Yes, of course the Hitler comparisons are absurd, but I'd really like to know which genius on the Obama campaign thought it would be a good idea to have their candidate conduct a major campaign rally in Europe with three months to go till the election and their candidate, despite an incredibly favorable climate and a fumbling opponent, still clinging to a 2-4 point lead in the polls? Overall, the overseas tour has been good to Obama, both for the obvious reasons and because making joint appearances with foreign leaders is a solid-enough way to build up his credibility as a potential Commander-in-Chief. But photo ops are one thing, Beatlemania-style rallies are quite another - and having your candidate appear in front of tens of thousands of adoring European fans when your campaign's biggest problem, as John Judis puts it today, is that "Obama remains the 'mysterious stranger' rather than the 'American Adam' to too many voters who are put off rather than attracted by his race and exotic background" strikes me as the height of political folly. The Berlin rally probably won't hurt Obama - voters aren't really paying attention to anything election-related right about now, and it'll be forgotten by the time the fall campaign begins in earnest. But it could do some minor damage, and it certainly won't help him. (If he's counting on the expat vote to put him over the top, then he's in more trouble than anyone thinks.) Is it too late to call the whole thing off?
I misread this Peter Robinson post as a transcription of an email exchange with John Cogan, rather than a distillation of Robinson's exchanges with his own emailers. Robinson clarifies here. My apologies to Professor Cogan.
Note that the increase looks roughly twice as shocking as it actually is because the chart-makers, John Cogan and Glenn Hubbard, decided to start with a baseline of $200 billion rather than zero. They're honest enough to allow that a chunk of this increase is inflationary, and another chunk homeland-security related; what they don't show, though, is the growth of the U.S. economy during the same period, and how the Bush-era increase in discretionary domestic spending looks in historical context as a percentage of GDP. To his credit, Robinson queried Cogan on this point:
Q: The chart shows the increase in spending in dollar terms. Haven't you been able to find a chart that shows the increase in spending as a proportion of GDP?
A: No, I haven't—not in the time I've had available for Googling this weekend, which, since I've been scrambling to get the family ready to go back East for a couple of weeks (we're off at 4.30 this very morning) amounted to a little under half an hour. Sorry about that. And I'll check in the from the beach when I can.
Um ... what? According to Cogan's bio, he's a professor in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University, and his "current research is focused on U.S. budget and fiscal policy, social security, and health care" - yet he can't find a chart showing one of the most relevant statistics to a debate about whether George W. Bush is a wild and crazy overspender? I know where to find those statistics right off the top of my head, and I'm a rank amateur: Just head to CBO.gov, click on Historical Budget Data, and flip to page 8, where you'll discover that in 2001, when Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for ... 3.3 percent of GDP. In the years between, it rose as high as 3.6 percent of GDP, which is on the high side by post-Reagan standards (we averaged 3.25 percent a year in the 1990s), but way lower than in the profligate, post-Great Society Seventies, when we were spending as much as 4.8 percent of GDP a year on domestic programs.
The bottom line: The Bush years haven't been a small-government success story by any means, and fiscal conservatives have every right to be disappointed. But the road to serfdom this ain't. (Certainly Friedrich Hayek himself, who vigorously defended free markets without taking anything like the Norquistian position on the pressing need to drown the welfare state in a bathtub, wouldn't recognize it as such.)
It strikes me as just slightly odd that Post reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose, like Michelle Obama a Princeton grad, could write an entire mini-essay on "Michelle, meritocracy and me" - about the special difficulties faced by black Americans trying navigate the overclass, and her worry that "no amount of pedigree and personal polish will let us entirely escape suspicion, mistrust and jealousy" - without even mentioning affirmative action, let alone pondering its impact on the elite African-American experience. "I've given a lot of thought to the intersection of race, education and meritocracy," she writes, "based on both my personal experience and my job covering schools for The Post." Maybe she should think a little harder.
There are two ways to read Pew's numbers on evangelical voters and the '08 election. You could read them the way Mark Hemingway does, emphasizing the fact that Obama is currently running a point behind where John Kerry was among white evangelicals at this point in the 2004 race. Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in '04. I'd choose the latter reading. In July of 2004, only 4 percent of white evangelicals said they were undecided about whom to vote for. Now 12 percent say that they are - and while it's possible that nearly all of those undecideds will come home to the GOP once the chips are down, undecided voters do tend to break against the incumbent party, which seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.
When all was said and done, Bush took a whopping 78 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004. If Obama can hold the evangelicals who are supporting him now, and swipe two-thirds of the undecideds, he'll hold McCain to just 68 percent of this demographic - which could easily turn out to be an election-tipping difference. The opportunity is there. Obama just needs to figure out if he's willing to take the political risks necessary to exploit it.
Update: Obama's performance at Saddleback (and McCain's) will probably be at least mildly important in determining how those undecided evangelicals cast their votes.
So says E.J. Dionne, arguing that Al Gore's speech yesterday showed the Democrats how they should talk about rising fuel prices - by offering voters a "bigger offer" on energy, a long-term vision rather than a short-term fix.
