Conor Friedersdorf has joined the small but hardy band of conservatives (now holding steady at two) who are calling for Palin to be removed or to resign from the ticket.  Conor will get no argument from me when he says that she is not qualified, but I think he misjudges things when he thinks that there would not be a significant revolt.  I could see this leading to a very healthy outcome of conservative alienation from the GOP so intense that it might lead to some significant changes either in the priorities of the party or in the emergence of an alternative movement on the right.  More likely, though, things would revert to what they were before Palin was picked as suddenly energized evangelicals and activists lose interest and remember all the reasons why they dislike McCain.  Turnout would decline, the campaign would be in disarray (which is not an undesirable thing from my perspective) and the post-defeat recriminations would ultimately work to the detriment of conservatives.  Whichever sorry soul was tapped to replace her would be spurned by these voters simply to punish McCain.  Personally, I do not find this prospect all that disturbing at the presidential level, but it could be a problem if the GOP minority in the House loses many more seats in a wipeout election. 

Conor may think that this gives these voters too little credit, but there are two things he is overlooking.  Many conservatives do not necessarily accept the idea that she is unqualified, because they seem to think that her political career and family life together provide the evidence that she is.  Conor sums up the problems with Palin’s record, or lack thereof, very succinctly, but for most of these voters that either does not matter or they don’t believe it to be true.  More important, they have identified with her and bonded with her to such a degree that just as her addition was received with hosannas, because she was “one of us,” her removal would be the cause for lamentations and cursing.  Throwing overboard someone who has already been lauded as the next Reagan will provoke a grassroots fury that will make the anti-bailout protests to Congress seem like a mild difference of opinion.  Some over-enthusiastic admirers may have compared her to Joan of Arc (never a good idea), but they are not now going to accept betraying her for what they will perceive to be the appeasement of the enemy.    

Four weeks’ worth of arguments that she is more qualified than Obama will not be forgotten quickly; the resentment against journalists and liberals stoked at the convention before, during and after her speech remains; the reflex to reject an elitist critique of her has not gone away.  Miers was criticized and rejected early on by movement activists and pundits.  Palin, on the other hand, has largely been embraced by the same people who refused to defend Miers and demanded the withdrawal of her nomination from the beginning.  Having deemed Palin not only acceptable but outstanding a few weeks ago, few are going to backtrack and admit that they, like McCain, were profoundly wrong.  Those who do will be ostracized and ignored, dismissed as RINOs or worse.  Conor calls on conservative elites to lead the way in pushing for Palin’s removal.  Leave aside that there is not enough time, and none of the other short-listed candidates would accept the nomination, which would be like accepting the political equivalent of a cup of hemlock.  Even if there were a plausible replacement and plenty of time, the people Conor calls on to act would not play ball.  Meanwhile, the voters Conor is talking about heed the words of Hewitt and Hannity, who I promise you will be livid if Palin is removed; George Will and David Brooks are not their guides.  Most of the heterodox bloggers Brooks mentioned either wouldn’t agree with Conor’s “reclamation” project or, like me, wouldn’t care if the GOP ticket goes down in flames. 

Conor says that those who “prefer fealty to the principles of the founders, a preference for small government, an appreciation of competence and a tempermental aversion to rapid, risky change” will welcome her removal, but what he misses is that many of these same people simply don’t accept the critique of her competence even when it comes from the right.  Unfortunately, once a critique has been identified as a left-wing trope there is tremendous resistance to accepting the idea that real conservatives might hold this view; this is true on policy, and it is probably even more true when it comes to criticizing popular candidates.  No one who wants to have a future in the movement is going to light out on an anti-Palin crusade in the name of principle.  Previously, Conor has expressed his aversion, which Peter Suderman and I share, to the sort of cultural lifestyle politics that seems to be driving enthusiasm for Palin, and because he properly finds this politics so substantively lacking I think he may now underestimate just how powerful its hold is.   

Conor asks:

Can conservatism survive as an intellectually viable political movement if its adherents privilege the electoral chances of the GOP above averting the installation of an unkown and by all outward appearances woefully unqualified person in the White House?

I reply: Conservatism is an intellectually viable political movement?  Has something changed recently?  I am only partly joking.  My point would be that the same conservative movement that has welcomed Palin as a conquering hero cannot now throw her out into the cold on the grounds of some supposed intellectual rigor and the defense of venerable tradition.  The precious impulse to show themselves to be more diverse, feminist and cutting-edge than the Democrats will not suddenly give way to newfound concern about complementarity of the sexes.     

