The McCain and Obama campaigns are mirror opposites. Mr. McCain offers little biography, while Mr. Obama is nothing but. ~Karl Rove

This is ludicrous, and it surprises me a little that even someone as dishonest as Karl Rove would try to pass off this most blatant of lies.  McCain offers little biography?  The candidate who went on a self-styled Biography Tour offers little biography?  Then there was the small matter of his first national ad: it was so substance-free and obsessed with McCain’s time in Vietnam that the name of the ad was McCain’s serial number!  Even his campaign’s motto, “Country First,” is a continual reminder of how he wants to present his wartime service as his definitive qualification for office.  It’s true that Obama’s candidacy is founded on his biography, but so is McCain’s, and what is strange about this claim is implication that McCain has reached this point in the election on the basis of his firm grounding in policy expertise.  I’m not sure the already blissfully message-free McCain campaign can become even more centered on McCain’s biography than it already is.

It is now common ask why Obama does not have a larger lead in national polls, and it is reasonable for Democrats to worry about what this means for the autumn given the recent history of Republican polling gains as the election approaches, but the argument that Obama “should” be doing better right now is based in large part on the assumption that the intense anti-GOP mood ought to translate into a landslide victory that Obama is so far “failing” to win.  Of course, he’s still winning and he’s currently projected to improve on his predecessor’s Electoral College tally by 45 votes at the least.  This does not have the makings of another 1932, as some Democrats may have hoped, or even another 1952, as I had long assumed it would because of the unpopularity of Bush and the war, but bears closest resemblance to 1976.  Given the greater, earlier engagement of much of the electorate in this cycle, the increased speed with which most of the electorate has been informed about the candidates and the increase in the sheer amount of electoral coverage online and on cable, it could be that the old, gaudy double-digit Democratic leads that previous nominees used to run up in the summer and proceeded to lose in the autumn (as in ’76 and ’88) are simply never going to happen again.    

There is not that much reason to expect that the presidential coalitions will have changed that much from the kind of polarization and evenly-divided electorate of the past two cycles.  This polarization is structural, for reasons Steve Sailer has made clear, which is confirmed in other ways in The Big Sort.  This is another reason why bipartisanship tends to be strongest in those areas of policy that are least representative of public opinion, since the divergent interests of polarized voting blocs will tend to increase the incentives for not cooperating with the opposing party.  At the same time, the more polarized the electorate is, the greater the importance of pulling in the remaining undecided voters, who are famously the last to start paying close attention to the election, which ensures that the major party candidates will try to minimize any stark differences between them.  Activists may prefer a choice rather than an echo, but electorally it is often less humiliating to be the echo who loses by two or three points rather than the choice that almost two-thirds of the electorate reject.   

What is interesting about this is that Obama’s campaign has gone out of its way to raise expectations about the outcome of this election.  He has sometimes said that the election is not going to be a tied contest with both campaigns fighting over a few voters in the middle in a couple of battleground states, but aside from the number of battleground states being contested that is more or less exactly the general election we are poised to have.  More recently in his controversial “dollar bill” remarks, he has said that no one really thinks the GOP has credible answers for any current challenges, which means that he is barely leading the representative of a party that is entirely bereft of any good policy ideas.  So there has been some encouragement from the campaign that Obama should be doing better than he is, when there is actually little reason why the two major political coalitions should have changed so much to allow Obama to move much beyond Kerry and Gore levels of support. 

Conceivably, a different Democratic nominee might be doing slightly better, and I am still convinced that nominating Obama was a blunder on the Democrats’ part for which we will all end up paying, but the disconcerting thing to realize is that even after eight years filled with illegal warfare, rampant criminality, the authorization of torture and numerous executive abuses of power the nominee of the party primarily responsible for all of this will probably still pull in 47-48% of the vote and maybe more.  Since most of the worst abuses were in the executive, the enduring strength of the Republican presidential coalition is particularly disturbing, since the people who have been held accountable for the administration’s wrongdoing have largely been merely the President’s lackeys and enablers in Congress rather than the authors of these policies.  In November we seem poised to throw out more of the lackeys from their relatively powerless perches in Congress.  Meanwhile, we may end up potentially rewarding one of the biggest enablers of the crimes of this administration with the executive power whose abuse he did little or nothing to challenge.