Well, that's one way to look at Gore's speech, which argued that "the survival of the United States of America as we know it" and indeed "the future of human civilization" are at risk, and the best way to avert disaster is to "commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years." Here's a slightly different take, from James Pethokoukis:
Gore's fantastic—in the truest sense of the word—proposal is almost unfathomably pricey and makes sense only if you think that not doing so almost immediately would result in an uninhabitable planet. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens recently came out with a plan to generate 20 percent of America's power through wind. His estimate was that it would cost $1 trillion to build that capacity and another $200 billion to update our electrical grid to transmit that energy around the country ... By my math, using Pickens's numbers, converting the whole economy to renewable energy in a short period of time might cost $5 trillion—and that is if you assume that government-led projects come in on budget. (Remember, the current U.S. gross domestic product is $12 trillion.) That would be like creating another Japan. Or fighting World War II all over again. The latter analogy is especially apt since the Gore Plan would effectively transform our free-market economy into a command-and-control war economy full of rationing and scarcity ... Again, all this makes sense if you think we are doomed otherwise.
This isn't the first time Gore has made a proposal with jaw-dropping economic consequences. Environmental economist William Nordhaus ran the numbers on Gore's idea to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050. Nordhaus found that while such a plan would indeed reduce the maximum increase in global temperatures to between 1.3 and 1.6 degrees Celsius, it did so "at very high cost" of between $17 trillion and $22 trillion over the long term, as opposed to doing nothing. (Again, just for comparative purposes, the entire global economy is about $50 trillion.)
So yes, there's a sense in which Gore is making Americans a "bigger offer" than the "drill here, drill now" crowd. The notion that it's a winning political offer seems a little more dubious.
Congratulations are in order whenever someone accepts a new position, of course, but I hope Matt won't mind if I add that I was very sorry to hear that he'd decided to leave the Atlantic to take a job at the Center for American Progress. Partially, this reflects pure selfishness on my part: I like Matt a lot, I've enjoyed having him as a colleague (and a sparring partner), and I'll miss his company in the office as well as the presence of his commentary on the Atlantic's site. But it also reflects slight disappointment at where he's decided to go. Maybe this is foolish: I respect his desire to be in the arena, TR-style, rather than on the sidelines, and there's no doubt a touch of concern-trolling involved whenever I fret about how the new progressive ecosystem seems hell-bent on imitating a lot of the things I find unpleasant about my own side of the partisan divide these days - the team-player mentality, the tendency toward cocooning, the obsession with policing orthodoxy, etc. Certainly, I have no doubt that Matt will remain Matt - independent-minded, acerbic, not suffering fools gladly - even under the umbrella of an explicitly partisan organization. But I also think that American politics benefits from having smart writers of both political persuasions who have one foot in movement politics and one foot outside it, and given that Matt is one of the smartest liberal writers in my generational cohort, I'm sad to see him giving up on this balancing act. He'll do well, and better than well, wherever he goes - but part of me suspects that over the long run he could do more, both for himself and for progressivism, if he were ever-so-slightly outside the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy rather working for it directly.
It's been happening all week, first at TPMCafe and then in this Bloggingheads conversation. Here's a short clip, in which I offer my two cents on the Obama cartoon controversy:
Our remarks on Obama's fundraising, though, seem to have been overtaken by events.
Not knowing the man, I didn't have much to offer over the weekend, but for anyone who hasn't seen it, I would recommend Elizabeth Edwards' Newsweek piece on his passing.
It’s a little disappointing that of all the insightful points Mr. Bishirjian made about the threat of centralisation and regimentation to a sane and humane social order Ross finds the references to a flat tax and some kind of education reform to be the most interesting.
Actually, the fact that Bishirjian's essay made many theoretical points with which I agreed was precisely why I thought his completely unimaginative, Limbavian proposals for what conservatives ought to actually do were worth highlighting.
Larison goes on:
The link is to the NYT profile of Limbaugh, which includes his six-point list that overlaps in some places with policies Mr. Bishirjian supports. What is notable about this and Ross’ ongoing spat with Limbaugh is that when it comes to practical politics Limbaugh and Ross are effectively in agreement about what the government should be doing far more often than Bishirjian and Limbaugh are. Limbaugh may nonsensically complain that Ross and Reihan want to embrace the New Deal, as if the GOP hadn’t already abandoned overturning that agenda decades ago, but for all practical purposes Limbaugh generally proposes very little (except perhaps for Social Security privatisation) that could be fairly described as being in any way anti-New Deal.
Bishirjian is proposing a thoroughgoing repeal of the centralised administrative state that has grown up over the last century, but while he is making many proposals that might find an audience in conventional GOP circles he is also making a fundamentally communitarian case for building up intermediate institutions that would probably give Limbaugh hives.
I apologize for being somewhat reductionist here, but while I take Daniel's point, I think that conservatism - and especially its dissident factions - could benefit from fewer airy discussions of the ideal conservative social order, and more meat-and-potatoes discussions of what a renewed conservative movement that flowed from these first principles would actually be for. As a result, I don't have that much patience for sweeping calls for a "thoroughgoing repeal of the centralised administrative state" when those calls are wedded to a specific domestic policy agenda that is more or less identical to what Rush Limbaugh is already urging on the GOP. If Bishirjian had ended his essay simply by calling, as some other dissident-conservative writers have, for a depoliticization of the conservative movement, and a renewed focus on cultural activism and "building up intermediate institutions" that can eventually contest with the administrative state for influence, I would have disagreed with him, but I would have respected him for proposing an actual alternative to the current conservative mindset. But in point of fact, he marries very general calls for a renewed conservative communitarianism with a few very specific policy suggestions - a flat tax, Social Security privatization, and a reduction of the capital gains tax rate - that strike me as profoundly unhelpful to conservatives in their current situation, either because they're impractical or because they have very little to do with the broader state-shrinking project he claims to be engaged in. (An administrative state funded entirely by a flat tax would, I suspect, look exactly like the one we have today, except the tax burden would be more regressive.) Hence my frustration with the essay.
