Freddy correctly identified the musical instrument used in this McCain ad as a duduk, which I find to be one of the most beautiful-sounding instruments in the world, but then I am also a fan of the bagpipes.  While the duduk is typically Armenian, it is used along with a host of other instruments in Armenian folk music that are found throughout the Near East and along much of the Mediterranean basin, such as the kamancha, the ud and the like.  Armenian and Iranian musical traditions have strongly influenced one another, not only because of the countries’ geographical proximity but also because of the many linguistic, cultural and historical ties between Iran and Armenia that date back into antiquity.  The strange thing is that duduk music is not menacing, so it is lousy accompaniment for an attack ad that is supposed to instill fear.  Very often, duduk music is very melancholy and sad (as is so much Armenian folk music), which puts it almost entirely at odds with the images used in the video.  The ad is part of the last, dying gasp of the McCain campaign, which does not even seem to know how to instill fear properly anymore.   

P.S.  I have to thank the McCain campaign.  They may be absolutely terrible in putting together effective advertisements, but they have inspired me to spend more time brushing up on my Armenian.  Apren!

TAC’s endorsement issue has many different arguments for a number of candidates and write-ins, as well as for the option of not voting.  Having already endorsed (and voted absentee for) Chuck Baldwin, I won’t restate my points here, but I would recommend Joe Sobran’s endorsement of Baldwin as a good, succinct argument for voting for the Constitution Party candidate.  I have a lot of respect for the non-voting, don’t-legitimize-the-result, withdraw-in-disgust option, and it was tempting, but for whatever reason voting has become an ingrained habit that I have always felt compelled to practice despite understanding full well its staggering irrelevance.  Having been inclined to back Barr at one time, I can’t fault anyone who ended up supporting him, but in the end I’m not a libertarian and I don’t see the point in casting protest votes against the Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency (which I should specify is really just the appropriate designation of whichever major party holds the most power in Washington) when the candidate is not really protesting against one or more of these things.  Paul Gottfried makes a related point in his Baldwin endorsement. 

As for support for Nader, it is getting harder and harder to disagree with our left conservative friends when they say:

The anti-imperial, pro-civil liberties, pro-constitution base is not on the right. It is on the left.

This doesn’t mean that there is no support for these things on the right, but it does mean that it is pretty clearly much weaker.  That will be driven home yet again as Nader stands to get twice or even three times the level of support of either right-wing third-party candidate.  This is one of the reasons why many dissident conservatives are understandably so wary of left-right alliances, as the numerical superiority of left-libertarians and antiwar progressives promises to make any protest movement into a movement dominated by the left.      

What of McCain?  Leave aside for the moment that the outcome of the election is all but certain, and that McCain is probably going to suffer the worst defeat for a Republican nominee since 1964.  The divided government argument for McCain sounds appealing at first, and I can see some merit in it, but McCain is exactly the wrong kind of Republican to have as President during a Democratic ascendancy.  Eager to get back in the good graces of his first and true love, the media, and anxious to demonstrate his willingness to collaborate with Democratic leaders to re-establish the public persona he spent so many years cultivating, he will roll over for almost anything the Congress sends to him, unless it involves bringing an end to unnecessary foreign wars.  An amnesty bill is far more important to him and it is a much higher priority for him than it is for Obama, whose position on the question is admittedly no better, so I think it is correct to assume that an immigration bill is much less likely to be passed under unified government than it would be under divided government.  There was significant opposition for different reasons on the Democratic side to the last “comprehensive” bill, and there is an even greater chance of a purely anti-Democratic backlash if an Obama administration attempted to force the legislation on their reluctant conservative and marginal district House members.  As with the deeply unpopular bailout, the Democrats will want the cover of broad bipartisan support for an amnesty bill, and that support will be much more likely if McCain is in the White House.  

The only main argument for Obama from the right that is remotely persuasive combines a call for accountability and a correct, negative assessment of McCain.  Whatever else you might say about him, Fukuyama makes exactly this argument and so has made what is to my mind the most credible case for why someone on the right would vote for Obama.  I have never found this argument persuasive enough, and in the end I don’t quite see how anyone on the right can endorse a candidate with whom he disagrees on most or all things for purely punitive or negative reasons, but as an argument why McCain should not President (and why, by default, Obama will have to be President) it is difficult to find a flaw in this statement:

It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.

McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was highly irresponsible; we have suffered under the current president who entered office without much knowledge of the world and was easily captured by the wrong advisers. McCain’s lurching from Reaganite free- marketer to populist tribune makes one wonder whether he has any underlying principles at all.

