When the legislature in Alaska authorized the ethics probe into Palin’s firing of the Public Safety Commissioner in July, I assumed that Palin’s chance of being named as VP was gone.  Obviously, that was not the case.  However, as Palin has effectively outsourced her response to the investigation to the McCain campaign, the controversy seems as if it will loom over her much more than I suspected.  The backlash against McCain operatives seeming to take over parts of Alaska’s state government is growing:

Even conservatives are expressing resentment over the governor’s about-face on the Monegan investigation and the infiltration of state government by the McCain campaign.

“This Palin VP thing has Alaskans all stirred up. Much like Palin divided the Republican Party, she has managed to divide the state over her national candidacy,” conservative talk-show host Dan Fagan complained in a commentary last week.

“My fellow conservatives, remember how frustrating it was when Bill Clinton committed perjury and liberals looked the other way. As conservatives, we are no better unless we demand full disclosure from our governor,” he said. ” . . . No politician is so popular and charismatic that they should be above accountability and telling the truth.”

Keeping Palin largely inaccessible for weeks except for stump speeches and a handful of interviews vindicates one of the main criticisms of her selection, which is that choosing her was a P.R. stunt that could not be defended on its merits.  Whatever comes from this investigation, it will not be credible to say that she is a champion of transparency and accountability in government.  The last three weeks show that this is simply not the case when it involves her career.

P.S. Conor Clarke makes a persuasive case that Palin’s use of private email accounts for state business was an attempt to avoid being subject to state public records law.  As Clarke says, “it’s hard to think of anything less transparent than conducting state business with the obvious intention of avoiding laws designed to promote state transparency.”

Now, an increasingly organized segment of American Jews is stepping up to present an alternative perspective that is far more representative of the Jewish community. It may take quite a while — and the Palin invite withdrawal is a small step — but I’m hopeful that the days of pandering to the Jewish vote with saber-rattling [sic] are slowly coming to an end. ~Scott Paul

This is certainly a different interpretation of the significance of disinviting Palin to the anti-Iran rally, since the public justification for keeping her away was that they did not want the event to become “partisan” and the real reason was that Democratic pols did not want to appear at the rally alongside Palin in the middle of an election campaign.  Certainly, these pols would find anything that lends her even superficial credibility on foreign policy to be undesirable.  Presumably an anti-Iran rally is in and of itself part of “pandering to the Jewish vote” with sabre-rattling, as most of the people who are most concerned about Iran’s nuclear program and who obsess about Ahmadinejad tend to be people who also favor aggressive military action against perceived threats.  Indeed, the J Street “action alert” to which Paul refers takes for granted that the rally was originally going to be an exercise in sabre-rattling, and it probably still will be.  The “victory” of disinviting Palin has nothing to do with advancing a J Street agenda on policy, as a non-partisan or bipartisan anti-Iran rally would necessarily undermine the idea that “the best way to deal with Iran is through tough, smart diplomacy.”  On the whole, proponents of “tough, smart diplomacy” do not stage rallies designed primarily to ridicule and insult the head of government of the country with which one wants to negotiate, as the ridicule and insults negate the smart part of that formulation.  Of course, if the main objection that J Street has is to the means and not the ends of Iran policy, it’s not very clear what meaningful alternative they are providing.  If they are in agreement about the ends of Iran policy, pushing for disinviting Palin appears to be a transparent election-season ploy to avoid providing a platform for a Republican candidate.

P.S.  The organizers of the rally, led by the National Coalition to Stop Iran Now (no, I didn’t make that up), started their statement on the move to disinvite Palin and other American politicians this way:

The purpose of “THE RALLY TO STOP IRAN NOW” on Monday, Sept. 22, 2008, is to protest the presence of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, and to oppose his nuclear weapons program. We take most seriously his threat to wipe the United States and Israel “off the map” and believe the world leaders gathered at the United Nations must act with resolve to prevent a nuclear armed Iran that would be a threat to this country, Israel and the world.

Note how the foreign government is identified entirely with one person–it is Ahamdinejad and “his nuclear weapons program,” as if it had anything to do with him personally.

