here's Will arguing with him:

Frankly, I find this extremely unconvincing, and I daresay even pernicious ... What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect ... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest-that is, the most imbalanced-are by and large the best places for human beings to live.
My own view is that there is a distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies. As Hayek noted, the decisive shift in human history was the shift (in some places) between personal to impersonal exchange. And part of this is a shift from personal to impersonal mechanisms for achieving order. If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.)
I think the answer is that in Hayek's "extended order," the conservative sentiments play a relatively small and decreasing role. A more thoroughly liberal moral culture evidently not only sustains order, but sustains an order that leaves us healthier, happier, and orders of magnitude wealthier. If cranked-up conservative sentiments were necessary to sustain that order, then their decline would indeed endanger us, and could not constitute moral progress. But insofar as they have become superfluous, the failure to further suppress them is a failure of further moral progress. This is not a story of liberal/conservative Yin and Yang. This is a story of Yin devouring Yang.
I admire Jon's anthropologist's impulse to take the variety of moral cultures seriously, and to take our own society's mostly intra-liberal moral pluralism seriously. But I think he's making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It's pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren't in them. When we recognize that, in the advanced world, those conditions have largely vanished-when we recognize that is partly what makes it the advanced world "advanced"-the question cannot be "Why do we need to respect tribalism, subordination, and moralized disgust?" The question is what to do with impulses that now hurt more than help, but are written into us anyway.

I have a Fukuyaman streak that thinks Will might be be proven right about this in the long run - that the levels of wealth generated by market capitalism will rise and rise, cushioning away the impact of any negative externalities that the "conservative" moral instincts may be evolved/designed to guard against. But I also think that it's way too soon for the partisans of a purely liberal order to get cocky. The liberal impulses have been gaining ground against the conservatives ones ever since Christianity came on the scene, but they started from a pretty weak position: It took them the better part of two thousand years to reach parity, and only in the twentieth century did they really gain the upper hand, making it possible for Will and others to fantasize about a world in which the non-liberal sentiments can be ignored and/or discarded. Today, the world's most liberal societies are still only a couple generations deep into a massive experiment in the kind of social organization that Will favors, and I'm not sure that results to date are a guarantor of future returns.

Take the Sexual Revolution in the United States, for instance - which represented a massive ratcheting down of the "purity/sanctity" index, to borrow Haidt's terms, and a ratcheting up of a more "liberal" approach to sexuality. If you'd freeze-framed America in 1991 or so, a generation into this particular experiment in a more liberalized morality, it wouldn't have been hard to make the case that the costs were exceeding the benefits: Alongside the increase in sexual freedom, you had skyrocketing divorce, teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth rates, rising rates of STDs alongside the then-uncontainable plague of AIDS, a thirty-year crime wave that many social scientists believed would be compounded by a new generation of "super-predators," and various other stark indicators of social decline. Flash forward fifteen years, of course, and things look much better on many of these fronts, which has prompted various people to argue that we've passed through what Francis Fukuyama terms a "Great Disruption" (and then through what Tom Wolfe famously called a "Great Relearning") and reached a stable post-Sixties equilibrium. But there are still reasons - some of which are detailed in Grand New Party - to be pessimistic, or at least not completely optimistic, about the long-term consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Yes, there's much more reason for optimism today than there was in 1991. But I don't think the trends that produced a great deal of early-1990s declinism are quite far enough in the rearview mirror to be dismissed as just a temporary pit stop on the road to the broad sunlit uplands of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European version of the liberal experiment currently involves the intersection of a post-Sexual Revolution birth dearth with immigration policies seemingly designed without much input from Haidt's "conservative" moral impulses - particularly the whole "ingroup/loyalty" business. Now maybe this experiment, despite some hiccups along the way, will work out to the long-term benefit of the all the peoples involved. I know that Will assumes it will, and it's quite possible he's right. But there, I think, it's definitely too soon to tell for sure. The indicators point in a lot of directions at once, and it's by no means absurd to suspect that we'll look back from the vantage point of 2100 or so and say that Europe would have been better off if the conservative moral impulses hadn't ceded the floor quite so completely to the liberal ones in the latter part of the twentieth century.

It's also worth pointing out that we don't really have any idea how Will's "distinctive form of liberal order achieved by extended market societies" would handle a severe and extended economic shock of the sort that (God willing) we've just narrowly avoided. The last time the liberal West endured such a shock, the results were extremely ugly, and it was touch-and-go for a while whether democracy would survive at all, or whether the Wilkinsons and Douthats of the future would be competing for blogging licenses in a world divvied up between competing totalitarianisms.

Of course, maybe the totalitarian moment was only made possible because the liberal weltanschauung hadn't advanced far enough, and there was still enough conservative atavism left for fascists and communists to batten on. Maybe we've advanced past all that: Maybe we won't have to find out how Will's Yang-less order bears up under severe stress; maybe we will, and it'll bear up fine.

But I tend to think that the liberal as well as the conservative moral impulses off Haidt's list went into the forging of totalitarianism, and that conservative as well as liberal impulses served as bulwarks against the worst crimes and excesses of that era. And with that in mind, the fact that rising liberal sentiments and declining conservative ones have correlated, to date with greater human flourishing overall seems somewhat short of dispositive proof that we can do without the latter entirely.

Annals of Alternative History

Musing on what might have been if Al Gore had won Florida in 2000 - namely, a Democratic Party rallying around a presidential nominee named Joe Lieberman in 2008 - Yglesias throws in this curveball:

And of course there's also a universe in which John McCain accepted John Kerry's offer of the VP slot, and the two of them ran and won a bipartisan ticket committed to ending the incompetence of the Bush administration and prosecuting the war in Iraq the right way. That world would likely have involved a "troop surge" and reliance on the sort of counterinsurgency theories associated with David Petraeus (who, at the time, was a favorite of Bush-critical journalists).

The obvious Kerry foreign-policy counterfactual, to my mind, involves some half-hearted attempts at counterinsurgency followed by a Baker-Hamilton style exit strategy for Iraq starting in mid-2006 or so. But of course it's easy to forget about the bizarre but real possibility of a Kerry Administration with John McCain as its foreign-policy czar, which might well have produced a turn to a surge-style strategy much, much sooner than the surge we actually got. With Bush out of the picture, the GOP would have held on to Congress in 2006, and thanks to security gains in Iraq, Kerry would have been cruising to re-election in his all-Massachusetts matchup against Mitt Romney this year - until the economic crash (what, you think a President Kerry would have prevented it?) suddenly produced a massive tightening in the polls, as the Democratic ticket's foreign policy edge (a vote for Kerry-McCain is a vote for victory!) was undercut by Romney's sudden lead on economic issues, built on extremely effective ads tying Kerry to Barney Frank's Fanny Mae shenanigans. And down the stretch they come!

Obama and the Race Card

On the "'spreading the wealth' as racial appeal" question, Yglesias writes: "Well, obviously you could read just about anything as a coded racist appeal. And I think a case could be made that you'd be right to. The simple fact of the matter is that the politics of economic conservatism in the United States have a lot to do with the politics of race. I always think it's worth recalling the practical constituency for libertarian economic policies as seen in the 1964 elections." Then he links to a map showing Barry Goldwater winning the most segregationist states and losing everywhere else.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that here we are forty-four years later, in a country that's at least somewhat different from the America where Barry Goldwater ran as the candidate of libertarianism, states' right and segregation (and lost miserably, of course), and we're nearing the end of an election in which the fact that almost any conservative pitch can theoretically be read as a coded racial appeal seems to have benefited the savvy liberal African-American candidate as much it has the old white male conservative he's running against.

Think about it this way: Maybe the "Joe the Plumber" line is a super-coded attempt to play the race-and-welfare card. Hell, maybe all of the race cards McCain has supposedly played - linking Obama to Paris Hilton; cutting an ad with too many white women in it; cutting an ad with too many black men in it; disrespecting community organizing; calling Obama "disrespectful"; bringing up Obama's ties to a (white) domestic terrorist; describing Obama as "that one"; and so on - have been completely cynical attempts to tap into the white electorate's latent or not-so-latent racist sentiments. If this is your take on the election, though, you should acknowledge that if these were all attempts to play the race card, they've been pathetic attempts - weak, bank-shotting, detached from the major issues of the campaign, and so sub-sub-subliminal (Obama is a celebrity ... Paris Hilton is a celebrity ... Paris Hilton is a slut ... Paris Hilton is a slutty white woman ... sex ... Obama is a black man ... black men are randy ... Obama wants to have sex with Paris Hilton ... Obama wants to rape white womanhood!) as to be more or less pointless.

Consider, for a moment, that here we are, five days away from the election, and a Republican nominee for President has run a campaign against an African-American opponent that has barely touched any of the traditional racially-charged domestic-policy issues. Affirmative action has been off the table, of course. Obama's liberal record on crime has been raised, I believe, in a couple of Rudy Giuliani robocalls and that's about it. The "welfare" ad I just linked to is pretty much the first time the McCain campaign has mentioned the word all year: Obama opposed the mid-1990s welfare reform (albeit in a characteristically bets-hedging way), but you'd never know it from listening to his opponent's campaign. Nor have they touched immigration, where the Obama camp takes the prize for the most demagogic, racially-charged attack ad. And of course Obama's most politically-poisonous personal association has been more or less off the table throughout.

Now there are various reasons why none of these issues have played a role in the campaign: Attacking on some of these fronts would have required flip-flops on McCain's part; attacking on others (crime, especially) would have reaped vastly diminished returns compared to GOP campaigns of yore; etc. But it's also the case that the Obama campaign (and its surrogates and allies) have done a masterful job of boxing the GOP in on race-related fronts, playing off the media's biases, McCain's sense of honor, and the Republican Party's unpleasant history to create a climate of hair-trigger sensitivity around terrains and topic that usually hurt Democratic candidates. I'm not asking anyone to shed any tears for the McCain camp on this front: African-Americans have been on the losing end of hardball politics in this country since the first slave ship docked in Virginia, and there's more than a little rough justice in the fact that Barack Obama's campaign has found ways to turn his race to its advantage during this campaign. But given the race issue have played out, I think the appropriate liberal sentiment on the eve of this election should be a lot closer to Ta-Nehisi Coates' confident brio to the "race is still gonna doom Obama, isn't it?" paranoia that I'm hearing from a lot of my liberal friends.

Fixing the Postseason

Peter Gammons, before last night's demi-game:

When this World Series finally ends, there will be a great deal of discussion about how to avoid this sort of misery. The first will be to figure a way to shorten the schedule. Say the schedule was reduced from 162 to 148 games (records or no records; the Steroids Era made too many baseball records meaningless), then the division series and League Championship Series could be played between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6, with the World Series theoretically completed by mid-October. Granted, the loss of the seven home dates would hit teams' revenue streams, but they'll just have to adjust player salaries; CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez might have to make ends meet on measly $20M salaries.

In the mid-'90s, several owners went to a Miami Super Bowl and discussed the notion of having a 10-day World Series at a neutral site. They'd have to get local fans to buy into destination and vacation packages. There wouldn't be the feel in Anaheim, San Diego or Los Angeles that there is in New York, Chicago, St. Louis or Boston. But then the Cardinals are the only team since the 2002 Angels to win in front of their home fans. It would be a hard sell, but the notion of a World Series week has some advantages.

I say no to the second option - October baseball in a neutral, warm-weather site? heresy! - but yes to the first. Though I don't see why you'd need to drop all the way to 148: Why not go back to the original 154, thus re-establishing continuity with the pre-Sixties game? They'd save about nine days, which would give MLB the flexibility to start the postseason a week earlier and, perhaps, to make the first round best of seven instead of best of five. And while they're at it, they could start a few more playoff games before 8 PM, and even schedule a few for the weekend afternoons. I know, I know, the TV networks would never allow it - but some day soon, we're going to reach a point where the World Series ratings have nowhere to go but up.

In Fairness ...

... I should note that the design of this last-ditch McCain ad - which actually uses the word "welfare," as opposed to just talking about "spreading the wealth," a distinction that makes a difference - makes John Judis's "race and Joe the Plumber" argument seem at least slightly more tethered to plausibility:

Congratulations, Philadelphia

That was a pretty exciting three and a half inning victory. (Seriously! And it ended before midnight! Maybe the postseason needs more rain-suspended games.) I was especially happy for Brad Lidge, after the great post-Pujols flameout in Houston ... and yes, I was still rooting for Tampa Bay fans to learn the meaning of postseason suffering. So sue me.

Incidentally, if you're Joe Maddon, with a runner at third and one out for the Phillies in the bottom of the seventh and the game tied, I really think you have to bring in David Price and go for the strikeout, instead of leaving Chad Bradford in to give up what turned out to be the Series-winning hit and saving Price for three inconsequential outs the following inning. Just something to mull over during the months till pitchers and catchers report ...

Heads, You're a Racist. Tails, You're a Racist!

As I've said before, I'm been somewhat baffled by the McCain campaign's decision to spend its final weeks accusing Barack Obama of being a "spread the wealth" liberal, given that this is more or less how Obama has been campaigning all year long: Taxing the rich to pay for health care and and middle-class tax cuts isn't his domestic agenda's dirty little secret; it is his domestic agenda! But now, thanks to John Judis, the McCain strategy becomes crystal clear:

I mention the Bradley effect because I think, too, that McCain and Sarah Palin's attack against Obama for advocating "spreading the wealth" and for "socialism" and for pronouncing the civil rights revolution a "tragedy" because it didn't deal with the distribution of wealth is aimed ultimately at white working class undecided voters who would construe "spreading the wealth" as giving their money to blacks. It's the latest version of Reagan's "welfare queen" argument from 1980. It if it works, it won't be because most white Americans actually oppose a progressive income tax, but because they fear that Obama will inordinately favor blacks over them. I don't doubt that this argument will have some effect, but I suspect it's too late and that worries about McCain and Republican handling of the economy will overshadow these concerns.

Noam Scheiber agrees, adding: "Worse, though I have no evidence for this (nothing new there), I worry that these insinuations are reinforced in the minds of working-class whites by the millions of African-Americans lining up early to vote for Obama."

Maybe if you have "no evidence" for worrying about a McCain victory on the basis of a racist backlash, you shouldn't speculate publicly about it! Look - I know that liberals are panicky about blowing the election, and I understand that some weird bad race-related mojo is the only way that they can imagine Obama blowing it. And I know that Judis has written before about research into the kind of effect he's positing here. But really. I'm sure I'm displaying my immense naivete about the sinister machinations of Steve Schmidt and company here, but if I had John McCain's disposable income I'd happily put up tens of thousands of dollars betting that the "don't let Obama spread your wealth to shiftless blacks" ploy that Judis is describing has not once been a topic of conversation in any McCain strategy session throughout the whole "Joe the Plumber" phase of the campaign. (Though maybe it's such a subtle strategy that even the strategists themselves don't realize they're employing it!)

Moreover, under the standard Judis is using, it seems as though any attack a conservative could possibly launch on a black Democrat's liberalism is racially-charged by definition. Seriously - is there any attack McCain could launch against Obama at this point, whether policy-driven or personal, that couldn't be read, in some tortured fashion, as a racist appeal?

Jindal, Race, and the Right

Dave Weigel weighs in on the subject here; Daniel Larison here. I think that liberals trying to understand the conservative mind, circa 2008, should take this passage from Larison to heart:

... never underestimate the Republican desire to get on the high horse of anti-racism and egalitarianism, to say nothing of the even greater desire to demonstrate that they are in no way racist ... The small cottage industry out there cataloguing the "real racism" of liberals represents a genuine conviction in the modern GOP that they are the only true defenders of color-blind equality. The Republican obsession with Jeremiah Wright cannot be understood apart from this "fight the real racists!" mentality. The enthusiastic reception of Palin and the sudden willingness to label any criticism of her as sexism and elitism reflects a similar impulse to out-egalitarian the egalitarians. This is opportunistic insofar as it is aimed at confusing conventional definitions and throwing the opponent off guard ("we're the real feminists, so there!"), but it is quite serious in that reflects a widely-held Republican belief that their agenda and their party represent "empowerment" for women and minorities.

Now this is not to say that there aren't plenty of Republican operatives out there who have a different and rather more cynical view of their party's relationship to race and racism; nor is it to say that there aren't plenty of racist Republicans. But as a rule, the more ideological a given conservative (and thus, one might add, the more likely to vote in a GOP primary), the more likely he is to take the view of American politics that Larison describes above - of the GOP as the party of colorblindness, and the Democrats as the party of racialism if not racism. And the more eager, in turn, he will be to cast a vote for someone like Bobby Jindal, the better to vindicate his conception of the party he supports.

Meanwhile, in a follow-up to his original argument, Chris Orr takes issue with my suggestion that the "Otherization" of Obama - the portrait of the Democratic nominee as a dangerous radical, un-American, etc. - has much at all to do with the radical connections from his Chicago past, as opposed to just being an outgrowth of his race, name, foreign relatives, etc:

This seems to me not only convenient but largely wrong: Liberation theology has barely entered into the presidential season, and all the Muslim, terrorist pal, falsified birth certificate, not "the American president Americans are looking for" garbage of the cycle seems far more closely connected to Obama's "name, ancestry and skin color" than to his "academic-lefty and urban-machine milieu." ("Socialist" probably fits Douthat's explanation a bit better.) As a coverted Hindu whose legal name is still Piyush, whose parents arrived in the states not long before his birth and who attended an Ivy League university, Jindal would be open to many of the same kind of idiot smears directed at Obama, should any of his GOP opponents for the nomination care to make them.

I guess I'm a little uncertain about what we're talking about here. If we're only talking about the "Obama is a Muslim" fever-swamp stuff - which played a big role in the Democratic primary without any push from the GOP, one might note - then yeah, that would have been percolating around in chain emails and the blogosphere rumor mill independent of the Ayers-Wright-Chicago tangle, and I suppose that there might be similar stuff floating around about Jindal in the future. (Though it'll help that his middle name isn't Hussein, and that his dad isn't a Muslim.) But if we're talking about the broader "he's an anti-American with terrorist pals" narrative that's emerged in the right-wing mediasphere over the last few months - and that was given perhaps its most vivid and ridiculous expression, of course, by Michelle Bachmann - then I think we're talking about a narrative that has everything to do with the fact that Obama emerged from a political milieu that's considerably more tolerant of what I think it's fair to describe as anti-Americanism than the environment that produced a John Kerry or an Al Gore or a Bill Clinton.

Does this narrative bleed into unhinged fever-swampage, and vice versa? Sure. But would it exist in anything like it's current form if Barack Obama hadn't built his career in a political environment where unrepentant left-wing terrorists can become pillars of the community, and practiced his faith in (and lavished money on) a church where Amerika-bashing and far-left conspiracy theorizing seem to have been just part of the scenery? I think not. And I think it's fair to assume that as long as Bobby Jindal doesn't have anything like Obama's relationship to Jeremiah Wright - which remains the most troubling thing we've learned about our probable next President, I think, over the course of the last year - rattling around in his closet, he isn't going to need to worry all that much about being tarred as an anti-American because of his funny last name.

Again, this doesn't mean that Jindal's race would be an absolute non-factor in any Presidential campaign he might run. Later in the follow-up post, Chris narrows the thrust of his original argument slightly, suggesting that in a hard-fought GOP primary, one of Jindal's rivals could gain ground by "quietly cultivating" racism and/or xenophobic rumors about the Louisiana governor. That's plausible: As several emailers have noted, Jindal's narrow loss in his first campaign for governor probably had something to do with the Democrats' exploitation of northern Louisiana racism, and similar on-the-margin effects could come into play in a primary campaign as well. But that would have been the case with or without the "Otherization" of Barack Obama - and I remain convinced that there are more than enough conservatives smarting from being accused of racism in the context of the '08 race and eager to pull the lever for a dark-skinned right-winger to make his ancestry an net advantage for him overall in a future GOP primary, even if it's also a disadvantage in certain hard-fought states or districts.

