So why in the world is he choosing Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State when she was one of the loudest hawks on Iraq and threatened to obliterate 75 million Iranians? ~Matthew Rothschild

No doubt it’s because he thinks war with Iran should be a last resort! Snark aside, the answer is to be found in what I mentioned earlier today and in what I have been saying for well over a year. The very accommodating, consensus-oriented “pragmatism” many of his admirers find so attractive, in no small part because it was a departure from Bush’s governing style, is the same thing that makes him an unlikely candidate to revise policies and methods in dramatic ways. Besides, Obama is smart and sees what’s what–he knows that progressives are not going anywhere after eight years of GOP misrule and two years of a stalemated, ineffective Democratic Congress, so he knows that he can ignore them with impunity. The glass-half-full types will latch on to anything remotely positive and progressive that Obama does as the reason why progressives should stick by him, there will be a lot of talk about being “realistic” and there will be frequent reminders that “at least he’s better than Bush,” which will probably have the virtue being true.

This is how it begins: movements tie themselves to a President because he is the best chance they have had in ages of having their ideas heard and their agenda advanced, the President becomes in some respects identified with that movement even though his policies do not necessarily reflect many of their concerns, and the fate of the movement becomes tied in the mind of the public and especially in the mind of the opposition to his success or failure. Progressives will find themselves soon enough facing the same dilemma that movement conservatives faced with Bush, to whom the latter rallied when Bush was absurdly demonized as a crazy right-winger. Partisan team players who tried to stress all the ways that Bush was in line with conservatives in order to forestall conservative rebellions against him then found themselves in a ridiculous situation just a couple years later, as they also started to see the need to put distance between themselves and a failing administration. Suddenly the team players remember skeptical comments they made during the primaries from years before before the current President was nominated, which they then tout as proof that they “always knew” that Bush was no conservative. Something similar will probably unfold on the other side in the coming years.

All of the “Team of Rivals” interpretations of Obama’s reported moves seem off-base to me. If he really does bring Clinton into his administration, it will not be as a counterbalance to his own inclinations or as a sop to “centrists” or as a payoff to her, but it will be because the two of them are fundamentally in agreement about policy objectives. From the primaries, we can assume that they are in agreement. Their strongest disagreements were in foreign policy, but their disagreements over foreign policy were minute and process-oriented. They were differences of degree and style; she is probably not quite as crazy as her “obliteration” comment made her sound, and he is certainly not as reasonable as his supporters want him to be when it comes to the possibility of striking at Iran. All of the hawkish love being sent Clinton’s way recently echoes the convenient new respect interventionists on the right gave her during the primaries; it is their way of saying that Obama is proving to be as acceptable to them (and as unacceptable to the rest of us) as some skeptics have maintained all along.

So it is inevitable that progressives are going to be disappointed, and not just in the “politicians always disappoint their voters” way. That said, I think Rothschild might have been raising his expectations to dangerous heights if he ever thought that naming Kucinich to head the State Department was in the cards.

By the way, Rothschild also has an interesting link to a story providing some additional information on Brennan and Jami Miscik, Obama’s two top intelligence advisors during the transition.

Update: On the Iran question, obviously I agree with Alex Massie’s take:

Take Iran, for instance: as the world knows, Obama has talked a good deal about talking with Tehran. (Ignoring, conveniently, that there’s already a good deal of “dialogue” between Iran and the West). This is all very well and good. It would be a fine thing if Iran were persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Perhaps it can be. But what if it can’t? Obama has repeatedly said that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable”. That means military action remains an option. It is still – as you may say it must be – on the table. Which is to say that the goal of American policy has not changed, only the emphasis placed, perhaps, on the various possible ways of reaching that goal.

So says the Typealyzer‘s analysis of this blog (via Alex Massie):

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

James says that Anne Applebaum has things “so right” in her latest column on Russia and Georgia, but here James and I will have to disagree. Applebaum gets many things right, but one of her most important points is simply wrong. She wrote:

Their most important conclusion? Georgia started it and killed civilians in the process. My conclusion? We knew that already [bold mine-DL]. We also knew [bold mine-DL], and indeed have known for some time, that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is susceptible to extreme bouts of criminal foolhardiness. A year ago this month, he attacked demonstrators in Tbilisi with riot police, arrested opposition leaders, and even smashed up a Rupert Murdoch-owned television station—possibly not, I wrote at the time, the best way to attract positive international media coverage. I’m told Saakashvili—who did indeed overthrow the corrupt Soviet nomenklatura that ran his country—has many virtues. But caution, cool-headedness, and respect for civilian lives and democratic norms are not among them.