Give Nick Kristof credit–he is one of the few, after “otherizing” Obama for months and months, to acknowledge in any way that his paeans to Obama’s background and international connections may have contributed materially to the propagation of politically damaging nonsense about the candidate.  As the last Pew survey finds that 13% overall believe Obama to be a Muslim and another 16% can’t say for sure what his religion is, it may have started sinking in that pro-Obama writers talking up his exotic roots and insisting how much Muslims around the world will like him have been undermining him on a regular basis.  The inability, or perhaps refusal, of vast numbers of people to be able to identify a simple, well-known fact about a major presidential candidate would have existed anyway, since there are always going to be ignorant and gullible people, but it is undeniable that it has been stoked and encouraged unintentionally by every article and column expressing delight at Obama’s international and cross-cultural ties, which seem so marvelous to his admirers and which seem equally menacing or undesirable to many others.  These admirers were the same people who thought it was a good thing politically that Obama went to Europe to be cheered by a multitude of foreigners, but who were also plainly baffled by the enthusiastic reception of Palin by multitudes of Americans.        

Even last fall, long before most people knew much about Obama, the culture war divisions that have since reemerged with such ferocity were already present in the praise heaped on Obama for his mixed background, his father born in Kenya and his relatives scattered around the globe, since these things could have appeared so praiseworthy only to the people who also find Palin some bizarre backwoods absurdity.  The fetishization of the exotic Obama by Obama supporters mirrors in many respects the fetishization of the normal Palin by her supporters, because for the former it has been Obama’s differences from the typical American experience that have drawn their interest and enthusiasm while Palin’s fans are excited by how much like them she seems to be.   

Daily Show jokes that presuppose the audience already understands that Obama is not actually a Muslim and a New Yorker cover whose creators take for granted that no one could look at that image and take it seriously have all fed into rumors and false claims about Obama.  The sophisticated response after that New Yorker cover came out was that everyone understood satire and grasped that it was a criticism of absurd rumor-mongering, and sophisticates wagged their fingers at those who thought that there would be anyone who didn’t have the same ironic sensibility.  They never considered that there were large swathes of the population that didn’t want to see it as satire, or who were so poorly informed about Obama’s background that it would not take much misinformation to harden their opinion against him forever.

On a final note, I would add that Kristof gets one thing very wrong:

Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.

There is a crucial difference here that ought to merit much greater disgust now and in the future about the rumors used against Obama, since the far-fetched anti-Catholic conspiracy theories woven about Smith’s candidacy, while wrong and absurd, were at least based in the reality that Smith was a Catholic.  Were Obama actually a Muslim, one might imagine seeing the propagation of far worse rumors, but because he plainly is not one and we all know how much resistance there is to a Muslim candidate for President the campaign to portray him as one is on an entirely different level.  To the extent that his admirers never really appreciated how damaging being identified as a Muslim would be politically, and to the extent that they refused to accept that an overwhelming majority of the public was going to reject a candidate they perceived to be a Muslim, they share in the responsibility for driving up these numbers who are confused about Obama’s religion.  Their writing about Obama has given some shred of plausibility to the rumors by advancing idea that Obama might serve as a bridge between the West and Muslims around the world, which always implied that he shared something with Muslims in some way that was more than incidental.  Unless you already knew Obama’s story backwards and forwards, these overblown, largely baseless claims about Obama’s rift-healing powers “otherized” Obama before wide audiences.

It’s not quite the famous patriotic statement of the Nicaraguan President in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but James’ post referring to this Kurlantzick article made me think of it as I contemplated the possibility of a pink state filled with monarchists draped in yellow.  I have to say that, in addition to being aesthetically displeasing, something just didn’t fit.   Kurlantzick opens his article with the scene of the demonstrations in Bangkok, which I have neglected to discuss despite mypreviouspostingson the anti-Thaksin coup in 2006:

The antigovernment demonstrators, calling themselves the People’s Alliance for Democracy, were lashing out at the prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, who they claimed was a tyrant who’d violated a range of laws. In truth, however, they were not battling for democracy – they wanted Samak, who was democratically elected, to step down. In addition, they hated him because he was allied with former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whom they accused of massive graft and human rights abuses. Eventually, they got their wish: Last week, the prime minister resigned after losing a controversial court decision.

In the streets, the seas of yellow openly wept with joy. The democrat was deposed.

Sounds like a happy ending to me.  There’s a problem here?

