While I will be watching and probably liveblogging the dreary duo tonight, John Schwenkler will be reporting on Barr’s para-debate event, which is happening at good old CNU.  I remember Christopher Newport mainly as the host of one of our cross country meets back in college, and I recall that their course was very flat, which I very much appreciated at the time.  Now it is time to begin girding myself for the third and final trial of the nation’s patience.

Heather Mac Donald and Laura Ingraham go around and around over Palin after the publication of Mac Donald’s anti-Palin article.  Mac Donald stresses Palin’s lack of qualifications and her thin record, and Ingraham comes back again and again to Obama.  This is a strange response, but it is a very common one.  There is an assumption that if the media are treating candidates by different standards, conservatives should actively lower theirs for their candidates to compensate.  If Biden makes gaffes or false statements and these go unreported, conservatives must pretend not to notice when Palin makes super-gaffes or spouts utter nonsense.  If Obama has not held executive office, that somehow makes Palin’s less-than-stellar performance in executive office, her apparent abuse of power and concerted efforts to evade transparency rules perfectly fine.  At least she ran something, these people say!  Don’t pay close attention to how she ran it, mind you, but at least she made decisions!  

Should you notice any of these things despite people constantly shouting, “Yeah, but Obama…,” you must not think about them much, and if you must think about them it is absolutely out of the question to speak publicly about them.  The people who wanted to berate Obama for his tendency to pause and think during debate or interview answers–Sen. Harvard needs a TelePrompter, they would laugh–embarrass themselves with elaborate excuse-making for why Palin frequently makes no sense or repeats canned answers that may or may not be related to the question asked.  Gone are the days when they would spread the rumor that Palin winged her entire nomination speech from memory, and now you can almost hear them saying, “For the love, get this woman to a TelePrompter!”  We have heard more about malicious interview editing, “gotcha” journalism and “speaking over the heads of the media” in the last month than we have probably heard in the last two years, and all of it to cover up for the fact that Palin doesn’t answer questions, especially follow-up questions, well.  As everyone has already noted many times, the person sent out to ask who Obama is has never held a press conference since her nomination; accountability for thee, not for me, she says.  Instead of paying attention to excellence and merit, as Mac Donald urges, Palinites want to avoid measuring her against high standards because they know she will fall short, and the best they can say in response is that they think Obama is worse.        

Despite knowing very little about her political philosophy, you hear Ingraham affirming her support for Palin on the grounds that Palin’s philosophy is similar to her own.  In fact, the number of subjects on which we have any evidence for her independent, pre-nomination views is incredibly small, and what we do know is not necessarily encouraging.  To the extent that we know her views on anything since her nomination, she has predictably aligned herself with McCain, whom we are repeatedly told by many party loyalists is not very good in conservative eyes on a number of issues.  In other words, to the extent that anyone knows anything about Palin’s views, much of it is simply a reflection of McCain’s views being fed to her, but her views are supposedly what endear her to her supporters.  Despite a record that would not compare favorably with many other Republican governors who have been derided as friends of big government, as I have statedseveral times to the complete indifference of her admirers who claim to care so much about her record, her record as governor has been invoked countless times–and Ingraham invokes it again–as proof of something.   

I mention all of this by way of getting to Patrick Ruffini’s complaint that “the conservative establishment” has betrayed movement conservatives in their criticism of Palin.  Oh, the betrayal!  Ruffini writes:

In this charged environment, there is almost irressistible movement-conservative temptation to raise the figurative middle finger to anyone or anything associated with establishment Republicanism — one which gave us runaway spending, a $700 billion bailout that preceeded an 18% stock market swoon, and bank nationalization….

Now, zoom back in on the Palin situation. In the midst of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, conservative establishment pundits appear to blame John McCain’s inability to seal the deal not on the misfortune of being the candidate of the in-party of his thin track record on economic matters or his jarring response to the crisis, but on a hockey mom from Alaska.