Writing in Modern Age, Richard J. Bishirjian concludes an essay on "Why I Am A Conservative" with this peroration:
How, then, do we successfully save a public space for ordered living? First, of course, we must educate ourselves in the wonderful literature of the West and in the recovery of philosophy that émigré conservative scholars from Western Europe brought to this nation when they were exiled from West, East, and Central Europe. And once having educated ourselves, we can commence the work that is necessary to preserve and grow private institutions—including private colleges and universities—voluntary associations, privately held businesses that employ family members, and other forms of community—including churches and synagogues—that traditionally act as buffers between our private lives and the centralized administrative state. And we must break up the monopoly of public education!
We must also aspire to enlarge and enrich civil society by reducing the scope of governmental agencies, programs, corps, and their intrusive oversight of our private lives. Can we not have a flat tax? And what about privatization of Social Security and the FAA’s air traffic control? A consistent policy of outsourcing of government services that can best be performed by the private sector must become basic policy of the American government. And the Republican Party, if there is one left after the election of 2008, must take tax reform seriously, including capital gains tax reform. At the margins of this effort to reduce the state, we must ask if there is any reason why our national historical parks should not be turned over to private entities committed to the preservation of history? When I visit King’s Dominion, Busch Gardens, or Six Flags I see what private enterprise can do to entertain thousands of persons daily. But visit Bunker Hill, Appomattox, or Yorktown Battlefield, and you see 1950s technology and the mentality of government wardens.
Now here's what I find interesting. Earlier in the essay, Bishirjian - good paleocon that he is - goes on a tear against the contemporary conservative movement, complete with a sneering reference to the jingos in "mass media Talk Radio." Yet when it comes time to advance a domestic political agenda - one that's in keeping with European philosophy, "ordered living," and the Great Tradition of the West - his proposals are essentially identical to Rush Limbaugh's preferred domestic policy! (Allowing for the idiosyncratic riff about our national parks, of course.) This isn't necessarily an inconsistent approach to politics - somebody can be completely wrong in one sphere, and completely right in another - but I think it ought to jar Bishirjian enough for him to at least consider the possibility that the Limbaugh approach to conservative governance isn't the only one there is.
Noam Scheiber highlights an event that I've been meaning to mention - the great Sam's Club smackdown taking place at New America this Thursday night. In the same post, he also responds at length to my earlier post on the GOP's relationship to its corporate moneymen; I'll try to respond in turn, either on the blog or at the panel, but for now just go see what he has to say.
The fun continues. (And my name is fiendishly difficult to pronounce - it's "Dow-thut," to rhyme with south and mouth and almost every other "ou" word in the English language, but for some reason everyone defaults to Doo-that or Doo-tah - so I don't hold that against him.)
Calling this the the "A.D.D. election," the guys at First Read describe last week thusly:
It’s another whiplash week. It's amazing how many Fridays we look back at the week and just shake our head... This really is turning into the A.D.D. election. Here’s the week that was… in reverse order… Phil Gramm's “mental” comments (btw, isn't "mental" such an '80s word?), Jesse Jackson “nut”-ty remarks, Iran’s missile tests (and that McCain “killing them” joke), FISA (Obama’s reversal and Clinton voting against it -- so did Biden, by the way), Clinton donors not happy with Obama’s debt relief efforts (and Obama briefly forgetting to mention the former rival at a joint funder), that McCain bio spot invoking the culture wars of the 1960s, the scrutiny of the candidates’ economic plans, more courting Latinos, Webb off the veep list, Carly Fiorina's Viagra/birth control comment, the T. Boone Pickens energy ad launch, the RNC energy ad and the first Obama response of the general election, and, of course, we started the week with Obama announcing he was moving the last night of the Dem convention to a football stadium. Whew. It's no wonder neither candidate has been successful at taking one of their "insert issue here" weeks from start to finish. There are just an incredible amount of distractions even during a supposed slow period like this one in July. ... But seriously, can either of these candidates get the message THEY want out there for even a 48 hour period? Calling you, Wes Clark, Phil Gramm.
Well ... use the words "whiplash" and "A.D.D." if you want, but I think this paragraph, with its roll call of minor controversies (the FISA flap and the Iranian missile tests are the only items that actually matter for policymaking, and I suspect that neither of them will matter much to the outcome of the election), is a perfect distillation of how unfavorably the largely-fake excitement of the general-election campaign contrasts with the actual excitement of the just-past primary campaign. The main difference, obviously, is the absence of actual voting from here till November: Pundits like to compare election coverage to sports coverage, but having a primary or caucus every week made the nomination contests feel like a baseball or football season in a way that the general-election competition simply can't compete with. There was a legitimate (if sometimes-disputed) way to keep track of wins and losses, and "winning the week" meant that you actually gained something that counted (i.e. delegates), instead of a couple days of favorable, quickly-forgotten press coverage and maybe, maybe, a one or two-point blip in the polls. Whereas after the agony and ecstasy of New Hampshire and Florida, Super Tuesday and Texohio, the Huckabee surge and the McCain comeback, the Giuliani fade and the too-little, too-late Hillary revival, the road to November feels less like an actual sporting event than like a four-month version of Super Bowl Week, with tons of media-abetted sound and fury signifying next to nothing. It was the same way in 2004 and 2000, I suppose, but I was spoiled by the primaries; I want that sort of excitement back. It's enough to make you think that we should run our general election across two months, as a rolling series of regional votes, just for the drama of it all.