Of course, Thaksin is certainly guilty of graft and arguably guilty of human rights abuses during his tenure when he was waging a desultory military campaign against Muslims in southern Thailand (the “war on drugs”).  To the extent that Samak was tainted by association with Thaksin, it is hard to see why anyone should lament his fall or see it as part of an undesirable pattern, unless it is undesirable to have corrupt politicos and their cronies ousted from power.  As Kurlantzick rightly notes, the middle class has consistently been the core of anti-Thaksin sentiment, and it would not be the first time that a middle class rallied to a monarchy out of horror at the politicians raised up by mass democracy.  Urban and educated, the Thai middle class have a large stake in Thai institutions, which have been steadily corrupted during the democratic era of the last 16 years.  The Thai middle class is learning, as each nation’s middle class does, that giving the vote to people with radically different interests than theirs results in the government suddenly doing all sorts of things that they never intended for it to do. 

Post-1876 Austria might offer some useful parallels as the buergerlich Vienna liberals found themselves suddenly swamped by the empowered forces of urban labor and rural conservative aristocrats and peasants, and the situation became progressively worse as the franchise was expanded to more and more people.  While this led directly to greater illiberalism in government and the transformation of Austrian liberals more and more into either simple social democrats or nationalists, it did not mark a retreat of democratic reforms, but was the process of broadening political participation.  In the Thai case, the middle class revulsion with Samak and Thaksin is a more straightforward anti-corruption backlash combined with political resentment at the demagogues who have risen to power with the support of rural and poorer voters.  But to say that Thailand has “gone backwards” in recent years is to take for granted that the Thaksin years represented progress.  I reject this absolutely, and evidently so do many Thais.  As for the “pink” element to this story, aside from a passing reference to the demonstration being like Woodstock I have to say that I don’t see the usual signs of the “pink” Faustian bargain of selling out freedom for consumer goods and license.   

Many of the examples Kurlantzick name-checks (Venezuela, Russia, Bangladesh) have one hugely important thing in common: the coincidence of democratic governments and massive corruption.  Many of the others, ranging from Rwanda to Kyrgyzstan, are perfect examples of how outsiders dubbed the winners in an ethnic or tribal struggle to be the true democrats (Kagame could at least say that he hadn’t launched a genocidal war against his neighbors) turn to abusing power soon after acquiring it to benefit their group and the allies of the strongman ruler heroic reformer.  Kurlantzick is describing how democratic despotism emerges in political cultures where institutions are not trusted, personal and family ties are more powerful and there are no strong traditions of rule of law or constitutionalism.  This is not a retreat of democracy, but its logical conclusion when there are no other significant forces to keep its inevitable abuses in check. 

Update: Kurlantzick has another version of the same argument here, in which he “reveals,” among other things, that the new Kyrgyz boss is the same as the old Kyrgyz boss, which those of uswatchingthe so-called“Tulip Revolution”at the time could have told you three years ago.  Freddy has more on the main blog in response to the Globe piece.

Joining in this debate on campaigning and honor with Ross and James a little late, I want to go back a few months to the time when Obama had just wrapped up the nomination to recall Obama’s numerous shifts and flips on various issues, including the violation of his campaign pledge to accept public financing.  While McCain was not alone in ridiculing Obama on his changed public financing position, McCain did express his disappointment about Obama breaking his word.  I suppose the true cynic would regard this, like all of McCain’s invocations of honor and integrity, to be just another maneuver in McCain’s never-ending pursuit of more obnoxious moral posturing, but it gets at something fundamental about how McCain has sought to present himself. 

McCain exploits the concept of honor and frames every disagreement in terms of honor and dishonor, so it is particularly revealing that he is willing to launch dishonest and dishonorable attacks, because this drives home how much his concept of honor is intertwined with his own visceral reactions to opponents and with his self-interest.  Contrary to the conventional pundit interpretation that McCain has “sold his soul” and abandoned his once-honorable former self, the thing to understand about McCain’s lies in this campaign is that he invests these misrepresentations with his utter contempt for his opponents.  From McCain’s perspective, this infusion of contempt seems to transform shoddy, baseless attacks that disgrace him into indictments of the other politicians (e.g., Romney wants to surrender in Iraq, Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election).  If McCain thinks he is always honorable, resistance to him and his ideas must ultimately be villainous and vicious, and we have seen him deploy his perverse, solipsistic ends-justify-the-means concept of honor against Romney and now against Obama.  McCain’s admirers have largely missed this either because they happened to agree with McCain on policy or because they have mistaken his language of honor and principle to refer to the meanings that they attach to these terms. 