Our C11 colleague Joe Carter is having none of it.  I think Carter overreaches with his initial point about Adm. Stockdale.  Stockdale was, he rightly notes, a great man who was unfairly ridiculed for his performance in the ’92 campaign as Perot’s running mate, and Carter does not push the comparison too far, but it is because there is no real comparison between Stockdale’s qualifications and Palin’s that the example does not make the point Carter wants it to make.  Even though he is right to insist that a few performances on national television should not be the sole basis on which to judge the fitness of candidates, I think he gets something important wrong.  Being able to communicate one’s views and agenda in both speeches and interviews is an important part of the position Palin is seeking, but more important than that is evidence of readiness to command, and I’m afraid there simply isn’t any to cite in her favor.  Carter does overlook Conor’s paragraph in which he dispatches Palin’s record with a few quick thrusts.  It is possible that he accidentally missed it, because it does not take much to deal fatal blows to the official narrative of Palin the champion-of-reform.  There is also something to be said for being taken seriously.  Forget SNL and don’t worry whether trendy hipsters dislike Palin; it is far more damning when you have reasonably fair-minded journalists frequently referring to her as ignorant and pathetic.  It can’t help when you have a steady stream of people describing the prospects of her holding high office to be terrifying.  Bottom line: a VP candidate should not be attracting this much attention unless it is very positive attention. 

Yglesias made an interesting point about Jack Cafferty’s disgust with Palin:

I first got to virtually know Cafferty when he was a long-time local news reporter and anchor on WPIX-11 in New York City. There, and after his shift over to CNN, his persona is very much that of a working class outer boroughs type. The kind of guy who voted for Rudy Giuliani and, crucially, for Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s.

To put it another way, when you are losing not just the support but the basic respect of the Caffertys out there, you have become an electoral liability pure and simple.  The argument against Palin’s qualifications used to be deflected by saying, “McCain has to get elected first!  Palin will make that possible.”  I’m sure it seemed that way a couple weeks ago.  Now Carter has undertaken the more strenuous, thankless task of insisting that she is clearly qualified regardless of the fact that she is now an electoral liability, and it is no criticism of his article to say that he simply can’t make that case because I don’t think anyone can make it persuasively.  Carter makes the mistake, however, of critiquing Conor’s argument with the claim that substance doesn’t matter that much or a variant of the absurd “so what if she can’t remember the name of the Ugandan health minister?” line:

Conor also appears to put a much greater emphasis on the ability to memorize a policy briefing book than on character.

I’m not sure that Conor puts emphasis on memorization so much as he is stressing an ability to grasp and understand complex policy questions at some level.  It is not as if there is a written record that shows that Palin is an outstanding intellect with significant policy knowledge who just bungles interviews.  Goodness knows that I would not want to be judged solely on my public speaking, but I would like to think that I have produced a few things over the years that could be taken seriously.  We’ve gone down the “he may not know a lot, but he has good instincts and he’s got advisors for that other stuff” road before with Mr. Bush, and I don’t think most conservatives have liked most of the ultimate policy or electoral results.  Indeed, we have discovered that Mr. Bush, the one with the good instincts, actually has terrible instincts when it comes to all sorts of things and relies far too much on those instincts when making important decisions.  In case I have not made the point clear enough, Conor already made it:

Never again should a Western governor of questionable competence win over conservatives with nothing more than promises of tax cuts, religious faith, and the empty claim of an outsider’s perspective.

Of course, I agree entirely, but it will do no good to say “Never again!” when it has already happened again and it is now too late to undo it.  Conor’s critique of Palin is entirely right, but trying to talk conservatives out of Palinophilia is like trying to talk a friend out of staying in a bad relationship–it won’t work, and your friend will take the advice very poorly.      

Update: How poorly will people take what Conor is saying?  Kathleen Parker, who already called for Palin to step down, gives you an idea:

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn’t, I should “off” myself.

So I think people are taking it pretty well, don’t you?

Parker asks:

But what is a true conservative? One who doesn’t think or question and who marches in lock step with The Party?

For many people, that does seem to have a lot to do with it.  It is always a revelation to conservatives who find themselves on the other side of an issue just how much a majority of their fellows defines conservatism as lockstep agreement with whatever the GOP line happens to be.  Denunciation, if not necessarily death threats, is the usual response.  The GOP is against nation-building?  So are they.  The GOP is in favor of nation-building?  They couldn’t be happier, and anyone who is against it probably hates America.  More important, even if they don’t change their beliefs as dramatically as this they are usually quite willing to support the pols who do.