Is Slate Conservative? (Revisited)

Question asked ... and question answered.

And yeah, I understand that when Yglesias suggested that Slate leaned rightward, he was probably thinking of the tendency of some liberal-run media outlets to challenge/provoke their liberal-leaning readership by publishing lots of counterintuitive arguments and writers, to the point where you can see why hardened left-wing partisans would accuse them of being operationally conservative. (It's worth noting that Matt's remarks were prompted by the appearance of LibertyWire - now Culture11 - which in its brief existence has published more than a few pieces challenging the assumptions of its conservative readers ... and, naturally, has been tagged as operationally left-wing by the hardened partisans of the Right as a result.)

But still. Still.

The Iraq War and the GOP's Fortunes

Yesterday, Culture11 hosted an interesting back-and-forth between John Schwenkler and James Poulos on the question of where the Iraq War (remember that?) fits into the Republican Party's current woes. I think there are strong points in both pieces. Schwenkler is clearly right, I think, that the Iraq War is the dark matter of GOP decline - even now that almost nobody's focusing on it, it's still exerting a downward pull on the Republican brand. The absence of WMDs and Iraq's post-invasion decline into chaos are two of the defining debacles in what's widely viewed as the broader debacle of recent Republican governance - and more than that, they're debacles that combine to undercut what's long been considered the central reason to vote for conservatives, namely their national-security chops. As such, I expect the way the war played out to to be a drag on Republican fortunes not only in this election cycle, but in many to come.

Yet even so, I think Poulos is right that Iraq is only one part of a broader pantomime - and right, as well, to be skeptical that the Republicans would have gained very much at all by engaging in some sort of breast-beating repudiation of the Iraq invasion during this election cycle. Maybe - maybe - if Dick Cheney had been a primary-season candidate, and some white knight (like, say, a very different Mitt Romney) had been looking to slay the dragon of Bushism and emphatically separate the GOP of 2008 from the GOP of the Bush Era, then having an extended argument about pre-emptive war and the "freedom agenda" would have been good for the party. But given the slate of candidates and, more importantly, the state of the conflict during the primary campaign - which took place, you'll recall, during a period when a (Republican-promoted) strategy was opening the possibility of salvaging something from the wreckage of the '04-'06 period in Iraq - I don't think that an agonized debate over the decisions made in 2003 would have made very much sense, either for the Republicans or for the country. Post-surge, post-2008, and post-2008, this is a debate the Right needs to have: I line up alongside Schwenkler in believing the Iraq War to have been misconceived, and in believing that conservatives need to learn from the Bush Administration's strategic mistakes as well as tactical ones. But in this particular election cycle, I actually think the McCain camp's broad approach to the issue - emphasize the successes of the Surge, criticize Obama for opposing it, promise to leave Iraq with honor, and downplay the question of whether we should have invaded in the first place - has been pretty much the best possible tack a GOP candidate could take.

Jindal, Obama and the GOP

I think Chris Orr is completely wrong about this:

... while there are plenty of 2012 GOP presidential aspirants who have reason to be unhappy with the McCain campaign's decisions over the last couple months (and, in particular, the Palin choice), a case could be made that no one's nearish-term prospects have been hurt more than Bobby Jindal's.
Though rarely explicit (and certainly not exclusive) a large portion of the GOP's closing argument this cycle has been to stoke white, working class fear and suspicion of the Other. The dark-skinned man with the foreign-sounding name may be a Muslim, or a socialist, or a friend of terrorists, or a racial huckster, or a fake U.S. citizen, or some other vague kind of "radical." You may never be sure which he is (maybe all of the above), but in your gut you simply don't "know" him the way you know the other candidates. This is not, to put it mildly, a message likely to benefit Bobby Jindal.
Now, yes, four years is a longer time in politics than it used to be. But I still don't see these toxins leaching out that quickly, particularly from a GOP that will, in all likelihood, continue trying to raise subliminal doubts about Obama's Americanness. Add to this the blunt fact that the GOP probably can't afford to lose racist white voters, especially in the South (you think a Jindal - Obama race wouldn't invite a conservative, white, third-party candidacy?), and I think Jindal's chance of being the nominee in 2012 is, despite his obvious talents, pretty close to nil. The GOP isn't going to be looking for its own Obama; it's going to be looking for an anti-Obama.

I think this vastly, vastly overestimates the extent to which the attempt to "Otherize" Obama has been about race qua race (and racism qua racism), and vastly underestimates the extent to which it's been about the way Obama's name, ancestry and skin color have dovetailed with other aspects of his background - from his liberation-theology church to the academic-lefty and urban-machine milieu in which he spent much of his early political career - that the GOP would have tried to play up against any Democratic candidate (and especially in a year when the party didn't have much else going for it). If anything, I think the way the McCain campaign has finished up - and the way the media has covered it - works to Jindal's advantage in 2012: Conservatives are going to be extremely eager to prove that they only hate Obama because he's a radical, not because they're racist, and what better way to demonstrate that than to nominate a dark-skinned conservative with a funny-sounding name? Indeed, much of the current affection for Jindal among movement conservatives - and especially in talk-radio land - can be traced to precisely such a yearning for a conservative Obama: A multicultural prince who channels Ronald Reagan, and whose nomination would at least reduce the taint of racism that clings to the American Right.

Likewise, the idea that Jindal, if nominated, would invite a right-wing third party challenge aimed at peeling off racist Southern whites strikes me as fanciful in the extreme. Maybe the usual sad-sack Libertarian nominee would do slightly better in a Jindal-Obama race than in, say, a Pawlenty-Obama race because of some sort of racist peel-off ... but I'm pretty doubtful on that score as well. If Bobby Jindal can win the Republican nomination and then the governorship in Louisiana, he isn't going to have any race-based trouble as a GOP candidate on the national stage.

The End of Conservatism?

For some reason, The New Republic has decided to embarrass the talented and perceptive John Judis by digging out of its archives a piece that he wrote announcing the death of conservatism ... in, er, 1992. The piece "holds up remarkably well," Max Fisher writes by way of introduction, which I suppose is one way of descriping an essay that sounds an awful lot like the epitaphs for conservatism being penned amid the current Republican crisis - but that has the disadvantage of having been written some sixteen years ago, amid a brief false dawn for liberalism, and just before the Republican Revolution of 1994. Since we're talking about Bill Weld in other contexts, I thought I'd highlight this passage:

While some older conservatives like Kristol have increasingly identified with the fundamentalist critique of modern society -- last year Kristol published an extended polemic in Commentary against "secular humanism" -- younger conservatives on campus and on congressional staffs tend to be far more cosmopolitan in their attitudes. According to one estimate, about 50 percent of the members of Ivy League conservative organizations and about 75 percent of the Washington Bush-Quayle staff are pro-choice. And many Washington conservatives such as Policy Review editor Adam Meyerson see Massachusetts's pro-choice, pro-gay rights Governor Weld as a promising presidential choice.

Alas, for the lost Weld Presidency!

Seriously, there are all sorts of reasons to think the current conservative crisis is rather more dire than the post-Reagan blues that gripped the Right when Judis was penning his premature obituary. But the fact that a "conservatism is dead!" piece from sixteen years ago seems to offer such an apt description of our own era should offer conservatives at least a small measure of encouragement as they prepare to take their lumps next Tuesday.

Liberal or Conservative?

McClatchy has a piece on the Bush Administration's successes curtailing homelessness - a subject I've written about before. Because spending has risen even as homelessness numbers have fallen, the reporter describes the policy shift as "radical" and "liberal." Ed Morrissey basically concurs:

Was this one of Bush's more liberal policies? I'd say yes. By providing a housing solution free of charge, federal and state governments had to cough up a lot of money. As McClatchy notes, though, that saved money that would have gone to acute-rescue efforts like shelters and crisis treatment centers. Housing gave the previously homeless an opportunity to seek employment, creating a net revenue gain rather than a funding drain. Whether or not anyone wants to call it liberal, it certainly proved more cost effective than the other liberal plans in place during the previous generation.

The trouble is that this logic takes you halfway to describing welfare reform - probably the biggest conservative domestic-policy success of the post-Reagan era - as a "liberal policy" as well. After all, it merely replaced AFDC with a more "cost effective" program, TANF - one oriented, like the Bush Administration's homelessnes policies, around moving people from straight-up welfare into the paid workforce - rather than doing away with the welfare system entirely. It's true that at the national level, welfare reform reduced spending along the way (though Tommy Thompson's reforms in Wisconsin, the model for the national reform, boosted funding during the transition to workfare), whereas the Bush anti-homelessness push has required an infusion of roughly $500 million (less, I believe, if you adjust for inflation) over what HUD provided for homelessness policy in 2002. But the payoff in terms of conservative goals - reducing dependency, increasing workforce participation - has been pretty impressive. And responding intelligently to homelessness seems like exactly the kind of thing that a more minimalist, means-tested welfare state ought to be doing.

Morrissey goes on to wonder why the rest of the media isn't reporting on the Bush Administration's success. It's an excellent question - but it would be an even better question if conservatives were willing to take credit for the success, instead of disowning it.

Moderate Republicans, Reformist Conservatives, and Other Animals

A reader writes:

I read your posting on Limbaugh's monologue. There is one point I do not understand. You seem to claim that a bad campaign by McCain justifies moderate Republicans jumping ship. I do not understand why that in anyway justifies the actions of moderate Republicans in endorsing Obama after the Republican party nominated their candidate John McCain over the objections of conservatives. Even if the dubious claim that McCain ran a "substance-free campaign" is true, it should not cause anyone who seriously follows politics into believing that somehow Obama is more in tune with moderate/ centrist/"reformist" Republicans than John McCain. This is simply style over substance at its worst. The fact that a number of "reformist conservatives" have so endorsed Obama suggests a dangerous level of opportunism on the part of these people. It is reasonable for more tradiutional conservatives to conclude on the basis of this action that at least these Obama-endorsing reformist are not to be trusted by any type of conservatives when rebuilding the movement post-McCain. (I am curious. Would you agree with Limbaugh on this at least?)

I would agree that some of the once-Republican figures who have endorsed Obama have done so out of opportunism and/or a desire for attention, yes: In this category I would place figures like Scott McClellan (whose photo appears next to the word "opportunism" in the dictionary, I believe) and Ken Adelman (last seen disavowing any responsibility for the nasty consequences of a war that he loudly supported), among others. Others have endorsed him for somewhat more principled reasons: If you have the politics of, say, a Colin Powell or a William Weld or a Christopher Hitchens, there's a case to be made that you basically belong in today's Democratic Party anyway. And others still have endorsed him for reasons too tangled, I think, to be applicable to anyone who wasn't born and raised a Buckley.

And no, I wouldn't trust the rebuilding of conservatism to any of these people. But nobody was going to entrust it to them anyway: Scott McClellan, Bill Weld and Christopher Hitchens were not going to be the architects of a new Republican majority in any world you care to imagine. Indeed, you could even flat-out say "good riddance" to them, as Limbaugh wants to do ... if you had a plan for finding converts to conservatism somewhere else. But Limbaugh doesn't have a plan, and what he and others are doing is using the McClellans of the world to pre-emptively discredit anyone else who thinks the GOP needs to reform, rather than retrench. You moderate Republicans, he says: You wanted John McCain, you got him, and now you're all jumping ship! But everybody who disagrees with Limbaugh isn't jumping ship, and going forward the Right doesn't just face a binary choice between Limbaugh's conservatism and McCain's "moderate Republicanism," let alone between Limbaugh and Bill Weld.

One alternative path forward - and only one, out of many - is a reformist conservatism that tries to craft a new right-of-center domestic-policy agenda, one better attuned than the current Republican agenda to the set of challenges facing middle and working-class America. This sort of reformism is associated with a group of writers that would include people like Ramesh Ponnuru, David Frum, Yuval Levin, David Brooks, Reihan and myself - and, if you cast a wider net, perhaps figures ranging from Jim Manzi to Rod Dreher to Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner. As the list suggests, it's not an ideologically coherent group by any means, with divergent views on issues ranging from abortion (Ramesh and I are pro-life, Frum and Brooks are pro-choice) to foreign policy (where I'm an outlier, being more in the realist than the neoconservative camp) to the wisdom of choosing Sarah Palin as John McCain's veep. And even on the basic domestic-policy questions there's considerable disagreement. Frum, Ramesh and I are more restrictionist on immigration than, say, Brooks and Gerson. Frum favors a carbon tax, Manzi opposes it. Ramesh is to my right on size-of-government questions, while David Brooks is probably well to my left. Ramesh had some unkind things to say about David Frum's book. I had some unkind things to say about Michael Gerson's. Etc.

But with the possible exception of David Brooks - who's the most centrist, as opposed to rightist, person on the list - I'm pretty sure that nobody in this group is going to be voting for Barack Obama. And I'm quite sure that none of the strategies and policy proposals that we've batted around, individually or collectively, have been discredited by the McCain campaign's various struggles - and especially not by McCain's failure to keep Scott McClellan and Bill Weld, of all people, in the Republican fold. Our ideas may, in fact, be terrible, un-conservative, political poison, or all of the above. But they haven't been tried and found wanting; to date, they've been largely left untried.

The bigger point (and I know I'm a broken record here) is this. Whatever direction you think conservatism should be going in from here on out, the absolute worst thing the members of a losing political movement can do - if they ever want to win again, at least - is attempt to pre-emptively close off debate about the movement's future. Conservatives need to have arguments, not promise excommunications, or else pretty soon there won't be very much worth arguing over.

Rush Limbaugh Explains It all

This Rush Limbaugh monologue is a fascinating document, and should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand one of the most powerful conservative narratives emerging around the looming GOP debacle. For Rush, there are only two kinds of people in Republican Party: True conservatives like him, and "moderate Republicans." The latter is an ideologically-inclusive category: You can be pro-choice or pro-life, David Frum or Colin Powell, a Rockefeller Republican or a Sam's Club conservative; indeed, the only real requirement for moderate-Republican status is the belief that the Republican Party needs to reach out to voters who don't agree with, well, Rush Limbaugh on every jot and tittle of what conservatism is and ought to be. And this inclusive definition allows Limbaugh to shape a narrative of the '08 election in which "moderate Republicans" can shoulder more or less all the blame for what's gone wrong:

I wish to reach around and pat myself on the back. Way back during the Republican primaries ... we were told Ty the Republican Party hierarchy that the only chance the Republican Party had (by the way, we were told this also by some of the intellectualoids in our own conservative media) to win was to attract Democrats and moderates; and that the era of Reagan was over, and we had to somehow find a way to become stewards of a Big Government but smarter that gives money away to the Wal-Mart middle class so that they, too, will feel comfortable with us and like us and vote for us.

In that sense, it was said the only opportunity this party has to regain power is John McCain. Only John McCain can get moderates and independents and Democrats to join the Republican Party, "and we can't win," these intellectualoids said, "if that didn't happen." Well, the latest moderate Republican to abandon his party is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts who today endorsed the Most Merciful Lord Barack Obama. He joins moderate Republican Colin Powell. He joins former Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan. He joins a number of Republicans like Chuck Hagel, Senator from Nebraska ...

Now, I wish to ask all of you influential pseudointellectual conservative media types who have also abandoned McCain and want to go vote for Obama (and you know who you are without my having to mention your name) what happened to your precious theory? What the hell happened to your theory that only John McCain could enlarge this party, that we had to get moderates and independents? How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents?

... When I saw the Weld thing today I smiled and I fired off a note to all my buddies and I said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! How can this be? How can this be? This is the kind of guy that our candidate was supposed to be attracting, and we were supposed to be getting all these moderates from the Democrat Party," and we will, by the way. We're going to get some rank and file, average American Democrats that are going to vote for McCain. But these hoity-toity bourgeoisie... Well, they're not the bourgeoisie, but... Well, they are in a sense. They're following their own self-interests, so I say fine. They have just admitted that Republican Party "big tent" philosophy didn't work. It was their philosophy; it was their idea. These are the people, once they steered the party to where it is, they are the ones that abandoned it.

The logic is so airtight it's suffocating. John McCain is a moderate Republican. Some people - the party establishment and the "intellectualoids" - said that only someone like McCain would stand a chance of winning the Presidency in 2008, given the state of the GOP brand. But here we are in October, and John McCain is losing - and worse, some of his fellow moderate Republicans are defecting to Obama. Therefore, not only are all the people who urged the GOP to nominate McCain discredited, but so is anybody else who disagrees with Rush Limbaugh about the future direction of the GOP. Moderate Republicanism had its chance this year, and it failed. The big-tent approach was tried and found wanting. Next time, they'll listen to Rush if they want to win. And so forth.

Take a step back, of course, and the whole argument collapses. (McCain's substance-free campaign discredits more reformist visions of conservatism how, exactly? The defection of Bill Weld, blueblood extraordinaire, is supposed to undercut the idea that the GOP should be trying to appeal to middle-class Wal-Mart shoppers? McCain is still going to win the "rank and file, average American Democrats" - it's only the "hoity-toity" types who are jumping ship? etc.) But read quickly (or delivered with Rush's customary brio), it has a certain surface plausibility - just enough, I suspect, to be persuasive to the many, many conservatives eager to be convinced that the '08 outcome had everything to do with John McCain's heresies and the treason of the Beltway elites, and nothing whatsoever to do with them.

The Absence of Policy

One of the many fascinating things about Robert Draper's Times Magazine story on the McCain campaign is what isn't included in its account of the attempts to brand (and rebrand, and rebrand) John McCain's candidacy: Namely, any real discussion of policy. From Draper's account, the McCain campaign staff has gone around and around trying to figure out how to sell their candidate - as a fighter! as an experienced leader! as a maverick! etc. - but hardly ever seemed to have spent much time thinking about how these narratives would mesh with or be reinforced by the actual policy agenda the campaign was advancing.

Now, obviously Draper's piece isn't the whole story of the campaign, and obviously he was focusing on the strategy apparatus, rather than the policy apparatus. (Douglas Holtz-Eakin doesn't make an appearance in the piece.) And yes, of course, those of us with wonkish inclinations tend to dramatically overestimate the impact that actual policy choices, as opposed to narratives and symbolism, have on the outcome of presidential elections. But I don't think it's a coincidence that McCain's successful sales pitch to GOP primary voters was built around a specific policy - namely, his support for the surge. And I suspect that his unsuccessful general-election sales pitches have suffered badly from being untethered to specific popular policy proposals that the candidate himself was interested in defending. Think about 2000: George W. Bush's brand identity, if you will, as a "compassionate conservative" dovetailed perfectly with his near-obsessive focus on education policy and his promise to work across the aisle on a prescription drugs bill. Whereas the McCain camp's stabs at crafting a brand identity only beg the question: He's a maverick ... who'll do what? He's a bipartisan reformer ... but what reforms will he deliver? Etc.

To the extent McCain's policy agenda has been branded in the public mind, Obama has done it for him - with a series of health-care ads that are among the most dishonest of this cycle, but among the most ubiquitous and effective as well. Meanwhile, Obama has aggressively branded himself as the guy who'll cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. Would the Democratic nominee be winning without these successful policy-related gambits? Probably. But they certainly haven't hurt.