In any public confrontation that McCain has, he strives to show that he has kept faith with the public and his opponents have betrayed the public trust.  This isn’t because McCain is actually some devoted servant of the public interest, but because he has an irrepressible self-righteous streak that he thinks permits him to impugn the integrity of anyone who gets on his nerves or gets in his way.  Hence it was not enough for him to find fault with action or inaction by the SEC–Chris Cox must have betrayed the public trust.  Because McCain’s views are visceral, not intellectual, and he is not interested in policy detail, everything is a morality play, and it goes without saying that he thinks he is the hero.  

As he said countless times during the primaries, he was not interested in winning “in the worst way,” and there were things that he was not going to compromise in the process.  This was one reason why many misguided people believed that an Obama v. McCain election would be a high-minded, respect-filled affair, and it is why many of his former admirers have begun lamenting the “changed” McCain.  Because both were basing their candidacies on biography and character to such a great degree, I was sure that the campaign would get quite nasty, and so it has.  The important thing about McCain’s lying about Obama and his positions, which he has been doing on and off for months, is not that it marks some great break with a previously honorable campaign style, but that it reveals the completely opportunistic approach to campaigning–and policymaking, for that matter–that McCain has embraced his entire career.      

Update: It seems that Chait and I have come to much the same conclusion independently.

Pakistan’s prime minister said Thursday that strikes by foreign forces were “counterproductive,” as officials said there was no warning about the latest U.S. missile strike in the Pakistani northwest.

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The missile strike Wednesday was part of a surge in U.S. cross-border operations, and it was especially galling to Pakistanis because it came the same day an American military leader assured the nation’s leaders the U.S. respects Pakistan’s sovereignty. ~AP (via Antiwar)

Secretary Gates maintains that the U.S. has a right to launch attacks into Pakistan, and that our forces are “partnering” with Pakistan, except for the small detail that they are left out of the loop and are not informed about these operations.  It seems to me that when an ally, even a nominal ally, insists that we cannot violate their sovereignty with impunity, that should be enough to cause a reassessment of the tactics being used.  It is conceivable that a civilian government perceived to be too weak to defend Pakistani territory against foreign encroachments could fall to a new coup, which could create a military government much less inclined to cooperate.  Meanwhile, as Pakistan’s Daily Times reports, there is the very real possibility of stirring up otherwise quiescent tribes to launch attacks into Afghanistan, substantially complicating an already difficult, undermanned mission:

Every Ahmedzai Wazir tribesman will fight US forces on Afghani soil if their incursions into South Waziristan continue, a 3,000-strong jirga ruled on Wednesday.

The jirga consisting of pro-government tribal elders and pro-Taliban clerics was held in Wana.

“Each and every Ahmedzai Wazir tribesman, be young or old, will take up arms against the US and fight alongside the Pakistan Army,” eyewitnesses told Daily Times, quoting pro-Taliban Noor Muhammad reading a unanimous resolution at the end of the jirga.

This is the thing that proponents of these strikes don’t seem to understand, or have failed to consider: forces from the Pakistani side can enter Afghanistan and launch attacks right back at our soldiers.  Some of these tribal forces have stayed neutral so long as the Pakistani army was engaged in the fighting, but with every one of our strikes the harder it will be to keep additional Pashtuns from aligning against our forces.  The relatively limited number of soldiers in Afghanistan has meant a heavy reliance on air power, which has resulted in a series of politically damaging episodes of civilian deaths that have resulted from using air strikes to provide support.  The more forces our drone attacks in Pakistan stir up the more outnumbered NATO forces are going to be on the ground, thus requiring still more reliance on air power.  If you wanted to think of a way to exacerbate all of the problems we are having in Afghanistan, launching these drone attacks would not be a bad way to start.

Krikorian explicitly rejects the notion that the predominantly Mexican ethnicity of the new immigration is an issue, pointing out that America has always had an elastic definition of “white” (which used to exclude Germans and later Irish) and has steadily expanded it.