Sonny Bunch asks an interesting question in response to Obama’s waste of money clever final appeal to the nation:

Are the few remaining undecideds really going to be swayed by soft focus personal interest tales?

I don’t mean to berate undecided voters yet again, but…well, yes, I do.  The sort of cloying, saccharine, “I understand your problems” presentation Obama offered is probably much closer to what undecided voters find most satisfying, and it isn’t just the undecided voters who respond to these things.  Undecided voters trick pollsters and political writers with their traditional complaints that the candidates are not “specific enough,” when specificity and wonkery are the last things they want.  These voters have standard responses that they use when they are talking to pollsters, journalists and focus group leaders.  We’ve heard them all.  They say, “They’re just saying the same old things” or “it’s just politics as usual” or “they’re not talking about what matters to me.”  An undecided voter will say the last one even when the candidate has directly addressed a subject that the pollster or journalist knows for certain matters to him.  The biggest flaw in attempting to reach these remaining undecided voters through a half-hour paid political ad is the assumption that undecided voters are likely to watch a half-hour paid political ad.  One of the distinguishing features of being an undecided voter is a lack of attention to and interest in the election.  Those who have a greater interest have already aligned themselves with one candidate or another by this time.    

It is not as if undecided voters are savvy consumers of campaign literature who are torn between the promise of McCain’s health care tax credit on the one hand and Obama’s pledge to incorporate labor and environmental standards in future Latin American trade deals on the other.  These are not typically people who tie themselves into knots because they feel drawn to different aspects of the two platforms, or find both candidates’ policy addresses compelling in different ways.  These are not the people who ponder the virtues of future card check legislation.  There is a reason political ads, including those that last for half an hour, are consistently unsatisfying to people who actually pay attention to the campaigns.  Especially at this stage of the election, they are geared to appeal to people who pay very little attention to the election and whose interest in and information about policy are minimal.

The latest Pew poll confirms this portrait of undecided voters:

On most issues, the positions held by undecided voters fall between those of Obama and McCain supporters, although they are somewhat more similar to McCain supporters on the issue of illegal immigration. Overall, these voters are more likely than supporters of either candidate to say they don’t have an opinion about most issues [bold mine-DL].  

Undecided voters do clearly distinguish themselves from supporters of both McCain and Obama in their lower levels of participation and interest in this election, and partisan politics in general. A majority (51%) of undecideds do not identify with either the Republican or Democratic parties and fewer than half (48%) report having voted in the primaries this year; by contrast, 63% of both Obama and McCain supporters say they voted in a primary. 

Fewer than four-in-ten undecided voters (37%) say they are following news about the election very closely.

As Chris Hayes discussed in his item on undecided voters four years ago, the undecided do not have opinions about most issues because they do not think in terms of issues:

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances.    

Who are these people?  Per the Pew poll, half of the undecideds have a high school education or less, almost two-thirds are women, and three-quarters make $75,000 a year or less.  If most undecided voters watched Obama’s infomercial, this profile suggests that many will probably have come away with a favorable impression. 

Bunch also asked these questions:

Wouldn’t they be more interested to know how Obama plans on paying for all his new policy proposals while maintaining lower tax rates for the middle class? Wouldn’t they be interested in hearing just how Obama would extricate our troops from Iraq in a reasonable manner?

The answer for most undecided voters is no, they wouldn’t be interested, because these things do not interest them.  That is not to say that they are indifferent to the realities in question, but detailed plans aren’t what they want to hear, either.  When political bloggers, pundits and journalists ask these questions on behalf of undecided voters, we are explaining what we wanted to hear Obama say.  Obama did not persuade many high-information voters last night, because most of these voters at this point are no longer persuadable and have already chosen their candidate.  In any case, they were not Obama’s target, because they do not constitute the bulk of the undecided vote.

If there are six days until the election, it must be time for a ginned-up phony controversy.  The phony controversy derives from the story about the L.A. Times‘ Khalidi tape combined with the confident foreign policy pronouncements of Joe the Plumber Geopolitical Strategist that voting for Obama is voting for the “death of Israel.”  These are not necessarily directly related, but it seems likely that the latter’s claim about Obama has some connection to the Khalidi tape or to other reports about Obama’s alleged sympathies with Palestinians.  There is presumably also some connection to Obama’s proposal to hold negotiations with the Iranian government, which is at least a position that Obama actually holds and affirms in public. 

