Helen Rittelmeyer responds with a good post elaborating on her earlier argument, and I have to say that I agree entirely with the following:

My “Red Socrates” thesis depends on the claim that cultural libertarianism is ill-equipped to make sense of a tragic universe. Tragedy involves looking at human suffering and saying that it was not only unavoidable but, more importantly, in some sense just and proper. Loyalties come into conflict and people get hurt, but that’s what’s supposed to happen when loyalties conflict!

I would say more than this.  Cultural libertarianism is not only ill-equipped to make sense of tragic universe, but it assumes that a tragic universe–one affected by the consequences of the Fall–does not exist or if cultural libertarians accept that it exists they assume that virtually all troubles can be resolved or at least ameliorated.  I detect an adapted version of Delsol’s Icarus Fallen argument that cultural libertarianism, like liberalism, is intent on trying to eliminate structural realities and burdens in our earthly life that cannot–and more to the point should not–be eliminated.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that cultural libertarianism simply seeks to avoid or ignore these realities.  We cannot escape these realities, and we can at best divert them into new and potentially more dangerous forms, which Delsol dubs black markets.

What do Ken Adelman, Chris Buckley and Boris Johnson have in common?  They have all offered fairly unpersuasive endorsements for Obama that are really just indictments of McCain’s (and Bush’s) failures.  The Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden reasonably enough calls the Lord Mayor’s endorsement “silly,” but it seems to me that this may be the great Obamacon strength.  For months I have been railing against Obamacons with arguments that Obama is not who they think he is, that he is going to disappoint them, that his foreign policy and national security views are in most respects indistinguishable from the mainstream GOP that they dislike, which has made the crucial and fatal mistake of taking seriously their position as a pro-Obama position.  I kept saying, “The only conservative argument for Obama is that he is not McCain,” but I failed to see the implications of my own observation.  Conservative endorsements of Obama must necessarily be rather silly, because these endorsements have never been statements about Obama’s readiness but have been pointed statements about how unfit for the Presidency McCain is.  The endorser has to go through the motions of saying something positive about Obama, and so he says things that do not sound very compelling, because Obama is almost beside the point.  It is the act of endorsing Obama, or rather refusing to endorse McCain, that matters.  The sillier, the less persuasive the endorsement is, the more powerful its ridicule of McCain.  It is as if to say, “I can’t think of any really good reasons to vote for this other candidate, but you are an absolute joke and so I am compelled to go with your opponent and I will come up with some pretext for it before Election Day.”  Obamacons cannot be defeated or refuted by their critics because their arguments have never needed to make sense; all that has been required is that they find some way to not support McCain, and very few people are going to fault them for that.

Well, day one, you bring in everyone around that table, too, you bring in the congressional leadership, and, assuming that there will be, certainly, Democrats, at that table, that’s good, too, these are gonna be bipartisan approaches that must be taken, I have that executive experience also having formed a cabinet up there in Alaska that, you know, we’ve got independents and Democrats and Republicans whom I have appointed to our administrative positions to that, we have the best of ideas coming together in order to best serve the people. John McCain, too, he’s been known as the maverick to take on his own party when need be, to reach over the aisle and work with the other party also. Now, Barack Obama has not been able to do that, he’s gone with, what is it, 96 percent of the time with Democrat leadership. Not having that, I think, ability or willingness to work with the other side. So as an executive, we need to create that team that is full of good ideas and not let obsessive partisanship get in the way, as we start taking the measures to shore up our economy, which already Congress is working on with the rescue package, with some of the bailout packages, the provisions in there that can work, too, but it’s gonna take everybody working together. ~Sarah Palin

Got all that?  You need to have the people with the good ideas who will work with others–good call!  She is also in favor of some bailouts, but not those crazy Democratic bailouts:

But now that we’re hearing that the Democrats want an additional stimulus package or bailout package for what, hundreds of billions of dollars more, this is not a time to use the economic crisis as an excuse for reckless spending and for greater, bigger government and to move the private sector to the back burner and let government be assumed to be the be-all, end-all solution to the economic challenges that we have. That’s what’s scaring me now about hearing that the Democrats have an even greater economic bailout package, but we don’t know all the details of it yet and we’ll certainly pay close attention to it.

