I don’t think in my lifetime I have ever witnessed quite a campaign in which the wife of the Presidential candidate has been sequestered lest she voice yet another sweeping generalization that can be rightfully interpreted as denigrating both the American system at large or the values of other Americans; or in which the Vice Presidential candidate has been sequestered from press questioning lest…once again in an interview or an impromptu says something that either is so bizarre that it makes no sense at all or serves as a good argument not to vote for [the] running mate [bold mine-DL]; or in which the Presidential nominee himself knows that if he stays on the teleprompter he has a good chance of winning, but if he wades in to banter wtih the crowd there is equally a good chance that he may say something so disturbing that the entire facade that he has so carefully constructed simply collapses. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Guess which campaign Hanson is talking about.  Except for the line about “the American system,” almost this exact thing could be and has been said as a criticism of the McCain campaign over the past two months.  Are McCain supporters seriously going to start complaining about the other party’s seclusion of a VP candidate or the inaccessibility of the candidate’s wife?  Of course, with McCain the problem is a little different: he says disturbing things when he sticks to the script, and when speaking from a teleprompter keeps smiling in that creepy way we have all come to fear.

Is McCain, as the subhed has it, the “best man” to unite America? Well, I think he’d have to be. Let me stress that “uniting America” isn’t necessarily the highest priority of the next president — perhaps Barack Obama would not “unite with” about 35 percent of the country that is bitterly opposed to his agenda, and I think that’s fair nough. But McCain would, in my view, be forced to unite America because he became the standard-bearer of a minority faction in our politics. How could McCain govern without engaging in really radical outreach to Democrats and independents? ~Reihan

This is right, and I wonder whether my original remarks on Reihan’s column were entirely fair.  After all, in the improbable event of a McCain win, the next administration would be faced with a hostile Congress and an electorate that would have elected McCain in spite of its hostility to the Republican Party.  His main concern would be to placate the majority, and not shore up his support within the party.  Besides, were McCain to win, Palin would be sent off to tamp down conservative rebellions and make a lot of rhetoric about how much the President appreciates their support.  With the exception of needing a couple votes in the Senate from time to time to eliminate the possibility of a filibuster, on many issues McCain would not need to bring along that many other Republicans.  What they think of him would not be that important during the first two years, and depending on midterms he might feel free to ignore them for much of his first term. 

There is a factor I overlooked before.  This is the habit of rallying to the President of your party, which Republicans are even more likely to do as a result of their postwar dependency on winning the White House as their main route to power.  Were McCain to win, it would delay and probably quash any nascent conservative skepticism about the expanding power of the executive branch, as the Presidency would once again become the sole focus of national Republican politics, and there would once again be a strong impulse to defend the administration against its critics.  (You can already see why a McCain victory would be very unhealthy for conservatism, whatever else it might bring.)  Even though conservatives would probably find important parts of McCain’s domestic agenda to be somewhere between annoying and appalling, their instinct to support “their” President would be powerful and would be particularly hard to resist so long as we have ongoing foreign wars.

Philip Weiss discusses “Obamaguity” (shouldn’t that be Obambiguity?):

It’s time to identify a central characteristic of this great politician: his ambiguity. Obama is neither black nor white, he is neither progressive nor conservative, indeed even his sexuality can seem ambiguous. His femininity is part of his enormous charm. Look how lithe he is next to masculine McCain. Ambiguity has served Obama very well indeed. For instance, he alienated no one at Harvard Law School–the stories are always about him engaging a group of people in a spirited discussion of issues, and giving nothing away, never taking a stand [bold mine-DL].

