With Hurricane Ike cutting a savage path through Texas, Senator Barack Obama canceled plans to appear on the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” and asked voters to consider the “quiet storms” taking place in the lives of many Americans as they weigh their choice in the presidential race. ~The New York Times

Why does Obama do this?  Does he really want to remind people of the time when he referred to the Virginia Tech massacre (on the day it happened) to talk about the “quiet violence” of Don Imus?  Or does he want to call to mind the occasion when he warned about the “quiet riots” in the black community?  This sort of language has one of two effects: it trivializes the violence or the storm in question, or it grossly exaggerates the power of the less dramatic and destructive problems to which Obama is referring.  Either he is saying that the storm is not all that devastating to east Texas, or he is saying that these “quiet storms” are as damaging as a powerful hurricane.  Neither is true.

Blake and Shay Johnson of Reno were even more plain-spoken [about Palin].

“She’s an American,” said Blake. ~The Politico

That’s a stroke of luck.  Here I had been thinking all along that she was Canadian. 

Palin’s first campaign destination on her own was there in Nevada, and it seems that each of her public appearances is going to be pretty much like the last:

Palin, greeted by chants of “Sarah, Sarah,” spoke to about 3,500 people for about 20 minutes. She was interrupted frequently by cheers and applause. And she led the audience in the now-familiar refrain: “Drill, baby, drill.”

In addition to showcasing this profound understanding of energy policy, there was this:

In her remarks, Palin delivered several feel-good lines: “America is an exceptional country and you are all exceptional Americans.”

It is remarkable that Palin, whose popularity is rooted firmly in her ordinariness and the perception that she is a normal, common American (indeed, one of the people in the Carson City crowd praises her for her common background), has adopted this sort of language.  If everyone in her audience is an exceptional American, being exceptional becomes the new norm, in which case all attempts to make distinctions between the normal and abnormal, the regular and the exceptional, become useless.  This is very close to the modern self-esteem cult’s false proposition that everyone is a winner.  If Obama uttered such saccharine nonsense, he would be mocked for months for his drippy, feel-good sentimentality. 

Chesterton once identified “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal,” which might be a good shorthand description for what McCain is doing to Palin by adding her to the Republican ticket.  Now it would seem that a generally normal person, Palin, is employing language that empties the words normal and exceptional of their basic meanings in a way that undermines the core of her own popular appeal.

P.S. Apparently, there are people who think Palin is from Canada:

Karen Porter, an economically hard-pressed longtime waitress at Paul’s (“I used to be on a beer budget, now I’m on a bus budget”), would be what political scientists call a “low-information voter,” if only she were registered. Attracted to Obama (“I think he really cares about people in the middle class”), Porter is tempted to vote for the first time. When asked about his Republican rival, Porter said, “I don’t know much about McCain. I hear a lot about his vice president. What’s her name? The one from Canada.”

Weep for the future.

Alex Massie offers this challenge to Palin critics:

Still, a super-qualified running-mate is not much use if they don’t help the ticket win in the first place. And that’s why I ask: what was John McCain supposed to do? The front-running candidates for his Veep would each, I think, have guaranteed his defeat. Mitt Romney? Please! Tim Pawlenty? What a snooze. Joe Lieberman? You have to be kidding. none of these men could have had Sarah Palin’s impact upon the race. None of them would have been a potential game-changer.

There is no question that no other selection, except perhaps choosing Jindal (and probably not even that), could have dominated the news for the last two weeks in the same way, but I’m not sure it’s true that none of them could have had the potential to change the dynamic of the campaign.  Choosing either Romney or Liberman would have been a game-changer, all right, but in the way that a forfeit changes a game.  While movement leaders and many activists would still have swooned, it seems certain that selecting Romney would have been an electoral catastrophe.  Palin provoked so much hostility from the left and from the media because of culture war themes that were magnified by class differences, and despite Romney’s ceaseless effort to make himself into a culture warrior he does not possess the credibility to generate the kind of excitement or fear that Palin does.  Romney would have actively alienated evangelicals and working-class Americans just as much as Palin has attracted them.  Marginal gains in Michigan would have been offset by demoralization across the rest of the Midwest and the South.  McCain’s mockery of Romney as the “candidate of change” would be replayed daily.  Obviously, I think Romney would have been politically very foolish.  Likewise, had Graham prevailed on McCain and Lieberman became the nominee, the election would already be over. 