Yes, this crisis is not something to be used to promote bigger government!  Drawing a line in the sand!  Oh, wait:

Now, as for the economic bailout provisions and the measures that have already been taken, it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in playing an appropriate role to shore up the housing market to make sure that we’re thawing out some of the potentially frozen credit lines and credit markets, government did have to step in there.

Following up on an earlier question that misrepresented an NR article about Palin, Palin offered this remark:

You have that, that combination and I think that some in the media,maybe in The National Review [bold mine-DL], they don’t know what to make of that, they’re like, gee, she’s, you know, where’d she come from, surely, you know, it should be our job I think they assume is to, pick and, and be negative and, and find things to mock and, that’s just I guess part of the political game, I guess.

Not that we should expect Palin to know that some of her most die-hard, adoring fans are at National Review (that would require her either to read NR or be briefed about it at some point), but this exchange is a useful example of a pattern in Palin’s answers that doesn’t get mentioned all that often.  She will latch on to a certain phrase or a detail in something the questioner says and she will use it to elaborate on her response, even though in doing so it underscores how generic and largely meaningless her answer is.  Having been prompted to talk about something in The National Review, as the interviewer made a point of calling it, she came back to it later to fill out another answer, and unintentionally lumped in some of her strongest apologists with her worst critics.  It has ceased being funny and has just become sad.

Palin said later:

Thankfully, too, the American public is seeing clearer and clearer what the choices are in these tickets.

You betcha!

Having complained about the “ruralist” takeover of the Republican Party, Helen Rittelmeyer is not someone you would not immediately with praising “red state” culture, but then the way that she goes about it almost makes you wonder whether she is delivering a left-handed compliment in her response to this:

Let’s put aside the question of whether or not New Yorkers really question their moral assumptions (although if someone else wanted to take up this line of argument, I wouldn’t stop them) and simply look at the end result of this Blue State skepticism. Most of the time, it’s some variation on the harm principle under which the most important ethical question becomes “Does it increase everyone’s happiness?” What could be less sophisticated?

Contrast this with the moral decision-making of a Red Stater who has unquestioningly accepted a truckload of inherited traditions (the clod!). He has to weigh love of country against love for his brother serving in Iraq, not to mention Christian morality, which has a thing or two to say about war. Or he might have to consider family loyalty versus the desire to do something about his sister’s alcoholism. Or loyalty to his wife versus passionate love for another woman. Cheating songs are a sign of moral sophistication (insofar as they take seriously both the sacred vow and true love), and I dare you to name one Blue State genre of music that can boast as many cheating songs as country [bold mine-DL].

Moral philosophy is hard. If every ethical question could be boiled down to some hedonistic or utilitarian calculus (I’m looking at you, cultural libertarianism), it would be easy. Maybe Red Staters don’t respect Socrates as much as they should, but that doesn’t change the fact that, in a world where urbanity is synonymous with cultural liberalism, they’re the only side of the culture war that needs him.

If I read this right, Ms. Rittelmeyer is saying that it is lack of utilitarianism, competing obligations and an abundance of temptation that confer moral sophistication.  She has taken the social disorder and family instability that drives many lower-middle class people in “red states” towards the politics of order and stability and turned it into a kind of complex moral reasoning.  For the sake argument, assume that New Yorkers, Angelenos and Chicagoans and the rest do not question their moral assumptions–how many people ever really question their moral assumptions?  Having cross-cutting obligations and complicated relationships is not the same as reflecting upon the nature of justice and knowing oneself.  If it was absurd to say that an unexamined life was worth living, as the “red state” correspondent claimed, it is perhaps even more absurd to say that a complicated life full of conflicts is one that has been examined.  It is also not clear that all “blue staters” are simply utilitarians, but almost certainly have their own sets of conflicting obligations and their own “truckload of inherited traditions,” which may include utilitarian ethics and liberal politics.  Consider: she says that “red staters” have unquestioningly inherited their traditions, but she says this by way of illustrating how unquestioning “blue staters” are, so which is it?           