See also Ambinder for a more eloquent version of this point.
Very broadly speaking, when you look at people who gravitate toward the two political parties, the GOP tends to be the party of economic optimists - people who are confident about their professional lives, their future prospects, and the country's economic health - and the Democratic Party tends to be the party of people who worry and fret about both their personal fortunes and those of the nation as a whole. This divide has a host of implications, but I think Phil Gramm's instantly-controversial remarks about America being in a "mental recession," in which a "nation of whiners" can't see through all the media hype about bad economic news and recognize that "we've never been more dominant; we've never had more natural advantages than we have today," is a good example of one of them: When economic times are tough, Democratic politicians and pundits tend to go way overboard exaggerating how dire things are, while Republican politicians and pundits tend to go way overboard insisting that everything's fine and the public needs to stop whining, stop listening to the media, and start enjoying the good times. In 1979, the tendency to play to type produced Jimmy Carter's famous malaise speech, in which the American people were informed that the solution to their economic problems was to accept a wartime mentality in which the government would massively regulate the energy sector and everyone would have to make do with much, much less. In the 2000s, it's produced too many Republicans who think and talk like Phil Gramm, whether they're insisting that a sluggish economic recovery with weak wage growth for most middle-income Americans actually represents "the greatest story never told," or claiming that we can just "drill our way out" of the current energy crunch.
Of course there's some truth to Gramm's remarks about America's fundamentals remaining strong (though the claim that "we've never been more dominant" seems like something of a stretch - the post-World War II era says hello), just as there was truth to the late-'70s anxieties about what America's dependence on foreign oil portended for the future. But there are other relevant truths as well, the art of politics involves striking a balance, and a political party that lurches too far toward either Panglossianism or pessimism isn't long for power. Just ask Jimmy Carter.
The talk of Cameronism reminds me that I've been meaning to address Daniel Casse's very kind review of our book for Commentary, which includes the following caveats:
The main trouble with Grand New Party lies ... in the decision of the authors to attempt both a policy analysis and a partisan political strategy in one and the same volume. When it comes to the latter, Grand New Party is unpersuasive.
In response to the GOP’s growing electoral strength in the 1980’s, the Democratic party tried to make itself more appealing to certain tightly defined demographic groups: urban liberals, Jews, blacks, gays, union members, and so on. Pollsters like Stanley Greenberg and Mark Penn, both of whom worked for Bill Clinton, went further by categorizing voters into “single urban environmentalists,” “married minivan drivers,” and the like. Grand New Party assumes that similar techniques will work for the GOP—that is, that a new coalition can be galvanized into formation by means of a list of bite-sized policies for bite-sized constituencies.
There is scant evidence that this is the case. Indeed, the Democratic effort itself proved unsuccessful when Hillary Clinton, guided by Mark Penn, sought to use it to catapult herself to the Democratic nomination.
Consider Douthat and Salam’s central notion of appealing to families as a powerful voting bloc. Demographically, the United States has an aging population, and most current polling shows that the older voters become, the less interest they have in supporting policies that help parents and children. Nor, despite the strong case made by Douthat and Salam for a governmental helping hand, are voters in general clamoring for an expansion of government services. A May 2008 survey by Rasmussen Reports found 62 percent of respondents preferring fewer government services, with lower taxes. Nowhere does this book present a realistic political strategy for reversing such sentiments.
The innovative policies proposed by Douthat and Salam might indeed bring about welcome changes for many working-class Americans. To that end, Grand New Party can serve as a valuable resource for the next Republican President’s domestic-policy team. It will, however, be far less useful as an electoral weapon for this year’s Republican presidential candidate.
I think Casse's broad point is a fair criticism: The second half of the book does try to interweave policy and politics, but it focuses more on the former than the latter, and it's not surprising if some of our attempts to play political strategist for would-be Sam's Club candidates feel a little forced. Our main goal was to pool a wide variety of policy ideas that future right-of-center candidates might draw on, and as a result I think the book probably has more to offer a politician looking for proposals to weave into a pre-existing stump speech or campaign narrative than to one looking for a complete blueprint for how to run for office as a Republican in 2012 or 2016.
That being said, I would push back a bit on the specifics of Casse's critique. I'm second-to-none in my disdain for the "microtargeting" approach to politics, and while it's true that our book gets somewhat micro at times - when we're talking about telecommuters, say, or Plains State farmers, or homeschoolers - by and large I find the claim that we're offering "bite-sized policies for bite-sized constituencies" (which is a fairly common critique of the book, I've noticed) a little puzzling. If anything, I think the book errs somewhat in the opposite direction, by generalizing (and sometimes overgeneralizing) about very large, very diverse constituencies - the working class first and foremost, which after all is a majority of the American electorate under our definition, but also groups like "working families" and "parents who send their kids to public schools" and "suburbanites" and "Americans who have employer-provided health care." Indeed, we repeatedly criticize some of the most common forms of right-wing microtargeting - whether we're arguing against the Bush Administration's assumption that the way to win Hispanics is to pander to their ethnic loyalties, or advising social conservatives to broaden the often-sectarian appeals of the religious right into a more ecumenical language of moral renewal, or criticizing economic conservatives' focus on a somewhat-chimerical "investor class." I certainly take Casse's point about the limits of a pro-family party's appeal in an aging society with declining marriage rates; indeed, I think these demographic trends are one of the biggest challenges facing the GOP over the next twenty years. But I still think that the voting blocs we're talking about - families with children, Americans with a high school diploma and some college, etc. - are large enough that a party that focuses on their interests would be engaged in the sort of macro-targeting that can build enduring majorities, rather than the sort of Rove or Penn-style micro-targeting that gets you to 51 percent by the skin of your teeth.
