Still, as her former running mate would say, the fundamentals of Sarah Palin are strong. Her conservative detractors—Colin Powell, David Brooks, and Christopher Buckley among them—were put off not by her personality but rather her lack of knowledge about certain national and foreign-policy issues. Such deficiencies can be addressed easily [bold mine-DL]. ~Chris Beam

This is a claim I keep seeing repeated again and again to bolster the claim that Palin will be back.  New reports from inside the McCain campaign put this in a rather harsh perspective, since they suggest that the deficiencies are so great that if they are to be addressed at all it will not be easy. 

Carl Cameron reports:

There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability to be a running mate, a Vice President, and a heartbeat away from the Presidency.  We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA….We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent….a whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability….[She] was particularly angry about how the Katie Couric interview went.  She didn’t accept preparation for that interview, and aides say that was part of the problem.    

Obviously, we should take what disgruntled McCain staffers dish to reporters with a grain of salt.  They have an agenda, and part of it is to make her look even worse than she already does to deflect some of the criticism away from McCain.  The claim that she didn’t know Africa was a continent is the sort of thing that almost sounds as if it belongs to a caricature of a person who knows nothing, but it seems remotely possible that it is true.  Americans’ knowledge of world geography is notoriously poor, which does not excuse it in this case if true, but neither is it all that far-fetched.  The troubling thing is that I get the sinking feeling that a lot of people who want her to become the future of the party couldn’t care less about this.  I can almost hear some dedicated pundits rehearsing the next defense, “Well, how many people understand that Africa is a continent?  Do we expect our elected officials to understand the conventions originally invented by ancient geographers?  Besides, technically, Africa is attached to the landmass of Asia and so you can see why she might have been hesitant to identify it that way.”  A more aggressive defense might say, “Who cares about Africa?  Palin is interested in helping this country.”  The claim about NAFTA seems hard to believe–how could a governor of Alaska not know which countries were involved in this agreement?  Then again, this tends to confirm everything we have come to know about her lack of interest in policy details.  These claims about her are so bizarre and yet specific that it is hard to dismiss them outright.    

Still, the report that she refused to prepare for the Couric interview makes everything quite clear.  She wasn’t overwhelmed with scripted answers and talking points that they had been forcing on her–she was genuinely at a loss for coherent answers because she had not even attempted to prepare for the questions she would be asked, and so she tried to bluster her way through to rather calamitous results.  Far from being a distorted or misleading image of what Palin knew on her own, that may have been the clearest picture of her understanding of the issues that we had in the last two months.  In the last few days, I have seen remarks to the effect that “anti-Palin” conservatives are going to end up feeling foolish in the future for having doubted her qualifications, but with every passing day and each new revelation I am even more convinced that everyone who criticized her fairly on her record and statements will have no reason to feel that way. 

Update: In a newNYT story, the claim about the interview is qualified here by an anonymous McCain advisor:

Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. “She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”   

I’m not sure that this helps Palin that much, but it does complicate the picture a little.

Of course, it’s not the level of spending that gets the most attention; it’s the manner in which the spending is allocated. The proliferation of earmarks is largely a product of the Gingrich-DeLay years, and it’s no surprise that some of the most ardent practitioners were earmarked by the voters for retirement yesterday. Few Americans will take seriously Republican speeches on limited government if we Republicans can’t wean ourselves from this insidious practice. But if we can go clean, it will offer a stark contrast to the Democrats, who, after two years in training, already have their own earmark favor factory running at full tilt. ~Rep. Jeff Flake

The frustrating thing about this earmark obsession is that Flake is reliably right on spending and I have nothing particularly against Flake, and I understand the impulse to give one’s own priorities more attention when talking about what needs to be done, but how on earth can you come away from the last two consecutive electoral defeats for the GOP and conclude that earmarks and spending are the main problems?  In fairness to Flake, that’s not the entirety of his argument (he gives a nod to rolling back intervention in the financial sector), but glaringly absent is any mention of foreign affairs or national security, immigration policy or trade policy.  It’s not that Flake has taken a mistaken position on any of them–they are simply not included in the discussion.  It is as if the last two years never happened and Republicans are still confident, just as they were in 2006, that “excessive and wasteful spending” did them in.