For those of you who have wisely been ignoring the final days of the campaign, here is the story about the tape: back in 2003 when Khalidi was about to leave Chicago to fill Edward Said’s post at Columbia after Said had passed on, there was a farewell party attended by Obama, and there was a video record of it that was leaked to the L.A. Times that the newspaper first reported on in April.  This party and Obama’s attendance at it have been more or less common knowledge to anyone who has spent much time following Obama’s career, and the party and the relationship between Obama and Khalidi have been made out to be meaningful evidence that Obama harbors some pro-Palestinian attitudes because of things he said at this party about Khalidi.  Pro-Palestinian activists and advocates for “even-handed” U.S. policy ardently hope this is the case, and hawkish “pro-Israel” people desperately fear that this is true, or at least they are willing to pretend that they think it is true if it helps to defeat Obama, whom they may dislike for various other reasons.  Now some are claiming that the tape purportedly has a record of Obama saying things not just about Khalidi, but about Israel and Palestine as well, but as far as I can tell this is just more baseless rumormongering. 

It seems that the only reason why anyone suspects that there is something “damaging” (i.e., something not reflexively “pro-Israel”) on the tape is that the Times won’t release it because of an agreement it made with its source(s), but if the Times were to break its agreement with the source(s) and release the tape it would then presumably be accused of violating ethical standards in order to vindicate its preferred candidate.  This is a very odd case of a newspaper being accused of “suppressing” evidence after having published a report on the very thing it is supposedly suppressing.  Had it acquired the tape and never reported on it, that would be one thing, but it did just the opposite.  What is most bizarre about all of this is that from everything we do know about what Obama said, his remarks about Khalidi clearly implied that he didn’t agree with his colleague, which is why in classic Obama fashion he applauded Khalidi for challenging him and making him face his own biases.  Presumably, if the Times had always been trying to follow the directive, “do and say nothing that hurts Obama,” it would never have reported on statements made at the party by other attendees.  As it is, these other statements don’t count for much, and they have nothing to do with Obama’s views on Israel and Palestine.  Perhaps Joe the Plumber can return to worrying about incipient socialism and leave foreign policy to others.

After Ralph Peters’ last laughable effort (the short version of which was “Obama might not save Bolivia from itself!”), we might just as easily ignore his new column, but it serves as a useful example of the adaptability of fearmongers.  Once certain states have been put on the enemies’ list, they never come off, even when they have objectively ceased to pose much of a threat to anyone.  When they are stronger but not particularly aggressive, it is because they are biding their time; when they become weak they are going to start lashing out as a distraction from their economic problems.  At no point are these states treated as if they have their own self-interest that may not entail attacking or invading other states at all. 

When the petro-states were flush with cash and seemed to be gaining ground on all fronts, we were hearing grim warnings about the reconstitution of the Soviet empire, Russian naval visits to Venezuela (which even Peters acknowledged to be a meaningless display) and the growing power of the Tehran-Caracas axis, sometimes as recently as early September of this year.  Now that they are becoming weaker as oil prices drop in response to the global downturn, it is their bankruptcy and weakness that make them terrible threats to the world, even though the sudden change in their fortunes shows how limited and frail their ability to project power always was. 

Here is one scenario Peters proposes: Russia starts going broke, and so has no incentive not to start invading other countries.  No incentive, that is, except for the possibility of foreign investment and aid to shore up its slumping economy.  Another scenario: Iran goes broke, but somehow has the resources to acquire a nuke, which it would naturally then launch on Israel.  This makes as little sense as Iran committing national suicide in boom times.  If Iran is going broke and suffering from the significant internal disorder that will accompany a worsening economy, doesn’t it seem more likely that it will have more pressing concerns than developing a nuclear weapon?  Peters has to acknowledge that Venezuela is such a shambles that it cannot threaten anyone–but it might collapse in on itself in nasty ways! I suppose that has always been true, but it hardly fills the rest of the world with dread and it makes Santorum’s warnings against Venezuelan-Bolivian conquests in Latin America seem even more outlandish than they were at the time. 

Economically weakened authoritarian governments have even less interest in and opportunity for aggressive actions outside their borders as they become increasingly preoccupied with internal dissent and upheaval and the basic problems of economic failure and excessive dependence on natural resource extraction.  Ahmadinejad was elected on a platform of additional subsidies to the poor and some kind of solution to the chronically high unemployment Iran has, but now finds himself failing to control rampaging inflation (officially at 30%) and has fewer and fewer resources at his command as revenues shrink.  Remember–this failure is the clown that filled interventionists with fear and became synonymous for them with the threat represented by Iran.  We should never have been afraid of these people, and now that he is flailing and failing and the entire regime is suffering from the economic downturn we are supposed to be more afraid?

The latest salvo is available at Culture11.