James will probably have more to say about this, and I can imagine that one of his first responses to the charge that Obama is a postmodernist would be to shrug and the second would be to laugh.  There are postmodernists on the left who are no doubt attracted to pomo methods and arguments because they want to subvert prevailing narratives and challenge established authorities that they find undesirable.  To one degree or another, conservatives have employed similar methods in attacking prevailing historical narratives and working to deconstruct liberal mythology about their revered heroes.  What is remarkable about Goldberg’s complaint against postmodernism is not just that he oversimplifies what it is, but that he does not seem to appreciate the irony that his defense of “old-fashioned literal truth” is the defense of a perfectly modern, positivist epistemology that assumes that objectivity exists, which is the product of a particular period of history.   

Of course, there is an argument, and a rather good one at that, that some traditional American conservatives either anticipated certain pomo critiques or came to similar conclusions.  This is not to say that Obama is therefore some sort of crypto-Kirkian or anything of the kind, but that traditional conservatives may appreciate the relationships between myth, power and language in ways that a pomo on the left might also find familiar, even though we would come to vastly different conclusions about what to do with this understanding.

In his Reason review of Gerald Russello’s book advancing this claim, my colleague Dan McCarthy writes:

Toward the end of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, the conservative scholar Gerald Russello insists, “The possible connections between…Kirk’s conservatism and postmodernism are more than a simple enemy-of-my-enemy stance toward liberalism.” His book makes a surprisingly strong case for that unlikely claim. But it also reinforces what is likely to be the reader’s first impression: that the lowest and surest common denominator between Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, and pomo theorists such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard lies in their shared antagonism toward the Enlightenment and liberalism in all its forms.

It is natural, then, that Goldberg, whose conservatism is more or less a warmed-over classical liberalism by his own admission (p. 402-403 in Liberal Fascism), would find postmodernism worrisome just as he has been put out by neo-traditional conservative and old European conservative arguments that challenge the liberal tradition in which he is working.  Of course, this reaction turns into a kind of self-parody when he describes Obama’s claim that words matter as one “sounding like a sorcerer offended by the suggestion that magic incantations are mere sounds.”  Of course, the idea that words and names do not possess significance is similar to the nominalism that exercised Richard Weaver for so much of his career; the understanding that control over the definition of words is a source of power was ancient when Orwell talked about Newspeak, and it is also common sense.  Any student of modern propaganda must understand at some level that the words (and images) people use have real psychological and therefore political power.  In fact, I wager most conservatives today take for granted that “words matter,” if only in a negative way because conservatives are well-acquainted with the power of pejorative labels to dismiss and marginalize an argument and many of them are well-versed in using such labeling against other conservatives.  Even in this complaint against postmodernism, Goldberg himself is making a sort of pomo critique of how liberals have sought to control language and speech and set up their own set of norms, which, as we regularly complain, are designed to empower them and advance their agenda.  As a regular part of his criticism of the left, Goldberg delights in “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the definition of postmodernism Dan cited from Lyotard in his review, but the metanarratives he chooses to question and critique are different from those critiqued by left pomos.  There is nothing at all wrong with this, but it does tend to make it seem much less outrageous that Obama has postmodern tendencies. 

The problem with most of the statements Goldberg critiques is not that they reflect a pomo sensibility, but that they are pretty clearly efforts at deceiving the public.

Via Andrew, Jeffrey Goldberg contemplates the problems an Iranian bomb might create: 

Something else changes: Terrorist groups that threaten, or have threatened, American targets – terrorists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon – will come under the protection of the Iranian nuclear umbrella. Hezbollah’s rockets have helped the group establish a local deterrent to Israeli attack; an Iranian bomb would strengthen Hezbollah in Lebanon, and well beyond Lebanon. 
An Iranian bomb would also set off new tension between India and Pakistan, an ally of Saudi Arabia that would almost certainly turn to Pakistan for help with its program, making the Indians, who are already distressingly close to India [sic], exceedingly nervous.