Ruffini isn’t resisting that temptation.  Now here’s the thing: Palin is now directly associated with establishment Republicanism.  As you may have heard, she is John McCain’s running mate.  McCain backed the bailout that Ruffini rightly hates, and his mortgage-bailout-in-every-pot scheme makes Paulson’s partial nationalization move look like weak-kneed gradualism on the road to the lenders’ paradise.  Palin works for McCain.  Think about that.  She is one of the people mostly closely associated with establishment Republicanism, because she is the foremost public ally and backer of the consummate insider, establishment Republican.  Furthermore, one of the likely reasons for McCain’s jarring response to the financial crisis–the suspension/cancel the debate/go to the debate soap opera–was to distract attention from his running mate’s disastrous interview.  Finally, and this is really the most important part, the selection of Palin itself was a foreshadowing to how McCain would respond to the crisis, because it was typical of his seat-of-the-pants, stunt-oriented style of planning and preparation.  Palin herself is not, or is no longer, the biggest drag on the ticket, but the selection of her is indicative of the serious flaws in the McCain campaign and in McCain as a candidate that have dragged him down (and dragged her down along with him). 

Ah, but Ruffini will tell you that she is part of “the grassroots conservative / outsider / Mark Levin circle,” which is roughly as credible as her story about telling Congress no thanks to a certain bridge.  Of course, criticism of McCain for his blunders has been plentiful on the right from the same treacherous pundits who also dared to criticize Palin (Will’s crack about McCain’s characteristic substitution of vehemence for coherence was a particularly good line).  They can see McCain’s flaws just as well as Palin’s, and they don’t think it is their task to stay quiet and pretend that everything is fine or tie themselves in knots making ridiculous justifications for poor performance.  Indeed, what movement conservatives ought to find so annoying about these establishment pundits who are now becoming critical of McCain/Palin is that they did not speak up earlier and more forcefully when Mr. Bush was leading them all off a cliff with those “good instincts” they are always praising.  Instead, in perfect knee-jerk reflex mode, they will rally around Palin and make all the same mistakes.

I was critical of McCain when Ross, Brooks, and others were praising him. ~Mark Levin

The first part is certainly true, and I recall that Levin was among the most hostile critics of McCain at NRO, but this line of defense, echoed by some of the other targets of Ross’ criticism, is a rather odd one.  The argument goes something like this: “We never wanted McCain and thought he would be awful, but once he was the nominee we got behind him, while the people who argued for him or sympathized more with him are breaking with him or attacking him at this late stage.”  As a description of what has happened, this seems fair and largely accurate, though I am taxing my memory trying to come up with any occasions when Ross heaped praise on McCain.  I was in the same room at CPAC when I believe he said that he would vote for him, but that was about the extent of the “praise” I have heard from him. 

What is odd about Levin’s defense is that you would think that the most vocal anti-McCain critics would be feeling vindicated by the man’s shambolic campaign, while you might expect various “reformist” conservatives to make Gerson-like excuses for him (the short version of which is that McCain had to cope with reality and was overwhelmed).  Here is why, on the whole, the reverse is happening: McCain’s mainstream conservative critics never expected anything good from him in terms of policy, and have rallied to him primarily to stop Obama and so they seem most intent on encouraging the campaign to obsess about Obama’s character and associations.  Meanwhile the “reformists” held out some hope that McCain’s reform mantra would turn into a coherent policy message that would address present challenges, and they are therefore annoyed or perhaps even embarrassed by the triviality and aimlessness of the campaign.  The “reformists” are much more likely to hold McCain responsible for squandering what they saw as a real opportunity, while his long-time critics had no illusions about McCain and cannot be disappointed in him.  Regardless, they are preoccupied with vilifying informing voters about Obama. 

In the end, McCain confirmed many of his own critics’ arguments with his message-free, incoherent, largely negative campaign, but he is doomed to disappoint them as well because he will never be willing to go quite as far as they want him to in attacking Obama.  If former admirers have turned to criticism or even decided to back his opponent, this is a measure of how badly McCain has failed, even if their expectations of him were far too high.  He has alienated some of the people who are normally most sympathetic to him and his kind of Republicanism and he has been winning the half-hearted support of those who never wanted him and who tolerate him only because it is necessary.

In recent days, I have been more sanguine about the partial nationalization proposal, considering it to be a somewhat improved approach given that the awful legislation has passed anyway, but Jeffrey Miron outlines why I should not have been:

Government injection of cash, however, does little to improve transparency. A bank with complicated, depreciated assets is in much the same position after the government gives it cash as it was before, since outside investors will still have limited information about the solvency of any individual bank.

Perhaps the new cash will spur the sale of bad assets, or nudge banks to reveal their balance sheets, but that is far from obvious. Banks, moreover, might remain cautious even with this increased liquidity simply because of uncertainty about the economy. Thus it is hard to know whether cash injections will actually spur bank lending.