Rewatching The Sopranos

Like any good movie geek, I've got David Thomson's "Have You Seen ...?" - the companion volume to his epically awesome Biographical Dictionary of Film - high on my Christmas list this year. And as with the Dictionary, a big part of what I'm looking forward to is the chance to disagree, vehemently, with Thomson's assessments. Here's Ben Schwarz's review in the latest Atlantic, and here, via Schwarz, is an example of what I mean:

Thomson is most penetrating when he develops and enlarges his ideas and arguments over multiple entries, and when he's neither praising nor slamming but simultaneously giving and taking away: see his ambivalent analyses of Do the Right Thing; Tinker, Tailor; the often magnificent Heaven's Gate, the photography of which is exactly "heartbreaking"; and The Sopranos--expertly done, but "The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you."

Well! The Godfather does play every year, but it's also only three hours long, and thus a completely different artistic animal than The Sopranos, which clocks in roughly eighty hours when all is said and done. There's no perfect analogy here, obviously, but on length alone it's a little like comparing James Joyce's "The Dead" to David Copperfield. Yes, Coppola's masterpiece has a self-contained perfection to which a long-running television show simply can't hope to aspire - and yes, as a result, there are episodes and even long swathes of David Chase's show that bore upon reacquaintance, just as there are sections of Copperfield or War and Peace that I wouldn't care to read and re-read every year. But trust me: I'm watching The Sopranos in re-runs right now, and as a cumulative experience - allowing for bumps and blind alleys and boredom along the way - it's no less impressive than the first time or two I watched it.

Palin in 2012, Revisited

Basically, I agree with the Ambinder-Cillizza take on the question - namely, that Sarah Palin might well be a formidable contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 even if she's massively unpopular with the sixty-five percent of America that doesn't vote in Republican primaries. In an Obama-era GOP, where the various factions and candidates are competing for control of a increasingly purist rump, isn't hard to see a scenario in which Palin unites evangelical voters and talk-radio conservatives - constituencies that split between Huckabee and either Romney or Fred Thompson, respectively, in 2008 - and rides that bloc to victory against a field that's just as divided as it was in '08.

What's very, very hard, though, is to see how a primary campaign fought and won along those lines would put Palin in a position to actually win the White House - assuming, that is, that Barack Obama doesn't completely fall on his face in the next four years. Not because Obama won't be beatable in 2012 even if his Presidency isn't a disaster, mind you, but because the Sarah Palin whom the base loves at the moment just isn't a candidate who could beat him. Given the way she's presented herself on the campaign trail and/or been used by the McCain campaign, and given the media narrative surrounding her candidacy at the moment, for Palin to be elected President of the United States would require an image makeover even more substantial than the one Hillary Clinton underwent between the late 1990s and this year. (That was the substance of my argument in this post from three weeks ago, and I think it holds true in spades right now.) Such a makeover is by no means impossible - this is America! nothing's impossible! - but running as the candidate of Rush and James Dobson in 2012 isn't going to get her there.

(And speaking of Palin and the GOP, this exchange between Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke is worth a read.)

A Boy's Life

It occurs to me that in this campaign season, some of my readers may be spending so much time leaping from Atlantic blog to Atlantic blog ("these are the saddest of possible words: McArdle to Douthat to Coates ...") that they're neglecting the (snazzily redesigned) magazine that's responsible for the existence of all these blogs in the first place. If you're one of those people, I recommend taking a couple hours off from the Presidential race this afternoon to dig into Hanna Rosin's phenomenal piece on Brandon/Bridget Simms and the debate over sex changes for children. I don't have any gloss on the story, except to say that it's magazine journalism at it's finest - it's always fascinating, often deeply sad, sometimes infuriating, and you should definitely read the whole thing.

Biden's Epic Gaffe, Cont.

People keep emailing me to say that Biden's gaffe wasn't a gaffe at all, that he was just talking about how Barack Obama will be tested like any new President will be tested, etc. Daniel Larison makes a similar point, calling Biden's remarks "wholly unremarkable." But folks, God love you, it's just not so. Per Ben Smith, here's what Biden said:

It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Biden didn't say: "Every President gets tested in his first six months in office, and Barack Obama won't be any different." He specifically highlighted Obama's youth as a reason to expect a "generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy," and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy - whose perceived inexperience (and poor initial impression on the world stage) was supposedly one of the contributing factors in the Russian decision to send missiles to Cuba. It's true that all Presidents should expect to get their mettle tested in their first year in office, and it's true that John McCain's years working on foreign-policy issues in Washington won't exempt him from that rule. And maybe that's what Biden meant to say. But the words he actually uttered seemed intended to cite his running mate's youth and relative inexperience as a reason why Obama, in particular, would be likely to face an international crisis in his first six months. And in an election where John McCain has been trying (and trying, and trying) to emphasize the risks associated with Obama's inexperience, that seems like a remarkably foolish thing for a vice-presidential candidate to say about his running mate and foreign policy. If Biden's remarks are "wholly unremarkable," then, it's only because we've reached a point in the race where Joe Biden could be photographed doing the foxtrot with Jeremiah Wright at a "Free Mumia" rally and it wouldn't affect the outcome of the election.

Larison's follow-up comment, though, is worth pondering:

What is remarkable about what Biden was saying as he addressed a crowd of Seattle Obama fans is that he was telling a progressive crowd bluntly that a President Obama is probably going to use military force in the early months in response to a crisis or foreign conflict. Biden was telling them that it is going to seem completely unnecessary and contrary to everything Obama voters think they are getting when they elect him. What could he have meant when he says that the administration is going to need the help of these Seattle progressives (and others like them) "in the community"? My guess is that he was saying that all of the antiwar progressives who have flocked to Obama are going to be deeply disillusioned by Obama's response to said crisis and there is a danger that the administration will become politically isolated as Obama's core supporters lose confidence in him at a supposedly critical juncture.

Biden's Epic Gaffe

Ambinder, on the Dem veep's comments about Obama being greeted by "an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy":

In the 2008 election we were participating in circa August, Sen. Joe Biden's musings would have traversed the river separating gaffe from Gaffe. If the economy weren't collapsing, if Barack Obama's national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then one can envision a scenario where Biden's comments would be given a gloss a la Gerald Ford's freeing Eastern Europe.

Yes. Biden's bizarrely honest remarks are an almost too-perfect exemplar of the Kinsleyan definition of a "gaffe" as an accidental statement of the truth - and in a different, closer election, one untouched by a global economic crisis (and, yes, the ongoing Sarah Palin story), they might have been the game-changing flub that conservatives keep looking for. (At the very least, I think they summon up a much more compelling argument against the Democratic ticket than Obama's comments to Joe the Plumber.)

Spreading the Wealth (III)

Jonah has a thoughtful response to my last post on the subject.

Haters

In this week's New Yorker, Steve Coll remarks that at McCain-Palin rallies "the mood has been not so much socialist as national-socialist." This comes on the heels of last week's New Yorker, in which Hendrik Hertzberg described McCain-Palin rallies as "bloodcurdling hate-fests." I thought of these claims while I was reading this Ben Smith item, on New York "street art" posters depicting Sarah Palin as a fanged creature with blood dripping down her chin:

There's a classic genre of New York street art that casts Republicans as, literally, the devil. Some of my earliest memories in Manhattan are of being somewhat freaked out by large posters of Ronald Reagan with red eyes and horns; some of my kids' first memories of Brooklyn will be of stenciled images of George W. Bush with horns.
It's a sign of the odd dynamic of the Republican ticket that ultra-partisan New York Democrats never really came around to loathing John McCain with the passion Reagan and Bush inspired. Indeed, that was initially a bit of a strength of the ticket: McCain has preserved his appeal to moderates, and wasn't a polarizing figure.
But Palin, as she's rallied the base, does seem to have filled that slot, as this reader picture from 38th Street and 9th Avenue shows.

For a closer look at the image, you can check out this website. (It features a quotation from none other than Ezra Klein!) I would say that the picture resembles Nazi propaganda, but then I suppose I'd be stooping to the New Yorker's level of political analysis. Suffice it to say that if somebody showed up at a McCain-Palin rally with a poster depicting Barack Obama in this guise, I'm pretty sure nobody in the media would wax nostalgic about the "classic" Republican street art of yore.

But of course, everybody knows that conservative hate - especially when it comes from anonymous hecklers at massive rallies, or when it involves booing the press - is fascism come round again, but left-wing hate is just, well, kitschy and adorable.

Spreading the Wealth (II)

Another thing on this subject - is opposition to wealth-spreading in principle really now a litmus test for being a conservative? I thought that being on the right meant that you wanted a welfare state that's small in size and limited in scope - that's what I signed up for, at least - and the most just and reasonable way to shrink and/or restrain the American welfare state that I can see is to make it more redistributive, rather than less so. To quote William Voegeli quoting Paul Pierson in a fine essay on the dilemmas of small government conservatism: "If conservatives could design their ideal welfare state, it would consist of nothing but means-tested programs." In other words, a conservative welfare state would eliminate our current network of universal entitlement programs, and replace them with cheaper, means-tested programs that, well, spread the wealth - that spend your tax dollars to provide temporary assistance to the unemployed, underwrite health care costs for the aged and very poor, set an income floor underneath American seniors, and so forth, rather than taking money from the middle class with one hand and giving it back to them with the other.

Whereas if conservatives back themselves into a corner where they're denouncing any kind of redistributionism as pure socialism, they're undercutting their ability to push for this vision of a more means-tested welfare state - because that push, if it ever has any chance of succeeding politically, will have to rely on explicitly redistributionist arguments to succeed. For instance, when John McCain proposed - correctly, in my view - that we should consider means-testing the Medicare prescription drug benefit, he justified the proposal on the grounds that "people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don't need their prescriptions underwritten by taxpayers." In other words, McCain was proposing a leaner Medicare that spreads the wealth to seniors who can't afford their prescription, and uses Warren Buffett's tax dollars to do it - rather than a more bloated, inefficient Medicare that makes less of a distinction between rich and poor in how it spends taxpayer dollars. I thought that was a conservative proposal. But maybe it's just creeping socialism.

My Good Opinion of Alec Baldwin ...

... has been vindicated yet again.

(h/t: Ericka Anderson)

Update: Just for the heck of it:

Is Libertarianism Discredited?

So sayeth Jacob Weisberg: Sure, he allows, there were lots of contributing causes to the current meltdown, but "market fundamentalism" deserves the lion's share of the blame, and having brought the world to the brink of a Great Depression, libertarians should have the decency to just shut up from here on out.

Now, I have my disagreements with libertarians now and then, but this strikes me as an uncommonly silly idea. (Almost as silly, one might venture, as the idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy discredits social conservatism.) I'd direct you to Brink Lindsey, Tyler Cowen, John Schwenkler and of course Will Wilkinson for more on the broader issues, but I want to focus in on this one paragraph from Weisberg's piece:

The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already?

But see, the thing with Marxism was that every single time someone actually tried to implement its tenets, the result was mass murder and large-scale impoverishment: There weren't any examples, save in fantasyland, of a Marxist regime that wasn't an economically-incompetent tyranny. So for Weisberg's analogy to work, libertarian principles would need to have produced misery more or less steadily, across multiple regimes and cultures. But all he's got is one crash, which has followed on the heels of decades of impressive economic growth (with very little mass murder, I might add), which almost certainly won't come close to wiping out the gains of the last thirty years, and which has a sufficiently tangled etiology to make any monocausal explanation deeply, deeply suspect.

Now obviously the crash isn't good news for defenders of deregulated markets. But we're a long way from Pol Pot territory here, I think. And arguing that a single bad economic contraction following a long period of growth permanently discredits an ideology that can be implicated in both the growth and the contraction is like arguing that, say, Weimar Germany permanently discredits partisans of democracy. (Good God, it led to Hitler! Haven't you people done enough harm already?)

Sarah Palin and the VRWC

This Jane Mayer piece promises the story of "how John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin," but it's remarkably short on inside information from the actual McCain campaign; instead, it spends much of its word count cataloguing all the instances in which Sarah Palin angled to get national attention for herself while governor, and all the instances in which conservative pundits made favorable comments about Palin before she was picked. As such, I suppose it's a useful corrective to the whole "where did she come from? (and why weren't we told about it?)" spirit that dominated the media coverage for the first few days after she joined the ticket, but I think you can tell how seriously to take its account of the elite-conservative machinations that supposedly elevated Palin onto the ticket from this paragraph:

Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley's campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was "very appealing" [emphasis mine]; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as "a great choice." The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as "a babe."

That was Reihan, of course, in this post from February on "non-obvious Vice Presidential thoughts." Allow me to quote the second half of the post in full:

Thus far I've been pretty milquetoast.

How about

the exhumed body of Silent Cal?
disgraced former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney?
Bernie Sanders of Vermont as part of a conservative-socialist front against Clinton?
former New York governor George Pata -- wait, that's just absurd.

I still want Scalia to run. As the song "Here Comes the Judge" plays in the background, he will fly from state to state, crushing injustice with his mighty gavel. Speaking semi-seriously, I would be interested to see a committed originalist or textualist in the White House. It would be pretty strange, I think, and possibly very healthy. I assume she or he would use that veto pen with great verve.

You know who I kind of like from a distance? Tom McClintock, the California state senator made somewhat famous by his role in the California recall election. Too bad he looks and sounds like a man possessed. Then again, that's clearly why I like him.
I'm just waiting for the ferocious battle between Petraeus and Jindal in 2016, when frontrunning Petraeus will be laid low by the charge that he is some kind of secular humanist. Jindal, meanwhile, will use a massive botnet attack to cripple the federal government as he uses an army of homeschoolers to establish a sovereign Christian republic in the states of the Old Confederacy. But Jindal's use of Bengalooru hackers will lead Dixie nativists to revolt, thus initiating a round of coups and counter-coups in the fragile new state. It's at this point that Petraeus, at the head of an army of loyal Iraq veterans, will seize control of the heartland to establish the Islamic Republic of Petraeustan, governed by a particularly harsh interpretation of sharia law. His grand vizier? Imam Walid W. Bush, the man formerly known as "Dubya." Caliph Bush 41 will, in a meeting with European president Tony Blair, declare eternal peace between the two warring civilizations. And all will be well.
You heard it here first, folks.

Vintage Reihan? Yep. Brilliant and classic? Of course. The sort of thing that should have been block-quoted into Mayer's piece on principle? Absolutely. Evidence of an semi-conspiracy among conservative elites to push John McCain to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate? I'd say probably not.

But of course I could be underestimating my co-author's influence. (It's happened before.) And when Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes and Rush Limbaugh all start talking up a Palin-Bernie Sanders fusion ticket for 2012, or dropping oblique references to Bobby Jindal's homeschooled army, I suppose I'll have to reconsider.

Palin And Her Critics/Apologists

People keep pointing me to this Noam Scheiber piece on Sarah Palin's Alaskan past as conclusive proof that she's some horrifying combination of Richard Nixon and Greg Stillson, defined entirely by a mix of class resentment, machiavellian populism, and anti-intellectualism. It's a lively enough read, but basically my reaction was the same as Sam Schulman's, writing in this week's Standard, who noted that "Scheiber spoke to various people from Palin's past, all of whom have two things in common: Every one of them is smarter than Palin and none of them has been heard of since their encounter with her."

But then Schulman goes on to argue that the principal challenge facing the McCain-Palin ticket is the fact that both candidates have "refused, by sheer cussedness, to fulfill the social expectations of others." (Er, maybe.) And then, inevitably, comes this:

This may make them poison to undecideds who suffer, more than most, from class anxiety. But do not despise the undecideds. Even conservatives can contract Scheiber Syndrome. Think of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will. The symptoms? Curiously amplified, obsessively repeated, sometimes elaborately stage-whispered doubts about the Republican ticket.

There is no cure, but there is an etiology. All share a dreadful secret--their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry, not merely thinkers and entertainers. There is nothing more anxious-making than striving to create taste for the classes, not masses, or even to keep up with it. (The struggle to do so is etched in the lines of Tina Brown's face.) But what the classes think is a matter to which the GOP standard-bearers are sadly but nobly indifferent.

Hey - at least he didn't mention those dreaded cocktail parties.

Seriously, though, from the way her candidacy is being covered, you'd think that Scheiber and Schulman were offering the only two possible readings of Sarah Palin, governor and vice-presidential nominee. Either she's the second coming of George Wallace, stewing from the slights she once suffered at the hands of "the more urbane members" of the Wasilla community and determined to have her revenge on uppity elites once and for all, or else she's a true-to-herself conservative heroine who's been unjustly victimized by the class anxieties of undecided voters and (especially) the conservative punditocracy. No more nuanced interpretation is possible. This is what polarization looks like, obviously, and it's all immensely wearying.

Spreading the Wealth

For a week or so now, I've been listening to smart conservatives suggest that Obama's "spreading the wealth" remark might really, really hurt him - "talk about playing into the most extreme stereotype of your party, that it is infested with socialists," writes James Pethokoukis - and I have a question: Hasn't Obama been promising to spread the wealth throughout the entire race - a race he seems to be winning at the moment? His signal domestic-policy proposals are 1) a series of tax cuts and tax credits aimed at Americans making less than $250,000 a year and 2) a big-ticket health care reform aimed at expanding coverage; both of these plans, he promises, can be paid for with tax hikes on the richest 5 percent of Americans. This agenda isn't a big socialist secret; it's more or less the basis of his campaign. I suppose it's possible that the "spreading the wealth" turn of phrase throws the redistributionist aspect of Obama's agenda into relief in a way his campaign promises haven't. But it seems to me like a generic restatement of a message that's central to the Democratic campaign: Namely, that the rich haven't paid their fair share under Republican rule, and that people making over $250,000 a year should pay more in taxes so that most Americans can pay less, to the IRS and in health-insurance premiums.

To the extent that the "Joe the Plumber" incident helped McCain, I think, it's because it hearkened back to campaigns of yore, when the GOP was promising lower taxes for guys like Joe Wurzelbacher and the Dems were promising higher taxes. That's the Reagan-era archetype that McCain is trying to tap into by flogging the Wurzelbacher story, and it's a powerful one. But I'm skeptical that the message has the same resonance when you're talking about taxes on a business that Joe the Plumber might own someday, as opposed to taxes on the income that he actually earns this year - where Obama's plan almost certainly lets him keep more cash. And I'm really, really skeptical that Obama's pro-wealth-spreading response to Joe's challenge tells voters anything they didn't already know about the two candidates' proposals and philosophy.

Congratulations, Tampa Bay Rays

You earned it the hard way, you bastards. Good work, and welcome to the Show.

Is Joe The Plumber Fair Game?

Jon ~~Chait~~ Cohn, on the media coverage of everybody's favorite everyman:

... Running with thinly-sourced or unconfirmed allegations about Wurzelbacher's personal life--his financial records, his license situation, his marriage--goes too far. Wurzelbacher doesn't seem particularly skittish about speaking his mind or getting attention for it. But there's no way he could be prepared for the kind of scrutiny that comes with being the political world's most famous talking point.
As a result, writers should allow Wurzelbacher a bit more privacy than they would the typical public figure. And when printing anything that touches on his personal life, even remotely, they should be sure to confirm it first. So far, it seems, writers haven't always done that.
One reason I feel strongly about this is that I've seen it all happen before. As you may recall, back in 2007, a young boy from Baltimore named Graeme Frost was tapped to give the Democrats' weekly radio address. Congress was in the middle of debating whether to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Frost, who relied upon the program to cover ongoing medical treatments from a severe car accident, used his story to argue for the program's growth.
Within days, though, right-wing bloggers started digging into the Frost family story in order to prove he didn't really need S-CHIP. To make their point, they published "revelations" based on hearsay, hasty public records searches, or mere suspicion. The Frosts had new marble countertops in their kitchen! They had enrolled their kids in one of Baltimore's toniest private schools! They could have bought insurance if they wanted it!