This reminds me of an old Daily Show clip mocking Cheney’s claim to be part of the legislative branch: “He is neither man nor beast, yet has elements of the twain!….He is the Highlander!”   That line about Obama never taking a stand is worth noting.  In this context, it’s clear that it means that he never took firm positions in these discussions, but looking at Obama’s entire career it becomes clear that he is not in the habit of taking stands that jeopardize his continued advancement.  What I have never quite understood is why Obama’s supporters find this quality attractive, since it guarantees that he is almost certainly going to yield to established policies and interests concening most things that they take seriously.  It suggests that any promise he makes to his constituents that involves challenging entrenched power is more or less worthless.  The conclusion that Weiss and a number of Obama supporters never seem to reach is that this ambiguity is a means to disarm opponents who might create difficulties for him if he took a clear position one way or the other, and that his opponents ultimately include them on the issues that matter most to them.      

Weiss continues:

Obamaguity–I need to coin this–is a big issue for us on the left. We want Obama to be a leader not a pol; we want him to be the Reagan of the left. And, in my little camp, we want him to be the savior of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. He gives us very mixed signals. He used to be Rashid Khalidi’s friend.  I’m sure he knows the Palestinian narrative, and not just from eating Mona Khalidi’s hummus. Now Obama’s thrown Khalidi under the bus. 

Well, of course he has.  If he threw Wright under the bus, there was and is no one he won’t be willing to abandon if it becomes politically necessary.  What Weiss mistakes for “mixed signals” are not signals at all.  Obama’s friendship with Khalidi had and has no significance when it comes to policy.  Obama’s signals on Israel and Palestine have been unambiguously “pro-Israel” in the most conventional sense.  Let’s grant that he knows the Palestinian narrative–that has not changed his policy views at all.  The belief that he will later turn against this position is an expectation that is just waiting to be dashed.  Far more likely, it is his progressive and antiwar supporters whom he is likely to turn on after Tuesday, because he will not need them nearly as much once he is President and they will be told time after time that they have nowhere to go if they don’t like what Obama is doing.

In the same article, Dr. Fleming remarked on Palin and Robert Stacy McCain’s defense of her:

Dan Larison on his Eunomia blog now on AmCon has drawn attention to our old friend Stacy McCain’s defense of ignorance.  Palin and her supporters are virtuous, he is arguing, precisely because what they don’t know won’t hurt them.  I fear, however, that it will hurt us.  This is worth an entire issue of the magazine.  Since Socrates (at least) we have understood that to pilot the ship of state requires skill, not just a good heart, especially when that ship is no longer a simple republican skiff but a nuclear powered submarine armed with missiles carrying nuclear warheads.  Besides, it is easier to make a judgment of someone’s experience and competence than of the soundness of his heart.

McCain has responded to the effect that her lack of competence in national and international issues, which is at the heart of the critique of her candidacy, is a mark in her favor:

Sarah Palin is the governor of Alaska, a very popular and for all I know a very good governor. She apparently focused her attention on the job she was doing and, prior to being chosen as McCain’s running mate, had paid little attention to the national and international issues that the presidential campaigns were talking about. Very good, I say — I wouldn’t want my governor to be obsessed with presidential politics, but rather to concentrate on doing his job as governor.

Palin’s honest ignorance of presidential-level issues was held up as evidence that she is, or was, unprepared for the vice-presidency — as if years of studying such issues were in itself qualification for the office. Evidence contradicts this idea.

Study of such issues might not prepare someone to be in such a position, but a lack of knowledge about them cannot be considered a recommendation.  Indeed, it must be considered a serious and probably disqualifying deficiency.  When a person applies for a post in the upper reaches of a firm, an academic department or, for that matter, a magazine, don’t we expect that the person to have not just relevant experience but the requisitive knowledge to fulfill his responsibilities?   

As a New Mexican, I can appreciate the point about wanting one’s governor to do his job and not go galivanting around the globe or the country to aggrandize himself, but a focus on state priorities should not require someone to be oblivious about everything else.  It is debatable whether she is a particularly good governor, as her main accomplishments to date have been spending other people’s money (which I am reliably informed by a certain Vice-Presidential candidate is tantamount to socialism) and negotiating a pipeline that apparently cannot be built without the cooperation of the very oil companies whose taxes she raised in order to buy the love of the people with rebate checks.  Of course, we cannot know what she might have done had she not been catapulted onto the national stage after barely a year and a half in office, but that drives home the point that it remains to be seen whether she is a successful governor, much less whether she is capable of the responsibilities of the Presidency that might fall to her in the (increasingly unlikely) event of a McCain victory.   