My guess is that a Pawlenty choice would have been very different.  As with any counterfactual scenario, we’ll never know, but given what we do know about the response to Palin here are a few reasons why a Pawlenty choice would have shaken up the race considerably.  It is hard to imagine that a more conventional choice making as much of an impact as Palin, but as everyone has acknowledged Palin is an extremely high-risk, high-reward pick and so far we have mostly seen only the reward and not the downside for McCain.  Picking Pawlenty would have been less bold, but also far less transparently desperate and indifferent to qualifications.  While Pawlenty would have been deemed the safe choice–McCain would have been choosing a longtime loyalist whose chances at receiving the nod had been discussed for months–he would have been almost as unknown nationally as Palin without the problem of being quite so obscure and far removed from the national debate.  Despite having been on political junkies’ VP lists for most of the year, most voters would not have known much about him, so he would not bring any more baggage and would bring fewer surprises than Palin. 

Unlike Palin, though, he has a longer record as governor of Minnesota than Palin does in Alaska, he has the distinction of being one of a handful of Republican governors of a “blue” state left standing and he narrowly won re-election in one of the worst years for Republican gubernatorial candidates in decades.  Considering some of the more superficial attributes, Pawlenty has a working-class background (his father was a Teamster), he is the same age as Obama, and he actually plays hockey, all of which would have added a similar dose of youth, working-class voter appeal and a connection with hockey fans across the Upper Midwest.  Like Palin, he was originally Catholic and then converted to evangelical Protestantism, but unlike Palin he grew up in the Catholic Church and so might have had some connection with Midwestern Catholics.  A lot of the same identity-driven enthusiasm about Palin could very well have accompanied a Pawlenty nomination, since it is quite clear that what matters to a lot of her enthusiasts is not anything she has done but who she is and what she represents.  With the convention in his state capital, Pawlenty’s nomination would have seemed particularly fitting. 

As Noam Scheiber noted a few months ago after he wrote a profile of Pawlenty, “Pawlenty is smart and extremely fluent in the details of domestic policy–something McCain can’t come close to claiming, but which will be pretty critical in a campaign waged over health care, infrastructure, and energy.”  Compared to a running mate who doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the basic elements of the federal budget and who reinforces the campaign’s obsession with oil drilling, Pawlenty would have been a more capable lieutenant and consequently a more effective attack dog on policy.  Rhetorically, he has had a habit of breaking with the GOP without diverging much from fiscal and economic conservatism, but has supported enough “populist” legislation (e.g., increasing the minimum wage) that he cannot be readily reduced to a caricature of a Republican.  Electorally, Pawlenty might have helped McCain more in the Upper Midwest.  Given how close Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan still are this year, Pawlenty could have helped offset the Democratic advantage of having a nominee from Illinois.  Granted, Pawlenty is not a very engaging speaker, which is a problem, but he is clearly far more capable of handling the press and arguing his case on television.  Concerning foreign affairs, Pawlenty has led a number of state trade delegations overseas and has visited National Guard units in several countries, so he would not have been as much of a novice in this area as Palin.  On immigration, he has a little credibility as an opponent of illegal immigration and supporter of border security, which would have reassured conservatives a little on that score.  If the Palin nomination blows up in McCain’s face, as I think it still probably will, a lot of people will look back at the supposedly boring, safe choice of Pawlenty and wonder what might have been.  As someone who dreads the prospect of a McCain administration, I’m glad that McCain opted for the riskier choice.

Via James Fallows, I see that Prof. Andrew Bacevich, a TAC Contributing Editor, was recently interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air about his new book, The Limits of Power, and again by Bill Moyers.  Prof. Bacevich also has a new, extensive article adapted from his book in the latest issue of TAC.  In the NPR interview, Bacevich was especially interesting and persuasive when he was talking about the relationship between American expansionist impulses, reckless foreign policy and our culture of consumption and acquisition, which is a theme he discusses at some length in this article.  Here is a provocative excerpt:

Carter’s speech did enjoy a long and fruitful life—chiefly as fodder for his political opponents. The most formidable was Ronald Reagan. He portrayed himself as conservative but was, in fact, the modern prophet of profligacy—the politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption. Beguiling his fellow citizens with talk of “morning in America,” Reagan added to America’s civic religion two crucial beliefs: credit has no limits, and the bills will never come due. Balance the books, pay as you go, save for a rainy day—Reagan’s abrogation of these ancient bits of folk wisdom did as much to recast America’s moral constitution as did sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

But Gov. Palin’s administration acknowledges that it is still pursuing a project that would link Ketchikan to its airport — with the help of as much as $73 million in federal funds earmarked by Congress for the original project. 