I saw the Republican Party today, standing in line to see Palin at Shippensburg University. ~Robert Stacy McCain

At the rate the McCain campaign is going, pretty soon I wouldn’t be surprised if you could fit the entire party into a single auditorium for one of her rallies. 

McCain continues:

Let the cynics attend a Palin event and try to imagine those crowds turning out for, inter alia, Tim Pawlenty.

Of course, no one in the general public knows who Tim Pawlenty is today anymore than they knew who Palin was two months ago, and when they were told how wonderful and fantastic Palin was they responded by concluding that she was wonderful and fantastic.  They would have done much the same for Pawlenty.  I’d be willing to bet that they would have responded to Pawlenty’s working-class evangelical reformer shtick with more or less the same enthusiasm that they greeted Palin’s, because it is has ultimately never been about the VP candidate as such and has been entirely about McCain choosing someone who validated rank-and-file conservative views and lifestyle.  The difference would have been that he might have deserved some of the praise that has been heaped on her, and he would have been able to hold his own in articulating the reasons why the campaign’s policies are worth supporting.  More to the point, if the same crowds had not turned out for Pawlenty, a perfectly credible alternative with a better record and qualifications, it would show how much the Palin enthusiasm is driven entirely by sentiment and irrational identitarianism. 

P.S. McCain was right about this much when he said, “if Sarah Palin is enough to make you decide you’re not a Republican, you’re not aRepublican.”  Indeed, I am not, never have been and, if Palin is the future of the GOP, I never will be. 

Update: McCain does have some remarkable footage of the impressive turnout for a Palin rally in awful conditions.

What is it about this election that causes people to say absolutely crazy things?  John McCain is a tsaddik!  John McCain is like Tsar-Martyr Nikolai!  What profound confusion or monomania can people suffer from that allows them to compare blithely one of the worst presidential candidates in my lifetime to revered and holy figures?  I would not show disrespect to my Catholic friends by comparing the ridiculous members of our political class, particularly one known for his reflexive support for wars that have directly harmed Catholic communities in the Near East, to Blessed Karl of Austria for any reason.  Endorse McCain as the lesser of two evils if you must, but spare us the sacrilege.

On the specific policy matter at hand, there is an assumption here that the so-called Freedom of Choice Act would pass the House in which conservative Democrats make up a fifth of the majority.  This is a very questionable assumption, to say the least.

Here is a RedState post (“The Seven Reasons McCain-Palin Are A Lock To Win”) that will serve as a valuable artifact of the political and intellectual cocoon of the modern GOP and mainstream conservatism.  In years to come, when strategists and pundits try to understand what happened in this election, this might serve as a key text demonstrating core Republican disbelief that they could lose. 

It may interest you to know (on the day that Gov. Crist had to extend voting hours to accommodate the waves of early voters) that there is an egregious campaign of voter suppression, and I suppose it must be a conspiracy so vast that I and many other conservative bloggers have unwittingly contributed to it by acknowledging reality days and weeks ago:

The first and foremost reason McCain-Palin will win is the absolute arrogance, elitism, condescending, patronizing and in-your-face voter suppression campaign – don’t vote for McCain, he can not win — being conducted by the national media on Senator Obama’s behalf.

Now think about this for a moment.  When the author says that there is a “voter suppression campaign,” he means that the national media are reporting poll numbers and Electoral College projections accurately and then drawing more or less rational conclusions from the information they have reported.  For fun, let’s grant this point–there is a vast campaign to “suppress” the vote, but we are then told that the vote-suppressing is going to lead to McCain-Palin victory by way of causing a backlash.  If that’s true, shouldn’t McCain supporters want the media to be even more biased and unfair in the closing days?  After all, as his media coverage has gotten worse and more hostile McCain’s numbers have been soaring.  Oh, wait, maybe that’s not right. 

The other reasons why McCain-Palin is a “lock” (note that he doesn’t even hedge his bets with a lot of conditional statements about what still could happen) are: 1) the Gallup poll after Labor Day as reliable predictor (which means we should ignore all the polls since then); 2) the “predictor states” of Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee (never mind that Obama is probably going to win one and possibly two of these); 3) Farrakhan and Jackson’s remarks about Obama are scaring away elderly Jewish voters (never mind that Obama’s support among Jewish voters is at 74%); 4) Disaffected female Clinton supporters will re-emerge and shock all of us (Pew has Democratic support for McCain at a whopping 7%, and his support from women is 34%); 5) Unstable economic situation means voters will turn away from the young, inexperienced candidate (even though economic woes clearly work in Obama’s favor); 6) Bradley Effect! (non-existent!).