I'd also add that we have no interest in reversing the American bias in favor of lower taxes and fewer government services - we like that bias, and if anything our long-term goal is to strengthen it, by addressing the social and economic forces that (in our view, at least) are eroding it. But I think that the sort of polls Casse cites are a little misleading, since when you ask Americans about whether government should spend more or less in specific areas, they tend to become considerably more favorable to expanding government's role, and considerably more hostile to spending cuts. This is the landscape in which conservatism has to find a way to operate - a landscape in which Americans favor less government in the abstract, but more government on a case-by-case basis, which in turn means that a would-be center-right majority needs to offer an agenda of welfare-state reform, rather saying "no" to everything the Democrats propose and leaving it at that.
Needless to say, I found a lot to like in this speech, which David Cameron just delivered in Glasgow. Andrew, though, thinks it sets up a striking contrast with our book:
I'm struck, in contrast to R&R, how restrained Cameron is. His policy prescriptions - more autonomy at the bottom of public services, more accountability within the public sector, a gentle tax incentive for marriage - are more in line with traditional conservatism than wage subsidies, for example.
Honestly, I think this is a bit silly. Yes, we have some proposals in Grand New Party - wage subsidies being the biggest example - that go beyond what Cameron's Tories have proposed, but there are also plenty of areas where the Tory Party (which operates in a vastly different political landscape than the American Republican Party, obviously) is considerably to our left - and to Andrew's, presumably - on taxation, spending and welfare policy. As for that "gentle" tax incentive for marriage ... well, let's look at what the Cameron Tories are actually proposing: A tax allowance of roughly £1000 a year for parents who stay home with their kids, front-loaded per-child tax benefits that offer parents £2800 a year while their kids are below the age of three, and increased tax credits for low-income parents, which would offer 1.8 million British couples roughly £1600 a week a year [sorry, typo]. Translate those pounds into dollars, and those population figures into an American context, and you've got a set of proposals that might be slightly less pricey than the $5000-per-child tax credit and the (fiscally unspecific) notions of benefits for stay-at-home parents we propose, but that are certainly in the same general ballpark - and that actually go further than our basic proposals (though not our ideal ones) in terms of directly discriminating in favor of marriage. I understand that Andrew wants to like the Cameron Tories, and that he's suspicious of some of the ideas Reihan and I have put forward (and they merit suspicion!), but the notion that Cameronism is way closer to some platonic ideal of "traditional conservatism" than what we're talking about in Grand New Party just won't wash.
Update: See also Reihan's remarks on the subject, especially his observation that "if Cameron embraced an agenda like the one outlined in Grand New Party, he would likely be accused of being a libertarian radical hellbent on destroying the most cherished parts of Britain’s welfare state."
Via Andrew, here's a rough version of the sort of ad I think the GOP nominee ought to be running - though it isn't McCain-specific, and as a result it's focused on "staying the course" rather than "who do you trust?," which is the question McCain will win the election on if he manages to win it:
Meanwhile, Matt thinks the notion of running on the surge is a "little bit crazy." He writes:
The smart Iraq strategy for McCain is the one he was using before the current "Obama's a flip-flopper" tactic came into vogue, namely one that's less focused on lying about Obama and more focused on telling big lies rather than small ones. It's absolutely vital for McCain to repeat, loudly and falsely, that there's a very good chance of al-Qaeda taking over Iraq and using it as a base from which to attack the American homeland and that Obama believes he can appease al-Qaeda by giving them Iraq. He needs to say lots of stuff about how "unlike my opponent, I don't think al-Qaeda will be satisfied with Iraq; unlike him I remember what happened the last time we allowed them to take over a country."
The lie on which the war was initially sold, and the lie on which it retained its popularity, was that the war was directly necessary for U.S. national security in a very simple and straightforward sense. That required, yes, some whoppers but they were whoppers about the sort of thing (preventing a WMD terrorist attack on American soil) that would constitute a good reason for starting a war. All this "success of the surge" business is incredibly abstract and totally disconnect from anything real people care about -- I can tell you which Americans have died because of the surge, but I have no idea which Americans are supposed to have benefited from it.
Setting aside the "is McCain lying about Obama?" question - while noting for the record that the Democratic nominee hasflip-flopped a great deal of late, and that he did support a rapid withdrawal from Iraq during the period when AQI's influence in that country was at its height - I think Matt makes a good broad point: Forward-looking arguments about specific potential dangers to the U.S. tend to be more potent than backward-looking arguments about dangers that have been averted. The question is whether the rule holds in this particular instance, and I'm just not convinced it does: I think McCain's ownership of the surge is a unique political case, and that having staked his career on a strategy that very few other politicians supported he simply has to make his (apparent, possibly temporary) vindication the centerpiece of his campaign. Obviously, McCain can make forward-looking and backward-looking arguments at once: He can take credit for the recent improvements in Iraq while simultaneously warning of the dangers that would follow from a swift withdrawal. The question is where he puts the emphasis, and I remain convinced that emphasizing the surge, and the successes that seem to have flowed from it, sets up a stronger contrast with Obama than talking incessantly about the future dispositions of U.S. forces in Iraq - an arena where Obama can, and will, blur the differences between the two candidates in a way he can't if the debate focuses on the recent past.
