Via Conor, I see that Hunter Baker seems to have been drinking McCain’s favorite flavor:

If anyone in the senate has shown an ability to pass legislation, it is John McCain.

Though McCain is politically dead, the myth of McCain lives on.  As many observers noted during McCain’s self-important suspension, dropping in at the last minute to claim credit for legislation that had been hammered out by his colleagues is what McCain has done for most of his Senate career.  His “ability to pass legislation” is the ability to latch himself opportunisitcally onto major legislation as a co-sponsor, let others negotiate the specifics and then mug for the cameras after the bill passes.  It’s an ability of sorts, I grant you, but hardly one that should make us take his grandstanding over the bailout seriously.  This is what he tried (and failed) to do with the immigration legislation last year, provoking his memorable clash with Sen. Cornyn, and it is what he hoped to do with the bailout.

Then Baker gets really carried away:

Were we to have a hall of fame for senators, McCain would be in it on the basis of his accomplishments.

What accomplishments?  He has been a named co-sponsor for one high-profile bill that became law in the last eight years, but aside from McCain-Feingold, the (failed) McCain-Kennedy bill and the (failed) McCain-Lieberman bill can his admirers name all these accomplishments that rank him among the greatest Senators of all time?  I am doubtful.  Then again, who cares?  He’s got experience!  This is one of the things that has puzzled me the most about McCain backers who attack Obama for not having done anything in Washington–their candidate has been there six times as long and has scarcely accomplished much more.     

Baker asks:

Is it so strange for such a person to feel he needs to actually do his day job during a time of trouble?

What was stopping him from doing his job?  Was there anything that he ended up doing that he could not have done without declaring that he has suspended his campaign?  It was over a week and a half from the time Lehman declared bankruptcy until McCain’s “necessary” suspension and his antics about the presidential debate.  He didn’t feel compelled to do his day job until a few days before the first debate, at which point it became imperative.  The reasons seem clear: for the first week of the crisis, he was not yet sinking so dramatically in opinion polls and his running mate’s catastrophically bad interview had not yet aired.  Only as he saw his campaign unraveling did he decide he needed to jump-start it with another stunt, except that this time it didn’t work.

Conor comments on Pat Buchanan’s latest:

It’s hard for me to imagine paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives in the same party four years from now.

We’re in the same party?  That comes as news to me.  Of course, as I said the other day, it seems possible that neoconservatives will gravitate toward supporting an Obama administration that will prove to be every bit as activist and interventionist as Obama’s earliest policy addresses suggested that it would be.  Just as many Obamacons moved to Obama in the hopes of discrediting the neocons, they will probably be alienated from a President Obama who, while not advised by neoconservatives, nonetheless has many of the same objectives and has no intention of changing most U.S. policies abroad.  It might be difficult for some after having tried to portray Obama as a McGovernite, but they’ll manage.    Republican politicians, on the other hand, may become less eager to embark on foreign adventures and make new commitments around the world after having been burned by the fires of the “global democratic revolution” Mr. Bush tried to spark, so more paleocons may find the GOP barely tolerable once more if traditional realists enjoy a brief revival.  Without the steady tug of party/tribal loyalty, the GOP’s Jacksonians may rediscover hostility to needless deployments and unnecessary wars, which will, of course, evaporate the moment a future President from their own party declares an unnecessary war to be necessary.

P.S.  To help resolve Philip Klein’s puzzlement, the reason many so-called hostile critics of Israel “are looking forward to Obama’s policies in the Middle East” is one of the following: either they either don’t know what his policies are and are projecting their own desires onto him, or they know what his stated positions are and have gone into complete denial.  My guess is that most Obama backers who expect significant change in foreign policy are engaged in wishful thinking rather than willful denial, but it could be some of both.

An important part of the life of any tribe is its mythology, which is why self-described members of a political tribe are usually so keen to defend their myths from being debunked by skeptics.  Casting doubt on these myths is seen as something that only an outsider would do, so whenever a putative member of the tribe questions a certain myth he necessarily risks being considered as an outsider and being accordingly ostracized.  For example, Helen Rittelmeyer holds fast to the myth that the GOP is the more conservative party in the United States, for which there is vanishingly small evidence these days, and she finds Conor Friedersdorf’s lack of faith disturbing.  To the extent that membership in a political tribe is premised not on policy issues but on the acceptance of shared heroes and narratives, political tribalism requires a certain abdication of critical thought and an indifference to history.  The difficulties this creates for self-criticism and self-correction are obvious, but one of the reasons why political tribes insist on maintaining their myths is the same reason why any group does this, which is to give their allegiances greater meaning than they would otherwise possess.  Another reason why political myths are so powerful and enduring is that they help to justify past actions that cannot really be justified and to cover over present actions that need to be forgotten. 