After Gilchrest lost his bid for re-nomination, I noted that the Club for Growth’s efforts to defeat the moderate Republican had probably helped ensure that the seat would be won in November by the Democrats, and it is now quite possible that the Democratic candidate will win there.  Andy Harris may come back from his small deficit from absentee voting, but the idea of purging a reliably electable moderate in a closely-divided district during a very poor election cycle for Republicans was asking for trouble.  On the whole, in recent elections the only thing that the Club for Growth seems to be very good at growing is the Democratic majority in Congress.

NBC-WSJ GOP pollster Neil Newhouse did a post-election survey last night, and here’s what he found: Just 12% of those surveyed believed Palin should be the GOP’s new leader; instead 29% of voters said Romney, followed by 20% who say Huckabee. Among GOPers, it was Romney 33%, Huckabee 20% and Palin 18%. ~FirstRead

Via Andrew

This suggests that Palin’s tremendous popularity within the GOP does not translate into support for her as the default party leader, which is an example of some understanding of political realities among Republican voters.  If all those named in this survey choose to run, it also could portend another very divided primary field where the next Republican nominee will end up winning most of the delegates by ekeing out 32-35% of the vote in state after state.  This is similar to what happened after the ’92 loss.  Few, if any, seriously backed Quayle as the heir apparent, and Pat Buchanan had loyal supporters but was obviosly loathed by the party establishment (Huckabee seems to fit this role best), which meant that the party relied on its trusty “it’s his turn” method of selecting an establishment candidate.  McCain was considered the frontrunner in 2007 for the same reason–he had been the runner-up in 2000, and he was due–and as it worked out he survived the challenges of various younger line-jumpers and outsiders.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Republicans rarely reward line-jumpers and outsiders.  A candidacy like that of Obama has not yet proved successful in the GOP, and by this I mean having the candidacy of a fairly young challenger lead to general election victory.  The last three Democratic Presidents (including the President-elect) have been long-shot outsiders of one kind or another, and arguably every non-incumbent postwar Democratic nominee has followed this pattern.  As significant as Goldwater’s nomination was, it was a fluke of sorts in the postwar era and the only one of its kind on the Republican side.  Perhaps the ’64 result convinced party leaders that they should never try anything like that again.  As we all know, Reagan had paid his dues in 1976, and was rewarded with the ’80 nomination, after losing in ’80 Bush waited his turn until ’88, and Dole had served his time and was eventually rewarded in ’96.  If the Republicans keep up this tradition, Romney would seem to be the logical successor, even though he would almost certainly be a poor nominee. 

However, McCain’s loss and the deep misgivings about his candidacy among many GOP primary voters may have changed things.  Under the old pattern, and based on the survey data above, Romney would be considered the party leader (even though he technically finished third, not second, during the primaries) and probably will be treated as such by a lot of people on the right.  Then again, McCain’s defeat may have made the old pattern seem foolish, so there could be much more resistance to anointing Romney as the heir apparent than there has been in the past.  This would normally be where I launch into my usual anti-Romney argument, but I think having mainstream conservatives and party leaders rallying behind a candidate as terrible as Romney will create the perfect opportunity for a line-jumping, perhaps even populist candidate.  As I discuss in a new article for Takimag, what we learned from the 2008 election was the powerful establishment hostility to anything resembling grassroots, populist conservatism and also the strong desire among the party’s core constituencies for a candidate who represents them:

Regardless of how one views Sarah Palin herself, the phenomenon of enthusiasm for Palin, like the grassroots mobilization for Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul we saw in the primaries, shows the powerful hunger in Middle America for someone to speak for them and defend their interests.  Except perhaps on immigration, institutional conservatism and elected representatives in the Republican Party have largely failed to do this.  During the primaries, institutional conservatism was content to foist two rebranded Northeastern liberal Republicans on conservatives as their champions while denigrating the two candidates with the strongest grassroots support. As the enthusiasm for candidates as different as Huckabee and Paul shows, Christian conservatives and libertarians are looking for representation. These voters are not going to find it in a mainstream movement that loathes Huckabee and Paul, nor will they find what they seek among the “reformists,” so their support is up for grabs.    