We knew that about him [bold mine-DL]—and so did the Russians.

These easy references to what “we” all knew all along are troubling, because for most of the last three months almost our entire political class and more than a few pundits spoke and acted as if they knew nothing of the kind. Russian aggression, Russian imperialism, Russian expansionism–these are the phrases that have defined the debate among establishment figures. Not that long ago, Glenn Greenwald was upbraided for pointing out this obvious truth.

In the very early days of the conflict, Georgian culpability for escalating the conflict was widely acknowledged, at least among the bloggers who were paying attention, but for the most part this was because Saakashvili apologists and Russophobes had not yet swung into action until the start of the week following the initial escalation. Likewise, Saakashvili the reckless hotheaded authoritarian was nowhere to be found in most of the Western commentary on the war; he was the leader of the “democratically-elected government of Georgia,” waging heroic resistance against the evil empire. Seeing the main claims of the Georgian government disproved convicingly and the findings of independent investigations in major Western newspapers after months of loose talk about Russian aggression, neo-Soviet empires and our supposedly vital concern for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline should not be so easily dismissed as redundant and obvious, when it has been anything but obvious to many of our political leaders and opinionmakers that Georgia struck first and bears a large share of the blame for what transpired. When Applebaum talks about what “we” knew, by and large she means that this is what informed people not necessarily inclined to engage in pro-Georgian boosterism knew and said at the time.

That brings up the question–what did Applebaum know at the time? What did she have to say when the war was happening? For someone who knew and understood all of these things, she sounded shocked and bewildered by what the Russians were doing, even though this is now supposed to be something we all knew. Back on 8 August she wrote:

Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes a response more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have now become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular “frozen” conflict has escalated right now.

The clear implication here is that the answer for why the escalation happened was to be found in Moscow, not in Tbilisi.

I found her response disappointing at the time, even if it wasn’t that surprising, but in its way the new column is more disappointing. There is a strange false equivalence that Applebaum sets up here. On one side, there is Georgian propaganda, which our government and a large number of Western commentators have publicly swallowed more or less whole, and on the other side there is Russian propaganda that essentially no one outside of Russia believes, but we are enjoined not to believe in either one. That would make sense if anyone did believe the official Moscow line, but no one does. Even the Ossetian woman from Tskhinvali writing in the L.A. Times, whom Applebaum cites as an example of the “cartoonish” hostile view of the Georgian government, does not endorse the position Applebaum claims that she does. Ms. Tskhovrebova does not claim that Georgia is “a tin-pot dictatorship, an evil American-neocon lackey, and the personal fiefdom of a major war criminal,” and it is a lousy thing for Applebaum to do to portray her perfectly reasonable criticism of Saakashvili and U.S. support for his government as mere vilification.

Tskhovrebova actually said that the actions taken against Tskhinvali were “ruthless” (a reasonably fair characterization), that the Georgian government has been accused “by some” of war crimes (this is true–the independent organizations that have investigated the war have recognized that some of the tactics used against Tskhinvali rose to the level of war crimes), and calls Saakashvili a “so-called democratic leader.” It is undeniable that were Saakashvili not a client of the United States and Europe, his credentials as a democrat in good standing would have been revoked by Washington and Brussels long ago, but when an Ossetian who was on the receiving end of his attack on her city casts doubt on those credentials this is tantamount to reducing him to nothing more than a “tin-pot dictator.” Personally, I see no conflict between recognizing that he is an elected leader and also an authoritarian with bellicose and sometimes thuggish tendencies, but Tskhovrebova, who is a leading member of the Ossetian peace movement, does not even go so far as to say this. She very carefully avoids falling into the trap of repeating anything that sounds like Moscow propaganda, which makes her indictment of Saakashvili all the more powerful, and yet Applebaum outrageously tags her as a propagandist. This is the same sort of tactic that is frequently used to portray even the moderates who belong to a marginalized group in any conflict zone as being guilty of the worst rhetorical and ideological excesses of the most extreme members of the community. The only people who should be interested in discrediting Ossetian peace activists are hard-liners in Moscow and Tbilisi. Applebaum should know better.