And yes, Matt's of course correct that framing the argument this way requires persuading the American public that the stability of Iraq ought to matter to us for reasons (both strategic and moral) that go beyond the immediate risk of terrorist attacks in the U.S. homeland. But frankly if John McCain can't make that case then he isn't going to win the election anyway, so he might as well give it a shot.
The liberal blogosphere wantstoknow: Why have conservatives lined up to say kind things about the late Jesse Helms? Partially because nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, but largely because Helms was an sometimes-effective, always-steadfast champion of conservative causes for decades, and there's a sense on the right that the liberal case against Helms-the-awful-bigot is really just the latest manifestation of the long-running liberal attempt to argue that (as William Voegeli puts it in a fine essay on race and the Right in the latest CRB) "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism ... [and] that everything that conservatism has accomplished and stood for since 1965—Reagan, the tax revolt, law-and-order, deregulation, the fight against affirmative action, the critique of the welfare state...everything—is the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree."
Regular readers will know that I sometimes have sympathy for these sentiments, and that I tend to be sensitive to the way that liberals cry "racism!" in an effort to disarm conservative arguments on issues ranging from crime to affirmative action to Jeremiah Wright. And in that vein, I should note that I'm not convinced that Helms' famous "white hands" ad merits the sort of outraged denunciations that Andrew and Max Boot have offered up today - since if it does, the implication would seem to be that any hard-hitting attack on racial preferences is ipso facto racist.
But a specific ad is one thing; Helms himself is another. He simply was an awful bigot, and worse he was an awful bigot who never expressed a shred of remorse, so far as I know, for his toxic approach to issues ranging from civil rights to HIV to foreign affairs. Far from being the sort of politicians who conservatives ought to defend, out of a sense of issue-by-issue solidarity, he's the sort of politician conservatives ought to carefully distance themselves from, because his political style brought (and continues to bring) intellectual disrepute to almost every cause with which he was associated. Inherent to conservatism is the responsibility to stand up and say to bien-pensant opinion: Just because a bigot opposes something doesn't mean it's a good idea. But the necessity (and difficulty) of making that case, whether the issue is affirmative action or "comprehensive" immigration reform or the NEA and Piss Christ, is all the more reason for conservatives to keep their distance from actual bigots, even (or especially) when they're representing the great state of North Carolina in the U.S. Senate. Jonathan Rauch had it right in 2002: If Ronald Reagan and Helms had similar positions on countless issues, that doesn't prove that Helms was good for conservatism; it only suggests that conservatives should look for more Reagans, and fewer Jesse Helms. I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.
Writing in response to Rush Limbaugh's remarks on our book, Reihan compared El Rushbo to Oprah Winfrey, and I think the Times profile of Limbaugh this weekend's Times Magazine confirms that insight. The piece paints Rush, accurately I think, as a fascinating and enormously talented entertainer, a guy who addresses the anxieties, aspirations and prejudices of put-upon, middle-class white men in much the same way Oprah speaks to the anxieties, aspirations and prejudices of angsty middle-aged white women. If Oprah is selling, in myriad ways, a particular (and particularly American) worldview - one defined by self-help and sisterhood and spirituality - then so is Rush: He's a voice for a self-reliant, up-by-your-bootstraps vision of American life, in which perpetual material abundance is available to anyone willing to work for it, and people who insist that there are limits to growth just don't understand what the U.S. of A is capable of.
The major difference between the two, of course, is that Rush's worldview has explicit political implications - a suspicion of regulators and taxmen and bureaucracies of any kind, a hatred of political correctness and sex- or race-based victimology - whereas the politics of Oprahland are (usually, though not always) implicit. In this sense, the absolute best parallel to Rush in the cultural firmament is probably Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show is to the weltanschauung of bright young East Coast liberals what the Rush Limbaugh Show is to the worldview of their SUV-driving, self-made uncles out in flyover country.
What does this mean for Rush's relationship to Republican politics? Just this: In the same way that every ambitious Democratic politician ought to be attuned to how Jon Stewart covers the news, so every right-of-center politico should keep an ear to the portion of the dial where Rush holds forth - because the Limbavian worldview, and the people he speaks for, represents an important (and valuable) slice of American conservatism, and indeed of America itself. But those same politicians should remember, as too many conservatives seem wont to forget, that Limbaugh is first and foremost an entertainer, and to mistake him for a strategist or policy wonk or political philosopher is to make a category error of epic proportions. Letting Rush define who is and is not a conservative, or what the national GOP can and cannot stand for, is the equivalent of the Democratic Party inviting the writers of the Daily Show to hammer out their party's platform - or the Roman Catholic Church turning the next edition of the Catechism over to Oprah.