On the music question, I am no expert but it seems to me that hip-hop and R&B must have a large number of songs that address the question of infidelity, and if they do not compare to country songs in this respect they are probably close.  Are these “blue state” genres?  I am not sure that they are, since you can find listeners for them all along the old Route 66 corridor, but they seem to fit the bill.  Turning to film, we can find cautionary tales about infidelity set in metropolitan areas in the oeuvre of Michael Douglas, and I think if you turn to television you will find other forms of entertainment that have great fun mucking about in the swamp of moral turpitude and conflicting obligations (e.g., Nip/Tuck, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, etc.).  If these are the criteria for a culture that prizes self-knowledge, “blue” America is likely to meet them as well as “red,” but I think all of this misses something important. 

Worldliness and competing loyalties do not define moral sophistication, but simply define our condition in this world that all of us share.  Whatever moral sophistication we are going to find, it is not going to be found in questioning assumptions but in fulfilling our obligations.

Currently, 49% of voters express an unfavorable opinion of Palin, while 44% have a favorable view. In mid-September, favorable opinions of Palin outnumbered negative ones by 54% to 32%. Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 60% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% in mid-September [bold mine-DL]. ~Pew

The very high unfavorables among women do not surprise me that much.  From the beginning women have tended to be less favorably inclined to Palin than men, and Palin has done more than enough in the last two months to intensify that negative reaction.  Meanwhile, the overall Obama lead of 14 (among likely voters, mind you) is approximately at least twice of what the normal lead in the Pew poll has been all year and represents an increase of seven points among LVs since last week.

Joe Carter discusses the divide between “Joe Sixpacks” and “elites.”  He made this observation, which I think does get at the heart of the problem:

Consider foreign policy. For the JSPs, the opinion of a twenty-something Army Sergeant who just got back from patrolling the streets of Baghdad carries more weight than the twenty-something Harvard grad who writes for The American Prospect or The Weekly Standard.

That’s right, which doesn’t say much for the “JSP” perspective in this case.  The “elites” in this case are trying to have broader perspective and are attempting to think strategically and not tactically.  That is, they are attempting to make arguments about policy.  They may be good arguments, they may be terrible, but they are arguments that are necessarily more abstract and also wider in focus.  The danger of abstraction is that it can lead to utopian programs or theoretical constructs that bear no relationship to the real world, which result in destructive and coercive policies (see Iraq, war in).  Abstraction is unavoidable, however, if we are going to be able to think about large-scale problems in a coherent way.  

Unless we’re discussing the tactical situation in Baghdad or Iraq as a whole, it’s not at all clear that the opinion of the sergeant is necessarily more useful or valid when determining what our Iraq policy ought to be.  The two don’t have to be in opposition, and ought to be complementary.  There’s no question that people with first-hand experience of a war zone have extensive practical knowledge and understand the way things really are, at least in the areas where they’ve been, so they have knowledge that others do not have and cannot readily acquire.  There is no guarantee, however, that this perspective is a better basis for setting policy.  Policymakers, journalists and pundits cannot and must not be oblivious to that first-hand experience, but that experience cannot be the only or main basis for policymaking and debate. 

Ideally, “elites” are supposed to have some historical perspective and understanding of geopolitical realities concerning the place in question.  One of the great problems with most of our “elites” is that they are often scarcely better acquainted with history or international politics than the average American, and often what they do know comes from cookie-cutter progressive interpretations that celebrate freedom’s triumphal march through time.  So they are reduced to relying on oversimplified interpretations of the history of a conflict and what Kennan correctly diagnosed as the moralistic-legalistic impulse.  These simplified, moralistic interpretations are the bane of sound foreign policy, but our “elites” have them in abundance. 

The war in Georgia stands out as a good example of how “elite” foreign policy consensus relied on such an interpretation when it determined that Russia was the “aggressor” or, if there was some recognition of the Georgian role in escalating the conflict, there was at least the certainty that U.S. policy towards Georgia should not change in the slightest.  Common sense would come in very handy as a check on “elite” pretensions in this case (common sense would make us ask why it matters to us whether Russia wields influence in the north Caucasus), but, of course, the public is even more readily misled about conflicts in obscure parts of the world about which they know little or nothing.  If we have bad “elites,” we don’t seem to have enough citizens capable of recognizing and articulating why they are bad, and so instead we get generalized rhetoric against any and all “elites.”  The “JSPs” would have a point if they were to say that many “elites” don’t know nearly as much about the rest of the world as they claim to know, but for them to make this critique they would need to know enough about the rest of the world to recognize how paltry “elite” knowledge often can be.    