In any event, government ownership of banks has frightening long-term implications, whether or not it alleviates the credit crunch.

Government ownership means that political forces will determine who wins and who loses in the banking sector. The government, for example, will push banks to aid borrowers with poor credit histories, to subsidize politically connected industries, and to lend in the districts of powerful members of Congress. All of this is horrible for economic efficiency.

Government pressure will be difficult for banks to resist, since the government can both threaten to withdraw its ownership stake or promise further injections whenever it wants to modify bank behavior. Banks will respond by accommodating government objectives in exchange for continued financial support. This is crony capitalism, pure and simple.

So my basic objections to concentration of power and collusion remain much what they were before.  I would not go so far as Miron in advocating a purely do-nothing approach, but on reflection it is clear this implementation necessarily has the flaws that made the bailout so objectionable.  Yves Smith has more on how Paulson delivered the staged ultimatum–that seems the best description for it–to the nine CEOs, and in another post she confirms that, despite the government’s claims that the banks must start lending this money, they are not going to be required to do anything with it.  As Smith explains, this was more of the administration’s corner-cutting, incompetence and outrageous power-grabbing at its finest: 

To make the point more clearly: the public at large was taken not just once, but twice, It was hosed in the unduly generous terms given to nine banks (the lack of writedown of assets to realistic values, the failure to wipe out current equity holders and subject debt holders to a haircut, the merely symbolic limits on executive pay). But it also got a less obvious shellacking in the way legal and regulatory processes were trampled. Given the Treasury and Fed’s combined banking authority, and the dubious valuations of many types of assets on these firms’ books, the powers that be could easily have compelled any bank to accept a much less favorable deal, or frankly any deal they wanted them to take. And it would not have taken all that much additional effort (although it might have taken some planning, which is a persistent shortcoming of this Administration). 

But Paulson instead went through a bizarre, public exercise in sham corecion (and real sidestepping of even minimal normal forms) so as to avoid a candid discussion of how lousy the banks’ balance sheets really were. And the ruse, like the TARP itself, was another demonstration that the Treasury considers itself to be outside the law.

Equally, “constructing” a “narrative” of Obama as a “lightweight celebrity” was a strategy that depended upon Obama showing himself to be nothing more than a lightweight celebrity candidate. But what if he showed more than that? What would the McCain campaign do then? In other words, McCain’s strategy depended upon Obama failing, not McCain succeeding. As such it was vulnerable. Indeed, it was predicated upon an analysis that was not the GOP’s to control. ~Alex Massie

This is an important point.  There is a basic rule in any competition, and elections are no different.  If you assume that all you really need do is show up and wait for the other side to fail, you will lose and probably quite embarrassingly at that.  McCain never made the case for himself, because he assumed that he would be the default winner once the public decided Obama was unprepared.  Whether or not Obama is unprepared by some standards is not the point.  Relative to McCain, he has shown himself to be fairly masterful while his opponent blunders and lurches.  Despite having every advantage in the political conditions this year, Obama has not taken those advantages for granted nearly as much as he could have done.  The post-nomination pandering and position-switching, all of which now seems to have been quite unnecessary, were part of a steady, cautious effort to appear cautious and steady, which gave calls for undefined change a reassuring rather than an unsettling quality and negated McCain’s efforts to portray him as reckless and unready.       

What is striking about McCain’s failure is how irrational it was to approach an election this way amid conditions that everyone acknowledged to be very good for Democrats.  It might make sense to coast along on biography and belittling your opponent’s readiness and depth in a year when you have the wind at your back, a coherent message and a party label that is not radioactive, but McCain had none of these advantages.  Gordon Brown, a similarly doomed political figure, also likes the refrain “it’s no time for a novice” as a dig against Cameron, but after years of failure by the experienced politicians you would naturally think this is precisely the time for some new blood.  McCain supporters are always dwelling on Obama’s inexperience.  This would be fair enough, but we see now that it isn’t very smart, because each time this charge is made people are reminded that he hasn’t been in Washington very long, to which the ordinary sane response is to say, “Excellent.”   