Okay, but ... Graeme Frost and Graeme Frost's parents chose to become a spokesfamily for a particular piece of legislation, and to place their personal story in the service of the Democratic Party's political agenda. Whereas all Joe Wurzelbacher did was ask a question on a rope line. Now, it seems like he enjoyed the ensuing attention - or at least initially he did - and it's true that John McCain, not the prying media, was responsible for turning him into a national celebrity by citing him endlessly in the last debate. But if you're talking about the vexed question of how much privacy the media should afford citizens whose life stories become political footballs, the Frosts and Wurzelbacher seem like at best imperfect equivalents: The S-Chip family asked for their celebrity to a far greater extent than Joe the Plumber did.

~~Chait~~ Cohn embeds his argument in an attack on Michelle Malkin's hypocrisy, since she led the charge to investigate the Frosts but posted an outraged attack on the media invasions of Wurzelbacher's privacy. But citing Malkin throws into relief another difference between the cases. As Byron York noted last week, the only people who pounced on the Frosts were right-wing bloggers like Malkin; the mainstream media followed up later on, and covered the story as a case of a boy and his family being "attacked by conservative bloggers." That's not, to put it mildly, how outlets like the Times have pursued and framed the Wurzelbacher story. Now there are reasons for this difference apart from straightforward media bias: Frost's age, for one thing, and the fact that a Presidential election produces much more of a feeding frenzy than a health care debate. But I doubt they're much of a comfort to Joe the Plumber at the moment. And between this business and the bad-taste-in-your-mouth Cindy McCain "investigation," it seems like a bad week for Clark Hoyt to come out with a thumbsucker on how wonderfully evenhanded and judicious his paper is.

And yes, to echo Tyler Cowen, in an ideal world this whole controversy would prompt politicians to stand up against the mandatory licensing of plumbers - and of quite a few other occupations as well. (Cutting down on licensing requirements is one of the many small-bore notions we float in Grand New Party, and one of the least likely to be realized.)

Update: My apologies to both Jons for the mix-up.

What Is The Conservative Cocoon?

Ach, okay, I'll wade back in to this debate one more time, because I think Mark Steyn has slightly mistaken the thrust of this post:

One of the things I love about America (speaking as a foreigner) is how decentralized it is. Pace "New York, New York", you don't have to make it there, you can make it anywhere. Yet, in contrast to other industries, our chattering classes are uniquely concentrated in the aforementioned corridor. Isn't this a little odd? And doesn't it pose particular problems for Republicans? Conservative elites live in liberal jurisdictions - and, way out back in the "conservative cocoon", it gives them the whiff of absentee landlords, who enrich themselves on the strength of various holdings in ramshackle colonies but have no desire to spend much time there. Whatever one feels about what Ross Douthat calls the "conservative cocoon", it elects conservative mayors, conservative school boards, conservative road agents, conservative state reps, and conservative governors: it's the only place to go to experience conservatism as applied in practice. On the other hand, Mr Douthat's afforementioned NY/DC corridor will once in a while elect a Michael Bloomberg or a Christie Whitman, and that it's: conservatism remains strictly a theoretical proposition.
That's why the metropolitan sneers about the size of Wasilla were extremely ill-advised, and not just because of the implication that the mayors of, say, New Orleans, San Francisco or Detroit are therefore more qualified to be in the White House. If it weren't for small towns, suburbs and rural districts, there would be no conservative government at all. With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), "blue states" mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California). Almost by definition, an effective conservative executive - the kind you might want in the White House - can only come from flyover country.
So, when a conservative pundit mocks Wasilla, he's mocking conservatism as it's actually lived, as opposed to conservatism as a theoretical fantasy playground for the purposes of cocktail-party banter.

Just to clarify: Sarah Palin's Alaska is not the conservative cocoon. Neither is Tim Pawlenty's Minnesota, or Mike Huckabee's Arkansas, or any other place out in flyover country where a populist conservative became a popular and successful governor. The cocoon is the constellation of mutually-reinforcing conservative institutions - think tanks and advocacy groups, talk-radio shows and websites - that can create the same echo-chamber effect that the liberal media has long produced, and that at times makes it difficult for the Right to grapple with reality. The cocoon is the place where it took an awfully, awfully long time for conservatives to admit that the post-2004 crisis in Iraq wasn't just a matter of an MSM that wouldn't report the good news. The cocoon is the place where conservatives persuaded themselves, in defiance of most of the evidence, that the reason the GOP lost Congress in 2006 was excessive spending, and especially excessive pork. And today, the cocoon is the place where conservatives are busy convincing themselves that Sarah Palin's difficulties handling high-profile media appearances aren't terribly important, that her instincts are more important than her grasp of national policy, and that the best way to defeat Barack Obama is to start with the lines that Palin has used on the stump - Ayers, anti-Americanism and ACORN - and take them to eleven.

So when I say that a populist conservatism needs elites, what I really mean is that it needs elites who can step outside this cocoon and see national politics more clearly - whether they work for conservative outlets, MSM outlets, or something else entirely. This is not, I repeat not, a matter of listening to Beltway conventional wisdom instead of the practical wisdom of the heartland. It's a matter of recognizing political realities, instead of denying them outright - whether you're in DC, New Hampshire, or Wasilla. The Sarah Palin who ran for statewide office in Alaska appeared to understand this, which is why she seemed like such a promising figure to me months before McCain selected her: As governor, she was conservative and pragmatic, right-of-center and anti-ideological. The trouble is that since she's burst on to the national stage, she's entered a right-wing world that's bent on, well, cocooning her - telling her how great she is regardless of whether she gets up to speed on policy and handles Katie Couric's questions, feeding her lines that appeal primarily to the segment of the electorate that's already in conservatism's corner, and calling out anyone who criticizes her as a cocktail-swilling elitist.

Again, these voices are doing her no favors. If you don't think Sarah Palin should listen to people like David Brooks, fine - there are other conservative thinkers whose views differ from Brooks's particular strain of right-of-centrism, but who share his interest in policy and (more importantly) his understanding of the straits the GOP is in. But she needs to listen to someone who won't just say, as Steyn does, that all she - or conservatism in general - needs are "a few sharper moose gags" to get things back on track.

The Glory of Their Times

Roger Angell, the greatest (and perhaps the oldest) baseball writer of them all, turns to blogging:

Boston's comeback is the second-best October turnabout in major-league history, topped only by an eight-run seventh inning by the Philadelphia Athletics in 1929, which won the fourth game and put the White Elephants (as the A's were called then) on their way to a five-game championship win over the Chicago Cubs. That game and inning are well remembered by this writer (who, at nine, could scarcely handle the yard-and-a half-wide sports pages of the time)--especially an inside-the-park homer by Mule Haas. A teammate of his in the dugout was so transported by the blow that he clapped his skinny, elderly Hall of Fame manager, Connie Mack, on the back, sending him to his knees amid the bats. Mack forgave him.
Those were the days. So are these.

I used to have an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of baseball history (before my head was stuffed with other, less interesting stuff), and when the Red Sox started coming back last night I actually summoned that seventy-nine year-old Athletics' rally from deep in the memory vaults before anyone on television cited it as a precedent. But Angell actually remembers listening to the game itself! The mind boggles.

Right-Wing Pundit Armageddon!

Ramesh takes me to task:

In an otherwise good post, Ross Douthat refers to "the great right-wing pundit civil war." Maybe we'll have one after the election, but the current fight is not yet nearly as big or bitter as the divisions over Colin Powell in 1995, the First Things controversy in 1996, the Bush-vs.-McCain contest in 2000, or even immigration in 2006-7.

Hey - I wasn't being entirely serious there! Can't a guy overstate the case a little? (Besides, I wasn't even born in 1995.)

Meanwhile, the latest skirmishes in the, er, great right-wing pundit Pennamite War - Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker's twin volleys in praise of Christopher Buckley, saint and holy martyr - almost incline me to switch over to the "don't let the door hit you on your way out" side of the argument, if only because Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama (and subsequent exit from NR's back page) didn't strike me as precisely the sort of intellectually-serious self-critique that conservatives ignore at their peril. (Noonan and Parker's own critiques of Sarah Palin do fall into that category; Buckley's foray into Obamaphilia, by contrast, struck me as more of a jaunty, self-dramatizing stunt.) But rather than wading back into the debate, I think I should listen to the reader who wrote in, after my spate of posts on the subject, to remark that "criticizing other pundits for ignoring the issues in favor of criticizing other pundits is even more meta, boring, and petulant than other pundits ignoring the issues in favor of criticizing other pundits," and just let the whole thing drop for a while.

Eight Unanswered

Like I said, it's time for Tampa baseball fans to learn the meaning of suffering.

Maybe there's hope for McCain yet ...

Update: Just so as not to tempt the baseball gods, let me add that the Rays, on the evidence of this series, are a more talented team than the Red Sox, that momentum is the next game's starting pitcher, and at this point there's every reason to have as much confidence in James Shields as you do in Josh Beckett. This could easily, easily, go the way of the Astros-Cards series in '05, where a stunning Game 5 comeback didn't carry over for the Cardinals.

But you never know, do you?

Explain Yourself!

I think Yglesias has this pretty much right:

To me, the crux of the matter is that McCain can't get out of the habits that served him very well when he was a Senator building a glowing national reputation largely by talking directly to elite members of the political press. If you watched the previous two presidential debates, plus the VP debate, plus about half of the Democratic primary debates, plus the prime time speeches at the Democratic National Convention, and you've seen a dozen Obama surrogates yakking on cable a dozen times each just since Lehman Brothers went under then it gets kind of boring to watch Obama stay calm and repeat his talking points on the key issues.
But the debate is targeted at folks who haven't watched all that stuff. And a lot of McCain's best moments will have gone way over the heads of most people.
For example, he alluded at one point to a desire to allow more imports of sugar ethanol. Now if you're familiar with the details of the ethanol debate, you'll know that McCain's stance on this is correct on the merits. And you'll also know that Obama is a big support of corn ethanol both because they grow corn in downstate Illinois and because they made a big push for the Iowa Caucuses. McCain, by contrast, has a long and principled record on corn ethanol that's hurt him in Iowa. This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it is a nice illustration of some of McCain's key campaign themes. And yet he didn't try to explain it at all. Similarly, he's had a knack for besting Obama on national security issues nobody cares about, like the relationship of US-Colombia trade deals to the US-Venezuela proxy conflict playing out in the Colombian jungle. People figure that Obama seems like a smart guy, and if something important happens involving a guerilla group nobody's heard of fighting a president nobody's heard of in a country nobody cares about, that Obama's up to the task of coming up with a good idea -- meanwhile, McCain has no education policy.

And JPod makes a similar point as well.

McCain's Mistake?

David Frum, on his primary-season choices:

While nobody could have predicted that a global financial crisis would erupt in the fall of 2008, it was observable a year ago that the incomes of the middle class had stagnated during the Bush years. (I know because I observed it--in fact, in 2007 I published a whole book largely on this very point.) McCain previously had expressed doubts about many Bush policies, from the tax cuts of 2001 to the administration's easy indulgence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005. He could have continued that theme in 2007 and 2008. He could have campaigned as Nicholas Sarkozy to Bush's Jacques Chirac--a critic from within the party who offered change combined with practical experience and a moderate worldview.

... The moment at which such a message became impossible for McCain was his decision to embrace the full re-enactment of Bush's tax cuts. It must have seemed an easy decision back in the primary. It was a litmus test for many conservative voters and, after all, with Democrats poised to expand their majorities in the next Congress, there was zero likelihood those tax cuts would ever be enacted.

Trouble is, by founding his campaign on a full supply-side message, McCain denied himself the opportunity to say anything new. Worse, because that message originally took shape as a (correct) response to the problems of the 1970's, McCain's attempt to dust it off and reuse it as a response to the very different problems of the 2010's only made him look more out of date.

It's possible that McCain simply couldn't have won the GOP nominations without endorsing the complete extension of the Bush tax cuts - and I think his deeper mistake (to the extent that any policy decision has really mattered in this election) was failing to make his new tax proposals more explicitly middle-class friendly. But if I'd been advising him during the pre-primary period on which of his various heterodoxies to abandon and which ones to keep, I would have suggested that he consider going further to the right on immigration and cap-and-trade - instead of sorta-kinda going to the right on the former (but not really), and rarely talking about the latter at all - while staying slightly to George W. Bush's left on taxes. In an election that's being fought on domestic issues, this would have allowed McCain to attack Obama from the right on global warming legislation ("I support sensible measures to combat climate change, but I've decided we just can't afford Barack Obama's costly regulations") and border security ("I have a long pro-immigrant record, but we need to have law and order on our southern border, and Obama can't deliver"), while blurring the differences between the two on tax policy ("I broke with my own party to support a more middle-class-friendly tax agenda!").

The fact that McCain more or less did the reverse could be attributed - as Jon Chait would doubtless attribute it - to the awesome power of supply-side orthodoxy over the GOP. But I think the simplest answer is that McCain really cares about immigration and climate change, and doesn't care that much about tax policy (save insofar as it relates to earmarks, I suppose). So he flip-flopped heavily on the issue that doesn't matter to him, and tried to stick closer to his true beliefs on the issues that do. It's a choice that speaks well of his principles, even if it's hurt his chances in November.

The Palin Effect

A characteristically judicious take from Jay Cost.

Tonight's Debate

In ninety minutes of crisply-moderated tedium, we learned exactly one interesting thing: That Barack Obama is almost eager to talk about Bill Ayers, and John McCain can barely bring himself to grind out the syllables necessary to make something vaguely approximating a point on the subject.

I will die a happy man if I never hear the buzzwords of this debating season again. Energy independence ... spending freeze ... a scalpel ... a hatchet ... when George Bush came into office ... countries that don't like us very much ... I will cut taxes for ninety-five percent ...offshore drilling ... small business ... tax breaks for oil companies ...without preconditions ... what's that fine gonna be? ... families making less than $42,000 a year ... same failed policies ... When John McCain castigated Obama for declining his invitation to do town-hall debates, and remarked that "we could have had ten of them already," I suddenly had an image of thousands of political junkies going mad from the repetition and Van Goghing their ears somewhere around debate number seven.

The whole "Joe the Plumber" bit, though, was fantastic - in a fourteenth century sort of way, as Poulos says, or at least in the way of a Monty Python skit about the fourteenth century. Or so thinketh Ross the Blogger.

That's all I've got. No, wait, I'll venture one further opinion: I thought McCain's best moment came during the back-and-forth over free trade and Colombia. Alas, I don't think that's going to be a decisive issue in this election.

Okay, that's really all. Make up your own damn mind who won. I'm going to bed.

Imagining An Obama Administration

At The Next Right and Culture11, they're having a symposium on best and worst-case scenarios for the GOP this fall, and beyond. Here's part of Poulos's contribution:

[Given the current polling], conservatives will really want to know how an Obama blowout and a seized-up Congress could also make for a best-case scenario. Simple: a narrow McCain win or loss will keep Republicans locked in a death struggle over the true meaning of conservatism and the identity of the party. So long as Congress doesn't flip completely and utterly into Democratic hands, a landslide for Obama will do conservatives much more good than harm. Without an all-powerful Democratic House and Senate behind him--or, more likely, in front of him, pulling him along -- a President Obama (even with an apparent mandate) would be high on inspiration and togetherness but low on power and ambition.

Hemmed in by the realities of an overstretched and strained economy, intense yet delicate military commitments abroad, and the broad but vague longing among the American people for a simple change in political tone, Obama would function largely as a figurehead -- something conservatives wary of executive Bridezillas could appreciate. Liberals would get all the catharsis they wanted without really being able to effect much substantive change. The left would get the healing, the right would keep the hope. And as the Obama administration became consumed in the patient, laborious, and incremental task of leading a nation unified mostly in exasperation and exhaustion, conservatives would be able to clear their minds and clean their house -- their most important task of all.

I almost buy it in theory, but as a live possibility it seems increasingly remote. The problem, as I've argued before, is that it's very difficult to decouple a party's fortunes at the Presidential level from its fortunes at the Congressional level these days. And as a result, the looming Obama landslide seems almost certain to push Congress - and especially the Senate - well beyond anything that could be described as "gridlock," leaving the GOP perilously close to a rump position. In that scenario, my biggest fear is that the economic crisis ends up tying Obama's hands somewhat on issues of spending and taxation - and related fronts like cap-and-trade as well, perhaps - which in turn forces him to placate the feeling-its-oats Democratic base by expending political capital on other, less immediately-expensive liberal projects. Like, say, the immigration reform of La Raza's fondest dreams. Or the Freedom of Choice Act, and various other unpleasant items on the pro-choice wish list. Or a run of judicial appointees who make John Paul Stevens look like Clarence Thomas.

To some on the Right, I imagine this sort of prioritization would be treated as relatively good news. But as someone who would take Barack Obama's agenda on taxes over his agenda on certain other fronts any day of the week, it seems pretty close to a worst-case scenario to me.

Me Versus The Corner

Ramesh says some things in my defense, and does an excellent job of clarifying the muddiness of my initial point. Just to clarify further, of course I'm not saying that Levin or Hanson or Steyn or anyone else should just nod their head when, say, Christopher Buckley says he's voting for Obama. I just want to be spared the whole "I'm the last conservative pundit who hasn't sold out to the liberal media" line. If you're going to argue, just argue. Don't tell me that the people who disagree with you are kiss-ups and stooges.

Why The Grassroots Needs Elites

You should read Patrick Ruffini on the great right-wing pundit civil war. He argues that I'm underestimating the justifiable sense of betrayal movement conservatives feel at being simultaneously asked to swallow a massive, massive government intervention in the economy while their own pundit class is lecturing them about how Sarah Palin - whom they regard as the only good choice McCain has made all year - is the problem with the McCain campaign and the GOP in general. "I'm with Ross," he writes, "on the fact that we have bigger fish to fry than pundit-on-pundit action right now. But once the post-election recriminations begin, and when someone starts to bury Palin with blind NYT quotes, I'll stand firmly in the Palin camp."

So might I - but it depends on what you mean by "the Palin camp." I generally agree with the grassroots-conservative argument that Sarah Palin is not the reason John McCain is losing this election, and indeed that picking her as his running mate briefly opened the only opportunity to win it that he's enjoyed all year. And the voices on the center-left and center-right who are suggesting that McCain would be in better shape if he'd gone with his heart and picked Joe Lieberman are almost certainly kidding themselves. But on the other hand, I agree with the Palin-skeptics that she has not turned out to be an asset for McCain - for a variety of reasons, the media's unfair treatment of her included, but in large part because of her difficulties appearing prepared for high office during her interactions with the press, and because the campaign has decided to use her almost exclusively as an attack dog on the stump. And those conservatives who say "Palin's done great!" and "if only McCain would take the gloves off like she has!" and "David Brooks/David Frum/Peggy Noonan/Etc. are just kissing up to liberals!" are doing their veep nominee no favors at all, both in this election and in any future race that she might run. (At the very least, I don't think it's a coincidence that while Palin has been saying a lot of the things that Mark Levin, among others, thinks McCain should be saying as well - throwing out Ayers and ACORN references, and mixing accusations that Obama isn't fit to be commander-in-chief with the old-time Reaganite religion - her favorable ratings have only gone down. It can't all be because the media is unfair, and the right-wing punditocracy won't defend her.)