Honestly, it seems to me that “JSPs” would be even more inclined to regard someone who went to a Great Books liberal arts college such as St. John’s, several of whose graduates I have known over the years, as having received an utterly impractical and “useless” education, even if it is one more grounded in classics of the Western canon than the education offered at certain elite universities.  In a strict sense, as a way to train for a job a St. John’s education is rather impractical, but then those who go to St. John’s assume that education is a matter of cultivating and enriching the mind and honing the ability to think and make arguments rather than providing job training.  If we were to include St. John’s alumni among the Joe Sixpacks of the world, I think that we are defining “elite” extremely narrowly, but perhaps Mr. Carter does not mean to imply this.

Carter continues:

The JSPs don’t believe that the guy from Harvard is any smarter — or, for that matter, better educated — than someone who went to State U.

This is a healthy skeptical view, but it can be taken too far.  It is really the question of the quality of the education that matters most.  On average, as these things are measured, students who attend elite universities do tend to be smarter, but that does not necessarily tell you anything about the quality of education or the quality of the graduates.  Neither does it guarantee at all that the ideas held by these graduates are good ones.  Capable students can come away from public universities or less-prestigious colleges with a better education, and university prestige can be used to exaggerate the quality of education on offer, but to some extent if JSPs believe that there are no qualitative differences between all of the students of different kinds of universities they are indulging a sentimental egalitarianism.

Rasmussen’s latest Virginia poll should put an end to any doubts about the outcome we are going to see in a couple of weeks.  Obama has a 10-point overall lead in the Old Dominion, which has not voted Democratic for President since 1964.  Pfotenhauer’s “real” Virginia is getting smaller all the time.  His Democratic support in the state has always been much stronger than it has been in some of the old Border states, but now it is at an enviable 96%.  More important, he leads among independents by 16.  He enjoys a large advantage in fav ratings (64%) over McCain (53%) among independents.  Obama is winning men by three and women by 15.  He barely edges out McCain among married respondents, but then racks up a 39-point lead among singles.  Perhaps we should call it the non-marriage gap instead.  

Even 11% of Republicans and 19% of conservatives back Obama.  Perhaps Ken Adelman (yes, that Ken Adelman) speaks for some of them:

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

What is most telling about this sizeable lead in Virginia is that Obama does not need Virginia to win.  So long as he takes Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico and holds the Kerry states, he could lose every other toss-up state and still prevail.  McCain must come back, in some cases very dramatically, in all of them.  McCain’s task is virtually impossible.  Perhaps the campaign knows and accepts this, which is why Palin was on SNL over the weekend being made to serve as something of a prop in her own mocking. 

Obviously, if the voting nationwide is anything like this we can expect a result similar to that of ’96.  I will readily admit that I didn’t think this would happen as recently as six weeks ago, and kept expecting Obama to implode or lose ground, and in this I was quite wrong. 

Update: CNN reports that McCain is giving up on Colorado, and New Mexico and Iowa are essentially out of reach.  The campaign’s focus on Pennsylvania is, it seems to me, not nearly enough in light of the numbers from Virginia and Missouri.  Even if they could win it, which seems unlikely, Pennsylvania wouldn’t get them enough votes on its own unless they could hold all of the toss-ups.

Speaking of people who probably cannot understand Powell’s endorsement, Ralph Peters offers us this gem:

Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror.

Projected it to whom?  When was all this pandering?  What has he actually done that would lead any observer–even one who wrongly defines opposition to illegal surveillance powers as evidence of “weakness”–to come to this conclusion?  Peters continues:

The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan – and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.

Suppose that the Pakistanis do think this.  Maybe some of them do.  Why would they think this, and more important why should Americans assume that this is the correct reading?  There are two unstated assumptions in this claim: 1) that McCain or someone pursuing an alternative course of action would not lose Afghanistan, meaning that this would only happen on Obama’s watch, and 2) that Obama’s position on Afghanistan/Pakistan is somehow not as equally hawkish as the current administration’s.  Arguably, this more hawkish position might very well lead to disaster in Pakistan or end up undermining the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but if that is the case our current policy is equally misguided and yet comes in for no criticism.

He goes on:

In the Middle East, Obama’s election would be read as the end of staunch US support for Israel.