“What the media isn’t reporting is that the project isn’t dead,” Roger Wetherell, spokesman for Alaska’s Department of Transportation, said. In a process begun this past winter, the state’s DOT is currently considering (PDF) a number of alternative solutions (five other possible bridges or three different ferry routes [bold mine-DL]) to link Ketchikan and Gravina Island.

The DOT has not yet developed cost estimates for those proposals, Wetherell said, but $73 million of the approximately $223 million Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK) earmarked for the bridge in 2005 has been set aside for the Gravina Access Project. ~Paul Kiel

Via Glenn Thrush

Perhaps now she will say “thanks, but no thanks”?  Well, no, not really. 

To recap: Palin’s record on earmarks isn’t what McCain and Palin make it out to be, and they consistently misrepresent that record to justify selecting her as VP nominee, but her earmark record is better than Murkowski’s (some accomplishment), and running a campaign largely on hostility to earmarks is trivial in any case.  So this confirms several things we knew: Palin was poorly vetted, the McCain campaign is trying to mislead the public, Palin doesn’t have much to show for her claim to being a reformer, and McCain and Palin are running an absurdly substance-free campaign.   

Update: The Wall Street Journal lede from the new story on Palin’s earmark requests as governor:

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn’t sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years.

I respected McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. ~Thomas Friedman

This is a view so completely detached from reality that I’m not sure what there is to say in response to it.  The people McCain was most in danger of alienating with his bittereinder approach to Iraq were the columnists and journalists who had built him up as the “maverick,” and somehow they took it as proof of his profound political courage and integrity to run on a policy that was overwhelmingly popular in his party and to endorse a tactical plan that became the only relevant litmus test in Republican politics.  In the GOP in 2007, questioning the “surge” was the path to political doom.  Today, it is even more dangerous, since the mainstream consensus is that the “surge” has “worked,” provided that you redefine what it was supposed to have accomplished and significantly lower the standards for what constitutes success.  In any case, the real risk for a Republican presidential candidate in early 2007, as Sam Brownback learned to his chagrin, was to raise questions and suggest modifications to the plan.  Outright opposition was limited, of course, to Ron Paul, who was never a remotely realistic contender for the nomination in large part because of his positions on the war and foreign policy.  Frankly, McCain taking a prominent pro-“surge” position last year was every bit as courageous and daring as Obama taking an antiwar position when he was a state senator from Hyde Park–it wasn’t.  Whatever else you want to say about these positions, they were not examples of lonely resistance against a party that was determined to take a different view.  That pundits who have lost patience with McCain cannot grasp this basic truth about the political expediency of McCain’s position on the “surge” during the primaries reflects the degree to which these pundits started believing the myth that they helped to weave about McCain.  It no longer mattered what McCain did–if McCain did anything, whatever it was had to be proof of his “maverick” status.   

McCain likes to trade on a reputation of breaking with his own party, but each time he has broken with his leadership it has been to curry favor with the Washington establishment or the press (or both), and now that he has apparently opted for an electiral strategy that hinges on energizing and mobilizing party regulars members of the Washington establishment and the press are crying about how he has sold out.  Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that he sold out to them years ago, and they lavished him with praise and helped to make him the national figure that he has become, and now they are furious that he is two-timing them.  What all these pundits refuse to face, or will not admit, is that the noble, reform-minded McCain was their creation–they imputed to him virtues and consistency he did not possess, ignored all of his bad instincts, excused his awful foreign policy views, dismissed his pandering and lies on the grounds that he didn’tenjoy doing it, and most of all pretended that the McCain they have been watching for the last two years is some radical break from the McCain of old.  No doubt it is more comforting to believe this than acknowledge that their enthusiasm in backing him was always as opportunistic as McCain’s pursuit of their admiration was or that the Republican nominee they find so terrible today is a creature that they foisted upon the country.  Working together, McCain and the press have insulated the GOP nominee from the fierce anti-GOP mood in the country, and all of their praise helped to make McCain into the “maverick” whom independent and moderate voters continue to find appealing.  Now, remarkably, in their hostility to Palin they have given McCain one last gift by making her the tribune of conservative America and also making McCain conservatives’ new favorite because he chose her.  Having made him a viable “centrist,” they have been working overtime in the last few months, and especially the last two weeks, to rebuild his shredded credibility with an alarmingly large number of conservatives who should know better.