Here's the thing: The Republican Party will be a populist party going forward, or it won't be a party at all. But the more populist it becomes - the more figures like Palin and Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty replace the blue-blazer Republicans of yore - the more it needs an elite capable of preventing it from spinning away into anti-intellectualism, hidebound dogmatism, and pure folly. Yes, sometimes these elites are snobbish and insidery, overly impressed with credentials, overly concerned about what their liberal pals think, overly willing to treat their party's base as an embarrassment. Sometimes the base is right and the elites are wrong. Sometimes you need a better class of elite entirely. But you still need them, and you need candidates who listen to them.

So you might think that David Brooks is too taken with Barack Obama's facility for Reinhold Niebuhr-related jaw-jaw, and too quick to attack conservatives who don't share his views on immigration, say, or the bailout. But if you want Sarah Palin as your standard-bearer, you need a Brooks, or someone like him, at the table when her speeches are being written and her policy positions are being hashed out. You need elites, and you especially need elites who work and live outside the conservative cocoon, and who have a sense of how to talk to people who aren't already persuaded that a vote for Obama is a vote for socialism and surrender. The more populist your party, in fact, the smarter it needs to get - at wooing swing voters, and talking intelligently about policy questions, and yes, even at charming the liberal media - because you know the elites on the other side won't cut it any slack. And a populist party that makes a lot of its elites feel unwelcome - that accuses them of betraying the team when they offer criticisms, and says "good riddance" when they head for the exits - is a party without much of a future at all.

Lessons of the Bush Era

A reader writes:

You had me, until: "...And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat."

It hasn't for the Left, who have been shouting for eight years that the Republicans cheat, the Media is biased against them, and the Democrats aren't fierce enough to win, and have been methodically culling the center-left out of their party and going on to greater and greater triumphs despite it.

Or because of it. Maybe.

Maybe. I think American liberalism has reaped some benefits from the "angry" part of the angry left: The fiercely partisan mood certainly helped with fundraising and movement-building, neither of which the Democratic Party of the 1980s and 1990s was much good at. But Bush hating and base-mobilization alone couldn't deliver the Democrats a majority in 2004, and if you look at what the Dems have done since - in terms of messaging and candidate recruitment - it's involved a lot more ideological flexibility than the conservative stereotype of nutty netroots types purging the reasonable center-left would suggest. The iconic figure of the '06 midterm rout wasn't Ned Lamont - who lost in the end, after all - but rather Jim Webb, a Reagan Republican turned anti-Bush Dem. And the netroots' darling, John Edwards, didn't come close to winning the Democratic nomination this year; instead, it was the guy who kept the Kossacks at arm's length and kept talking about transcending party lines. At his most partisan, Obama sounds like a very conventional left-liberal, but he never sounds like Daily Kos.

But the more important point is this: Any lessons conservatives take from recent Democratic successes should come with the enormous proviso that the Dems have benefited from running against the least popular President in modern American history, and against a GOP that's been associated with an unpopular foreign war, a botched response to an immense natural disaster, and a succession of inside-the-Beltway scandals. In this climate, the Democratic Party could have put Kos himself on the ballot in '06 and '08 and still turned in a respectable performance. Whereas in a world in which George W. Bush hadn't invaded Iraq, or a world in which large stockpiles of WMDs had been found after he did invade, or a world in which the occupation of Iraq hadn't been mismanaged into a bloody botch for three long years, I suspect that the anti-Bush, anti-media, "takes the gloves off" fury of many liberals would have remained what it was circa 2003 - an embarrassing sideshow for a fumbling minority party, rather than the fuel for a liberal realignment. And while conservatives can be confident that a President Obama and a new Democratic majority will eventually overreach and create openings for the GOP, they'd be fools to anticipate anything like the series of disasters, political and otherwise, that George W. Bush has presided over. If Obama ends up where Bush is today, then conservatives can campaign any way they damn well please in 2012 and 2016 and be confident of victory. But that isn't likely to happen, and if it doesn't, the Right is going to need a strategy based on something more than base-rallying and media-bashing.

The Liberal Media's Conservatives (II)

A couple of reader emails on the previous post:

It's not the dissent from McCain/Palin, or that these commentators are "aware of their audience" that I find so alienating. It's the glee. And the public rush to the liberal embrace. I mean if Kathleen Parker is conscience-bound to oppose Sarah Palin, then so be it. But does she have to go hold hands with Steven Colbert and make wisecracks about "bubba fantasies" in the South? You say it's not about getting invited to all the cool parties, but it sure doesn't seem like these high-minded folks are turning down any invitations.

Continue reading "The Liberal Media's Conservatives (II)" »

The Liberal Media's Conservatives

Various folks have already gone round on this subject, but I think it's worth saying something further about the way figures like Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson and others have responded to those right-of-center pundits who have harshly criticized the McCain-Palin ticket and/or the GOP in general lately. I think this Hanson line is worth quoting:

... with Obama now with an 6-8 point lead, some in the DC/NY corridor these last three weeks figure it's time now to jump on, or at least sort of jump, since the train they think is leaving the station and there might be still be some space at the dinner table on the caboose. They also believe as intellectuals that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind-in contrast to the "cancer" Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table-talk other than the chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.

I've always found the class-war element in inter-pundit sniping a little bizarre: Whether it's the netroots types hating on center-left columnists, or paleocons whining about how neocons get invited to all the cool parties, or Hanson's peculiar vision of David Brooks and Barack Obama chatting about Proust on the Acela (or something like that), it usually seems to involve the implication that successful newspaper columnists or think tank fellows live the lives of Hollywood starlets - or maybe Gilded-Age robber barons, maybe. (My favorite example in this vein: Daniel McCarthy capping off a blog post on paleocon successes by writing, "that sound you hear is Bill Kristol choking on his foie gras... ")

But leaving that issue aside, I think it's worth taking Hanson's larger point seriously. There is unquestionably a sense in which center-right scriveners who work for institutions more liberal than they (or merely exist in a climate more liberal than they) have both personal and professional incentives to criticize their own side as often as they do the other one, and to advance arguments and strike attitudes that drive more committed partisans up the wall. I'm flattered that Julian Sanchez's list of conservative writers in this position includes David Brooks and, well, me, but I think it's pretty easy to come up with a longer tally - it would include everyone from Rod Dreher (one of the very few explicitly-conservative writers at Beliefnet and the Dallas Morning News, I believe) to Christopher Buckley (Forbes FYI editor, New Yorker contributor, and now Daily Beast blogger) to various other (Peggy Noonan, Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, etc.) with one foot in the right-wing intelligentsia and one foot in the MSM. Not coincidentally, this list happens to overlap in many cases with a list of right-of-center pundits who have been highly critical of the McCain campaign and the GOP recently. And while I'm sure that these writers and talkers are striving for objectivity in all things and at all times, I'm also acutely aware, from my own experience, of the way that peer effects - the desire to be perceived as the "reasonable conservative" by friends and peers, the positive reinforcement from liberal readers, etc. - can subtly influence the topics one chooses to write about and the tone one chooses to take. It's not a matter of wanting a seat at the table in the Obama Administration, or anything absurd like that; it's just a matter of being aware of your audience, and wanting to be taken seriously by people who don't necessarily share your views, but who exert a significant influence over your professional success even so.

Now of course similar incentives are also at work for people who make their living writing and talking to a more partisan audience: If you run, say, a right-wing talk radio show, or work for an explicitly conservative magazine, stoking partisan fervor is almost always in your professional interest - and if you're going to accuse David Brooks of pandering to his liberal audience, what would you say about a Levin or a Limbaugh? But I want to make a different point. Suppose that you accept the most cynical account of, say, Peggy Noonan's uncertainty about whom to vote for in this election, or Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement - that they're just craven, self-interested bandwagon jumpers who want to keep getting invited to all those swanky cocktail parties I keep hearing about. Suppose that you regard every right-of-center writer - or single-issue fellow traveler with the Bush Republicans, in the case of Christopher Hitchens - who's publicly hurled brickbats at the McCain campaign as a quisling and a coward, a stooge for liberalism and a rat fleeing a fast-sinking ship. In such circumstances, what's the best course of action - denouncing the rats, or trying to figure out why the hell the ship is sinking? Even if Brooks and Noonan and Buckley and Dreher and Kathleen Parker and David Frum and Heather Mac Donald and Bruce Bartlett and George Will and on and on - note the ideological diversity in the ranks of conservatives who aren't Helping The Team these days - are all just snobs and careerists who quit or cavil or cover their asses when the going gets tough and their "seat at the table" is threatened, an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point. And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I'd be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.

Enough

Okay, so this has been a nice little run by the Tampa Bay Rays. I don't mind saying that I've been pulling for them all season; I don't even mind saying that I wasn't all that fazed when they beat out the Red Sox for the division title. It's good for baseball to have small-market teams make the postseason, and as with the Rockies last year I think that the Rays have paid their expansion-team dues at this point, and it's completely legitimate to be happy for their (relatively) long-suffering fans. Really, though - it's enough already. Rays fans are acquainted with regular-season losing, sure, but now it's time for them to be acquainted with another form of baseball suffering: The postseason near-miss. In the long run, it's for their own good: They'll better appreciate final victory when it eventually arrives, and they'll avoid the dreaded "Florida Marlins syndrome," in which a premature World Series win (or two!) ruins a city for the normal ups and downs of baseball fandom. All of which is to say that the Red Sox won't just be taking another step toward repeating as World Champions if they stop drowning in two feet of water and come back from 2-1 down to knock Tampa out of the postseason; they'll be doing the Rays, and especially Rays fans, a big favor as well.

Over to you, Tim Wakefield.

The GOP and the Investor Class

While I'm on the subject of capital-gains tax cuts and political strategy, this seems like a good time to cite my friend Matt Continetti's 2005 profile of Eliot Spitzer, which included a prescient explanation of why a growing "investor class" doesn't guarantee a growing share of the vote for the GOP:

... while universal stock ownership may be desirable for other reasons--most economists believe that lower-income Americans would benefit from having at least some of their savings in stocks--it hardly guarantees political catnip for Republicans. For one thing, if 80 or 90 percent of Americans own stocks and bonds, "investors" will no longer be a class at all--unless it's the class of all voters, in both parties. Furthermore--and more immediately--there's a corollary to the investor-class thesis that favors Democrats. As more people enter the market, they may turn to politicians who offer protection from rapacious capitalists and irresponsible money managers. Burned by market downturns, they will want politicians to go after those who did them harm. And those politicians, in turn, will say they are "saving" markets in the process. Politicians like Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer is gone, of course, and this isn't an exact summary of how the current financial crisis has played out for the GOP. (And as I've said before, I don't think that a straightforward focus on punishing the bad guys, as opposed to finding solutions, plays that well with voters caught up in an economic calamity.) But the broad point is timely, and true: When the stock market drops, the average middle-class investor may be more likely to look to the Democrats than to the Republicans for answers, and an ever-larger investor class may actually be more supportive of regulation - the better to minimize the short-run risks their portfolios and 401(k)s face, even at the expense of long-run gains - than a middle class that isn't heavily invested in the stock market.

If You Don't Have Something Useful To Say ...

Over the weekend, Politico reported that John McCain would be unveiling a new set of economic proposals. Today, the Times reports that no, he won't be, "unless developments call for some." That's probably for the best, if Politico had the details right:

As part of a plan to reinvigorate his flagging campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is considering additional economic measures aimed directly at the middle class that are likely to be rolled out this week, campaign officials said.

Among the measures being considered are tax cuts - perhaps temporary - for capital gains and dividends, the officials said.

Let's think about the politics of this idea. If you don't have money invested in the stock market - as I'm pretty sure, say, Barbara Snodgrass doesn't - John McCain is considering a short-term tax cut that won't have any immediate effect on your finances. If you do have money invested invested in the stock market, John McCain is considering a short-term tax cut on capital gains that probably you aren't even earning, because the market is tanking at the moment. And if you're the Obama campaign, you've already got an ad cut and ready to air: What's John McCain's plan for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? More tax cuts for the rich.

This is not to say that there aren't good reasons for conservatives to keep taxes low on investments, especially in the current economic climate. But as a last-minute political gambit, it makes almost no sense at all: The idea that a campaign that's floundering amid an economic crisis and searching for a way to connect with the middle class will reverse its fortunes by proposing a temporary capital-gains tax cut is the sort of daft notion that would only occur to a political party suffering from profound ideological sclerosis, and teetering on the brink of an election-night disaster.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Larison responds to my post on realignment, contingency, and why conservatives shouldn't necessary welcome the wilderness:

After the last few electoral cycles, and in the face of depleted American power and a remarkable financial shock that remind us how transitory worldly glory is, I turn more and more to the basic lesson of Geoffrey Parker's Success Is Never Final ... The lesson of the book, as the title suggests, is that victories are ephemeral and the seeds of later defeat are being sown in the midst of what everyone regards as progress and success.
... this basic lesson seems to get away from people, especially in election years. As November approaches, memories seem to get very short. Where just a few years before there was loose talk of thirty-year dominance of the Presidency on the model of the early 20th century GOP, there is now the fear of a long sojourn out of power. To avoid this, disaffected conservatives are supposed to "come home," but in November just as in 2006 it will not matter whether McCain succeeds in retaining the GOP core ...There may be a few more defections from the GOP on the right this year, but not that many. What seems certain is that, except for a shrinking, irreducible core of right-leaning independents, everyone who is not a registered Republican will be backing any candidate that is not McCain.
... What conservatives who want to remain politically engaged with the party that has failed them time after time (the non-Larisonians, if you like) need to do is make whatever efforts they can to limit losses in Congressional elections this year. Strategists need to assume a McCain defeat, which seems increasingly likely, and get into a position that will make the 2010 midterms somewhat competitive. Objective economic conditions seem likely to worsen in the coming year, and there is every reason to think that unified Democratic government will overreach as unified governments tend to do. If McCain were somehow to prevail on 4 November, the calamity that would befall the Congressional GOP in 2010 would great and would help to erase all political gains of the previous sixteen years. Those conservatives who do not want to be consigned to the wilderness for the next decade or two need to think about the long-term consequences of a McCain victory, which would be disastrous for conservatives both in policy and political terms in the next several electoral cycles.

It's true that the election won't be won for McCain by conservatives who "come home" and turn out in '04-style numbers for him; it's even more true that it won't be won for him by conservative writers who hold their noses and vote for him. (In this sense, the question of how conservatives should regard the prospect of a McCain defeat is even more academic, at this point, than the question of what tactics the McCain campaign should pursue.) That being said, I would only point out that while success is never final, some successes are more final than others. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 gave birth to an administrative state that has never been rolled back, and seems unlikely be rolled back in my lifetime. So that was a pretty final victory, as political victories go. Or again, while Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 had less enduring consequences than FDR's, at the very least it put its stamp on thirty years of American history in a way that, say, the election of Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush did not. And the convergence of an economic crisis and complete Democratic control of Washington should alarm even those conservatives eager to wash their hands of the GOP. The best reason for even the most disaffected right-winger to root for a McCain victory is simple: To the extent that much of the progressive agenda is a program in search of a crisis to justify its implementation, an election that delivers a liberal candidate who's adored by the media to White House, gives him huge majorities in both houses of Congress, and presents him with a worldwide state of emergency in which to govern, has the potential to be not just another loss for conservatives, but a once-in-a-generation defeat.

Now it's possible, as Larison suggests, that a McCain victory would just set the stage for even more devastating defeats in 2010 and 2012. But this is where contingency comes in: We know so much more about what the political and economic landscape will look like if Obama is elected than we do about the hypothetical landscape of '10 or '12 that worrying about a hypothetical Hillary or Obama landslide four years hence when we're faced with the possibility of a real landslide in three weeks feels, well, farsighted to a fault. (Also, conservatives should prefer Hillary Clinton in charge of a Democratic supermajority to Barack Obama in a similar position, I think.) And while it would be nice, as Daniel suggests, to decouple the fortunes of the House and Senate GOP from the fortunes of the McCain campaign, I don't think that's going to happen: This is a national election, and I suspect that House and Senate candidates will only rise in the polls if the national ticket is rising in the polls. Which means that even if you think he's already beaten, if you're a conservative you should still root for him to close the gap, because the GOP's ability to be a brake on the liberal majority in the House and Senate may depend on the size of Obama's win, and the coattails that come with it. (Which is part of why I find the Ayersing so frustrating: I suspect that the strategy won't just fail to help McCain, but will actually further weaken the GOP in down-ballot races, by fueling the perception that the party's deeply out of touch.)

A Bailout For The Middle Class

All this talk about "what McCain should do" is growing increasingly academic - he'll keep doing what he's doing, and even if he did something else events are in the saddle now - but it's still worth quoting Sebastian Mallaby:

How should government demonstrate concern for regular people? John McCain's plan to refinance mortgages shows that he has the right impulse, but this is not the best approach. Rearranging home loans one by one would be a slow process when what's needed is quick action. It would be almost impossible to rearrange the loans fairly: Prudent home buyers who have kept up with their payments might lose out to imprudent ones who stretched too far; folks who rented while saving for a home would get nothing. Besides, McCain's plan could exacerbate the financial crisis in a perverse way. Help for families who are behind in their mortgage payments could encourage others to stop paying, too, in which case loans that are now good would quickly turn rotten.

The fastest and fairest way to help ordinary people is via a budget stimulus package. Part of the extra spending should be distributed to state governments, which are having trouble maintaining Medicaid and other programs as recession eats into their tax revenue. Part of the extra spending could go to infrastructure projects, though this tends to be a slow way of getting cash into the economy. But much of the stimulus should be in checks made out directly to citizens. Wall Street is getting its bailout. Main Street deserves one also.

Once upon a time, conservatives won elections by promising to give middle-class America back its tax dollars. In the teeth of a recession, staring defeat in the face, that's a far better message to run on than earmarks, or energy independence, or William Ayers.

Ayers, McCain and the Dow

Imagine you're an undecided voter, turning on the news tonight. You hear about the enormous plunge Wall Street took today. You hear about the U.S. government taking ownership stakes in American banks. You hear about a global economic crisis. You hear about the Great Depression.

Then the subject turns to the Presidential race - and if the news channel behaves the way the McCain campaign clearly hopes it will, the first thing you'll see is a short feature on how John McCain has cut a new anti-Obama ad featuring Ayers, Ayers and more Ayers. It's possible that this inspires you to think: Man, that terrorist-sympathizing Obama can't be trusted in an economic crisis. In that case, Steve Schmidt, Andy McCarthy and sundry others are political masterminds, and I am a plain fool.

But I don't think I'm a fool. I think McCain looks, to our hypothetical undecided, utterly disconnected from what's happening in the world, and the details of the Ayers connection, however troubling they might be in another context, blur away into a broader impression of a flailing, desperate, out-of-touch candidate. At this point, the McCain camp seems to be taking its cues more from the liberal caricature of past conservative campaigns - that they've all been fundamentally unserious exercises in culture-war button-pushing - than from the campaigns themselves. It's as though they're being paid under the table by Thomas Frank to goose his book sales and vindicate his thesis.

Realignment and Contingency

Via Yglesias, Larry Bartels analyzes the role of chance in realignments:

The 1936 election has become the most celebrated textbook case of ideological realignment of the American electorate. However, a careful look at state-by-state voting patterns suggests that this resounding ratification of Roosevelt's policies was strongly concentrated in the states that happened to enjoy robust income growth in the months leading up to the vote. (As usual, voters seem to have been quite myopic--huge variations in income growth in 1934 and 1935 had no discernible effect on 1936 voting patterns.) Indeed, the apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt would probably have been a one-term president.