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The fact that most new immigrants speak Spanish means that many new arrivals can live entirely in Spanish-speaking environments, do business in Spanish, conduct legal affairs in Spanish, and come in no contact with American norms at all. ~Scott McConnell

Scott’s entire review is worth reading, and I intend to read Krikorian’s book, which seems to deserve the high praise it has been receiving, but these two remarks stood out for me since they seem to contradict one another.  If most immigrants are Mexican, Mexicans speak Spanish and the fact that most new immigrants’ assimilation is delayed or halted by the fact that they speak Spanish, the Mexican origins of most of the new immigration would seem to be a major part of the current predicament.  One need not believe that Aztlan is about to rise up to recognize that Mexico is unusually aggressive in its cultivation of emigrants through its consular offices, as Krikorian acknowledges, and that its President has continued a bad habit of President Fox by uttering phrases that Mexico is wherever there are Mexicans.  Even coming from a country with a less well-established sense of historical grievance in an era where unilateral declarations of independence were not sponsored by major powers, this sort of language would have an irredentist ring to it.  

The main argument that our economy no longer assimilates unskilled and uneducated workers in the way that it did a century ago is absolutely vital, and so in this sense large-scale immigration from any other country would represent a major problem.  However, if one of the reasons why the new immigration is different is that there is insufficient pressure on new immigrants to assimilate, the proximity to their country of origin and the land connection between their old country and ours represent significant differences from previous waves of immigration that reduce whatever pressure is currently being brought to bear. 

Then there is another equally important point:

The negative consequences of high rates of immigration remain whether the new entrants sneak across the border or are relatives by marriage of someone who arrived a dozen years ago.

In much the same way that railing against “foreign oil” is a way to avoid talking about the problem of dependence on oil, railing against illegal immigration only makes it seem as if the important issue is simply the legal, documented status of people entering the country rather than the effects a large influx of people has on wages, social services, demographics and politics.  Hence the proposals to legalize those who are already here–if all that matters is legal status, the implication is that mass immigration itself would be desirable if only there were a mechanism to accommodate it.

In this respect, Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era (the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA), expanded the powers of the presidency, established a new doctrine for active intervention abroad [bold mine-DL], and ultimately engaged in a war (Korea) — also absent an attack on the U.S. — that proved highly unpopular. ~Charles Krauthammer

Well, that’s odd, since Krauthammer insisted just last week that everyone would understand the Bush Doctrine first of all to be the “freedom agenda” and not a doctrine entailing preventive war.  But that was last week when he needed to find some convenient spin to help shield Palin from her critics.  Here he is now saying that, like Truman, Bush established a “new doctrine for intervention abroad.”  It’s almost as if Krauthammer is willing to contradict himself to make whatever rhetorical flourishes any given column needs!

There is a more significant point here, and it is that Bush’s legacy will be closely tied to the perceived viability of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and the success of the “freedom agenda.”  As the authoritarian charade of Saakashvili’s “democratic” government has been the poster boy for the latter, and the other main beneficiaries of democratization have been Hamas, Hizbullah and Shi’ite sectarians in Iraq, Bush will probably be judged harshly on his bizarre and dangerous fetishization of democracy.  If Washington abandons the possibility of successfully waging preventive war on account of limited or flawed intelligence and the sheer strategic folly of invading Iraq, as seems likely, this central aspect of the Bush Doctrine will not outlive this administration.  Unlike the Truman Doctrine’s enduring importance in the Cold War, preventive war will not become the basis for future policy and democracy-promotion, while still paid lip service, will once again take a back seat to some definition of U.S. strategic interests.  The signature policies of the Bush administration will likely be judged not simply to have been failures, but to have been calamitous blunders from the very beginning.

Call me cynical, though: I don’t think Sarah Palin had any idea what she was talking about, any more than I think John McCain had any idea what he was talking about when he said she “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America”. ~Hilzoy

What on earth is Palin talking about?  The commodity is fungible (check), and Congress won’t allow export bans, but the domestic markets need the oil first.  She forgot to mention that we must not blink.

I think I may be able to translate the statement out of its original Alaskan.  It might be that she is referring to the old export ban on Alaskan North Slope oil, which was finally lifted in 1996 after the GOP Congress voted against the ban in 1995.  The law had required Alaskan crude to be used domestically rather than sold to markets in Asia, and the ban removed the incentive for the development of domestic oil resources in California.  However, the gist of what Palin said suggests that she favors reinstating the export ban to mandate that Alaskan oil be sold domestically, but if I understand this correctly it seems that reinstating an export ban on Alaskan oil would discourage precisely the kind of offshore and domestic drilling in California that one assumes the proponents of “drill, baby, drill” favor.  So it’s not clear that her remarks make any sense, regardless of how you interpret them.

Update: Tapper calls the response “a less-than-well-articulated non-answer.”  So we can see that she is comfortable with McCain’s style of campaigning.