Thus Lincoln “saved the Union,” when in reality he destroyed the Union and replaced it with something else, but the reality is too terrible and cannot be defended without endorsing a radicalism his admirers usually do not want to endorse.  WWI, which was a bloody catastrophe from beginning to end, was fought, according to the propagandists, for the rights of small nations and to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it actually resulted in the ruin of many small nations and had nothing to do with protecting democracy.  According to another popular myth, Reagan “won the Cold War,” the clearest example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in modern history.  Of course, those most interested to promote this myth are among those who most bitterly opposed Reagan’s engagement and negotiations with the Soviets at the time–to credit Reagan with this accomplishment is to align themselves with him despite their previous opposition and to appropriate him for their own purposes later on.  This is just one part of the Reagan myth, which has been built up and expanded over the last two decades as Americans on the right have become disgusted with Reagan’s heirs: they glorify Reagan in the past for much the same reason many glorify Palin today, which is their disgust with the last twenty years of Republican leadership.  They can find something admirable only in the past or in very new figures.  This is why I think there has been such powerful resistance to questioning the myth of Palin the champion of reform, because looking too closely at her record (or lack of a record) exposes the mythologizing for what it is.

Conor Friedersdorf notes the unseemly exploitation of terrorism for political purposes:

But the McCain campaign has exploited the fact that Bill Ayers was a terrorist to imply that their opponent is sympathetic to our enemies in the War on Terror, a campaign tactic so irresponsible that even GOP partisans should forcefully denounce it, and for a reason that hasn’t anything to do with fairness.
 

This is hardly the first time that we have seen critics of the “war on terror” and other government policies tarred as little more than traitors and enemies.  In his despicable article denouncing several paleoconservatives and other antiwar figures, Frum memorably said:

Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business.

This surrender-to-the-enemy meme has been entirely false, which doesn’t stop these people from repeating it time after time.  The people who make these charges seem to believe them, however, and they justify themselves by defining whatever policies they don’t support as appeasement or the equivalent of surrender.  By definition, disagreeing with them becomes proof of wanting to surrender, no matter how irresponsible and genuinely damaging to the national interest the policies they advocate may be.  Having framed their opponents as no better than abettors of the enemy, they are then bewildered when someone says that they have questioned anyone’s patriotism. 

When Romney suspended his campaign in February, he said that he was doing it to avoid facilitating surrender to terrorism, which, it almost went without saying, he believed would be the result of a Democratic victory.  This has been a consistent theme of pro-war arguments for the last two years once large numbers of people began seriously considering withdrawal from Iraq as a viable alternative.  During this long campaign, Obama’s critics have repeatedly pushed the idea that he is somehow sympathetic to anti-Israel terrorists, and some on the right have dwelled on the so-called Hamas “endorsement” as if it meant something.  In the earlier version of the association game, Obama’s critics obsessed about peripheral advisors’ views on Israel.  Before we heard about Obama as the “pal of terrorists,” we were lectured frequently about how significant and terrible it was that Robert Malley had a small, informal role in the campaign, which simply had to mean that Obama favored talking to Hamas despite his stated opposition to this very thing.      

So talk of Obama “palling around with terrorists” is not exactly a new attack, nor is it a function of a flailing, losing campaign.Unfortunately, this is all rather commonplace.  Palin has misrepresented Obama’s views about tactics in the Afghan war in an effort to portray Obama as reflexively anti-military and, by extension, more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own soldiers.  She has shown that she regards the problem of civilian casualties from allied airstrikes in Afghanistan to be unimportant, even though these airstrikes have gradually been undermining local support for the NATO mission and have prompted public apologies from no less than the Secretary of Defense.  Just as they have demagogued the fear of terrorism to push for surveillance powers and invasions, many Republicans seem to treat our ongoing wars as little more than campaign props and they seem to have no qualms about demagoguing reasonable criticisms of current tactics as a way to impute disloyalty or lack of patriotism to their opponents.  

Conor is right that these attacks breed cynicism and make the public less likely to heed warnings about genuine threats, but he might also stress that this sheer lack of seriousness from those who, like McCain, talk about the “transcendent challenge” of Islamic extremism tells us something about how much they have exaggerated the nature of the threat as part of exploiting fear of it to acquire power.  It is a measure of how little the alarmists believe their own dire claims about the scope of the threat from jihadism that they are so willing to play political games with invocations of terrorism.  If Conor is expecting Republican partisans to denounce such tactics, which seem to be SOP for so many, he may be waiting for quite a while.