Considering America's Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to "throwing the bums out" than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply--and simple-mindedly--rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.

Pundits, myself included, have a tendency to get caught up in broad cyclical theories of political parties, in which "ideological innovation" gives way to "ideological exhaustion," and parties retreat to the wilderness and then re-emerge all snazzed up and ready to make a comeback. There's a lot of truth to these theories, but it's also true that political history is both cyclical and extremely contingent. Thus while Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 was the result of deep, deep trends in American politics; it was also the result of a series of contingent events, from Watergate down to the Iran hostage crisis, that could easily have fallen out differently and resulted in Ted Kennedy-style Democrats or Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicans governing 1980s America instead.

This should offer conservatives reasons for optimism, in the midst of what looks like a potential liberal realignment: Contingency is still king, and there's nothing written in the stars that says the Right can't come back much, much faster than it looks capable of doing at the moment. But Bartels' argument also highlights the trouble with welcoming a retreat into the wilderness, as some conservatives (myself included) are sometimes wont to do: When you're out of power completely, you become a prisoner of events - and especially economic trends - in a way that a party with at least some hold on power isn't. Above all, you cede the ability to take any credit for good news - and given the broad upward trends that have defined American history to date, the typical Presidency is more likely to generate good news than not. Out-of-power parties often benefit dramatically from bad times in America: The GOP did in the late 1970s, and the Democrats have over the last four years. But the pattern of American history suggests that bad times are the exception rather than rule - and unless James Howard Kunstler's prophecies come true, a party that goes deep into the wilderness and waits for a crisis to bring it back to power stands a good chance of waiting for a long time. (And yes, that's a case for disaffected conservatives of all stripes - those who still have a stake in the GOP, that is; not the Larisonians of the world - swallowing hard and voting for McCain.)

Gloves, Off

Well, we'll see how this plays on Main Street:

As Ed Morrissey says, this will put an awful lot of pressure on McCain to "say it to his face" at the next debate.

On a not-unrelated note, Nate Silver notes that in the first three debates, Obama/Biden used the phrase "middle class" twenty one times, while McCain/Palin used it twice. And alas, it's not because John McCain read Grand New Party and decided to start saying "working class" instead.

What Should McCain Do?

Okay, smart guy, you might say: If the Ayers-related attacks on Obama have limited utility, and attacking bad guys in Washington and Wall Street isn't much help either, then what should John McCain be doing?

Six words: Aggressive pandering to the middle class. I'm going to take a page from John Podhoretz here, who wrote:

The world's financial and economic realities are not what they were three weeks ago. This affords McCain the chance of rebooting his campaign, to re-engineer his economic policy proposals in light of a prospective recession. I am only a political observer here, not an economist, so I don't know what that rebooting would or could consist of. But a substantive gamble by McCain, one in which he attempts to change the tone and spirit of the last three weeks by introducing a new approach to a time of crisis, offers the possibility of a new focus to the presidential race -- a focus that would allow McCain not merely to spend the next month trying to sow doubts about Obama but also to inspire the sense that McCain is looking forward and has something positive to contribute that will ameliorate the tough times ahead.

Frankly, McCain has done such a lousy job selling the domestic policy proposals he's put forward that he's more or less free to change them however he wants at this point. It would have been better if he had changed them dramatically and publicly on Monday, after the bailout passed and the market kept tanking, but before the debate itself. But the next time the stock market has a really bad day (i.e., tomorrow), he should "huddle with his advisers" and announce that in light of the epic crisis, he's going to postpone his entire domestic agenda (such as it is) for, say, two years in favor of a short-term but expensive stimulus package aimed directly at the middle and working class. Last night's "homeownership resurgence plan" - which was the best pander he's produced since the financial crisis started - could be part of this package, but it should take a back seat to a proposal for short-term and substantial middle-class tax relief. The crisis is taking money out of people's pockets; McCain should promise to put a lot of money right back into them, and to do so immediately, with as large a tax rebate as he thinks he can propose without the media laughing him to scorn. And at the same time, he should promise that every dollar the federal government earns off the bailout, every dollar saved from cutting earmarks, and every dollar saved as we draw down into Iraq, will go directly into some other pander-iffic proposal - like, say, an emergency relief fund for retirees whose 401(k)s have lost more than some specific percentage of their value in the last month. Wrap it all in a bow, call it a "Bailout for Main Street," and put as much energy into selling it as they've put into trying to rebrand Barack Obama as radical, vacuous, unready to lead. (And yes, they can still talk about Ayers, too.)

Is this cynical and opportunistic? Sure. Would it please the conservative intelligentsia? Quite possibly not. Would it look like just another desperation move, one that undercuts McCain's spending-hawk brand and gets mocked roundly in the press? Quite possibly. But John McCain is running to succeed the most unpopular President in modern history, in what is quite possibly the most politically-hostile environment a Republican has faced since the Great Depression, and in the midst of the worst financial crisis since, well, the Great Depression. And while four weeks of aggressive pandering to the middle class probably wouldn't win him this election, it's a strategy that has the virtue of actually addressing itself to the massive, massive anxieties that Americans are experiencing at the moment, as opposed to addressing itself to issues that voters, I suspect, perceive as tangential at best.

The Limits of McCainism

Patrick Ruffini on the debate:

To me one thing stood out. John McCain's maverickness is not gone. McCain doesn't need to return to his old maverick self. If anything, McCain's maverickness is the problem.
I noticed this whenever someone would ask about the economy. McCain would launch into a tirade against the greedy special interests on Wall Street. Obama would tend to lead with how it affected the voter. Two very different reactions. And I can't help but think that Obama's response connected better.
McCain has long tried to appropriate the populist, muckraking instincts of TR and the progressive Republicans. But there's a reason why these tactics haven't worked since, well, TR and the progressive Republicans.
Yes, voters may say they are mad about corporate pay, and Wall Street, and a do-nothing, self-aggrandizing Congress. But they are ultimately looking out for #1. The most relevant questions are and have always been: what are you going to do my taxes? my health care? my job?
This is why populism ultimately has such weak appeal. Sticking it to corporate CEOs and greedy politicians doesn't in and of itself put food on the table.

Conservatives have long understood populism as a weakness in liberal economic rhetoric, allowing us to win debates we otherwise would not have won by deploying more grounded, solution-oriented arguments (e.g. populist rants against trade and greedy CEOs who outsource vs. the direct benefits to the consumer of cheaper goods and services). But now this populist rhetoric is being visited on our own house.
In a time of crisis, people especially want to know what this means to them. And in this light, I can't help but think that John McCain's rush to indict distant bogeymen and his Senatese reminiscences about fighting the good fight against the bums in Washington fell a little flat.

I would quibble with what I think is Ruffini's somewhat narrow definition of populism, but overall he's right. This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution. And in a crisis that nobody really understands, and where the blame for what's happened runs through Main Street as well as Wall Street and Washington, McCain's usual "punish the bad guys" message just doesn't seem like what voters want to hear.

Home Economics

I can't believe Yglesias beat me to excerpting this snippet from George Packer's much-praised essay on the working class:

"These days, you have to struggle," she said. "As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can't take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you've got to think how you're going to put food on the table." Snodgrass's parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the "very privileged." She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. "That's who's middle-class now," she said. "Two parents, two kids? That's over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don't have nobody to look out for them. You're one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck."

Matt goes on to reference Grand New Party's focus on precisely this issue, and then writes:

Of course the problem is that once you recognize the truth of this line of analysis, you're still left wondering what, exactly, you're supposed to do about it. Stopping committed gay and lesbian couples from getting married won't, in the real world, help people build the sort of stable family structures that are an important part of emotional and economic support and security for those who have it. Nor does it really seem plausible to me that any government safety net, no matter how generous, could realistically fully make up the gap. And it's hard for me to imagine a government "marriage promotion" initiative that's heavy-handed enough to be effective, but not so heavy-handed as to be frighteningly authoritarian. But as a pure matter of electoral politics, I think it would probably be easy enough for an enterprising politician to talk a little bit more explicitly about this kind of thing and that would probably help candidates connect with people who, not wrongly, see linkage in their lives between "cultural issues" about family life and the economic challenges facing their family.

I definitely agree with the last point, and I also agree about the limits of straightforward "marriage promotion" programs. But while there's clearly no domestic-policy silver bullet for the problem of high divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates, I think there are things the government can do to sharpen the incentives - a favorite phrase of Reihan's - and have an impact on the margins. Some of the ideas we kick around in Grand New Party - a more family-friendly tax code; more support, through tax credits and subsidies, for parents who want to work part time or not at all while their kids are young; etc. - fall into this category: They're proposals that have the potential to ease the financial burden on working parents, a burden that's quite often at the root of family breakdown, and create a virtuous cycle in which parents are more likely to stay together, and their kids, down the road, are more likely to become responsible parents as well - since the children of stable families are more likely to form stable families themselves. The goal would be a short-run decrease in working-class divorce rates, and perhaps a long-term decrease in out-of-wedlock births as the benefits of greater familial stability are passed on to the next generation. Again, I'm under no illusions that tax policy and/or subsidization can have a massive impact here, but I think a family-friendly politics could offer at least a nudge, if you will, in the right direction.

The other half of the equation, in our view, would be reforms targeted at low-skilled males. One of the biggest reasons poor women have children out of wedlock is that the men in their demographic aren't really marriageable - they don't earn enough, they aren't working in the formal labor market, they're in and out of prison, etc. And it might be possible to improve their prospects (again, on the margins) - by reducing unskilled immigration, by reforming prisons while putting more cops on the beat, or even by developing a program of straightforward wage subsidies. (Though the last of these is a non-starter in the current fiscal climate: Of the big ideas we floated in GNP, it's the most expensive and the hardest to imagine the contemporary GOP - or the Dems, for that matter, though they'd probably be marginally more receptive - actually adopting.)

The Unplayed Card

Andy McCarthy isn't pleased:

... as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left? Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"? Nope. McCain didn't want to go there.

Great. Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists. If that's what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing."

You know, part of me actually wishes that John McCain had started talking about Bill Ayers, the Annenberg Challenge, Rashid Khalidi, and how the Global Poverty Act will line the pockets of Hugo Chavez. (Maybe in his answer to one of the questions about the economy - why not?) Because that way we wouldn't have to hear - as we will hear, from McCarthy and others, for months and years to come - that the biggest problem with the McCain campaign was that it just wasn't willing to really takes the gloves off and call Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer.

Update: I just tweaked the last line, to make it clearer - hopefully - that I'm not calling Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer myself. (Must ... dial ... down ... sarcasm.)

Insta-punditry

I'd call tonight's debate a draw, which if the dynamic from the first debate holds probably means it was a big win for Obama. I was gratified by the approach McCain took - by the absence of personal attacks (though, yes, the dislike still came through), by the attempt to actually engage with Obama on issues like health care, and yes, by the promise to buy up home mortgages, which was exactly the kind of blatantly panderish thing McCain needs to do if he wants to actually win this thing. (More on this tomorrow.) But Obama was unruffled and consistent - change vs. more of the same, change vs. more of the same, rinse and repeat - and for whatever it's worth the physical and generational contrast between the two men was very striking in this setting, and especially in the early going McCain seemed to me be showing his age as he delivered his answers. He improved as the night went on, but the vigor gap was palpable.

Oh, and everyone who's pointed out this wasn't anything like a real "town hall" meeting is exactly right. They should have just had Tom Brokaw moderate the thing, if this was the tone and format they were looking for. The whole thing had an unpleasant Potemkin feel to it, like the questioners were all afraid of what Brokaw might do to them if they strayed even modestly from the script.

The Ayers Dead End

David Frum is thinking along the same lines as yours truly:

My pals over at the Corner are very excited by the last-minute attempt to transform Bill Ayers into the Willie Horton of 2008. Well, good luck
In 1988, crime was a huge and rising problem - and Democrats still by and large resisted the effective crime control policies being developed at places like the Manhattan Institute and that would achieve such great results in the 1990s. So Willie Horton, the furloughed rapist and murderer, symbolized in very graphic terms something important and significant about Michael Dukakis the candidate.
But Bill Ayers? Does anybody really seriously believe that Barack Obama is a secret left-wing radical? And if not, then what is this fuss and fury supposed to show? It's like Ronald Reagan's opponents trying to beat him by pointing out that Birchers once supported him.

I think the answer is yes: Some of the conservatives studying and/or obsessing over Obama's connection to Ayers do think that he's a secret left-wing radical ... not a violent radical, but someone who shares Ayers' left-of-lefty politics, and the ex-Weatherman's vision of an America in dire need of revolutionizing. Obviously, I don't think this theory fits the facts about Obama very well at all, but to those who do I would also point out to the extent there's any evidence for the theory, it mainly involves curricular and power struggles in Chicago's public school system. Oddly, I actually suggested that McCain make an issue out of the curricular culture wars this summer, by piggybacking on some conservative think tankers' post-9/11 notion of a renewed focus on civics and "patriotic assimilation." But that was four long months ago and a political world away from where we stand right now, and I'm pretty sure that there's no surer way for the McCain campaign to look out-of-touch than by expending energy tying Barack Obama to left-wing activism in the Chicago public school system. That's as far as the Ayers issue can take you on substance, and it isn't very far at all.

Palin's Future (Or Lack Thereof)

Chris Orr lays down twenty bucks that Sarah Palin's future trajectory won't resemble anything like the optimistic scenario I sketched out here. I'd take the bet if he'd give me three-to-one odds! But yeah, at the moment it does seem more likely that Palin will be remembered as someone who was invited on board the U.S.S. Republican Party when it was already caught up in a vortex, and ended up lashing her career to its mast and going down with the ship.

McCain's Last Month (II)

Jay Cost makes the strongest possible case for campaigning on Ayers, Wright et. al. in the waning weeks of the election. He thinks that an issues-based campaign, pegged to McCain's bipartisan brand, made sense before the bottom dropped out of the economy; now, though, it's character or nothing. He notes that the sharpest, steepest drop in Obama's favorable numbers all year came during the initial wave of Wright-related coverage, and argues that this is the only avenue of attack that has a chance of shifting the race's dynamics:

Relative to past presidential nominees - Barack Obama has little relevant experience. His résumé is comparable to past "phenom" candidates Thomas Dewey and William Jennings Bryan. As a political matter, this means two things for Obama. First, as everybody knows, it is a direct weapon to use against him, which the McCain campaign has been doing for some time with its "Ready to Lead?" attacks.
Second, it means the definition of "Barack Obama" is more open to interpretation than other past nominees. The Obama campaign has used this vagueness to great effect. Simply put, because Obama has a slender record, he can be many things to many people. He can be the prophet of a new age to the chi tea crowd in Hyde Park, and a hardy Jacksonian fighter to the black coffee crowd in Youngstown. Politicians have been doing this dance routine for centuries. The fact that Obama's story is hardly conditioned by a paper trail enables him to do this with more facility than most contemporary politicians.
But this does not mean that Obama "is" only who he says he is. His thin record is potentially a double-edged sword because anybody can try to define him. With the mentioning of William Ayers, the GOP has just now begun the process of offering its alternative definition of the junior senator from Illinois. It waited until October because, as I noted last week, anywhere between 20% and 30% of the electorate is now making up its mind. This is the time to begin this process.

Like Poulos, I don't quite get that "begin" - I think the McCain campaign has been trying to redefine Obama's identity more or less all year; they've just been playing the "vacuous celebrity" and "tax-and-spend liberal" cards, and only now are turning over the "pals around with radicals" card because the others haven't worked. More generally, while I take the point about the potency of the Jeremiah Wright connection, my read on the situation is the opposite of Cost's: If there wasn't a single overriding issue like the economy on voters' minds, and if the two candidates were coming into the final month evenly matched - to the point where gaining a point or two with low-information voters or boosting your base's turnout by a point or two could make all the difference - then I think the gloves-off approach would have a chance of working. (Before the financial crisis hit, I confidently expected Wright to reappear down the stretch somehow, as a potential trump card for McCain in states where the polls were running very close.) But now, in these circumstances ... well, I think a rash of off-topic negative campaigning just makes the election look once and for all like "change versus change the subject," as Rich Lowry puts it today.

Blue America

Here's hoping you like the new design around these parts. The first issue of the redesigned and revamped magazine will be out within a week, and if for some reason you've never cottoned to the OnDeadTree Atlantic, I recommend picking it up on the newsstand and giving it a chance. (If you enjoy the blogs and feel guilty that you're getting all this great content for free, I even recommend subscribing.) My sole contribution to all this gorgeous retro-ness was to insist, with the aggrieved air of Steve Buscemi whining about his alias in Reservoir Dogs, that I wanted my blog's color to be blue. The fact that conservative America has been saddled - thanks to the vagaries of network-news color schemes and the closeness of the '00 election - with a hue long associated with international Communism and its enablers, while American liberalism gets to claim the color of the sea, the sky, and Frank Sinatra's eyes, is a small but obnoxious outrage, and as the Right prepares to enter the political wilderness I'm proud to do my part to at least reclaim our rightful color.

Bet On America

Past results don't predict future earnings and all that, but if you need a pick-me-up today, Will Wilkinson and Jim Manzi both should make you feel a little better.

McCain's Last Month

Allahpundit gets it:

What's the way out? An Ayers/Wright offensive simply isn't going to hack it; even I can't be bothered with it today between covering my face and peeking through my fingers at the sinking Dow. A sustained attack on the left over Fannie/Freddie will help, but I don't know how you push that message through to low-information voters with the time left. It seems unlikely in the extreme that people who don't follow this from day to day are to going react to a meltdown on Wall Street by electing the guy from the party commonly derided as a pawn of big business. On the contrary, the worse things get, the better The One's vacuous rhetoric sounds. After all, what surer tonic could there be for a looming depression than Hopenchange? Pricetag: $5 trillion. Horrifying exit quotation from an unnamed McCain advisor suggesting they're ready to give up: "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose." Note to Team Maverick -- you have no choice.

McCain is almost certainly going to lose this election. He can go down trying to talk about the issues that voters actually care about, and trying to make some headway in the debates that are going to dominate our politics for the next few years, or he can go down trying to change the subject. I really don't see any percentage in the latter.

From Willie Horton To William Ayers

Let's watch some vicious right-wing attack ads:

Okay, what was that ad about? "White racism!" cry the liberals. But table that argument for a moment: What else was it about? Crime. Take out the racial element, and you're still left with a devastatingly effective ad for an era - the late 1980s - when crime rates were near an all-time high.

Here's another one, just as infamous:

Again, what's this ad about? White racism? Again, table that debate - what else? Jobs. The Helms-Gantt Senate race took place in 1990, at a time when the Reagan boom was giving way to the Bush-era recession - and when North Carolina's manufacturing sector, in particular, was taking a big hit - and the ad's effectiveness depended almost entirely on its very direct connection to N.C. voters' economic anxieties.

Continue reading "From Willie Horton To William Ayers" »

The William Ayers He Knows

Discerning blog readers are probably aware that one of the biggest difficulties with the medium is that as far as the size of your traffic goes - and thus, in some ultimate sense, the size of your paycheck - it's much more important to write frequently than to write well. This creates unfortunate incentives for individual bloggers, who see near-constant posting rewarded with high traffic even when the quality of their posts suffer dramatically. And it creates a similar incentive problem for group blogs: The administrator has an incentive to extend posting privileges to an ever-larger crew, even when it means that bad material starts to crowd out the posts that made the blog worth reading in the first place. I can only assume that these perverse incentives explain the sudden election-eve presence of the novelist and professor Richard Stern on TNR's The Plank, usually one of my favorite liberal blogs; whatever Stern's merits as a novelist, his blogging style is near-parodic in its mix of pretension, vituperation, and "no enemies to the left" obliviousness.