Maybe, if everyone in the region is as clueless as Obama’s domestic critics (this would be difficult), but why exactly would that be the case?  Again, what has Obama said or done that would give anyone this impression?  This is the flip side of the equally implausible “Obama’s election will cause Muslims everywhere to love the U.S. government”–a view foolishly promoted by his own supporters–and it is no more likely to be proven correct.  Both misreadings rely on the idea that Middle Eastern governments and publics base their hostility/lack of hostility to the United States on superficial, symbolic things rather than actual U.S. policies.  If only we change the appearance or the name of the President, everyone will respond accordingly!  This is completely and in all ways wrong.

Peters prophesies some more:

Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel.

Perhaps, perhaps not.  If this happens, Obama will support Israel just as full-throatedly and unequivocally as he did in 2006 during the last war.  Who knows–he could very well back Israeli actions with direct U.S. military support, depending on the circumstances.  It is amazing to me that virtually no one in either party ever talks about Obama’s support for Israeli actions in the Second Lebanon War.  He was not alone in this, of course, as this was the default, almost universal position for members of Congress, but there is no question that it was his position.  I suppose it is more convenient for certain antiwar progressives and Obama’s Republican critics alike to ignore this evidence that their hopes/fears concerning Obama are false.

Peters keeps hallucinating:

Russia’s new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided.

This is highly unlikely to happen.  Unlike the short, swift incursion into Georgia, “gobbling up” Ukraine or even lending support to Crimean separatists would be a much larger, riskier and potentially more disastrous proposition for Russia.  Give Peters propaganda points for denouncing Timoshenko, once the socialist beehive-bedooed hero of American interventionists everywhere when she was on the Orange Revolution bandwagon, for charting a moderately less anti-Moscow path.  More to the point, were this to happen, there is every reason to think that Obama and Joe “Expand NATO to the Pacific” Biden would respond to it just as counterproductively than Mr. Bush would were he still in office.  How’s that for a vote of confidence? 

Peters continues:

Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country’s hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he’ll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism.

Well, I suppose he will, and he will keep failing as he has been failing for the last several years.  Meanwhile, Chavez’s own weakness at home makes him increasingly irrelevant. 

This one takes the cake for its silliness:

Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country’s dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.

The Bolivian government is a democratic government in all its demagogic socialist glory.  What Peters is accusing Obama of doing before the fact is failing to intervene against the democratically-elected government of Bolivia (to use the phrasing that pan-Kartvelian pundits prefer) in the domestic political affairs of an extremely poor, strategically insignificant country.  In other words, he says that Obama will be a responsible President who won’t waste American resources on sideshow internal conflicts where U.S. interests are scarcely involved.  Peters really has him on the ropes now!

Peters just keeps on making things up (why stop at this point?):

An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies [the Kurds] between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.

Abandon them to whom?  What is he talking about?  Incidentally, I wonder what the Indians think of being written off as less than a true ally of the United States.  I guess that nuclear deal was all a figment of our collective imagination. 

Peters again:

Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression – and outright murder – of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.

And how that would be a change from how things are now exactly?  On the contrary, if Obama is even remotely serious in what he was saying about Burma and Zimbabwe in his Berlin speech we should be more concerned that Obama will start doing all kinds of things in this area and adding to our already excessively long list of commitments.

Obviously, there is no substance to Peters’ criticisms of Obama, but what is worrisome is that Obama, already perfectly hawkish and interventionist on his own, will feel compelled to take even harder lines and be even more confrontational than he would otherwise be in order to demonstrate that he is not the weak, accommodating President that Peters et al. are making him out to be.  Having learned nothing from the Bush years, these critics may box Obama in and lead him to take positions that are more aggressive even than those of Mr. Bush to secure his “credibility” on national security.  If Obama simply ignores these critics and pulls back from more hard-line stances when appropriate, then he may still be wrong on many things but he will have earned some genuine credibility.

The Powell endorsement isn’t all that surprising, and like most endorsements it will have no meaningful electoral effect (especially in an election that is almost certainly over), but it is worth considering for what it says about Obama, Powell and the GOP’s encouragement of media adulation over Powell over the years.  As James says, Powell is actually a very conventional figure, and he is also very much an establishmentarian.  Even in his call for a “transformational figure,” he is expressing an establishmentarian hope not so much of transformation but of restoration of establishment credibility. Obama is consensus-oriented and accommodating enough to entrenched interests that he offers the best chance of repairing some of the damage that national political institutions and officials, including Powell himself, have done.  If Obama represents the “sanctification of the status quo,” Powell is one of many establishment figures hoping to participate in that so-called sanctification.   