There is something in all of this I don’t understand.  On the one hand, we are supposed to believe that Palin is being treated unfairly because she does not have the establishment’s preferred educational pedigree and, by implication, that her education was sufficient, but at the same time we have the acknowledgement, indeed celebration, of the fact that Palin really does not know much concerning national and international issues.  Which is it?  As Mr. Bush’s example reminds us, it does not necessarily follow that going to elite universities leads to any broader understanding of the world, nor does it necessarily spur interest in the rest of the world, but what this seems to prove is that Palin would not be qualified for the post she is seeking even if she had gone to all the “right” schools.  The exact same arguments could have been used and were used to defend Mr. Bush’s candidacy in 2000, and I would suggest that the results of giving him the benefit of the doubt have been nothing short of calamitous.  If it is true that experts, self-appointed and otherwise, helped to plunge us into the Iraq debacle, it is also true that Mr. Bush did not have the wit, knowledge or wisdom to reject their supposedly expert advice.   

While there should always be a healthy skepticism of experts, in part because many of those claiming or receiving the title do not necessarily deserve it, the failure of so many experts in connection with Iraq should make clear to us that the experts who supported the war were wrong and were evidently not quite the experts they claimed to be, but not that expertise is undesirable.  We ought to be careful to notice the distinctions between government officials and establishment pundits on the one hand and experts who question and challenge government policy on the other.  It should tell us something that Palin, purveyor of pseudo-populism, has sided repeatedly with the former, which is not surprising, as she is in her current position almost entirely because certain establishment insiders and pundits promoted her.      

McCain keeps invoking the dread specter of Jeb Bush as one reason why we should reconcile ourselves to Palin.  First, why is Palin the most likely to thwart the return of the Bushes?  Second, why exactly is Palin preferable to Jeb Bush anyway?  Like his brother, he is pro-amnesty, but then so is she.  He was the successful, twice-elected governor of a large state, and he is well-versed in a number of national issues.  There is no question that preventing another Bush dynasty restoration is highly desirable, but why should we think that Palin is the one to do it and why do we think that she would represent an improvement?

Dr. Fleming has some thoughts on the election as it comes to a close, and sums up the main conservative objection to Obama:

He is an enemy of anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization, and when he is elected, I hope that all those Silicon Valley libertarians who supported him will live to see their property confiscated and their kids sent to reeducation camps.  Yes, that is mean-spirited and unChristian but it is unsettling to realize that you have lived among such monsters for so long without grasping the depth of their depravity and stupidity.

I would add a few observations here.  It is a measure of how profoundly wrong this administration and McCain have been on critical questions vital to our country’s welfare that Obama’s candidacy, much less his Presidency, is even remotely possible.  Whenever anyone contemplates the worst aspects of a future Obama administration, he should remember that Bush, McCain and their allies share in the blame for it.  Just as they bear responsibility for the consequences of their policies long after they have departed from the scene, they bear the burden of responsibility for the political consequences of their failure, which include making someone of such genuinely atrocious views, particularly as it concerns human life and dignity, electable and broadly popular.  That much may be obvious, but it should be kept in mind. 

It has fascinated me, in the original sense of the word as a mixture of wonder and terror, to watch legitimately outraged critics of the torture regime or unjust war suddenly discover moral ambiguity and gray areas when it comes to Obama’s indefensible record on abortion.  This is one of the few moral outrages left in the world that is discussed as if it were an unfortunate accident; it is something, to listen to the standard pro-choice argument, that should be reduced in number while simultaneously given full legal protection and government support.  Why an outrage against human dignity committed by the government is more outrageous than one permitted and defended by the government has never been clear to me.  One crime is justified in the name of necessity, the other in the name of autonomy, but both are crimes against human dignity, which has been and must be one of the fundamental goods that our civilization defends.  If we deny the sanctity of life itself, is it any wonder that we devalue and dehumanize others?