It is important to remember that on most major policy questions he never challenges his own party, and the “surge” is the most famous example of how he both conforms to and creates the party line.  The issue that very nearly ended McCain’s campaign was immigration, and after the immigration legislation failed last year he has temporarily buckled to pressure from within the party and from the grassroots, and you will notice that he has said next to nothing about this subject for months.  As a matter of policy, I think it was good that McCain’s preferred legislation failed and that he and Bush were brought to heel, but if you want a good example of how McCain almost lost the nomination while binding himself ever more closely to the establishment the fight over immigration is where to look. 

P.S.  The lingering effects of media adoration of McCain could be one reason why the Obama campaign may be having trouble gaining any traction with its efforts to link McCain to Bush.  These efforts are quite reasonable given how indistinguishable the two are on most things, and you’d think that being closely tied to one of the most unpopular Presidents in history would be a problem, but when Obama’s cheerleaders in the press have spent years insisting how independent and different McCain is they are going to have difficulty insisting that he represents Bush’s third term.  Even though this claim is absolutely right, it is a message that contradicts years of gushing press coverage of McCain.  If they say that McCain used to be independent-minded and noble (translation: “he used to agree with us in the media more often”), as most of them keep repeating, they are playing into McCain’s hands by emphasizing that the overwhelming majority of McCain’s political career has been nothing like Bush’s.  Unless you can make the case, as I think you can, that McCain has always been as shameless, opportunistic and self-serving (yes, that’s right) in his political career as he is now the attacks on his campaign tactics end up coming off as little more than expressions of frustration that the media and their preferred candidate are currently losing.  Having granted him the status of a reforming paladin with extensive foreign policy expertise, it is a bit late for most of these people to discover that he is an opportunist who does not understand policy detail.   

That frustration is made even more acute by the mistaken belief on the left that culture war politics was not going to dominate this cycle, which many liberals assumed would have to be decided on the basis of serious policy questions, and by the partly mistaken assessment that things are so objectively horrible that the people have no choice but to vote against the GOP.  To listen to some pundits on the left tell it earlier this year, this was supposed to be another 1932 election.  Even now, there are pundits on left and right who assume that this is will end up being a 1980-style victory for Democrats on the assumption that 80% wrong track numbers must mean an incumbent party’s defeat.  This is why the griping about Obama’s underperformance has been as loud as it has–if you wake up every day assuming that a Democratic landslide is the appropriate electoral outcome in November the evenly-divided electorate must be maddening.

Update: This Telegraph story on Democratic complaints about the Obama campaign has some interesting quotes related to this point about unrealistic expectations meeting disappointing reality:

A senior Democratic strategist, who has played a prominent role in two presidential campaigns, told The Sunday Telegraph: “These guys are on the verge of blowing the greatest gimme in the history of American politics. They’re the most arrogant bunch Ive ever seen. They won’t accept that they are losing and they won’t listen.”

The strategist seems right to me, but no doubt this strategist completely misses the arrogance of his own statement.  The greatest gimme in the history of American politics?  Let’s try to have some perspective, shall we?  Just looking at postwar elections, 1952, 1976, 1980 and 1984 were all in their own ways much more lopsided in terms of the alienation from the incumbent President and party and economic conditions (and antiwar sentiment shaping things in 1952 and possibly a bit in 1976).  Part of the problem that the Obama campaign has been having in responding to Palin and to McCain’s attacks over the last three months is that this idea that the ’08 election is the “greatest gimme in the history of American politics” has infected the entire Democratic Party.  Months ago Obama declared that this was not going to be a 47%-47% split electorate with the campaigns fighting over a few swing states, and this presumption informed the decision to launch a 50-state presidential election strategy and start running ads in Georgia and Montana, among other implausible target states, to “expand the map.”  At present, the map may well be expanding for the Republicans, which seems (and is) crazy, but the refusal to recognize that this was even possible helps explain part of the flailing, confused response of recent weeks.  This arrogance was evident again in a less-noticed part of Obama’s “dollar bills” line when he said, “No one thinks that they [the Republicans] have answers to any of our challenges,” or words to that effect.  Even if I agreed with such a blanket statement, I would understand how absurd it would seem to voters who are torn between the candidates for whatever reason.  The electorate remains structurally very much like the electorate in 2004, and if recent Republican party ID and generic ballot numbers are right it seems that the toxicity of the GOP label has started magically vanishing with the nomination of Palin.  This is not the “greatest gimme” election ever, and as in so many other kinds of competitions the side that assumes all it has to do is show up is the side that gets outplayed and outscored.