Powell is a good representative of the moderate-to-liberal Republican Obama voter, and almost the only thing in terms of policy separating him from the Gilchrests and Chafees is that he was a prominent war supporter.  That’s a very significant difference, but it is much more muted now.  Otherwise, he fits the profile of a moderate Republican foreign policy “realist” pushed away by the aggressive posture of McCain and his advisors and the social moderate alienated by social conservatism and vulgar Americanism.  Many of the same social issues that mobilize most rank-and-file conservatives and which acquired such importance in the presentation of Palin as VP nominee are the very issues that have always made Powell an odd fit with the modern GOP and were at the heart of intra-conservative strife over his possible (but never terribly likely) ’96 run.  So long as Powell stayed out of domestic politics, the GOP encouraged the media’s creation of Powell as the personification of officially approved, “respectable” Republicanism.  For his admirers in the press, Powell was Giuliani without the authoritarian impulses and cruelty; for many conservatives, Powell and, at least until this decade, his Doctrine were examples of the GOP’s credibility on national security. 

Now one of their military media darlings has abandoned their other military media darling at the last moment, simultaneously endorsing the (mostly accurate) narrative of a GOP consumed by triviality and bitterness and implying that the party has ceased to be credible on national security, so Republicans are understandably annoyed.  That Powell himself was instrumental in making the GOP less credible on national security is conveniently ignored by all sides.  Indeed, one might wonder why Obama would want an endorsement from Powell, who receives the same kind of curious treatment that McCain has received for most of his career until very recently: yes, he misled the public at a crucial time, and it’s true that he failed to voice the doubts about the war that he had strongly enough, but what really matters is that he had doubts.  Just as McCain’s discomfort telling the whoppers that he nonetheless goes on telling proves that he is somehow a great leader, Powell’s private, unexpressed doubts that might have helped avoid calamity if they had been expressed absolve him of everything he did.     

One reason why some Republicans are insisting that the endorsement was primarily a matter of racial solidarity is that it helps to avoid Powell’s critiques of the campaign and of the party, even when those critiques might be refuted.  It is easier and therefore better at this point in the campaign to dismiss it by saying, “Race is all that matters here.”  It might be that for some Republicans it is genuinely inconceivable that a retired general and former diplomat would throw his support to Obama, as these are the same people who have tried to make Obama out to be a neo-McGovernite peacenik, but it should probably tell them something about where they have gone wrong that Obama keeps racking up such endorsements.  Having invested so much in Obama-as-radical-maniac, Republicans are missing the temperamental similarities between Obama and Powell.  Likewise, Obama’s admirers are probably consciously ignoring those same similarities to the extent that they imply that Obama, like Powell, will go along with prevailing wisdom and establishment consensus, because that is not what they expect from Obama.  Republicans also seem to think that the phrase, “the Surge is working! the Surge is working!” is a mantra straight out of Oz that will magically transport them back to the salad days of 2002, so they remain baffled by the idea that Obama’s fairly modest withdrawal plan might be appealing to someone like Powell.  The inability, or the simple refusal, to admit that the Iraq war was a costly, disastrous mistake has been dragging down the GOP for the last three years, so there’s no reason anything would change now.   

Domestically, there’s nothing remarkable about Powell’s opposition to more conservative justices on the Court–on several of the litmus test questions, Powell does not agree and never has agreed with conservative concerns.  This is not of the same kind as the pro-lifer’s negative argument for not backing McCain (he might not appoint conservative justices and wouldn’t be able to get them confirmed by a Democratic majority Senate even if he did).  This is an expression of a genuine preference for the sort of appointments that Obama would make.  Again, this sounds unbelievable to many on the right, who conclude that Powell couldn’t possibly believe that, as if it were impossible for a social moderate to find the preoccupation with overturning Roe to be unsatisfying.  Of course, either anti-McCain pro-lifers are right or Powell is, since part of his resistance to McCain is premised on the assumption that conservative justices are guaranteed after a McCain victory.