To the extent that Palin is, as Daniel Koffler astutely observes, “the reductio ad absurdum of some of those [putatively conservative] intellectuals’ efforts to manipulate the conservative base to advance their foreign policy agenda,” she is not necessarily the one best-suited to seize the opportunity presented by another episode of the establishment rallying to Romney.

Fred Kaplan believes the hype:

“President-elect Barack Obama”—the phrase alone does more to repair the tarnished image of America in the world than any action George W. Bush might ponder taking in his final weeks of power [bold mine-DL]. The very fact of a black president with multinational roots unhinges the terrorists’ recruitment poster of a racist, parochial, Muslim-hating United States. It revives Europeans’ trans-Atlantic dreams just as their own union seems to be foundering.

That first point may be true, but it may not count for very much.  If we assume that there is nothing Mr. Bush can do at this point to repair our image abroad, Obama’s election doesn’t have to do very much repairing to surpass anything Mr. Bush could propose. Its effect is greater than zero, but probably nowhere near as great as this paragraph suggests.  Let me add something here, and this is an important point: it is not going to be Obama’s fault that his election and the early months and years of his administration do not magically restore trust and goodwill that has been frittered away for many years, and he has never really claimed that this would happen.  His “helpful” admirers have repeatedly claimed something like this.  It seems to me that he understands better than a lot of the people spinning these grand theories of his geopolitical significance that any meaningful improvement in our relations with other nations will come from time-consuming, difficult work.  It is clear that he will be given more leeway in the beginning, and there is more tolerance in most foreign countries for Obama to make mistakes early. 

However, as one of the commenters has noted, Moscow is wasting no time making clear its objections to missile defense in central-eastern Europe and suggesting countermeasures (possibly tactical missiles to Kaliningrad) if Washington goes ahead with the plan.  More than most foreign governments, Moscow seems to have few illusions about what Obama’s election means for them.  From his gradually more antagonistic response to the war in Georgia to his selection of Joe “Expand NATO Forever” Biden as his running mate, Obama made abundantly clear what they could reasonably expect from a future Obama administration, which unfortunately isn’t very much. 

The potential pitfall for Obama abroad is that there is widespread expectation in Europe of a departure not only from the Bush style of foreign policy, but also a departure from much of the substance, particularly as it relates to various international treaties and institutions.  Trans-Atlantic dreams may be the right way to describe European expectations, because they seem to have so little basis in political reality.  Some of what many Europeans dream of is probably not going to happen (e.g., the test ban treaty, the ICC), and for the most part expecting much in this area comes from Europeans’ projecting what they think a “good” American President ought to do.  Obama may attempt to do some of the things Europeans hope for, but even though both he and McCain have endorsed the Kyoto Protocols that does not necessarily make ratification politically possible.  The Law of the Sea ratification will be a particularly tough fight.

Relations with European governments will be similarly tricky.  When Merkel and Sarkozy were elected, Republicans cheered the rise of “pro-American” governments, by which they meant governments that tended to agree with them more often than not, so what counted as “pro-American” under one administration may not count that way under another.  Sarkozy and Kouchner have been eager to reduce tensions with Moscow, but they have also tended to take a harder line on Near Eastern questions and, more recently, Kouchner has been tramping around Africa preaching the same humanitarian interventionism that led to the war in Yugoslavia.  To the extent that Obama is less belligerent towards Iran than Sarkozy,  and if Obama is serious about calling on Europeans to contribute more soldiers to Afghanistan, we might see considerable friction with major European governments that would be similar to some of the tensions in the early Bush years.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of this–states have different interests and they will sometimes clash.  Even so, there needs to be some grounding in reality when discussing what Obama’s election means to U.S. relations with the rest of the world.  