Parker continues:

The emotional pitch of many comments suggests an overinvestment in Palin as “one of us.”

I’m not sure what it can mean to have an “overinvestment” of this kind.  It seems to me that you allow your candidate preferences to be driven by emotional and identity-driven concerns that have nothing to do with the candidate’s merits, or you don’t.  Once you identify a candidate as “one of us,” that connection, that sense of shared belonging, is not something that is going to be constrained by rational appeals.  It can be easily taken to excess, which is why it is an undesirable trait of democracy and something that generally should not be encouraged even if it is inevitable in a democracy.  If a criticism of Palin was, by extension, a criticism of her supporters and their way of life, which is how they see it, it does not matter where it comes from or whether it makes sense.  There is something both admirable and worrisome in the absolutely unreflective quality of this loyalty: the willingness to stick by your symbolic champion shows a certain integrity, but it also shows that the basis for your attachment to that person is based pretty much entirely on symbolism and on what the person represents to the world rather than on whether the person is fit for the office in question.     

Second Update: In one of her more recent Couric outtakes, Palin says that she reads “most” or “all” newspapers, which any blogger has to find impressive (ahem), and she tells us that she has a “great appreciation” for the media (what?).  She has a “vast variety of sources.”  Also, Alaska “isn’t a foreign country,” she says, but I have been reliably informed that Alaska is close to some foreign countries.  What is there to say?

It’s fundamental cluelessness about how the economy works, and a demonstrable inability to conceive of foreign policy in anything but the crudest terms. ~Julian Sanchez

No, he’s not talking about John McCain, but he very well could be.  As you might have guessed, he’s talking about Palin.  This takes us back to what I was saying below.  This fad of “let Palin be Palin” is, among other things, the last in a sorry line of attempts to paint her as the next Reagan.  As far as I can tell, the argument is that she would be a powerful extemporaneous speaker if she just weren’t so heavily scripted.  There is absolutely zero evidence for this view.  These people would apparently prefer for her to engage in some improvisation on the spot, a sort of Alaskan jazz solo, which would surely lead to more off-the-cuff answers about sending forces into Pakistan on those occasions when her remarks made sense.    

Coming back to the first point, the description Sanchez uses could easily be applied to McCain, and the second half of it could be applied to many of his advisors.  The thing that ought to concern voters is not so much that Palin is clueless in her ignorance about the rest of the world, but that McCain and his advisors are clueless despite being supposed experts.  It is embarrassing to watch Palin give meaningless answers about Hamas and democracy in the Near East, but it should be appalling that empowering Hamas through elections was the official policy of the Bush administration.  There is no real excuse for Palin to be clueless, but how much less of an excuse is there for the presidential candidate to understand the world in the same crude terms?  Palin actually does us a favor in that she conveys the boiled-down essentials of McCain’s worldview, and the thing that we should always remember is that there is not much more sophistication or understanding in that worldview when McCain states it.

Governor Palin’s every comment was scrutinized by the media and judged against what Jefferson or Lincoln might have said. ~Fred Thompson

Yes, if not for the unfair Jefferson/Lincoln standard they imposed on her, she would be doing just fine.  Now we know why Palin has been doing so badly in those interviews–the standards we are using to judge her are just too high!  I don’t know how these sorts of arguments persuade anyone.  Perhaps they are not supposed to persuade, and are simply designed to fire up devoted followers.  That in a nutshell might describe the fatal flaw of Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign, except that his rhetoric always suffered from the serious flaw that it never fired anyone up.  What’s strangest about this sort of defense is that it presupposes a) the audience is really gullible and b) that Palin’s inability to handle mild, fair questioning on policy can only be explained by the media’s rigorous standards that set her up to fail.  At the Thursday night debate, this denial of reality or embarrassing apologetic will run head-on into a lopsided defeat.  Perhaps the purpose of commentary like this is to prepare the devotees for the inevitable humiliation.  They can then, like the Ma’min, reinterpret the abject failure of their idol as a cunning, mystical path to the salvation of the world.  Could we please stop all this?