Libertarians who support Obama are more amusing.  Obama is a supporter of the PATRIOT Act and warrantless wiretapping, the bailout and vast new entitlement schemes, all of which expand the reach of government and trample on our liberty.  At every turn, he has favored centralism and expansion of the power of the state.  The natural response to this is that “the Republicans are no different,” which is by and large true, but it is not much of an excuse for siding with someone who in virtually every respect promises to repeat the mistakes of this administration while possessing few redeeming features that I can see.  Even balancing against this the recognition that someone as dangerous and reckless as McCain must never be allowed to wield executive power, there is not really anything positive that can be said about the likely future President.   

Peter Suderman poses the question:

If McCain is not a real conservative, then shouldn’t principled conservatives be justified in refusing to vote for him?

They should, but I take Joe Carter’s point, whichismoreorlessthe point I havebeenmakingformonths, that there is not really a conservative argument for a vote for Obama.  Anti-McCain arguments are abundant, and this is what almost every Obamacon argument is, because it has to be.  As I said yesterday, the most credible pro-Obama argument that can be made is that the GOP must be held accountable and Obama is not McCain, but I still don’t think that is a persuasive case for casting a vote for Obama, much less urging others to do likewise.  You have to believe strongly that a McCain Presidency would be an intolerable disaster for our country, but for the most part the people who are most inclined to believe this about him are not the ones going over to Obama.  Many have hedged their Obama endorsement with paeans to the “old” McCain whom they once liked and their alleged Obama endorsements are filled with disappointment that McCain has let them down, as if to say, “I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”  Pretty clearly, the Obamacon phenomenon is on the whole not really an endorsement of Obama or anything he proposes to do, which is why most of the endorsements coming from the right cannot withstand much scrutiny.  That’s the whole point: the Republican ticket is so unappealing to these people that they will vote for its defeat in full knowledge that there is little or nothing to say on behalf of the man they’re electing.  That is how complete Republican failure now is.  Imagine how much worse it might have been had the Democrats nominated another “centrist” Southerner.   

Endorsing Obama is a vote of no confidence in the Republican Party, but in a weird way it is also an expression of what is probably utterly misguided hope that the Republicans will learn from the defeat and adjust to new political realities.  It is also a failure of imagination to the extent that Obamacons sometimes rhetorically ask, “How much worse could it get?”  It could get much, much worse, and Obama endorsers have put themselves in the odd position of taking on some responsibility for what is to come while having absolutely zero influence, but if it doesn’t bother them I can’t get very worked up about it. 

Everyone who is voting Obama to punish the GOP thinks that there is some small chance that the GOP might change its ways.  The diversity of views among Obamacons reflects how many different future directions are expected, guaranteeing that many will be disappointed, but it also reflects how badly the GOP has failed on multiple fronts that it is simultaneously losing so many prominent and obscure Catholic pro-lifers, libertarians, foreign policy realists, moderates and small-government conservatives, among others, to a Democratic nominee who genuinely is the most liberal of any they have had since 1972.  Under normal circumstances, a vote for Obama ought to be unthinkable for almost all of the people on the right who have endorsed him, but the GOP has failed so badly that it has made the unthinkable mundane and ordinary.  It’s reaching a point where the report of another Obamacon endorsement is no more remarkable than when the leaves start falling in autumn.  Far more important in the aftermath than coming up with new and amusing ways to mock the Obama endorsers is an effort to understand and remedy the profound failures that made this phenomenon possible before a major realignment does occur.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama’s associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks [bold mine-DL].  Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate’s free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.” ~Political Radar

If they’re not negative attacks, what are they?  Charming compliments? 