As an unexpected aid to Obama’s potential problem with Moscow, European governments, buffeted and weakened by the financial crisis perhaps more than most other Western states, will be even less inclined to pursue anti-Russian moves.  That will provide Obama some cover from critics at home if he were wisely to opt for a less confrontational approach and at least put NATO expansion on the back burner.  The missile defense agreement with Poland will be harder to put off, and it would be very difficult to renege on it at this point without inviting a million yelps about “appeasement,” and not just from the usual suspects.  Moscow clearly views this plan as a hostile move, and relations with Russia could decline rapidly if Obama goes ahead with the plan.

As for “unhinging” jihadi recruitment efforts, the first and best recruiting sergeants they have are ongoing American military operations in two Muslim countries.  If Obama brings one to an end only to redouble efforts in another, there is not necessarily going to be that much damage to jihadis‘ ability to recruit.  It has never been clear to me why the election of a politician who supported the bombardment of Lebanon and supports unilateral strikes into Pakistan (which are deeply resented by Pakistanis) was going to improve the image of America in the eyes of that many Muslims.  Leave aside the question of how much flexibility Obama will have back home given the persistent efforts to misrepresent his record on Israel and the like.  Hostility to and distrust of the U.S. government are not going to change significantly so long as the same policies are in place, and that likely means that jihadis will still have a large pool of potential recruits.  Just think about it for a moment.  Suppose you think that America is warring against Islam, occupying Muslim lands unjustly and supporting Israel to the hilt at the expense of your fellow Muslims, and you were offended enough by all of this to want to join a jihadi terrorist group–are you really going to be dissuaded from doing that when the U.S. President has an unusual name and some Muslim ancestors? 

What I am trying to say is that we should not set up the next President for failure by making such grandiose, unfounded claims about what his election will mean for our relations with the rest of the world.  The next administration is going to enjoy a long honeymoon, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but we should all be as sober and clear-eyed as possible about what a President Obama is realistically going to be able to do and what he isn’t.

As a rebel Tutsi army in eastern Congo threatens to plunge that miserable country into a new round of warfare, calls for intervention have been fairly few and far between, but what few we have heard have been very loud and coming from top European officials.  Meanwhile, Simon Tisdall outlines why Britain cannot and should not attempt an intervention on its own, and this makes sense.  Then I started to get a creeping feeling, as if Michael Gerson were hovering over my shoulder muttering saccharine truisms about the responsibility to protect, and it occurred to me that the deteriorating situation in the Congo is the sort of lose-lose predicament that seems to inspire lame-duck interventions by Presidents named Bush on their way out the door.   

It was Bush the Elder who saddled the incoming Clinton administration with a bizarre deployment to Somalia that he announced in December 1992.  I remember seeing the announcement on the television and thinking, “You mean he’s still President?”  Clinton then disastrously chose to turn it into a full-blown nation-building exercise, and the political backlash at home against the mission in Somalia after the Battle of Mogadishu was so great that Clinton dared not have American soldiers in Africa ever again and was leery of interventions that required significant ground forces.  Never one with much credibility with the military, Clinton was willing to bomb promiscuously but was rarely willing to take greater risks after the Somalia debacle.  It is not that much of an exaggeration to say that the results of the Somalia mission helped to make the first Clinton term appear to be more or less a failure with respect to foreign policy. 

Would Mr. Bush embark on a fool’s errand in Congo in the closing months of his administration with the armed forces already strained by their current obligations?  Probably not, but it would be a fitting, final hurrah of irresponsibility dressed up in preachy moralism.  If he did order an intervention, it would leave Obama with yet another mess to clean up and a politically untenable position of either perpetuating a futile and unpopular mission or suffering the inevitable criticism following equally inevitable withdrawal from Congo.

My apologies for not having had more to say on Election Night itself.  First, congratulations to the new President-elect are in order.  Throughout the campaign, I kept imagining reasons why he would not be able to do this, and at every turn he kept proving me and so very many others wrong.  He mobilized and organized his own grassroots movement, fought the entrenched establishment candidate and party machine and prevailed, and in what he was able to achieve there are lessons for disaffected conservatives.  It was interesting to watch the video of Obama giving his victory speech in Grant Park, which I have driven by and walked through so many times over the last seven years, and to behold an unprecedented event there in such familiar surroundings.  Here in Hyde Park there was some celebratory honking and shouting the name Obama, but the neighborhood was on the whole very quiet (probably a lot of people were at the speech). 