Matt, writing on yesterday's "Race and Politics in America: Where Are We in 2008?" panel here at Aspen:
Continuing with my Shelby Steele blogging, he went into what I thought was a really unfair attack on Barack Obama, drawing an invidious comparison between Obama and John McCain and Hillary Clinton on the grounds that we don't really know who he is. Instead, says Steele, Obama is running on a vague sense that he's a talented politician and a black guy. At first I thought he was going to take this in an unverifiably airy direction, but then he specifically said of McCain that if he's elected "we know what road that guy’s going to go down" whereas we don't know the same for Obama.
Now of course it's possible -- likely, even -- that many Americans don't know what road Obama would go down as president. But he's unveiled a fairly detailed policy record, and assembled a fairly consistent record in public life. It's John McCain, by contrast, who was against the Bush tax cuts before he was against them it's McCain who sponsored an immigration reform bill and then said he would have written against it. It's McCain who wants credit for tackling climate change but opposes all legislation aimed at curbing carbon emissions. It's McCain who's trying to run on an appealing biography while leaving cloudy impressions of his policy agenda.
I take his point, but if Steele had stuck to what Matt terms the "unverifiably airy" side of things - to Obama's personality instead of his policies - I would have taken his point as well. It's true that Obama's policy positions have been no more fungible than McCain's (though no less fungible as well, as evidenced by his recent maneuverings), and in many respects they've been considerably more detailed. But there remains, I think, a striking opacity to Obama - the deep structures that inform his thinking aren't out in the open for anyone to see, the way they are with McCain, and in certain ways I feel like I know less about Obama the man than I did when he had just started running for President. This has been reflected across his life and political career: I don't agree with the entire Steve Sailer take on Obama, but Sailer is on to something when he writes that the Democratic nominee seems to have "spent his life trying on different personalities," while his core has remained something of a mystery - perhaps even to himself.
Overall, this quality has been an asset to Obama as a national politician, since it allows his supporters to read their own biases and convictions into his candidacy: You can vote for him because you think he's the left-wing Reagan or because you think he's a cool centrist with a Burkean temperament; you can rally around him because he embodies African-American advancement or because he transcends racial categories entirely; etc. And it may be an asset to him as President as well: Dwight Eisenhower, one of our greatest twentieth-century chief executives, was also one of our most mysterious and opaque. But as someone who always wants to know more, rather than less, about people running for President, even (or especially) when the "more" goes to personality rather than policy, I wish I had a slightly better sense of what makes Obama tick.
Naturally, the idea isn't original to me: Jed Shugerman, an assistant law professor at Harvard, recently wrote a paper making the case for a 6-3 rule (though you'd need a Harvard ID or a Lexis/Nexis password to read it). He writes in an email:
There's actually a long record of these proposals throughout American history, but oddly, there are fewer efforts now even though there are more 5-4 decisions. You don't need to amend the constitution to force the Court to follow this rule. I argue that Congress could legislate this rule under Article III as a "regulation" of and "exception" to the Court's jurisdiction. But all you need is one judge -- the one in the middle -- to adopt this rule. Justice Kennedy, for example, could simply write, "I agree with many of the arguments by four of my colleagues that statute X is unconstitutional, but I do not believe we as a court should overturn the considered and democratically accountable wisdom of Congress without more consensus."
The rule does not create serious problems for lower courts. If a lower court rules that a statute is unconstitutional, the party losing that decision (the appellant) would regularly receive enough votes by the Justices (four) necessary for hearing the case, and then four Justices would be sufficient to preserve the statute as valid. If there are no other grounds for the party challenging the statute to prevail, then the party relying on the statute wins. But this is the problem in terms of practice. Five judges would not be enough to invalidate the statute, but those five could find other ways to limit the statute (a narrow interpretation of its text) or to rule in favor of the litigant challenging the statute. ln a legal system, you can only hope that judges will take rules seriously, and that applies to much more than the proposed supermajority rule. And that problem of judicial activism makes the turn to rules of judicial restraint all the more important, even if they can be evaded by some Justices some of the time.
The nice thing about having a co-author is that he can help shoulder the load of responding to comments on your book - and with that in mind, here's Reihan responding to Ezra Klein, to Ramesh, to Norm Ornstein (by way of Jonah Goldberg), and of course to Rush Limbaugh.
There may some day be a political party oriented toward working class voters whose ideological stance resembles Sam's Club-ism. But I don't think that party's going to be the GOP. (Nor will it be the Democratic Party--I think one or both of the major parties would have to die off and be replaced by this future party.)The people who fund and run the GOP are simply too committed to the idea of cutting taxes for affluent people and reducing government spending--basically the opposite of what Ross and Reihan propose. In fact, even saying the GOP estabilshment is "committed" to these things understates the grip of economic libertarianism over the party. It suggests a worldview that's the product of some reflection, when in fact the economic libertarianism of big GOP donors is mostly an expression of their self-interest--i.e., they want to keep their own taxes low. The idea that a party structured this way would embrace policies directly at odds with this mission is really tough to imagine. Which is why, for example, Mike Huckabee's candidacy was doomed the second he started attacking the "Wall Street-Washington axis."
Having said all that, these guys are right: The GOP is absolutely screwed. Even though the money comes from the same place it has for decades, the votes increasingly come from socially-conservative working-class people. At some point something's got to give. I just think it's going to be the GOP--which will basically cease to exist--rather than the moneymen and powerbrokers.