My paleoconservative friends, obsessed with battling neoconservatives over Iraq, apparently failed to notice that a substantial share of Iraq hawks parted ways with the Bush administration on immigration. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin — this just begins the list of those broke ranks over the Bush/McCain open-borders policy.

With Bush gone, McCain defeated, and President Obama inheriting the Commander-in-Chief role, foreign-policy disagreements among conservatives will fade in significance after this election. In seeking a path back to a Republican majority, domestic issues will dominate the debate, and immigration will almost certainly be one of the most important [bold mine-DL]. (For instance, Obama and his allies are likely to insist on a national health-care policy covering illegals.) Open-borders Republicans like Brooks will therefore be increasingly isolated from the GOP mainstream during the Obama administration. ~Robert Stacy McCain

McCain is responding to Dan McCarthy’s post on the main blog, and has a long reflection on the future of the GOP and conservatism that is worth reading.  He is, however, quite wrong when he says that foreign policy differences will fade in significance in the coming years.  To the extent that Obama is relatively hawkish on most things except Iraq, which Republican hawks deny for electoral reasons now but will rediscover once he is in power, we will see exactly the same splits between the hawks who side with the Obama administration’s interventions in (name a few countries where we have no business being) and the conservatives who do not believe these interventions to be in the national interest.  It will be very much like what we saw in the 1990s.  Mainstream, “responsible” and “realist” conservatives and Republicans will support Obama’s actions, and a significant but largely uninfluential minority on the right will protest against them.  All of the bogus arguments war supporters have trotted out for years to justify the Iraq debacle will be turned around on them, and most of them will end up backing the next intervention to halt a “genocide,” “liberate” another country or stop weapons proliferation.  They will delight in the frustration of the antiwar left and praise the bipartisan consensus in favor of American hegemony.      

The ’90s offer a good model for what is going to happen among conservatives during the next few years, as that was the only post-Cold War period under a Democratic President so far, and so we can already tell what the main lines of opposition to Obama will be: 1) he is not hawkish enough; 2) his interventions are too often related to conflicts that have no direct connection to U.S. interests; 3) he is associated with dubious characters and abuses his power.  After years of describing the Iranian regime as a dire threat that must be stopped, hawks on the right are not going to discover prudence and the limits of American power when President Obama announces that military action has become the only remaining option.  On the other hand, if Obama does not pursue such a course of action you can be sure that these same hawks will likewise be ready to frame the Obama administration as being far too weak and too unwilling to project power.  Non-interventionists and more serious realists would oppose a strike on Iran and would cheer an Obama administration that avoided war.  After declaring Russia to be a resurgent menace, Republican hawks are not going to become skeptics of NATO expansion and provocative anti-Russian moves.  Should Obama be persuaded that bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be folly, expect these hawks to exploit this to show that Obama is willing to “sacrifice” fledgling democracies to Moscow.  Again, non-interventionists and serious realists would be staunchly opposed to expansion and would cheer administration opposition to it.  These divisions will persist and will likely harden, because these differences are not incidental or based solely on views about the invasion of Iraq, but go to the heart of what each camp believes the U.S. government should be doing overseas. 

Certain things will be different from the ’90s, as they would have to be.  First, Obama is genuinely more liberal than Clinton ever was, but he will be presiding over an economic downturn during at least the first two years of his administration instead of the beginning of a recovery, and this could undermine support for an ambitious domestic agenda very easily.  Fiscal and economic realities will constrain his priorities in ways that they did not limit Clinton, but because of these realities his domestic agenda may end up being fairly modest.  To the extent that the misleading claim that the current predicament has demonstrated the flaws of deregulation becomes the conventional wisdom, we are likely to see a large number of conservatives go along with this.  As unpopular as the bailout was, expect to see a split between rank-and-file constituents and conservative elites over this and any additional measures taken by the government in response to the financial crisis.  The base will rail against the expansion of government and betrayal of principle, and the elites will counsel pragmatism.  As is almost always the case, the elites will ultimately prevail and the base will sullenly go along as they always do in the end. 

Immigration policy probably will be one area where most conservatives will agree to some extent, but it may not matter.  On account of the significant reliance on Blue Dogs in the House, it may not be possible for Democratic leaders to push for an immigration bill with any greater success in the future than they did in the past.  Unlike with the bailout, the Speaker will probably not be able to blackmail and bludgeon the minority leadership into capitulating, and Pelosi will have serious problems with defections from conservative Democrats and other freshmen members in competitive districts.  During difficult economic times, it will be especially hard to sell the public on anything remotely resembling an amnesty.  We should also expect divisions among conservatives between supporters of guest-worker programs and thoroughgoing restrictionists.  There will still be a significant number of conservative pundits who will insist that the GOP cannot afford to alienate anyone, and so they will argue against taking up anything resembling a restrictionist position. 