If “mavericks” like McCain and Palin were serious about cutting the deficit and the budget and really believed in smaller government they’d stop talking about earmarks and efficiencies and promise to eliminate entire programs. ~Jack Shafer

Of course, that would require political courage and a willingness to lead a difficult fight against entrenched interests.  Reformers don’t have time for that sort of thing.

Those complaining about a double standard of treatment being applied to Sarah Palin by the media seem to be quite serious, which suggests that they haven’t given the slightest thought to the question.  By the time John Edwards was the VP nominee, he had campaigned and debated as a candidate for months.  Unlike Palin, he was far from an unknown nationally and his positions on a range of policies were a matter of public record.  Concerning Obama, this is even more true, since he has been on the campaign trail for 19 months, has participated in even more debates and has given several high-profile policy speeches.  Whether or not I find those policy speeches to be detailed enough is not the point–his views on all of the policies Palin has been asked about are known and he has faced questions from the press about them on numerous occasions.  The idea that Palin is being treated with unusual rigor is exactly what I was talking about when I warned conservatives against using lowered standards when assessing her performance that are so insulting to Palin.  If this is the reaction most conservatives are going to have to her treatment in relatively easy interviews, they are going to go completely mad when they see what happens at the VP debate when she faces real pressure.

I’m appalled by this insistence on Georgia — and, much worse, Ukraine — being drafted into NATO come hell or high vodka. But there’s no denying that Palin conveyed not just a clear preference but a conviction as to the NEED for good relations with Russia, rhetoric or no; and no denying that this important feature of her interview, accompanied by a thrice-repeated declaration that we cannot and will not repeat the Cold War, was simply cut. This is an extraordinary disservice to the American people and the voting public — especially given the extreme sensitivity of a presidential election and the public vetting process of Sarah Palin! Shame and embarrassment should follow, but won’t. The press has every right to subject public Palin to public scrutiny. But they can’t filter the results according to whatever bent attitudes overrule their duty. ~James Poulos

I’m not sure whether it is a disservice to the American people and the voting public (who, we are reliably told by Palinites, don’t care about any of these things anyway), but I am quite sure that it is not a disservice to the candidate.  My take here is obviously quite different from James’ response.  Journalists report news, and they focus on those statements that they deem to be most newsworthy given limited time or space.  Does that encourage a preference for the sensational and dangerous?  It does, because those attract more attention and generate more business for the paper or network in question.  All that said, was there anything unethical about the way the interview was edited?  Did they actually make her appear to say anything that she did not, in fact, say?  On the contrary, they chose to edit out comments (no new Cold War, but put sanctions on Russia!) that would have been plainly self-contradictory.  A truly hostile press would have spliced the interview in such a way to maximize the absurdity and incoherence of her positions, which would not have been hard.   

McCain also puts throwaway lines into his speeches about how he wants good relations with Russia, but every move he makes and every policy he supports contradicts that.  Why should Palin’s assertions of the same thing be taken any more seriously?  As far as I’m concerned, Palin talking about how “very, very important” Russia is to the United States in the same breath that she says we may have to fight them over their own backyard makes her seem not only poorly informed but positively ridiculous.  Russia is “very, very important,” but apparently Georgia and especially Saakashvili are super-important and worth wrecking relations with this “very, very important” country.  Given how obviously unprepared Palin was for this part of the interview, exposing her to a television audience for the ridicule her complete answers would receive would have been an irresponsible failure to filter out a lot of the noise and confusion.  

James notes in his post that the problem with continued NATO expansion may not be a cold war, but a very real, hot one, which I would have thought would make it clear how meaningless professions of good intentions toward the Russians are.  To the extent that the full interview makes Palin look more like the “world’s biggest Fox News fembot” and makes voting for McCain seem even more reckless, I can see why some Obama supporters would be upset that these statements were edited out of the broadcast.  Anyone who wants to give Palin a fair chance to prove herself has to be glad that ABC went easy on her.