As for being ambushed, as Gerson puts it, no one put a gun to McCain’s head and demanded that he talk senselessly about earmark reform and the “surge” for half of the campaign.  No one forced him to have no message beyond calls for generic reform against stereotypical corruption.  The lack of policy detail, indeed lack of policy knowledge, the ad hoc, day-by-day planning, the utter disorganization in the campaign, the obsession with scoring tactical victories, and the endless sanctimony, all of which have crippled the McCain campaign’s ability to communicate a consistent, clear argument for his candidacy and build a successful “ground game,” are all reflections of who McCain is.  Let’s also remember that if McCain had been allowed his true desire, he apparently would have chosen Lieberman as a running mate, which would have been the single greatest act of political self-immolation ever.  When choosing Sarah Palin is the smart, safe alternative, there is something fundamentally screwy in the candidate’s ability to make decisions. 

Perhaps most remarkable about the attempt to potray Obama as a lightweight celebrity is how true of McCain that description now seems to be.

P.S.  As Mr. Massie noted, playing not to lose had worked for McCain in the primaries against other Republicans, which I think ought to lead us to render a pretty harsh assessment of the weakness of the GOP primary field.  McCain has demonstrated over the last almost two years that his main qualities are persistence and an ability to surprise.  Had his most capable opponent, Huckabee, ever had any resources, McCain would have lost, and had Romney been even remotely credible he would have wiped the floor with McCain.  As it was, McCain managed to hold off Huckabee, whose campaign structure was not so much disorganized as non-existent, and just barely edged out Romney and his millions in Florida.  Once he had a politically talented, reasonably well-informed and well-funded candidate, as he would have had in either eventual Democratic nominee, the writing was on the wall and McCain was definitely found wanting.

Did McCain suddenly become [bold mine-DL] a stumbling failure? ~Michael Gerson

Not at all.  He didn’t become anything that he hadn’t been for the months and years that he was campaigning before mid-September.  There was no strange transmutation after the financial crisis broke into open view.  He had been what he recently showed himself to be–Gerson’s phrase of “stumbling failure” is pretty close to right–but most were too enamored, too deferential or too sympathetic to mention it.  Give McCain a break–there may be other things at which he would have excelled, and there might be things he does very well, but demonstrating political leadership in the clutch isn’t one of them.  It is probably true that there was no chance for McCain once the crisis began.  Difficult conditions for a representative of the incumbent party became simply impossible.  That doesn’t mean that McCain has not steadily, daily contributed to his own defeat, because he clearly has.  If his response to the war in Georgia alarmed many of us, his response to the financial crisis was simply horrifying for almost everyone.  We are constantly told by certain pundits, including Gerson, that this is still a center-right country, but at the same time Gerson wants us to think that it should be to McCain’s credit that he was merely tied with someone widely considered a left-liberal inexperienced novice.  This story doesn’t hold up.  If McCain’s admirers are right about Obama’s inexperience and the public’s doubts about his leadership, what does it say about McCain that he could barely close the gap with his convention bounce and almost immediately fell behind again?

Ross:

And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I’d be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back.

In fairness to the denouncers, there is a certain satisfaction in the knowledge, or at least the assumption, that you have held out despite everything and remained on board the ship to the very last.  I have had plenty to say against party loyalty, but there is a kind of mad integrity in the reflexive partisan who will back his party no matter how sorry or ridiculous the candidates and no matter how vapid the message.  It doesn’t make any sense, but then it’s not supposed to make sense.  Of course Ross is right that conservatives should be more interested in making converts than finding heretics.  The bit about finding heretics rather than making converts used to be the accusation conservatives hurled against the left, and it was always something of an exaggeration (there has long been something of a fortress mentality among conservatives that lets you forget that two-fifths of the public even now identify by that label), but now it has been completely reversed.  Perhaps this is simply what happens as coalitions fragment and political alignments are in flux, but it seems to me that this is not inevitable. 

For a long time, conservatives have been blinded by optimism, and I think many of them began to expect success to follow success.  In the future, many of his former supporters may look back at Bush’s re-election and see it as the greatest disaster to befall their cause in a generation, and not simply because he presided over so many debacles in his second term but because his winning re-election taught them to expect victory when there was no good reason to expect it.  In their expectation of success, conservatives have tended to become complacent, to congratulate one another and to preach to the crowd–this is the cocoon effect Ross has criticized before–and to react with bewilderment and disbelief to any setbacks.  Many conservatives have mistaken optimism, which masks weakness, for confidence, which reflects strength.  In politics as in everything else, confidence is attractive, while the arrogant presumption that comes from optimism commands deference only so long as you and your allies wield power.  Once you are dethroned, you cannot command much respect at all.  I think this is why the Republican ticket seems particularly sad this time around, because the nominees practice the sort of bluffing and blustering that once carried the field and now just seem exhausted.