Continue reading "The William Ayers He Knows" »

The Drama Factor

I think this emailer's case for the seven-game series is stronger than my vague theories about what feels fair or just to the losing team's fans:

I'm a Cubs fan and I'm not going to whine that the five-game opening round screwed the Cubs. In a seven-game format they'd still, after last night, be down 0-3 with two more games to go at Dodger Stadium. Unless you get extraordinarily lucky you aren't going to come back from 0-3 to win a seven-game series. When you dump three in a row there's usually a reason for it.

But the best argument against a five-game opening round has nothing to do with what the losing team "deserves," or how much randomness it introduces into the outcome of the series. The argument is simply that a five-game series, because it's shorter, produces less excitement and fewer interesting storylines. Yeah, a sweep is a sweep whether it's three games or four games. But say the Cubs had won a hypothetical Game Four. Then Game Five is at least marginally interesting, because if the Cubs win then things return to Wrigley where--until the playoffs, at least--the Cubs have been a very tough team. More games automatically means more opportunity for drama and more fun rooting for the comeback, however unlikely. I'm sure you're happy that the ALCS moved to a seven-game format in 1985. Think of all the fun you would have missed out on in 2004 if the ALCS had ended that year with the Yankees clubbing the Red Sox 19-8 to sweep the best-of-five.

Sadly, Bud Selig isn't buying it:

Selig also downplayed any talk of expanding the first round of the playoffs from to best-of-seven series. He told team owners that expressed support of more playoff games they would have to cut regular-season games from the schedule -- something owners clearly weren't willing to do and the players' union likely would oppose.
"End of discussion," Selig said.

And meanwhile, last night's results suggest that the baseball gods have decided to take all my whining about the boringness of the three-game sweep and throw it right back in my face.

Both/And

In the spirit of this blog post from Megan (which may be my favorite of the entire economic crisis), here are two readings for the day. For the first is for every left-liberal who thinks the housing crisis was entirely the result of wicked Republicans (and quisling Democrats) who deregulated the hell out of the American economy in the name of cowboy capitalism; it's a month-hold interview with Warren Buffett (via Tyler Cowen), in which he talks about Fannie, Freddie, and the limits of regulation:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it's really an incredible case study in regulation because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that's $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies.

QUICK: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you can get them on the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to Sarbanes and Oxley every year. And they went--wrote 100 page reports, and they said, 'We've looked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.' And then all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350--340 page report examining what went wrong, and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit committee. They didn't have a word in there about themselves, and they're the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.

QUICK: That sounds like an argument against regulation, though. Is that what you're saying?

Mr. BUFFETT: It's an argument explaining--it's an argument that managing complex financial institutions where the management wants to deceive you can be very, very difficult.

The second is for any free-market conservative who thinks that the only thing that matters in this whole story is government's distortion of the market - the long bipartisan push to increase homeownership by any means necessary, that is - and that capitalism's tendency to encourage greed-addled shortsightedness has nothing to do with it. It's an interview N+1 did with a hedge fund manager nine months ago:

... There were people at the firm, say, at the middle of last year [2006], who were not mortgage experts, who were saying, you know, "I see the run-up in housing prices in some of these geographies, and I just don't really get it. I go down to Florida and see the forest of cranes, and I just really wonder, who's going to be in all those apartments? And I hear about all sorts of friends who are getting loans to buy apartments or houses speculatively and who are lying about the fact that it's not a primary residence, and I see these commercials on TV, you know, about low-doc, no-doc mortgages--and there is no way, there is no way that this is not going to end badly. And I see that these mortgages are being created by this massive demand for CDO paper, by this robotic bid, and this is the perfect example of a bubble--and we should be short, we should be short sub-prime paper."

n+1: This is what guys do? They travel around Florida, they watch TV?

HFM: Just in your normal life, I mean, like me, I trade a different market, I don't trade subprime, but, you know, I travel for other reasons, and some of my partners do the same thing. And we all, a number of us thought, "This is just crazy. We should be short. This is a bubble waiting to be popped." But the person who was the expert [at the fund], the person who ran the sub-prime business, who traded subprime paper and issued the CDOs, he was a true believer in the paradigm: "In 2003, people said that the credit quality of the average subprime mortgage was deteriorating, and now look, those mortgages have performed fine. The subprime market works." And, hey, he was the expert--you defer to the expert.

Via Keith Gessen. (They did a follow-up interview, after the Bear Stearns fiasco, that's also worth your time.)

Waiting For The Barbarians

For some reason, while reading this slice of a New York interview with Woody Allen ...

NY: Do you have a theory about why the culture keeps getting coarser?
WA: The country has, over the years, moved to the right. And it's possible that accompanying that move to the right, you also get a lessening of taste. But I don't know if what I'm saying is true, because I have shown some very good films--Bergman, Fellini--to kids from good schools like Yale. Bright kids. And they were not impressed. You know, it wasn't as though I picked out some kid from the Midwest who's a churchgoing barbarian. Those same kids that you see in the movie house doubled over with laughter over fraternity toilet jokes are very often kids from Columbia and Yale. We might also still be feeling the fallout from the sexual revolution, when everybody just ran amok talking dirty and doing things that were forbidden and it became the mark of drama and comedy to be simply outrageous. Not necessarily dramatically interesting or particularly comic, but just outrageous.

... I had a sudden vision of a group of Midwestern monks lovingly preserving the last surviving copies of Manhattan and Annie Hall through a long Dark Age, while wolves howl in Morningside Heights and owls nest in the ruins of Branford College.

I know, I know: Very Crunchy Con. I think I'll have a stiff drink.

Line Of The Day

Dave Weigel on David Zucker's American Carol, and the difficulties involved in making a slapstick comedy that doesn't mock authority, but reveres it:

If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he'd direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.

Weigel also suggests that the time to make a right-wing comedy spoofing Michael Moore was probably, oh, 2004 or so, back in the Fahrenheit 9/11 days when his celebrity was at its height. Coincidentally, back in '04 I wrote a piece for NR about the (conservative) American Renaissance Film Festival, in which I took note of the "almost pathological obsession with Michael Moore among filmmakers and audience members alike." But at least then it made a certain sense. Now, though - well, just read Weigel.

The Cubs, The Cubs

When I remarked that I would vastly prefer to have the division series round of MLB's postseason go seven games, because the current best-of-five feels "engineered to produce sweeps and injects an enormous crapshoot effect into an already overly-random system," a reader wrote in to point that statistically speaking, the crapshoot effect in a seven game series is only marginally lower than in a five game playoff:

Baseball is inherently a random game, so there's no real way to structure the playoffs to avoid the possibility of an inferior team winning. A battle between an 81-win team and a 100-win team would be a fairly lopsided playoff matchup. Using the log5 method (which is the generally accepted sabermetric method) and running 50,000 simulations, the 100-win team won a 5 game series 71.5% of the time and a 7 game series 74.6% of the time. So, the 7 game series is less random, but it's not a huge difference.

Interestingly, the just-concluded Cubs-Dodgers series was almost as lopsided as the simulation above - the 97-win Cubs against the 84-win Dodgers - and after watching Chicago go down to defeat , I'm of two minds about my "seven games are better" thesis. On the one hand, I think that even though the effect of the extra game(s) on the randomness of the outcome is marginal in the extreme, there's still a sense in which a seven-game series feels like a more just reward for a great regular season than a five-game series, and losing 4-1 or even 4-0 leaves the losing team's fan base with a better taste in their mouth than the "blink and you missed it" feeling that a three-game sweep inspires. (When the Red Sox lost 4-0 to the vastly-superior A's in the 1988 and 1990 ALCS, I felt like justice had been done; when they lost 3-0 to a similarly-loaded Indians team in 1995, I felt like I'd been cheated out of a real postseason appearance.) On the other hand, it felt like they could have played best-of-seventeen and the Dodgers still would have swept the Cubs: Alfonso Soriano would have ended up 3-for-42; Ryan Dempster would have walked 21 batters in three starts; Manny Ramirez would have hit ten home runs for the Dodgers, and the outcome would have been exactly the same. If you can't do more than the Cubs did in three high-stakes games against a markedly inferior team, maybe you don't deserve a fourth chance at it.

Palin's Appeal

Yglesias thinks it's all in (male) right-wing pundits' heads:

Now the simple fact of the matter is that Palin is an unpopular figure. There's no sense arguing about this. Likewise, the polls show unambiguously that most people who watched her debate performance were unimpressed. And yet among male conservative pundits .... gushing praise was extremely common. But before this loose talk of a Palin 2012 campaign takes off, people need to realize that her appeal seems grounded in the psychosexual hang-ups of conservative men. Her hyper-unpopularity with women makes her an unpopular figure overall, and talk of her mesmerizing qualities doesn't change that.

"No sense arguing?" Really? Look, it's certainly true that Palin has relatively low favorable ratings compared to the other candidates in the race, especially among women. But going into the debate, and coming off a week of round-the-clock public mockery following her disastrous interview with Katie Couric, she still had higher positives than negatives (according to Time, 47 percent of Americans viewed her favorably, and 40 percent viewed her negatively), so calling her a flat-out "unpopular figure" seems at the very least debatable. And while the post-debate polls show that most people gave the edge to Biden, I'm not sure that it's "unambiguous" that Americans were unimpressed with Palin's performance. In this CNN poll, for instance, she was judged the more likable candidate by 54 percent of viewers, compared to 36 percent for Biden. This CBS poll, meanwhile, found that "fifty-five percent of the uncommitted voters said their opinion of Palin had changed for the better as a result of the debate; just 14 percent said they had a lower opinion of her"; it also found that "Palin's rating improved after the debate on being knowledgeable on important issues - from 43 percent to 66 percent ... [and] Uncommitted voters' views of Palin's preparedness for the job of vice president also improved as a result of her debate performance - from 39 percent to 55 percent." These are not world-beating numbers by any means - Biden's knowledgeability and preparedness scores were off the charts - and the public's (completely justifiable) doubts about Palin's preparedness and experience may ultimately make her a liability to McCain in this campaign. But neither are they numbers that suggest that she can dismissed out of hand as an inarguably "unpopular" figure with no future in American politics, who's stock is being artificially inflated by the sexual fantasies of right-wing pundits.

Palin in 2012?

Chris Cillizza gets way ahead of himself:

... judging from the polls, Palin's image to the average American is as a likable Republican who probably needs a bit more seasoning. Sub out "Republican" for "Democrat" in that last sentence and you have the general sentiment about former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards following his 2004 run for president and subsequent vice presidential bid ...

Edwards spent the next four years laying the policy groundwork for a second bid, founding the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina and touring the country to talk about poverty and its import as a national issue ... Palin could follow the same blueprint -- choosing a signature issue (or two) and focusing heavily on making herself a leading authority on the issue while also boning up on other policy matters (particularly foreign policy) and putting in place a political team.
And, while Palin's weaknesses are apparent to any political junkie following the last few weeks of the campaign closely, her strengths are also legion ... She is beloved by social conservative voters who view her as "one of them". She will end this race, win or lose, with extremely high name identification nationwide. Regardless of the outcome, she will be a rockstar on the Republican fundraising circuit over the coming months and years. And, for a party that may well be looking to redefine itself in 2012, Palin stands out from a field that could include former Govs. Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Mike Huckabee (Ark.) as well as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty among others.

All right, I'll play along. If - if! - Palin has a non-disastrous final month, and arrives at election day with her reputation in roughly the same position as it is today - that is to say, beloved of the right-wing rank-and-file, and viewed as underqualified but not totally Quayle-like by at least some independents - and if John McCain then loses the election, she would become a not-implausible contender for the GOP nomination in 2012. In those circumstances, the temptation to go for it might be irresistible. But it seems pretty obvious to me that she ought to resist it. The political climate is going to be tough for Republicans for a little while, most likely, and barring unforeseen circumstances Sarah Palin is not going to be elected President of the United States without rebranding herself pretty dramatically, and putting some distance between herself and the role the McCain campaign has thrust her into - which is more or less Agnew in lipstick, except folksier and with cuter kids. (Though come to think of it, for all I know Agnew had some adorable moppets of his own ...)

Now maybe the necessary transformation could be accomplished in just four years. But Palin has the luxury of time: She's extremely young, she's going to be a folk hero to the conservative base for years to come almost no matter what, and she can afford to go back to Alaska, govern her state, run for re-election in 2010 and win, and then flirt with a national run in 2012 but ultimately decide against it - because she made a promise to Alaskans, or something like that. Let Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich and Pawlenty fight the right to lose to Obama in '12; even if one of them gets extremely lucky and knocks of the Dem incumbent, by 2020 she'll still be only fifty-six, with plenty of future still ahead of her. Meanwhile, she can hoard her political capital, campaign for GOP candidates in 2010 and 2012 and create a generation of office-holders who owe her, and spend some time reintroducing herself to the American public in a less-partisan context. What Edwards did with poverty, she could do with education or health care or some other issue where the GOP is weak - and better still, she could get involved in overseas charity work, and spend a lot of time shuttling around the Middle East and Africa with Rick Warren and Bono, helping widows and orphans and AIDS patients, occasionally meeting foreign leaders, and filling up the back pages of her passport. Next thing you know, she'll have Nick Kristof plugging her in his columns, and Bill Clinton praising her at goodwill dinners (not that he wouldn't anyway), and the ladies from The View having her on to chat about her charity work - and she'll refuse to talk politics, thank you very much, and although the base will still love her, the days when she spent all her time attacking Barack Obama and fumbling through nightly-news interviews will be long forgotten. And then - then - in 2016 or 2020, she'll run for President, and as long as some rising half-Hispanic GOP star doesn't come along to play Obama to her Hillary, the rest will be history.

Or, alternatively, she can spend a lot of time on Fox News over the next two years, decline to run for re-election in Alaska, surround herself with the same advisers and strategists who have made the McCain campaign such a glowing success, and run for President in 2012 - and lose to Barack Obama (if she makes it that far) by, oh, seven percentage points or so, amid a flurry of Tina Fey sketches and YouTube clips of the Couric interview. The choice is hers.

2-0, 2-0, 2-0, 2-0

What was that I said about the lousiness of wild-card era postseasons again? C'mon, Cubs and Brewers and White Sox and Angels ...

Well, okay, maybe not the Angels.

Judging The Dead, Who Can't Answer Them Back

I stopped watching the first season of Mad Men before it ended, and keep meaning to pick it up again but haven't. But Michael Brendan Dougherty's take on the show as a whole dovetails with my own initial impression - namely, that it wears its condescension toward its era and characters on its sleeve, inviting the viewer to enjoy the guilty pleasures of the early 1960s secondhand, while looking down, with "how far we've come" smugness, on the people who actually enjoyed them in the flesh. In its early going, Mad Men seemed to be aiming for the same trick David Chase pulled off in The Sopranos - depicting a corrupt lifestyle as simultaneously repellent and attractive, and then gradually (very gradually, in Chase's case) implicating the audience in the moral turpitude it was eagerly awaiting every Sunday night. (See Emily Nussbaum's brilliant Sopranos exegesis for more on this theme.) But Mad Men suffered from two big problems, at least in the episodes I watched: First, the show lacked The Sopranos' playfulness, its understanding that sin wouldn't be alluring if it didn't seem so damn fun. (As Dougherty puts it, "the writers give [Don] Draper the desperate, needy conscience of an addict, without ever showing him enjoying the high.") Second, its creator and writers didn't seem to realize that early-sixties admen, whatever their bigotries and vices, weren't quite the moral equivalent of murderous gangsters, and thus that a dramatic approach that worked in Chase's mob story would often end up feeling strained and portentous when the subject matter wasn't murder, rape and drug dealing, but booze and adultery and ad copy.

All of that said, it had obvious charms - Dougherty obviously likes the show in spite of itself, and of course everyone else loves it - and hopefully I'll pick it up again soon and discover that I'm being somewhat unfair in my criticisms.

The Missing $7,000

Here's Joe Biden last night on the McCain health care plan:

... do you know how John McCain pays for his $5,000 tax credit you're going to get, a family will get? He taxes as income every one of you out there, every one of you listening who has a health care plan through your employer. That's how he raises $3.6 trillion, on your -- taxing your health care benefit to give you a $5,000 plan, which his Web site points out will go straight to the insurance company. And then you're going to have to replace a $12,000 -- that's the average cost of the plan you get through your employer -- it costs $12,000. You're going to have to pay -- replace a $12,000 plan, because 20 million of you are going to be dropped. Twenty million of you will be dropped. So you're going to have to place -- replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the "Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere."

This is an argument you hear frequently from liberals: That McCain's plan will tax employer provided health insurance, which is worth roughly $12,000 for a typical family, which in turn will lead many employers to stop offering said health insurance; meanwhile, the plan will give the same family a tax credit worth only $5,000 to pay for the same plan they used to have through their employer. This makes the whole thing sound like a pretty rotten deal, but it also begs a pretty big question: What happened to that extra $7,000 that employers were spending on health care under the old dispensation? To hear Biden tell it, it'll just vanish into thin air. But that's just absurd. Right now, that $12,000 plan is part of your compensation; it's just that the current tax code incentivizes employers to pay you in health insurance rather than in cash, because the health insurance is tax free. But that doesn't mean that if health insurance stops being tax free and employers stop including it in your package of salary and benefits, they'll suddenly cut everyone's compensation by $12,000; they'll cut it by the cost of the tax deduction, presumably, and wages will rise to roughly where they would have been if employers had never been incentivized to pay their workers in health care. So the typical family will get their $5,000 credit from the government, and something like the remaining $7,000 they need to buy health insurance will show up in their paycheck. Except that a lot of Americans will actually come out ahead, rather than just breaking even, since McCain's plan offers a flat credit regardless of income, whereas under the current system the dollar value of your tax deduction - and thus the compensation your employer is incentivized to give you - goes up as your income rises.

An assessment of McCain's plan from the Tax Policy Center (no right-wing ideologues, they) put it this way: "Workers offered insurance through their employers lose the value of the income tax exclusion but gain the credit; the combination leads to higher effective costs of insurance for some (those in the higher tax brackets or who have relatively high-cost employer-sponsored insurance) and lower costs for others (those in lower tax brackets or who have less expensive insurance)." In other words, the middle and working classes actually tend to gain at the expense of the wealthy.

This is not to say that there aren't more reasonable liberal critiques of McCain's plan: That it focuses on affordability rather than universality; that the tax credit is indexed to the consumer price index, and might not keep up with rising health care costs; and especially that it doesn't have a strong plan for how to deal with people - especially people with pre-existing conditions - who would have trouble getting coverage during the transition from employer-based to individually-purchased insurance. But the critique Biden offered last night is possibly the most common, probably the most damning, and certainly the most flatly untrue.

Update: See also Yuval.

The Message, Not The Messenger

I think Jonathan Cohn is basically right about this:

Let's stipulate that these instant polls are not the most accurate measures of public opinion. Here's the interesting thing: The results are virtually identical to the results from last week's debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. In CNN's poll, 51 percent thought Obama won while 38 percent thought McCain won. CBS had it 39-25 for Obama.

... Obama and Biden don't really have similar personalities or debating styles; their backgrounds are pretty different, too. The same goes for the Republican ticket is even more disjointed. McCain and Palin are as different as two candidates can be. But when paired off against their counterparts, both the presidential and vice presidential candidates performed at basically the same level.