This strikes me as wildly overstated. Does the GOP have powerful interest groups that would resist some of the reforms we’re talking about? Sure. Is it hard to win the Republican primary while campaigning explicitly - and clumsily - against some of those interest groups? Sure again (though Huckabee did win quite a few primaries, and his eventual loss had at least as much to do with his failure to break out among non-evangelical voters as with the populist tack he took). Is the GOP going to morph into a soak-the-rich, pro-regulation party? Of course not - and I wouldn't be happy if it did! But the idea that every move the GOP makes is choreographed by a bunch of moneymen who are only interested in keeping their own taxes low by whatever means necessary doesn't square with reality. For one thing, the GOP's big-money donors don't all want the same thing: Some of them want low income taxes, some of them want low corporate taxes, some of them (though not all that many, I suspect) want government programs slashed, some of them want deregulation, some of them want regulation, some of them want pro-business judges appointed, some of them want subsidies for their industries, etc. etc. (And there are a few big-money donors who are in it for the social issues, believe it or not.) Which means, in turn, that there are lots of ways that the GOP can remain a pro-business party without all its money drying up: A right-of-center party that appoints conservative judges, opposes onerous regulations, and tries to keep taxes on investment low - all of which Reihan and I favor - is going to look pretty appealing to a lot of its current moneymen even if it's also interested in pro-family tax reform or education reform or any other issue that appeals more to the party's voters than to its donors. (And all of this is leaving aside the extent to which the Obama/Paul model of internet fundraising may make the old "big donor" approach to funding campaigns obsolete anyway.)
Moreover, even in its current incarnation GOP politicians are constantly pushing ideas that have little or nothing to do with "cutting taxes for affluent people and reducing government spending." During the Bush years, a Republican President was responsible for (among other things) No Child Left Behind, a new prescription drugs entitlement, a sweeping program to fight AIDS in Africa, and new (though not particularly substantial) investments in faith-based anti-poverty programs. None of these had much to do with a self-interested economic libertarianism, and some of them, in fact, had nothing much to do with political self-interest either. I'm not endorsing all of these initiatives by any means, and indeed I think "compassionate conservatism" represents a dead end for would-be right-of-center reformers. I'm just suggesting that it's hard to see how this record squares with the Scheiber vision of what the GOP can and cannot do. (And yes, of course, Medicare Part D included giveaways for GOP-leaning interests, but that doesn't prove that Republican donors won't accept anything except tax cuts and government slashing; it just proves that if a Sam's Club agenda ever gets enacted, there will have to be some compromises along the way. And that's true of any agenda you care to name: It's just how politics works.)
I don't want to be Pollyannish on this point: I'm much less confident than, say, David Brooks that the vision Reihan and I have sketched out actually represents the future of the GOP. There are all sorts of roadblocks, institutional and otherwise, to sort of change we're interested in, and our ideas may not survive whatever contact with political reality they earn. But ultimately, a more working-class friendly GOP is no harder to imagine than was, say, the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, which also required breaking with party orthodoxies and taking on entrenched interests. It may not happen, but it's a long way from being impossible.
Look, Rush has a serious and principled point: Maybe conservatives shouldn't try to reform the welfare state; maybe the lesson of the Bush years is that you just can't achieve conservative ends within the framework that FDR and company built; maybe Reihan and I are just government-loving quislings. But like Daniel Larison, it seems to me that if Rush really believes this, he shouldn't be wasting his time with the modern Reagan-Gingrich-Bush GOP at all - it's just a pack of quislings from start to finish. There's only one contemporary politician who would pass Limbaugh's stringent purity test, and his name is Ronald Paul.
But hey - maybe I'm wrong. And if Rush cares so much about the future of conservatism, I'm sure he'll be happy to have me and Reihan as guests on his high-rated radio program, so he can publicly set us straight.
You should, of course, read Norman Ornstein’s review of Grand New Party in the Sunday Times Book Review, but you should also read David Frum’s demolition of Allan Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation, which purports to be a history of American conservatism from the KKK (yes, it's that sort of book) to the present. This passage sums up the essence of Frum's critique, which could apply equally well to some otherrecentattempts to analyze liberalism and conservatism:
“White Protestant Nation” fails ... because Lichtman lacks the historian’s intuition for change over time. He hails women’s suffrage as progressive and damns immigration restriction as antipluralist and reactionary. Yet many of the most important proponents of suffrage favored immigration restriction — and many of the pro-immigrant groups opposed suffrage. Advocates of racial equality like Norman Thomas could also be adamant isolationists; internationalists like J. William Fulbright could be determined segregationists. Facing this refractory reality, it might make sense to accept that the political alignments of the 2000s cannot easily be projected backward 70 years or more.
Perhaps the single most famous attempt to impose a white Protestant identity upon America was the State of Oregon’s effort to suppress Catholic schools, which culminated in a landmark Supreme Court case named for Walter Pierce, the Democratic governor who signed the legislation. During World War II, Pierce, by then a member of Congress, would favor the internment of Japanese-Americans. He was also a supporter of women’s rights, prison reform and New Deal economic legislation. So: Was Walter Pierce a liberal? Or a conservative? Or perhaps we should accept that once we voyage back in time, we arrive in a different political landscape, with issues not easily assimilated into our present-day controversies. Lichtman, like Gilbert and Sullivan, believes contrary-wise that every child born alive is born a little liberal or else a little conservative.
The question of how to read the current liberal-conservative split back in time is, of course, one of the many strands in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, a book that I once promised to comment on at length and then - as its author helpfully