Having hidden behind every P.C. shield her defenders could think to set up around her (i.e., criticism of Palin is sexist, elitist, etc.), Palin has now adopted the most extreme victimization pose that equate criticism and news reporting with oppression and violations of her rights.  This just seems silly at first and increasingly irrelevant as the election approaches, but since we are being informed on a regular basis that Palin is the future of the Republican Party it seems worthwhile to consider what this remark means.  It seems to me that this dresses up contempt for accountability as zeal for free speech, and it remarkably makes the press the enemy of freedom of the press when the press has the gall to report accurately that a candidate is engaging in negative campaigning.  There is an old tradition of “working the refs” in political campaigning, and it is actually a bipartisan practice, but here Palin is implying that accurate reporting of a candidate’s activities should be considered illegal.  This is an elected public official saying that the press violates politicians’ rights by characterizing negative attacks as negative attacks–just imagine how oppressive it must be when journalists point out that you lie about or distort your record!   

Of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with negative campaigning, which is not the same as making false and dishonest claims about one’s opponent.  Palin wants us to identify the two and then wants to claim that she is not engaging in negative campaigning, by which she means to say that she believes she is not launching scurrilous or misleading attacks.  Even this latter point is debatable, but it is instructive that Palin’s instinct when confronted with media scrutiny and bad coverage is to wrap herself, the public official, in the First Amendment that is supposed to protect a free press from intimidation by and interference from the government.  If that does not worry her admirers, particularly those who are journalists, it should.

Reihan has taken up the thankless task of making the argument for why McCain should be elected.  It is an interesting short read, but I think he goes a bit awry when he says this:

The past seven years have been a time of extraordinary tumult in international affairs, and the world badly needs a period of consolidation and sweeping reform. Our diplomatic and economic institutions are ill suited to tackling the diffuse threats posed by climate change, financial contagion, mass epidemics and catastrophic terrorism. Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps the US will have to take [bold mine-DL].

Let us suppose that the “real” McCain has indeed been hidden, perhaps having been locked away in a dungeon (or at Guantanamo!) Man In the Iron Mask-style while his doppelgaenger roams free working his mischief on the campaign trail.  After the election, the double will be slapped back into chains and the “real” McCain will emerge to govern, and perhaps at that point the “real” McCain’s real VP selection will also be presented to us.  Regardless, this is the same “real” McCain conservatives cannot stand.  They support him primarily because of his hawkishness and his embrace of the war in Iraq, but their enthusiasm for him becomes even more tepid each time he mentions climate change, to take one issue where he commands no loyalty from the right.  Should he pursue the kind of institution-building agenda that I think Reihan has in mind, which will include more than a little international institution-building, he would run straight into a brick wall of opposition from the same populist and nationalist forces that rebelled against Bush the Elder in the early ’90s.  The reason why it was claimed that only Nixon could go to China, as I’m sure Reihan knows, was that he was a zealous anticommunist throughout his career, so he was immunized against the charge of being soft on communism. 

By the “only Nixon” logic, only McCain can end the Iraq war, even though he has no intention of doing so, and only McCain could improve relations with Russia, which he wishes to isolate, demonize and harrass.  The trouble with the “only Nixon” dynamic is that those who are given the most flexibility to take the necessary or prudent move in a given situation are those least likely to make that move.  Indeed, their unwillingness to make that move 99 out of 100 times is the source of the credibility that allows them to make that move that one other time.  This is clearly a crazy way to approach things, but this seems to be the way the world works.  However, note that no one ever applies the reverse logic that only a friend of Islamists can wage the “war on terror” or that only a communist can de-nationalize industries. 