I assume that he means to refer to the relations between Iran and India in this last sentence, since India has been building the same sort of strategic relationship with Iran that it is now cultivating with Afghanistan in an effort to check Pakistan on two sides.  Including Pakistan and India in the discussion is important, because it is not possible to understand an Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons without bearing in mind its long-running rivalry with Pakistan for influence in Afghanistan and in the region generally and the perceived need to match Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal with one of its own.  An Iranian bomb would complicate the situation and could encourage more proliferation, but one can also see how it could make an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange even less likely.  If two of Pakistan’s neighbors have a nuclear deterrent, the consequences of using its weapons become even more disastrous and so, one assumes, less likely.  

While it would be ideal if no states possessed nuclear weapons and the increase in the size of the nuclear club makes total nuclear disarmament even more difficult, there is some reason to believe that as more states acquire nuclear weapons there will be fewer occasions for large international conflicts because of the severe dangers that would come from escalating any disputes into a full-scale war.  The Kargil war in ’99, in which Pakistan’s military tested the limits of how much aggression its newfound arsenal would permit, could have escalated into a larger conflict, but it was in some significant part because both states had nuclear weapons that ultimately neither expanded the conflict.  As more states acquire these weapons, which would seem to be a more or less unavoidable consequence of globalization and the spread of technologies, low-intensity and proxy conflicts will probably become the norm even more than they already have done.  If we think of them as attempts to thwart the spread of knowledge and technology that is part and parcel of the global economy, wars for nonproliferation are a bit like fighting against the waves.

Meanwhile, the last time Hizbullah really threatened American targets was in the ’80s, so even when we are trying to discuss the consequences of an Iranian bomb beyond Israel’s security concerns we keep coming back to talking about threats to Israel.

Earlier, Goldberg asks:

Can we really live with a Middle East that has eight or ten nuclear powers?

It seems very improbable that there would be that many.  It is not difficult to imagine an Iranian bomb prompting Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to try to acquire a bomb, and Syria might follow suit, but I don’t see how we get to eight or ten states.  All of those, together with Israel, would still make for six new nuclear states, of which the Saudis are probably the most worrisome.

At the same time, instead of discouraging Afghan-Indian ties, as Kaplan recommends, the U.S. needs exactly this kind of strategic balancing to succeed to make clear to Pakistan’s military establishment that Afghanistan is not the ISI’s playground any longer.  India has a permanent, vested interest in cultivating a strong, stable Afghanistan; our interests here, while important, are transitory and will end in the near future.  Our presence there will eventually end, so in the interests of regional stability Afghanistan needs to have powerful regional allies that can counter the most dangerous elements within Pakistan’s military.

In his last interview, conducted last summer, Solzhenitsyn had some important words for all of us.  Responding to a question about the danger that there will be no accounting for the crimes of the Soviet government, he said:

As for “brooding over the past”, alas, that conflation of “Soviet” and “Russian”, against which I spoke so often in the 1970s, has not passed away in the West, or in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics [bold mine-DL]. The elder political generation in communist countries was not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist.  Nevertheless, I dare hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.  

Solzhenitsyn also warned against an anti-Russian essentialism:

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country. One should not attribute this to the “sick psychology” of the Russians, as is often done in the West.

Addressing the decline in relations between Russia and the West, he observed:

The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a “knight of democracy” has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West’s reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

He also expressed concern about the missed opportunity of forging a more stable alliance with Russia earlier in the decade:

But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West’s irrational refusal of this hand. No sooner did the US accept Russia’s critically important aid in Afghanistan than it started making newer and newer demands. As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears.

Many of the Solzhenitsyn obituary writers on the left have felt obliged to dwell a little on his post-Cold War politics (which, if they had been paying attention, were the politics he had had before then).  The gist of it has been, “Yes, he was a great and heroic man, but can you believe all the crazy things he said?”  Ross has a perceptive post on how the treatment of Solzhenitsyn’s “mystical reactionary” side misses that Solzhenitsyn was a great dissident and writer because he was the “mystical reactionary.”  As Ross says:

From the Timescomplaining about his “hectoring jeremiads” and puzzling over his willingness to criticize “democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers” as well as Communists, to Christopher Hitchens griping absurdly about the “ayatollah-like tones” of his famous Harvard commencement address (the equivalent of comparing Chesterton to Franco), the coverage has often involved a Gopnikesque attempt to seal off the Good Solzhenitsyn from the Weird Solzhenitsyn, and to insist that the eloquent foe of Marxist tyranny can be celebrated even as the mystical reactionary is dismissed. 