What is instructive about all this is what it tells us about loyalty.  For the denouncers, loyalism ultimately seems to mean keeping your mouth shut, ignoring reality and not breaking ranks.  In another era, these would be the legitimists who would have defended the rights of an imbecile heir rather than a competent claimant on the throne.  What we see is that it is not loyalty that is being defended, but rather conformity.  The loyalist is bound by devotion, and the conformist by fear, usually fear of an enemy or opponent.  We see the former when people rally to a monarch or leader they genuinely admire, and we see the latter in support for a dictator as the lesser of two evils.

Seeing as how I didn’t think there was much to Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Obama, I can’t say much for his claim that he had offered a “reasoned argument for the opposition.”  This is not intended to knock Buckley.  As I have said time and again, I don’t think anyone on the right can make a satisfying, reasoned argument for backing Obama except that he isn’t the other guy, which is as true today as it ever was.  You can find legions who can make extremely compelling conservative anti-McCain arguments, but Buckley didn’t much of an anti-McCain case, either.  So this isn’t exactly a classic NR purge, but it seems to me that this would have been one of those moments when NR might have refused his resignation as unnecessary.  At the very least, it might have given that old refrain of “we’re conservatives, not Republicans” a bit more credibility. 

Then again, it’s understandable up to a point.  If you believe, as most NR contributors seem to believe, that Obama is absolutely unacceptable and tied to all sorts of villains, you might find a voting preference for Obama to be equally unacceptable.  One interesting thing that did jump out at me was Buckley’s references to the reader mail he received that talked of his “betrayal” of the conservative movement.  To which he has responded, more or less, “There’s a conservative movement?  Really?  Who are they?”  In his words:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.  

It is always interesting to me how the people who write these sorts of letters are moved to anger when this or that pundit voices a dissenting view because they are so concerned about treachery, but when the President or other leaders of their preferred party enact plainly anti-conservative policies they are not seen as having betrayed anything.  Even if there is some consistency in the responses, it is almost as if the so-called betrayal of the pundit or writer is considered to be just as bad as that of the politician, when the failures of the latter are usually far more consequential and more deserving of scorn than anything any one writer has to say.  I suppose the point is really this: on the day when Mr. Bush hands in his resignation letter and apologizes for his myriad failures, perhaps then people can talk seriously about Chris Buckley’s “betrayal” of the movement that helped empower Mr. Bush.

Turning to a very important subject, Peter Suderman discusses the vital cocktail party sell-out question:

The cocktail party criticism has never made much sense to me. For one thing, it misunderstands the nature of DC networking, which is based on prestige far more than on one’s particular political opinions. There may be a handful of exceptions, but in general, switching one’s view on a particular policy or candidate isn’t likely to get you a truckload of invites to swanky society soirees.

I must confess that I have made the remark in one or two conversations about fashionable drinks parties as a half-joking explanation for why some conservatives take the views they do, but I have admit that this is a silly thing to say (and it was silly when McCain said it of Palin’s conservative critics).  It is certainly the sort of thing that seems most plausible to those who spend the least time in Washington, and therefore sounds least credible when uttered by Washington politicians.  Almost as silly as the cocktail party criticism is the entire genre of Strange New Respect polemics that are to policy views what the “cocktail party” argument is to politics.  (Actually, they’re really two sides of the same coin.)  We are all familiar with the Strange New Respect idea, which is that such-and-such Republican or conservative does not espouse a dissenting view from the majority of his peers because he thinks this view is true, but rather because he receives praise from the other “side” and he becomes very keen to win applause from people with whom he otherwise has nothing in common.  The one case where this might be true is that of politicians, who have real incentives to engage in opportunistic breaks with their party to curry favor with media outlets, but once you move beyond elected officials the advantages of criticizing one’s own “side” are non-existent and the costs multiply quickly.  The pressure to conform is very strong, and this is confirmed by the existence of the Strange New Respect and “cocktail party” stigmas, which are some of the mechanisms for maintaining that conformity.  These methods are used to isolate dissenters by claiming, or simply hinting, that their integrity has been compromised and that their opinions should not be trusted. 

It also matters how you break with your party or political confreres.  No one makes these claims about Tom Tancredo or Ron Paul.