There will be the ritual flagellation from mainstream conservatives, who will be decrying the alleged role of xenophobia and nativism in the ’08 election.  Never mind that there won’t be much evidence for this.  Like the myth that Prop. 187 alienated Hispanics from the GOP in California, this will be widely accepted and propagated as the “smart” interpretation of what ails the GOP.  Instead of concluding that the GOP needs to start actually serving the interests of its constituents, the “smart” conservatives will discover that the party has become too anti-urban and insist that it needs to reach out beyond its suburban and rural core, and they will use Palin as proof of the electoral weakness that comes from relying solely on the base.  For good measure, the knives will be out for social conservatives, just as many tried to make them the scapegoats for the ’06 defeat.

As the election campaign has already shown, the most powerful, widespread opposition to Obama from the right centers around his identity, his associations and what these are supposed to tell us about him.  We can expect constant obsession with Obama’s biography and associations to preoccupy most mainstream conservatives for the next four years, so that the names Raila Odinga and Tony Rezko will become for another rising generation of conservatives what Paula Jones and Mochtar Riady were to mine, which is to say they will become the distractions that will consume most of Obama’s critics and keep them from focusing on more serious problems with his administration (whatever those might turn out to be).

Robert Stacy McCain has missed something important here:

Brooks, then, has accomplished the neat trick of denouncing Republicans for abandoning a conservative intellectual tradition to which Brooks himself has never belonged, dragooning Kirk and Weaver from the grave as posthumous allies of the apostle of “national greatness.”

As I have made clear, there are a lot of problems with Brooks’ last column, but this isn’t really one of them.  Brooks’ point in invoking Weaver and Kirk was simply that the conservative movement was in the first place a movement of scholars and intellectuals, and that conservatives seem today to be rather too willing to cheer on candidates who are not particularly interested in ideas or specialized knowledge.  For all the reasons McCain outlines, Brooks could not credibly connect his ideas to Weaver and Kirk, but I don’t think he is trying to do this, nor was he trying to adopt them as forerunners of “national greatness” conservatism.  Brooks and everyone else know that there is no common ground there.  He is trying to make an argument that the conservatives who are praising Palin, for example, because she has good instincts but lacks understanding of policy matters and seems to have no particular appreciation for ideas are ignoring an important part of their own tradition.  To put in Kirkian, or more accurately Newmanian, terms, conservatives now seem to have excessive admiration for the illative sense (i.e., intuition) at the expense of imagination, intellect and knowledge.  Had Brooks invoked Strauss and Voegelin, there would still be a legitimate point here, which McCain’s characteristic reverse classism helps to make all the more powerful. 

It is unfortunately rather typical that McCain would harp on the different educational backgrounds of Brooks, Weaver and Kirk, which does nothing so much as make Brooks’ point for him that conservatives have been “telling members of that [educated] class to go away.”  To listen to McCain, unless you come from a small or Southern town and go to state university there could be something wrong with you.  It’s true that Brooks went to U of C, which did not use to be a mark of shame on the right.  I grew up in Albuquerque and now go to the University of Chicago, and I agree with Brooks on almost nothing–what does that tell you?  McCain consistently confuses his disagreement with the policy views of Brooks or, say, Ross Douthat, with his contempt for people who went to Ivy League schools to the point where he thinks there are the same thing. 

Now that we are on the verge of an Obama victory, it has become a bit more common to deride the University and claim that Hyde Park is a fanatical left-wing preserve.  To the extent that selective schools are largely populated by left-leaning students, and to the extent that the “educated class” is now predominantly left-leaning, this reflects a consistent failure of conservatives to compete for these minds and it is a product of the unfortunately very common preference to deride and dismiss the few right-leaning people come out of these institutions as prima facie incorrigible sell-outs.  It does take a certain talent to alienate educated middle-class professionals from the party ostensibly dedicated to representing middle-class constituencies, but some combination of Republican incompetence in government and an apparent hostlity to the education these people have received have done quite a lot to bring this about. 

Don’t take Brooks’ word or my word for it–just look at the election results from increasingly Democratic-leaning suburban districts filled with professionals who have no confidence in a party that celebrates hostility to expertise.