This is close to what I was saying yesterday.  In many cases, the obituaries of the famous departed are occasions for self-congratulation and the reinforcement of political norms.  The reason why many of the obituaries have tried to separate the aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s career that the American mainstream admires from those that it finds troubling or dangerous is part of an effort to make clear that Solzhenitsyn was great insofar as he agreed with the American mainstream and was eccentric, irrational and ridiculous when he did not.  That it was actually almost the reverse–that his anticommunist dissent and literary accomplishments were in a way the least important things about him and his agreement with our mainstream was almost accidental when it happened–is just one more way in which Solzhenitsyn remains poorly understood even by those, including Hitchens, who give him grudging admiration.  Moreover, it was Solzhenitsyn’s willingness to reject Western intellectual fads (including, broadly speaking, the Enlightenment) in the conviction that they all partook of the same distorted understanding of human nature and our relationship with God that enabled him to see so clearly through the falsehoods of the most extreme anthropocentric views.

I would take issue with Ross’ equation of Gopnik’s likening Chesterton to Franco and Hitchens’ comparison of Solzhenitsyn to an ayatollah.  The second seems to me to be much worse and I think it is intended to be.  First of all, equating the two does a disservice to Franco, who was, for all of the excesses ever committed by the Nationalist regime, never so fanatical.  Further, when compared to what is said by actual ayatollahs, Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address was a mild, friendly rebuke.  This is the old Hitchensian move of conflating strong religious and moral conviction with coercive fanaticism and then declaring that faith must always lead to oppression.  In this way one of the world’s foremost dissidents can be perversely aligned with an oppressive tyranny.  Ross notes that this comparison is absurd.  However, the other comparison between Chesterton and Franco is not so much absurd as it is inaccurate.  Chesterton probably would have sympathized with the Nationalist cause (as did Belloc and many English literary Catholics who lived to see the Civil War) because he would have understood–correctly–that theirs was at least in part the cause of Catholicism against her enemies.  That wouldn’t have made him the same as Franco; it would have made him a Catholic.  Chesterton probably would have come to similar conclusions as Belloc, for whom

Spain’s civil war merely confirmed him in his realization that the capitalist and the communist alike have always hated any Catholic society far more than they have ever hated each other.    

What is even more strange from my perspective is that Solzhenitsyn’s “mix of Christian humanism, Russian nationalism, and deep skepticism about modernity” is considered politically incorrect.  Of course, my perspective is fairly unusual, so that might account for my puzzlement, but aside from the issue of nationalism Solzhenitsyn’s “politically incorrect” views might very easily be mistaken for the views of a significant number of 20th century conservative intellectuals and writers.  Solzhenitsyn tended to take his critiques farther than others, but this was evidence of his freedom from the imposed constraints that he lamented when he was discussing the quality of Western intellectual life.  Granted, if he had stayed in the United States and not gone back to Russia, I can see how his Russian nationalism might have seemed odd, but he did go back and he was and always remained a Russian.  His Russian nationalism seemed to many in the West to be unattractive, but when you consider that there were, are, three unequal political forces in Russia–the remaining communists, the small batch of liberal “reformers” and authoritarian nationalists–it was unremarkable that he should express Russian nationalist views when the alternatives were obviously anathema to him.  For that matter, the Russian experience in the ’90s, which Solzhenitsyn likened to the Time of Troubles, made nationalists out of a vast majority of Russians.  To then complain that he took positions consistent with this view from his criticisms of Yeltsin’s ineffectual rule to his condemnations of the attacks on Serbia to opposition to NATO expansion is a bit like complaining that he was, in fact, a Russian and Orthodox.