I think that all of them would agree that, while there were a lot of things wrong in Pakistan during the years leading up to the 1999 military takeover, Pakistan was not a failed state as we normally define such states. I am on record as stating publicly that, having come to Pakistan from Liberia a year before the takeover, I had a pretty good idea of what failed states look like, and it was not one. ~William Milam, Fmr. U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan

There may be a charitable explanation for McCain’s blunder.  Just as he doesn’t understand what cap-and-trade, counterinsurgency, strategy and tactics are, he also doesn’t know what a failed state is, and so he labels Pakistan c. 1999 a “failed state” because he doesn’t really understand the concept, but he’s heard people use that phrase to describe countries that suffer from instability.  If there was a coup, it must be a failed state!  Yeah, that’s it.  The less charitable, but more likely explanation is that he has no idea what was happening in Pakistan at 1999 or at any other time.  What I find strange about this is that it has taken several days for anyone else to notice how utterly wrong McCain was on Pakistan, when it was pretty readily apparent.  Actually, it’s not that strange–most observers apparently don’t know all that much about Pakistan, either, and so when McCain engages in an arrogant bluff and pretends to understand something that Obama allegedly doesn’t they can’t call his bluff.  I’m pretty sure this is how McCain has maintained his inflated reputation as some kind of national security expert: he expects that his audience and the journalists covering him know even less than he does, and so he can get away with saying all manner of ridiculous things.  Sometimes his statements get a little too ridiculous, and journalists are obliged to notice, as they did when he went on about Iran sponsoring Al Qaeda in Iraq, but for the most part they defer to him and treat his pronouncements as if they were serious and informed.  If you look closer, you’ll find that they’re usually neither.

The whole reason for the urgency is that people genuinely are concerned that a financial collapse will spark a deep recession that will cause a lot more pain in Muncie than in Manhattan. But you sure as hell wouldn’t have known that. ~Ezra Klein

It depends a great deal on who he means by “you.”  If he means that a lot of the constituents burning up the Capitol phone lines were not fully aware of the negative consequences for the broader economy, he might be right, but I have to say that I’m pretty skeptical.  While some outlets tried to avoid spreading panic by not describing things in the darkest terms, there seemed to be no shortage of pundits, reporters and bloggers who were quite pleased to talk about another Depression, which even the most historically illiterate would recognize as a very undesirable outcome.  I don’t think I have ever seen so many references to Hoovervilles in my life as I have in the last week, so I am finding it hard to believe that most Americans were unaware of the alarmist scenarios bailout advocates were promoting.  Perhaps it reassures supporters that the public turned against the plan because of poor marketing–this is, of course, a classic Bush administration response to the rejection of its bad policies.  “If only we could get the sales pitch right…” has been the lament of many an administration official over the years.     

Paulson and Bernanke never used language quite so outrageous, but they made it clear in their testimony that they believed this would hit everyone where they lived and hit them hard.  All of the news programs did interviews with the relevant committee chairmen, and they made the same points.  If so few people were aware of the worst-case scenario, how is it that Rasmussen found that 79% of respondents were somewhat or very concerned about a depression “like 1929”?  Where on earth would that come from if not from the daily bombardment of fearmongering from the administration and bailout supporters?  What the Rasmussen results seem to show is that the government and media have done a good job of working most of the country into a fit of tremendous anxiety and fear, and still only 45% support “taking action.”  The public is actually evenly-divided on whether the government should do anything–chew on that one when considering the politics of all this.  That 45% figure probably overstates support for this specific bailout, er, I mean Glorious People’s Victory Plan.  

Update: John Schwenkler critiques Klein’s interpretation of poll results on the bailout.

Some politicians and government officials are making reckless charges of greater financial turmoil in the absence of a bailout. These grossly irresponsible statements may cause short-term market losses as investors try to second-guess how other investors will respond, but the assertion that the stock market’s health – especially in the long run – depends on bigger government is belied by real-world evidence. Japanese politicians made many of the same mistakes in the 1990s that American politicians today are considering, and the Nikkei suffered a lengthy period of decline – and remains today far below its peak level.

Proponents of a bailout also are trying to rattle credit markets by arguing that inaction will cripple commercial and household lending. Fortunately, there is little evidence of a freeze in credit markets, though the Administration’s rash rhetoric and the specter of a bailout doubtlessly are causing needless uncertainty and temporarily higher interest rates. Once the issue is resolved, one way or the other, credit markets will resume normal operations. The only question is whether capital allocation will be distorted – and long-run growth hindered – by government intervention. ~Daniel Mitchell

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.  Parallels with Iraq are obviously not exact and can be overdone, but we are once again being treated to the spectacle of manifestly reckless and irresponsible people damning everyone who opposes them as irresponsible in an attempt to ram through bad policy. 