My Culture11 article on what we can expect from the future President makes an argument that will be familiar to many regular readers of Eunomia, stressing as it does Obama’s aversion to political risk, his careful, deliberative approach and his preference for consensus and accommodation.  This is my concession to Obama supporters’ emphasis on the man’s temperament, which I think the article explains fairly well, albeit not necessarily in the most flattering way.  I set this view of Obama against the interpretations of those inclined to hope for or fear significant policy shifts in the years to come.  One point that I want to emphasize is this:

There is an assumption shared by most Obama backers that he will prove to be, in Colin Powell’s formulation, a “transformational” President, particularly with respect to foreign affairs and America’s reputation abroad. But the expected transformation in foreign attitudes seems based largely on temporary foreign enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy that is itself a product of the misconception that Obama’s election will mark some significant or meaningful change in U.S. foreign policy [bold added-DL].

As if on cue, Garry Kasparov offers this comment today:

Bush is practically a bouquet of the classic American stereotypes, the ones so easy to hate: rich, inarticulate, uninterested in the world, stridently religious and hasty to act. (And the images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina seemingly exemplified the stereotype of Americans as racists and were viewed largely without surprise abroad. Of course they wouldn’t rescue poor black people.) Obama would explode these stereotypes.  But the world’s multitude of grievances against the Bush administration quickly would be laid on Obama’s doorstep if he were to fail to back up his inspiring rhetoric with decisive action. 

Kasparov then goes on to make a predictable argument that Obama will be betraying his promise if he does not share Kasparov’s preoccupation in vilifying the Russian government.  That is, according to Kasparov the dramatic improvement in foreign attitudes toward the United States that many Obama supporters expect will be contingent on his ability to introduce changes to U.S. policy that are satisfactory to a great variety of foreign audiences and the American public in a very short period of time after entering office, and if he cannot do this the international hostility towards his administration will be just just about as great as it has been towards Mr. Bush’s.  This is to set Obama up for failure.  Kasparov may not care about this, but what is remarkable is how much his domestic supporters have also put Obama’s “transformational” potential in the hands of other nations.  Having accepted the premise that Obama’s election will repair our reputation and image abroad, they open him up to the charge that he has failed when other nations continue to respond to U.S. policy with the same skeptical or hostile attitudes, even though they are responding to the policy and not to the man. 

P.S.  Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States, sounds the warning against excessive European expectations:

I do worry that many Germans and other Europeans have developed unrealistically high expectations for an Obama administration. In some of the panels I’ve been participating in recently, you get the sense that everyone expects a trans-Atlantic paradise will emerge with blue skies and constant sunshine. Some disappointment is inevitable.

 

We know that on many issues there is an obvious, visible divergence of interests across the Atlantic. Europeans will be surprised, for instance, to learn that even with Obama in the White House and a strong Democratic majority in the US Senate, the US is unlikely to ratify the Kyoto protocol or its successor arrangements as they currently exist.

Andrew:

The Vatican failed to corral voters into the Republican column.

Because they were trying so very hard to do that, you know…

In other news, I “failed” to conquer Canada.

Turning to the House races, which seem to be much more competitive and interesting than the presidential race at this point, it’s worth noting that Kanjorski in PA-11 is doing better than I would have expected.  Unfortunately, the pro-Democratic wave in Pennsylvania might be strong enough to keep Barletta from ousting him.  It appears that Virgil Goode may indeed lose in VA-05 as I thought he might, which is a remarkable anti-incumbent result, and things are currently not looking good for the GOP in VA-11.  Souder (R) in IN-03 has held on and has been declared the winner, so I was wrong about that one.  The two Diaz-Balarts seem to be hanging on despite unusually strong challenges, but that is not yet final.  Meanwhile, Feeney in FL-24 is toast.