Meanwhile, those falling in more or less with the pro-Georgian party line include the current and future Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States as well as more than a few likely Cabinet officials in the incoming administration. This ongoing Western and particularly U.S. support for Georgia, which is what Tskhovrebova is criticizing, has not changed at all, and from the remarks of Secretary Gates in Estonia earlier this month we know that the insanity of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia remains the official policy of our government. Applebaum makes clear near the end that her sympathies lie with the Western status quo that this year’s events have utterly discredited:

Until then, Western leaders should support Georgian democracy—not particular Georgian democrats—and prepare a unified response to the Russian military escapades to come.

So, no, James, I don’t think Applebaum was “so right” in all of this.

Update: Leave it to Nick Kristof of all people to start making sense on this question:

Note to Mr. Obama: It would be a nightmare to have our troops tethered through NATO to Misha. In any case, Georgia doesn’t obviously qualify for NATO membership since it doesn’t control its full territory, while the talk about NATO pushes all the wrong Russian nationalist buttons.

Ross thinks Gingrich ought to have suggested his middle-class tax cut package during the election when it might have helped, but that would have spoiled all the fun. That would have been like McCain actually explaining how he would “get” Bin Laden or how he would reform Social Security (“I know how to do it, my friends,” he kept saying) by articulating, well, specific plans and proposals. During the campaign Gingrich was simply following the example of his party’s nominee in vaguely hinting at secret plans to achieve great things, all of which would have been revealed provided that you elected McCain. Now, alas, McCain’s secret knowledge must remain forever hidden, and we will never be able to see his sure-fire method to make Social Security whole, destroy Al Qaeda and restore the global economy in action. Clearly, Gingrich is breaking an important code of silence by making these proposals public now. This is an error that will soon be corrected when the next election year comes along, when we can rest assured that Gingrich will return to making inane demands for Census Bureau reform.

Ross and Yglesias have gone back and forth over the degree of Obama’s hawkishness, and both of them almost have it right. Yglesias is correct that “the safe thing to assume on foreign policy is that we’ll keep seeing more of the same — a President who meant what he said when he was a presidential candidate,” but he carefully omits some of the things that Obama said as a presidential candidate that would show Obama’s Iran position to be very close to that of the current administration. When Obama said that all options remained “on the table” (how I hate that phrase) or when he told AIPAC he will do everything in his power to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, these are the things his supporters very much want to believe were necessary electoral gimmicks and nothing more. When he says something encouraging about pursuing Israel-Palestine peace or taking the fight to Al Qaeda, well, that’s different. Ross makes sense when he says, “I have a sneaking suspicion that a President Obama will be slightly more likely to authorize airstrikes against Iran than a President McCain would have been,” but this isn’t just Ross’ sneaking suspicion–there is every reason to assume that Obama would launch such strikes if negotiations with Iran failed (because Obama has effectively said as much), and his perceived lack of “pro-Israel” and hawkish bona fides will probably make him less likely to resist pressure for military action.

This is why the emphasis on Obama’s willingness to enter into talks with “rogue” states was always misleading and its significance overblown: Obama did not and does not disagree about ends concerning Iran, and ultimately he does not rule out using the same means that McCain would also have been willing to use. Obama’s supporters will say, “Yes, but at least he thinks war should be a last resort.” Of course, Mr. Bush says that he believes war is a last resort, too, which doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Update: Jim Antle also joined the debate:

The most thoughtful of the Obamacons — that is to say, the ones who weren’t just voting for fancy book writin’ and against “You betcha!” — were realists or noninterventionists who opposed the Iraq war and any sequels its authors might be planning. If personnel is policy, the last few days of rumors and announcements suggest they are going to be disappointed.

This is right, but Jim’s point against the Obamacons is stronger than he allows here. Long before any of Obama’s likely personnel choices were known, there were many things, including his positions on Iran and NATO expansion, that should have made it clear to realists and noninterventionists that they would be disappointed in an Obama administration. Certainly, they could and did make the argument that he was still preferable to McCain, but their disappointment with such an ambitious interventionist was guaranteed more than a year before he became the Democratic nominee.