With the recent talk that Eric Cantor, the House Minority Deputy Whip from Virginia, is being seriously considered as McCain’s VP selection, it seems to me that it is a distinct advantage for Cantor that he engaged in scurrilous attacks on Obama’s position on Israel.  If the last couple of weeks has shown anything, I would think it would have shown everyone that it is clear that the McCain campaign is going to be as unscrupulous as it has to be, and Cantor has already distinguished himself as an attack dog on McCain’s behalf.  Far from being a liability, Cantor’s willingness to push the dishonest party line portaying Obama as anti-Israel is a feather in his cap in GOP circles.  The real question is whether McCain wants to be the first nominee since Mondale to name a current House member as a VP nominee.  (Bob Dole had the misfortune of choosing a former House member in Jack Kemp, and that didn’t exactly work out well, either.)  This is what I have never quite understood about the conservative enthusiasm for nominating Rob Portman, John Kasich or Chris Cox, among others, since none of them really brings the sort of executive experience that is going to give voters confidence to support the Republican ticket with such an aged nominee in the top slot. 

This is not to fault the current or former House members in question, but simply to drive home the point that even Eric Cantor does not really offset an Obama selection of Gov. Kaine, because Kaine is a governor and Cantor is just a House member.  More to the point, a McCain selection of Cantor is a signal of desperation and fear that Virginia is really in danger of being lost.  Whether or not Virginia is competitive (it is), the impression that McCain is on the defensive and is doing its utmost just to hang on to states that haven’t voted Democratic in over 40 years will probably cripple the ticket going into the fall.  Choosing a Pawlenty or someone similar says that the campaign will be contesting the Midwest and conceding nothing in the South, and it will add a governor to the ticket to offset any executive experience Obama may add with his choice.  The good news for McCain is that he will be able to find out Obama’s selection some time in advance of his own.  Obama can rest a little more easy in the knowledge that all GOP options are more or less unappealing.

As some of my relatives say, for the love.  Timothy Noah often excels at embarrassing himself, but he joins a select crowd of overreacting liberals with his latest item, which declares that this silly “Is Obama too skinny for his own good?” article also has a racial subtext.  This is very much like the overheated response to “Celeb” or “The One”–rather than simply laughing off these ads and articles as ridiculous, Obama’s supporters and many media figures seem to be deadly serious about stressing the cunning, super-secret deployment of racial messages in both.  Whether it is Perlstein hallucinating Nazi propaganda film homages or Gergen detecting racist tropes or Noah discerning skinniness as the latest one of these tropes, the responses have managed to make the various targets of their criticism seem sane, well-balanced and serious by comparison.  Meanwhile, looking back over recent episodes of The Daily Show, I was amused to find that Jon Stewart and his crew had made the exact same comparison between Obama and Moses that supposedly implied (according to Gergen) that the McCain campaign was accusing Obama of not knowing his place.  The response to these things is very simple: mock them for their stupidity, and stop investing them with the importance that their creators want you to give them.

His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas [bold mine-DL], Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. ~David Brooks

The first place on this list is a small but curious error, and one that might be subtly encouraged by Obama’s first national ad of the general election in which he talks up his grandparents’ Kansas roots.  While virtually every profile of the candidate remarks on his mother‘s home in Kansas, and the phony controversy over Obama’s birth certificate takes for granted that everyone agrees his birthplace is supposed to be (and was) in Hawaii, there is an idea that seems to be circulating that he spent some time as a child in Kansas.  This simply isn’t true, anyone who has spent any time following Obama’s career knows it isn’t true.  How does it get included on the list?  It’s not as if his non-Kansan childhood is a mystery, since it was remarked upon when he was campaigning in Kansas earlier this year when he made his first visit to his grandfather’s hometown.       

This would be almost entirely irrelevant, except that this serves as a useful example of how small, easily avoidable errors creep into prominent discussions of his biography and create the basis for other false claims on the grounds that we “don’t really know” who Obama is.  If the most basic, readily confirmed facts seem to be in dispute, when there is actually no dispute about them, the room for rumors and bizarre claims grows.  The supposedly “elusive” Obama is not really “elusive” at all, but for some reason people keep insisting on making him into this incomprehensible, protean figure who cannot be fully known.  The information is all there in the public domain, and his biography is as well-known to us as any candidate’s in recent memory (does anyone remember hearing even once about where Bob Dole went to elementary school?) thanks to his own autobiographical work, but somehow we are supposed to believe that his identity “eludes” us.  It would probably seem much more clear if everyone discussing his biography would be a bit more attentive to basic claims about where he lived and grew up.