Update: Jeffrey Miron makes all the right points:

Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street’s hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.

The costs of the bailout, moreover, are almost certainly being understated. The administration’s claim is that many mortgage assets are merely illiquid, not truly worthless, implying taxpayers will recoup much of their $700 billion.

If these assets are worth something, however, private parties should want to buy them, and they would do so if the owners would accept fair market value. Far more likely is that current owners have brushed under the rug how little their assets are worth.

James paraphrases Ross on the presidential debate:

So but for the one thing he needed to do in the debate to win, McCain won.

Perhaps this is simply my bias against McCain, but I just don’t see it.  Why does Ross think that, all things being equal, McCain would have been considered the winner?  This is the main point:

I saw the debate as an evening in which the policy differences between the two men were muted, and McCain was able to steer the conversation around, again and again, to his experience and record, which on paper is easily his biggest advantage over Obama.

This is the odd thing about the debate–McCain did do that and I think that is a large part of why I and many other observers thought that he lost.  It wasn’t just that he came into the debate trailing in the polls with the baggage of the phony suspension weighing him down.  McCain succeeded in bringing the conversation around again and again (and again) to his experience, and mostly managed in the process to make himself seem obnoxious, ignorant and often wrong.  He not only failed to portray Obama as the naive radical he wanted to paint him as, but he singularly failed to offer any credible arguments on his own behalf.  It is difficult to frame your opponent as naive and ignorant when you backed an ideologically-driven war in a region about which you have demonstrated no real understanding, and it becomes even harder when your attempted put-downs show that you don’t know anything about Pakistan, either.  Saying that you’ve been part of every national security matter for the last two and a half decades is interesting, but what does that mean?  For all his experience, he backed the invasion of Iraq in what is largely regarded as the worst blunder of the last three decades.  In other words, on the most salient and relevant foreign policy issue of the day, McCain has been badly wrong, as Obama pointed out in one of his better moments.  McCain preached about the importance of knowledge, experience and judgement,  and yet it was clear by the end of the night that at least for the last decade he has had neither knowledge nor judgement.  In what universe could this be considered a political victory?  To my mind, he was scoring own goals with some regularity.   

If McCain’s endless litany of “Sen. Obama doesn’t understand” sounded more credible to some than Clinton’s “35 years of experience” line, it was one of the principal reasons why viewers tended to favor Obama and move away from McCain.  If the Obama campaign has sometimes been rightly criticized for responding to attacks as if it were staffed by writers from The Daily Show, McCain on Friday was debating as if the electorate consisted of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and Hugh Hewitt’s listening audience.  Each time he said that Obama didn’t understand, you can imagine that these people thought he had landed a killer blow, while for the rest of us he seemed a tired, angry and increasingly ridiculous figure who doesn’t even have a very good grasp on the subject that he is supposed to dominate.  Less-informed and undecided voters reacted badly to McCain’s contempt for his opponent, while those of us familiar with the subjects under discussion were either shaking our heads or laughing at him.  I have heard an anecdote from back home that an avowed McCain supporters who thinks Obama would be a disaster was angry at him for what she perceived to be McCain’s disrespect for Obama, and I don’t think that is an isolated episode.  Concerning both style and substance, McCain clearly did a worse job and a majority of the audience picked up on that.  The problem for McCain is that this really was the best debate he has had during the entire campaign, and he is never going to have another one where he will be perceived to be as effective as he was in this one.

My take on the potential and the flaws of populist backlash politics is up at Culture11.

Shortly after the bailout legislation was shot down in the House, someoneArnold Kling said, “David Brooks is not going to be happy.” “David Brooks must be horrified.”  He had no idea:

And let us recognize above all the 228 who voted no — the authors of this revolt of the nihilists [bold mine-DL]. They showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed.

This may seem pedantic, but nihilists are exactly what the opponents of the bill are not.  You may think that they have helped unleash destructive forces, but they did not do so out of some perverse desire to tear everything to the ground a la Bazarov.  Far from being nihilists, the opponents of the bill were persuaded, I think reasonably enough, that they were resisting a dangerous encroachment of government power and an abuse of taxpayers’ money; they believed that they were preserving a system and a part of the modern American way of life.  Perhaps they were wrong, but whatever else they were they definitely believed in preservation, not destruction.