Goldfarb offers more sharp political insights of the sort that did so much for the McCain campaign:

And there are no pitchfork wielding Republicans intent on burning Chuck Hagel at the stake. There was hardly a peep from the right over his heresy because nobody cared.

Via Andrew

This is, shall we say, entirely untrue. I don’t know whether Hugh Hewitt has a pitchfork, but his lame, late, unlamented Victory Caucus was an effort to punish anti-“surge” Republicans (which is all Hagel ever really was) with primary challenges and to cast out opponents of the “surge” as defeatists. You would have to have been oblivious to what was going on on the blog right to not know that there was profound disgust for Hagel. The loathing of Hagel and liberal admiration of Hagel were out of all proportion to what he had done. Unlike Lieberman, he did not lose a primary and then run against the nominee of his own party to secure re-election. Because Hagel was up for re-election in ’08 and he retired, there was no chance for this to happen. Unlike Lieberman, he never went over into the Obama camp and certainly never campaigned against McCain. What is remarkable is how furious conservative bloggers were with Hagel considering how little he did to provoke their ire. Lieberman broke ranks in every way possible, except that he still caucused with Democrats when he came back after ’06, while Hagel uttered a few skeptical statements. The anti-Hagel sentiment died down because Hagel decided to go away rather than risk a primary challenge or run for President, because he had good reason to believe that neither pursuing re-election nor running for another office was likely to be successful. Had he sought re-election or announced his candidacy for President, the attacks from conservative bloggers would have been intense and frequent. To believe what Goldfarb says, you would have to believe that there is no rank-and-file loathing for those who are deemed to be RINOs. This is absurd.

Update: Jason Zengerle makes a similar point.

Andrew writes in response to the post below:

And why were they so trusting of Bush and unable to see his flaws, Daniel? You have to see the link between the fundamentalist psyche and the suspension of critical judgment in the Republican party for the past eight years. A non-born-again president would never have been allowed to get away with it.

Actually, I think we could attribute just as much of this inability to see (or perhaps it was merely unwillingness to criticize?) Bush’s flaws to their identification with Bush’s own religion. This is the same identification or bonding with a politician that made supporters of Palin so livid when she was criticized, because they took it as a criticism of themselves. To that extent, I might be more willing to acknowledge that evangelicals as evangelicals contributed more to the enabling of Bush than I said below, but I can imagine, and I remember, the same thing happening with strong partisans of all stripes and secular ideologues. Let me add that I am skeptical that “fundamentalist psyche” has much to do with it. What Andrew calls the “fundamentalist psyche” seems to me to be the mind of an ideologue, and a lot of the errors in question have more to do with displacing Christianity with the substitute of Americanism. Far more worrisome, and far more widespread, than any fundamentalism (which Andrew has always defined far, far too broadly) is the tendency to give wide latitude to and to make up excuses for the President of one’s own party. This is not something unique to Republican partisans, and it is certainly not unique to evangelicals. If there is a stronger attachment to the cult of the Presidency among Republicans because the White House has typically been their main access to power at the national level since WWII, that is a serious problem within the GOP that would need to be addressed. Caesarism, not so-called “Christianism,” is the much greater problem.

To say that evangelicals are not the sole or primary cause of the GOP’s woes is not to say that they have never gone wrong (for some balance to my original post, I recommend Prof. Bacevich’s chapter on evangelicals in The New American Militarism), but one reason they are so easy to blame is the same reliability of support that allows them and their issues to be taken for granted by the party. Consider what things would look like if the parties’ positions were reversed. If Obama should blunder and become deeply unpopular, but black voters remain steadfastly supportive of him out of a sense of loyalty and support for a Democratic President, will they be what ails the Democratic Party? Wouldn’t attempts to pin the blame on them seem absurd? Wouldn’t there be far more important factors to consider?

Update: Joe Carter makes a similar point about the lack of influence of the “religious right” on policy:

Evangelicals constitute the largest single voting bloc in America, yet what do we have to show for it? Can Parker (or anyone else) name the significant achievements of evangelicals over the past few years? I can’t think of anything. (We can’t even take credit for Prop-8 in California. That was due to the hard work and funding by Mormons.)

Rather than assuming that evangelicals are a large, powerful, committed political bloc that, for some inexplicable reason, is completely ineffective, the more realistic conclusion is that politically engaged evangelicals are like a herd of unicorns: powerful and abundant in the imagination while not actually existing in the real world.