This is why the pleasant story that the “real” McCain has gone missing, but will be back any moment now, is so pernicious and misleading.  The reason McCain could not “bring along” conservatives were he to be the next President is the same reason he performed so poorly in the campaign.  The “real” McCain was forced to woo the right in the general election because he had never won them over in the primaries.  Never fully trusted by conservatives, he was constantly appealing to the core of the party down to the very last week of the campaign.  Even as he engaged in one pander after another, conservatives still found him lacking and thought that he was just going through the motions.  Even as he took the recommended Ayers-ACORN-Khalidi route to failure, conservatives thought he was not aggressive enough.  Nothing he could have ever done would have satisfied them, because most conservatives wanted anyone other than McCain as their nominee and were never fully reconciled to him.  If he became President, we would see the same response time and again, so that McCain would either give up trying to appease the base and become politically weakened or he would find himself constrained to go through the motions once again.  Either way, conservatives would be unsatisfied with him, because they know, as we all know, that the “real” McCain has not gone anywhere, and they also know, as we should know by now, he is quite willing to do whatever he thinks is necessary to advance his career.

Yes, on Planet Khalidi, even Jimmy Carter could be seen as being overtly hostile to the Palestinians. ~Philip Klein

This prompts the obvious question: what reason would anyone have to assume that the Carter administration would not be perceived as hostile to the Palestinians (and to the PLO itself) by what Klein himself identifies as the Palestinian “hardliners” whose views Khalidi was describing?  These days it is fashionable to loathe Carter for his statements and actions concerning Israel and Palestine in recent years, but it seems to me that this has blurred the memory of what his administration actually did (or rather didn’t do) with regard to Israel and the Palestinians in the late ’70s.  From a Palestinian “hardliner” perspective (which does not appear to be Khalidi’s perspective, but one that he was referring to), and it seems to me also as a matter of objective fact, the Carter administration was hostile to the PLO and the Reagan administration proved to be even more so.           

Here’s what I don’t quite understand.  For the sake of argument, let’s grant that everything this article says about Khalidi is true–this article is supposed to be the damning indictment not just of Khalidi, but somehow also of Obama?  Because Obama said he hoped that there should be more dialogue and conversation around the world?  Perhaps even a reasoned discussion concerning Israel and Palestine?  We certainly can’t have that (apparently, we really can’t).  Quick, get a rope! 

Would a scholar with a similar relationship to, say, the ANC be considered such a political untouchable that it is impermissble to have befriended him ten or twenty years after his involvement with the group?  If Khalidi taught here at Chicago and lived in the neighborhood, was Obama supposed to snub the man and have nothing to do with him?  Would that make him sufficiently zealous for the cause?  In any case, how is it politically significant or indicative of any views he held five years ago or today if Obama offered up some kind words for an academic colleague’s conversational and debate skills on the occasion of his colleague’s departure?  Apparently Khalidi showed Obama what his blind spots and biases were, which doesn’t mean that Obama changed any of his views since then, but it might suggest that Obama sees some value in questioning and testing his own assumptions.  That suggests a less rigid, ideological cast of mind, and if that is true the people who will find him most unsettling are ideologues who never question their assumptions.        

Update: Via Andrew, Ron Kampeas notes some basic errors in the effort to tie Khalidi to the PLO:

The problem with the “spokesman” claim is that you can actually prove it’s not true. In saner times, “prove it’s not true” would be a phrase frowned on in an innocent until proven guilty culture. Khalidi’s denial would be enough in the face of a lack of evidence as to same. Those promoting the claim cite a single 1982 article by Tom Friedman; Khalidi says Friedman got it wrong, and that the term “PLO spokesman” was used promiscuously in 1982 Beirut.

More important is this point:

So here’s the thing: What everyone acknowledges is that Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid talks. That delegation – to a person – could not have had any formal affiliation with the PLO.

Kampeas has more here.

P.S.  It should have to go without saying that Khalidi has done nothing wrong, and associating with him should not be treated as if it were something that needed to be justified.  Khalidi’s ethnicity and political views are the only reasons why anyone is trying to make this into an issue.  Obama’s critics on this point seem unable to conceive of the possibility of someone having a friend who is Palestinian while at the same time holding conventionally “pro-Israel” views.