The Fed, the Treasury and the SEC appear to be in a state of panic. A crisis mentality led the custodians of the U.S. capital markets publicly to jettison their lifelong commitments to the capital markets in favor of a series of short-term regulatory quick fixes. Even more troubling, for the past several months the doyens of U.S. fiscal and monetary policy have ignored the most fundamental principle of central banking, which is that the primary responsibility of central bankers is to promote stability and to maintain confidence in the capital markets. Our central bankers appear to have suddenly lost confidence both in their own abilities and in the standard tools of fiscal and monetary policy. ~Jonathan Macey

I agree entirely, and I have been saying much the same thing for the last three weeks:

The role the government and bailout supporters have played in exacerbating the real problems in credit markets and sapping market confidence with apocalyptic warnings will, I suspect, go down as one of the most dangerous episodes of hysterical overreaction in recent history.

A bit earlier, I had said:

I wonder why confidence might wane when all of the people who claim to know the most about what’s going on are declaring that the end is nigh.  Bailout supporters are doing their best to instill unreasoning fear in the minds of the public and their representatives to stampede them in the direction of taking action, but I would bet that this political panic is contributing directly to the general loss of confidence.  As the loss of confidence spreads because of alarmism, I can imagine that the political panic could lead to a worse financial panic than might otherwise be the case.

It is difficult to understand the mad sell-off of the last week except as a general panic stoked by those in positions of authority.  Many will point to the credit markets, but even here the tightening of credit has been at least partly a response to government promises of intervention.  Macey does not limit his criticisms to the actions of the last few months, but includes the mistakes of the Fed, Treasury and SEC dating back to the start of the year and earlier.  It is worth reading Macey’s entire article to understand how rushing on several occasions to do something in very ad hoc, arbitrary ways, which was supposed to be imperative for restoring confidence, has been undermining confidence by sending clear signals that the authorities believe the markets to be broken. 

Macey concludes:

Most of all, if the markets are to get back on track our regulators must put an immediate stop to their current practice of publicly demonizing the markets and work to restore confidence in the system.        

In what may be another signal that the troubled economy is forcing John McCain’s campaign to play electoral map defense, Sarah Palin has scheduled a bus tour for Sunday through West Virginia [bold mine-DL], a state that’s been leaning red throughout this presidential race. ~CNN Political Ticker

Obviously, if the campaign is trying to hold West Virginia, which should be far out of reach for Obama, the GOP ticket’s position is even worse than it appears.  In other Palin-related news that seems likely to spell doom for the McCain campaign, the investigation into her alleged abuse of power determined that she had, in fact, abused her power as governor.  The full report (.PDF) is here.  In addition, a FoxNews poll confirms that Palin has become a significant liability: 40% of independents are less likely to vote for McCain because of her versus 28% who were more likely.     

P.S.  As an aside, the public still opposes the bailout 53-34.

It’s a not bad read, though his arguments seem to boil down to hating Sarah Palin, not believing John McCain will balance the federal budget, and enjoying Obama’s books. ~Jim Antle

That’s not entirely fair to Buckley, who simply expressed profound embarrassment and perplexity concerning Palin, but it makes for a pretty good short description of the Obamacon argument: the Republicans are ridiculous, and at least Obama is intelligent, so that’s something.  Indeed, that might be the Obamacon bumper sticker slogan: “I’m voting for the intelligent one for a change.”  There is basically no positive case for Obama, because I don’t think a conservative can actually make one, except to say that he might do slightly less damage than another Republican. 

Buckley’s remarks on McCain are interesting in what they tell us about the pervasive nature of the McCain myth: McCain used to be authentic, you see, but now he is not (not true–he has always been the same person!); he showed tremendous bravery in backing the “surge” (not true–it was enormously popular among GOP regulars and primary voters!); McCain has changed (see the first point).  This is the sort of whinging justification Obama supporters on the right often have to make to save face, which further reinforces the old McCain myth: if only McCain had remained true to himself, I would have supported him, but now he has sacrificed his integrity!  What few seem willing to accept is that McCain has always been like this, and his past admirers have blinded themselves to his flaws because they found him useful or were swayed by his biography, and until very recently most have had no problem with McCain’s flaws.  Indeed, they seem incapable of admitting that McCain has any flaws of his own, but are insistent that whatever is wrong with him is the function of the pressures of the campaign. 

They have been wrong about him for a very long time and don’t want to admit that, so they make the less insulting choice of endorsing his opponent.  It is much more generous to McCain to pretend that the presidential campaign has somehow forced him to become someone he isn’t.  It is a compliment to say that one is endorsing Obama only because McCain has betrayed his true self.  None of this is true, and it reflects a remarkable deference to McCain even at this late stage of the game that so many people are saying it.  Of course, this myth also helps to excuse their support for McCain for so many years.