Kathleen Parker is melting down:

And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.

This is wrong, but the sort of conventional silliness that we have all come to expect in mid to late November of an election year. It is, of course, entirely incompatible with her statement later in the same column:

Meanwhile, it isn’t necessary to evict the Creator from the public square, surrender Judeo-Christian values or diminish the value of faith in America. Belief in something greater than oneself has much to recommend it, including most of the world’s architectural treasures, our universities and even our founding documents.

“Something greater than oneself”? Is John McCain writing Parker’s copy now? But this can’t be right–Parker just informed us that religion must return to the privacy of the heart where it belongs. If religion belongs nowhere but inside the heart, it had better not be expressed, confessed or discussed in public. However, to speak of religion is to speak in large part about practice, which is done almost anywhere but inside one’s heart. I’m not sure how you can seriously claim that there ought to be some meaningful public role for religion, or that we should acknowledge our Creator, affirm those “values” or emphasize the “value” of faith, and at the same time say that religion must retreat into the closet.

So Parker’s broader claims don’t seem to make any sense. What about her more specific political recommendation? She writes:

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

It never ceases to amaze me how the least influential, but most reliable factions in the GOP are so readily blamed for what is wrong with that party. I am trying to think of some comparable example on the other side. It would be something like blaming the travails of the Democratic Party in 2002 on antiwar progressives or civil libertarians, groups that clearly had little or no pull with party leaders at the time and haven’t had nearly as much since then as you might suppose they would. Despite their numbers, and in large part because of their reliability as Republican voters, evangelicals and social conservatives draw very little water in the GOP. Each cycle GOP leaders see how little it will take to get these voters to turn out for their candidates, and what that amount of lip service is each cycle they try to reduce it. The voters continue to turn out, despite having less and less reason to do so, and for their trouble they are accused of the errors that the party leaders made and into which the establishment dragged them.

Certainly there is an argument to be made that dead-end partisans qua dead-end partisans who cannot speak to anyone outside their party are a problem, and you can make the case that the holdouts who still think Bush has done a good job are complicit to some degree in all of his errors and crimes. Maybe there is some significant overlap with the so-called “oogedy-boogedy” set, but then the problem with them wouldn’t be their religiosity or their social conservatism or any of the cultural markers that freaked out every pundit east of the Appalachians when Mike Huckabee would start to speak. Instead, the problem is that they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.

Of course, the war was a major reason why the GOP fell into disrepute, and Parker notably still has nothing to say about that. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she has rarely, if ever, written a single word of serious criticism of the administration regarding the war. You cannot diagnose what ails Republicans if you have no credibility on this most basic of policy questions, and there is no reason to think that Parker has any.

Ross:

Or put another way: I expect my Presidents to be heretics, but I think it matters a great deal what kind of heretics they are.

Arguably, no one can win the Presidency without confessing some form of the Americanist heresy, and so every President ends up adopting or professing views that are deeply at odds with traditional Christianity.

This reminds me of something important that Richard Gamble said at the ISI conference at Yale (about which I really will be saying more soon). He argued against the continued national and political appropriation of Christian language of mission and redemption. This language, of course, is at the heart of American nationalism/Americanism, and the use of religious language and concepts to justify, whitewash and simplify the past both displaces the proper Christian understanding of these words and concepts and invests the nation-state with quasi-sacred status and makes nationalist historiography into the record of a secular salvation history. Prof. Gamble was very anxious about the dangers of civic religion and the description of America as a “city on a hill” and a “credal” nation (the latter, in my view, simply being the “proposition nation” idea using bastardized religious language) for some of the same reasons. Of course, it is impossible to be a normal country when a nationalist secular pseudo-religion defines the political culture. The exceptionalism justified by this appropriation of religious language (and even more absurdly defended in theologically nonsensical ideas that God wills everyone to be a liberal democrat) paves the way for a missionary role in the world that just so happens to coincide with the interests of certain factions in and around the state apparatus. What is most frustrating about all of this is that secular and heterodox Americans are among the most likely to believe and espouse these things, while at the same time the use of religious idiom in confessing Americanism will be cited as evidence of incipient theocracy, which is the last thing this substitute religion offers.