It could be coincidence. Or it could be the fact that they made the same essential arguments--and the viewers reached the same conclusions about them..

In the Couric interview, Palin mangled her talking points so badly that all anybody noticed noticed was the mangling itself; the points themselves receded into the background. Her much-improved performance last night, though, had the paradoxical effect of throwing the weakness of the GOP message in this election cycle into sharper relief. To my mind, one of the more telling moments in the debate came when Palin, unbidden, latched on to a Biden reference to education, and started talking about all the teachers in her family, and how her kids attend public school, and then did her shout-out to her brother's third grade class - all of which would have been an ideal anecdotal way to lead into a more substantive argument about education policy. The fact that Palin didn't really have a substantive point (beyond vague references to paying teachers more and making NCLB more flexible) can be attributed in part to her lack of knowledge on the subject, no doubt, and perhaps to her lack of interest in policy detail - but it also reflects the fact that the McCain campaign hasn't put any energy into developing a clear, consistent, and popular message on education. Now, there's nothing wrong with that in principle: McCain wants to toe the line on the federal role in education, so he's mainly proposed small-bore initiatives and made notional commitments to school choice; fair enough. But when you don't have much to say to the middle class on taxes, either, and when you haven't figured out a way to address the liberal critique of your health care plan, and when you don't want to talk about immigration at all (except out of the side of your mouth, to Hispanic groups), when you have next to nothing to say about crime or poverty or the country's infrastructure or any other domestic issue except drilling and earmarks ... well, it gets real tough out there real quick, no matter how many times you throw around the word "maverick."

Real Estate and Inequality

This paper's findings won't be surprising to any college graduate who's pondered buying a house in the greater D.C. area:

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a high cost of housing. This implies that college graduates are increasingly exposed to a high cost of living and that the relative increase in their real wage may be smaller than the relative increase in their nominal wage. To measure the college premium in real terms, I deflate nominal wages using a new CPI that allows for changes in the cost of housing to vary across metropolitan areas and education groups. I find that half of the documented increase in the return to college between 1980 and 2000 disappears when I use real wages. This finding does not appear to be driven by differences in housing quality and is robust to a number of alternative specifications.

Via Will Wilkinson, of course - your one-stop source for findings that complicate the inequality picture, and the proprietor of a snazzily-redesigned blog.

Palin-Biden!!!!!

What, you want a take? You know I'm no good at assessing these things.

Okay, fine: They both won, in the sense that they both did what they needed to do. Palin needed to arrest her slide into political oblivion, to hold her own on the stage with Biden, and to give the TV pundit class - which has the most bizarre love-hate relationship with her I've ever seen them have with a candidate - a reason to switch their narrative from "Palin flops!" to "Palin exceeds expectations!" She accomplished all that, and showed, I think, flashes of real promise as a national politician. (As well as, yes, flashes of the awkwardness, unpreparedness, and syntactical weirdness that made the Couric interview such an epic fiasco.) She clearly restored her standing among wavering conservatives, and I suspect did herself a solid with undecideds and independents as well - and the initial polls seem to bear that reading out.

But those same initial polls also show respondents giving it to Biden, and I'm not all that surprised. He didn't need to wipe the floor with her in order to win, and he wisely didn't try; he just needed to sound more authoritative, nuanced, and experienced than her, to hammer away at John McCain, and to generally play defense for a ticket that's on its way to victory at the moment. And I think he succeeded. The Democrats have a lot of built-in advantages in this election cycle, and judging by the public's reaction to the first debate, the key to victory for Obama-Biden is to do no harm - don't squander your advantages, don't freak out when the Republicans score their points on the surge and offshore drilling, and just be sure to always nudge the conversation back to the economy, to middle-class tax cuts versus tax cuts for the rich, to health care, and to George W. Bush's record. So while Sarah Palin did an awful lot for Sarah Palin tonight, there was only so much she could do for her running mate - given her own limits, but especially given the state of the country, and the gulf between the issues the McCain campaign wants to fight on and the issues voters care about. She's saved herself from Quayle-dom, but Obama-Biden is one debate closer to victory.

The Palin Record: One More Look

With the debate only a few hours away - and with it, Sarah Palin's last best chance to reverse her slide into Quayle-dom - it's worth re-focusing briefly on her record as governor. You've probably noticed that my mounting disillusionment with Palin has centered almost entirely around her performance as a candidate, rather than on all the shocking revelations in the press and the blogosphere about what a terrible governor she actually was. That's because I don't really think there is very much evidence that she was a terrible governor, and what passes for evidence is mainly sound, fury, backbiting and gossip, signifiying not terribly much at all.

Take, for instance, this Michael Crowley post on Palin's "Potemkin" popularity, which I think is a good example of the style of criticism Palin's record has earned in the media:

Read today's Times piece about her tenure as governor, and you'll see that two of her signature achievements involved giving away money. One was signing a $200 million increase in education spending, and another was approving a $250 a month subsidity to low-income elderly Alaskans; Palin had originally sought to restore a subsidy, cancelled by her predecessor, to all elderly Alaskans who had lived in the state since before its statehood. This of course was all made possible by the state's skyrocketing oil revenues. It's not that hard to become popular when you can fling around money like that. (Although this campaign is putting a dent in that popularity among Alaskans.)
P.S. On NPR this morning I heard an interesting description of her management style from a former newspaper editor who had worked in state government under Palin: "She governs by BlackBerry," he said, eschewing long substantive meetings. How reassuring. At least she doesn't use an iPhone.

Now imagine for a moment that Sarah Palin had emerged from the ranks of Alaska's Democrats, rather than Alaska's Republicans. Imagine that she had followed the same political trajectory - taking on a cozy GOP establishment, attacking corruption, defeating incumbents, etc. And then imagine that she had amassed exactly the same record in office - passing ethics reform, imposing a higher tax on the state's oil and natural companies, facing off against the same companies in the battle over the state's new gas pipeline, and investing the state's rising revenue in education, a subsidy for the low-income elderly, and rebate checks for all Alaskans. Do you think that any liberal writer in America would have accused her of buying her way to "Potemkin popularity" by "giving away money," as Crowley does above? Seriously - read that Times story he links to on her record as governor, set aside her record on polar bears and the references to her social conservatism, and try to imagine how a magazine like TNR would normally cover a gubernatorial record and political story like hers if she were a centrist Democrat.

Ah, but then the twist of the knife - a former associate says she doesn't hold long meetings and "governs by Blackberry." Clearly, that's all we need to know about her!

Look, obviously, there are plenty of blemishes on the Palin record, as governor and as mayor - failed projects, whiffs of cronyism, the troopergate/tasergate affair. But no politician, and especially no governor from a small, strange state, is going to arrive on the national stage without blemishes, and in spite of wall-to-wall media coverage of Palin's career, nothing has surfaced that's significant enough to change the impression I had of her a month ago - an impression that had me touting her as a rising GOP star, and a potential McCain veep. Was she ready for this stage, and these responsibilities? It sure doesn't seem like it. Was it a responsible choice by John McCain? Almost certainly not. But she was an effective and impressive governor, however briefly - and perhaps will be again when all this is over. And the reality of her successes, and her untapped potential, only make what's happened over the past few weeks all the more disappointing.

Palin and the "Gotchas"

Larison (and various emailers) think I'm mis-using the term:

When someone at a restaurant asked Palin a question about Pakistan that generated some controversy because it seemed to contradict McCain's previous statement at the debate, the McCain campaign dubbed it "gotcha journalism" and right away when Gibson stumped Palin with his Bush Doctrine question there was a great hue and cry about the "gotcha" nature of this question. Apparently the questions on her reading habits and Court rulings has also been defined as a "gotcha" question by Palin supporters, even though it is as certain as the sun rising that journalists will ask nominees their views on judicial philosophy and Court rulings. It seems to me that we are redefining what "gotcha" means from the sort of Russertian exegesis that involved laying careful ambushes for smooth, evasive pols as a way of pinning down their positions to any question that candidates have trouble answering. In other words, the "gotcha" is no longer an ambush-it can include any question to which the candidate really should have an answer.

Fair points all. A better term for the sort of queries I had in mind might be "pop quiz" questions: They're perfectly fair questions to ask; what makes them distinctive is that they probably wouldn't be asked of a candidate who wasn't already viewed as unprepared (and thus vulnerable to being shown up by an interviewer). But if I seemed to imply that it's unreasonable or unjust to ask vice-presidential candidate to name Supreme Court cases they disagree with, or to express an opinion about the Bush Doctrine, then I retract that implication. All I meant to suggest is that a more skillful interviewee than Sarah Palin would have done a better job deflecting, say, the Supreme Court question, or the question about John McCain's past attempts (or lack thereof) to regulate Wall Street, even if she didn't have answer - and that the inability to deflect as well as the inability to answer has been part of Palin's self-presentation problem in her interviews.

The Struggles of Sarah Palin

What's been interesting - in a watching-from-behind-your-hands sort of way, if you're a conservative who wishes her well - about Palin's interviews with Charlie Gibson and especially Katie Couric is the way they've provided examples of almost every single way that an inexperienced politician can struggle in the media spotlight. Most of the attention has focused, justly, on Palin's flat-out incoherent answers to some of Couric's questions, and her difficulties deflecting obvious "gotcha" situations (Gibson on the Bush Doctrine, Couric asking what newspapers she reads and asking her to name non-Roe Supreme Court decisions with which she disagrees, etc.). But there are other, more subtle dynamics at work as well. In the Gibson interview, as a number of people pointed out, there was her tendency to answer directly in situations where a more practiced pol would obfuscate a bit. (Her response on whether bringing Georgia into NATO would require going to war with Russia, for instance, was a classic case of giving a straightforward answer where a little "the goal is to make sure it wouldn't come to that, Charlie" would have gone a long way - even if her straightforwardness was a refreshing reminder of why putting Georgia into NATO might not be such a hot idea.) And in both interviews, there was an inability to make the talking points she's obviously been forced to memorize in a hurry sound smooth and spontaneous, rather than rote and overrehearsed - or in the case of the whole "Russia is close to Alaska" fiasco (and whichever McCain aide is responsible for that piece of idiocy should never, ever work in politics again), to make deeply stupid talking points sound semi-plausible, rather than, well, deeply stupid.

But her struggles with Couric's questions about Roe and the right to privacy are perhaps the most telling - not just because of how Palin answered them, but because of how Biden answered a similar question. As Ramesh and Yuval point out, judged purely on substance, Biden's answer was much more of a hash than Palin's statement that she believes in a right to privacy but opposes Roe. (This is not, repeat not, an inconsistent position.) But Biden couched his answer in terms that made it sound like he possessed deep knowledge on the issue (as I'm sure he thinks he does), whereas Palin's response made it clear that she did not. And where media appearances are concerned, that makes an enormous difference.

For those conservatives who claim to see no problems with Palin's performance, of course, this is precisely what's so outrageous about the anti-Palin backlash: She's being judged, they complain, less on her record and her positions than on her ability to BS her way through "gotcha" questions from hostile interviewers, and she's being found wanting because she isn't as practiced in the art of the on-air dodge as more experienced politicians. (Thus Joe Carter's pro-Palin complaint, for instance, that he "cannot make the leap in logic required to believe that proficiency on television is evidence of capable leadership.")

I think this view is wrong for several reasons: Because Palin's relatively limited record in politics magnifies the importance of her public comments for anyone who's trying to get a handle on who this woman is and whether she's ready for high office; because her performance has been so comprehensively lousy that it has to reflect, to some degree, on her knowledge base and her understanding of policy as well as on her TV chops; and because like it or not, "proficiency on television" is simply a prerequisite for capable leadership in a mass democracy. But there's a sense in which the apologists for her performance are getting something right: In the process of performing very, very badly on national television, Palin is holding up a mirror to the rest of the political world, and revealing how the mix of talking points, bluster, obfuscation and BS that nearly all national politicians traffic in as a matter of course sounds when it's filtered through someone who isn't practiced in it, and isn't ready for the spotlight. Her performances reflect badly on her readiness for the vice presidency, no question - but they reflect badly on our whole compromised, spin-happy political class as well.

Hear No Evil, See No Evil

Culture11 has an interesting debate between Conor Friedersdorf and Joe Carter on the question of whether Sarah Palin should be dropped (or recuse herself, I suppose) from the Republican ticket. I agree with neither of them - or rather, I agree with Carter on the narrow point of whether she should be dropped (that is, I think she shouldn't), but I disagree with much of what he has to say in Palin's defense, and with his read on what her performance to date says about her readiness for the vice presidency. But my disagreements with Conor and Carter are as nothing compared to my disagreement with ... no, let me be frank .... my utter disgust with Erick Erickson's RedState response to Friedersdorf (and Culture11 as a whole), which you can find here, and which I'll excerpt:

I'm happy to let Katleen Parker [sic], etc. say what they want. Some people are on the team. Some people are not on the team. Some people want you to know they are conservatives first and Republicans second and by God let me pee on the GOP just so you know how far apart I am even if I play willingly into an unfair media narrative against Sarah Palin.

... Thankfully Joe Carter has a brilliant take down of the guy. I'd link to Joe, but then I'd have to link to Culture 11 and I'm not going to do that.

... There are days when I think we deserve to lose. And this is one of them. It's all great to say you are a conservative first, but at the end of the day, there are only two teams playing on November 4th -- pick one. I guess Culture 11 has chosen Obama.

So let's not confuse them with any sort of conservative standard bearer organization. They clearly are not.

Sometimes conservatives like to say that the great thing about the American Right is its vibrant internal debates, its tolerance for the free play of ideas, its disinterest in rigid ideologies and inflexible party lines. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes, though, it isn't. (Just ask "Katleen" Parker.)

The irony is that Erick Erickson no doubt really and truly believes that by blacklisting (blacklinking?) any conservative writer or website that isn't sufficiently on-side, he's just doing What It Takes to rebuild a conservative majority - when the reality, of course, is precisely the reverse.

And Starring Ann Hathaway As Herself ...

The long Vanity Fair piece on the rise and fall of Raffaello Follieri - a.k.a. Anne Hathaway's ex-beau - has me half-convinced that Follieri doesn't really belong in jail; it has me completely convinced that this story ought to be a feature film, or the very least a Lifetime Original Movie. I've blogged about the hilarity of Follieri's escapades before, but the VF profile captures what's truly fascinating about the whole thing: His apparent ability to charm anyone, anywhere, into giving him millions of dollars to sink into utterly nebulous and fantastic real estate ventures. Obviously, the story of a young Italian trading on Vatican connections and building financial dream palaces around the idea that enormous profits could be made by selling off church properties in struggling North American dioceses isn't the most representative story from the housing bubble. But the Follieri saga seems to me to capture something essential about the mania we've just passed through, in which the magic word "real estate" was sufficient to convince a seemingly endless string of players who should have known better to open their checkbooks for the charming Italian with the movie-star girlfriend. Here's a typically remarkable moment:

His dreams threatened, Follieri made the most of a modest chance. One of his staffers had a friend named Aldo Civico, a Columbia University anthropologist who had been helping the Clinton Foundation reach donors in Italy. What Follieri did next was both nervy and brilliant. He took Civico to dinner at Cipriani uptown, his favorite haunt, a few blocks from Trump Tower. At some point he intimated he wanted to make a major donation to the Clinton Foundation. No numbers were mentioned, yet somehow Civico left with the impression that Follieri might give as much as half a million dollars.

Civico contacted the Clinton camp. Soon Follieri was talking with Doug Band, right-hand man and gatekeeper to the ex-president who had played a key role in developing the Clinton Foundation. By chance, Band was going to be meeting in New York one day soon with Ron Burkle, the former president's good friend and, since Clinton's departure from the White House, his business partner. Maybe the two could grant Follieri a brief audience: that would certainly nudge this young, wealthy Italian into writing a substantial check.

... At the time, the meeting seemed a great success. Follieri was charming and charismatic, his Italian accent especially winning as he spoke of his humble hopes to serve the church by buying hundreds of millions of dollars of Catholic Church properties. True, the church would insist that the properties be put to some "reverent" use by their buyers: no nightclubs. But with the real-estate market soaring the way it was, how could they lose? Follieri left his new associates with the impression that he might soon be writing two big checks--one to the Clinton Foundation and another to one of Burkle's equity funds. But the only check that would ultimately emerge from that meeting came from Burkle's Yucaipa Companies. "Dear Raffaello.... It has been a pleasure to get to know you over the past month or so," Burkle wrote to Follieri on May 6, 2005. Five weeks later, Burkle agreed to fund a joint venture called Follieri/Yucaipa Investments L.L.C., and to commit to it the astonishing sum of up to $105 million.

Meanwhile, for those who like exquisitely uncomfortable interviews (not that we've seen any of those lately), here's Letterman pressing Hathaway to talk about her ex:

The Conservative Con?

Tim Noah thinks he has our number:

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy. Middle-class social conservatives loathed the government for legalizing abortion, forbidding prayer in schools, and coddling minorities through welfare and affirmative action. Upper-class libertarian conservatives loathed the government for soaking the rich through the income tax and weakening businesses through burdensome regulation. The only useful function of the federal government was to provide for the common defense. This was a con for two reasons. First, the middle and upper classes were both dependent on the federal government for a variety of benefits, including Social Security, trade protection, scientific research, and assorted localized spending (termed "pork barrel" by those who don't receive it and "economic development" by those who do). Second, the distribution of this government largesse greatly favored the rich. In the April 1992 Atlantic, Neil Howe and Philip Longman, citing unpublished data from the Congressional Budget Office, reported that U.S. households with incomes above $100,000 received, on average, slightly more in federal cash and in-kind benefits ($5,690) than households with incomes below $10,000 ($5,560). This was four years before the Clinton administration eliminated Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the principal income-support program for the poor. When tax breaks were added to the tally, households with incomes above $100,000 received considerably more ($9,280) than households with incomes below $10,000 ($5,690). Clinton subsequently expanded tax subsidies to the poor through the Earned Income Tax Credit, but not enough to undo this disparity. "[I]f the federal government wanted to flatten the nation's income distribution," Howe and Longman concluded, "it would do better to mail all its checks to random addresses."

The Reagan coalition survived because nobody wanted to believe this ...

The caricature of the conservative coalition that takes up the beginning of this passage is a novel variation on Thomas Frank's vision of unlettered rubes being tricked by a sinister GOP into voting against their economic self-interest. Here, instead, we have a vision of middle and upper-middle-class Americans being tricked by a sinister GOP ... well, how, exactly? It doesn't seem like a contradiction in terms for a middle-class voter to believe that the government of the 1970s imposed too many regulations and too high a tax burden, inappropriately closed off democratic debate on issues like abortion and school prayer, and imposed an unjust racial quota system and ran an increasingly dysfunctional welfare system, while simultaneously supporting the federal government's role in Social Security, the National Academy of Sciences, and the interstate highway system. In fact, that's probably why Ronald Reagan usually couched his criticisms of government in relatively nuanced terms, rather than sounding like the sort of absurd anti-government absolutist that Noah apparently remembers him as. (When Reagan called, in his first inaugural address, for a government that "can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it," and so forth, who, exactly, was he conning?)

Then consider that Howe and Longman piece from 1992 on our pro-rich welfare state, which Noah apparently believes (I say "apparently" because I can't completely follow the argument he thinks he's making here) to be conclusive evidence that conservatives claim to want limited government, but really support a big government that subsidizes the middle class and the rich.

Continue reading "The Conservative Con?" »

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October 31, 2008