This report is rather remarkable:

The campaign’s fundraising has given McCain the ability to spend more on television advertising than Democrat Barack Obama in key battleground states.

For a year in which the GOP is the political equivalent of a toxic landfill, it is a little surprising that McCain has been able to pull in as much money as he has over the last two months after a miserable start.  Certainly, had he and his campaign not dawdled and frittered away much of the last four months they would be in an even stronger position, but considering how badly everyone agrees his campaign has been run since he locked up the nomination he is doing rather well.  This is the sort of news that might make Plouffe rethink the grand strategy that involves throwing money down a hole with advertising in Alaska and Georgia.

Ambinder:

If Obama appears presumptuous and arrogant and not humble, there’s a good bet that we’ll see that reflected in the coverage back home.

Rather by definition, the proposal that he would speak at the Brandenburg Gate is presumptuous and arrogant, since it is a location usually reserved for addresses by heads of state during official visits on those occasions when it is used at all for political events. [Correction: I see that I was mistaken on this point, at least with regard to its uses by German politicians, but I think it still remains presumptuous for a foreign visiting politician to use it as his backdrop during an election season.]  As I understand it, Merkel is not inclined to give him his photo-op.  Besides, the logistical nightmare of shutting down the area around the Reichstag to host such a thing is probably not the sort of hassle that the Berlin city government and Merkel want to have.  The absurdity of the proposal will probably save Obama from showing off his arrogance in front of the international press.

Update: The proposal is controversial within Germany and has created a rift within the coalition government.  Maybe post-partisanship stops at the water’s edge?  It has drawn this perfectly legitimate and correct statement from Merkel:

No German candidate for high office would even think of using the National Mall or Red Square in Moscow for a rally because it would not be seen as appropriate.

For that matter, no candidate from another country would usually think of doing this, because it would make little sense as a way to win votes back home.  Just as a matter of political calculation, does Obama really want to send the message that he was able to give this speech at Brandenburg Gate because the Social Democrats allowed him to do it over the objections of the center-right Chancellor?  Besides being, well, socialists, the SPD is associated in the minds of most Americans with Gerhard Schroeder to the extent that they think about it at all.  Even if you believe, as I did at the time, that Schroeder was doing us a favour in speaking out against the invasion, he and his party are widely perceived as exploiters of “anti-Americanism.”  While Schroeder is long gone and getting fat off of hefty Russian contracts, that distinction may be lost on audiences back home. 

Second Update: Der Spiegel reports:

His strategists had hoped that Merkel would take the choice of Berlin and the Brandenburg Gate for the speech as a compliment.

Perhaps they also think that holding a rally at the Temple Mount when he visits Israel will be taken as a compliment by someone or other.  These must be the same clever strategists who thought a foreign jaunt would help to strengthen his foreign policy credentials, rather than draw attention to his obvious lack thereof.  At the very least, one hopes that these strategists will not be involved in running foreign policy in a future Obama administration.  As Der Spiegel notes:

But the tumult in Berlin also underscores a bit of foreign policy naivité on the part of Obama’s travel planners. Merkel’s clear choice of words may be surprising, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to imagine that the German government would give a tepid response to his plan to hold a speech at such a highly symbolic historical location.

That’s exactly the image the campaign can’t afford to project.  Then again, it was always likely to be the image that it projected on a European tour, considering that the candidate completely neglected holding hearings of his subcommittee on European affairs and hasn’t traveled much in Europe at all.  How would he and his team know what how the Chancellor would respond?  Actually, common sense might have worked.

You should be able to agree with Jackson’s point that Obama is condescending to black audiences without being, er, pro-castration*.  Since he often does condescend to the group he’s addressing even when he’s not engaged in anthropological analysis of their religious and hunting customs, it’s not surprising that he condescends to black audiences as well and that long-time activists and self-appointed “community” leaders are annoyed by it.  Of course Jackson is annoyed because he sees his waning influence–that’s obvious–and what he probably means is that he wants to be the one who talks down to black audiences.  This is very much like the “cling” business, where other elites hammered Obama for being elitist as a way of gaining an advantage over him in intra-elite competition.  It isn’t that Jackson wouldn’t also be condescending in a different way, but that he resents that he has lost status.  Likewise, Obama’s elite opponents know that the best way to undermine a rival is to feign sympathy for the people and attack the rival for his disdain.  Naturally, they have the same disdain and are quite happy to maintain the same social and cultural distance from the people whose cause they pretend to defend, but in the world of mass politics what is crucial for any member of the elite is not to be seen as revelling in that status. 

What seems like unvarnished truth-telling to outside observers often feels like an insulting pat on the head, or maybe more like a smack to the back of the head, to the people being lectured, and typically it involves endorsing someone else’s stereotypes of your group combined with head-nodding sympathy for your “plight.”  Even when there are elements of truth in what the lecturing pol is saying, it runs entirely against the grain of how mass democratic politics works.  The lecturing pol sets himself apart from and over the audience, and demands that the audience live up to a higher standard.  The ingratiating pol, the one who usually wins, is the one who does not tell you all the things that are wrong with you that you need to improve, but reminds you how alike you and he are.  It’s worth noting that he tends to address audiences in this lecturing style mainly when he already knows that they are solidly behind him, because he is still someone who avoids real political risk.  Overwhelming black support for Obama exposes them to more professorial lectures than almost any other group, because he knows that these are the voters least likely to break with him, no matter how many times he berates them, and he gets the added bonus of being the kind of black politician many whites have wanted to see.  Call it the ricochet lecture.

* John Kass provides the Chicago context.

What seems to be missing from thereactions to the latest remarks from Romney and Giuliani is any acknowledgement that these two in particular have deployed anti-Europeanism for years.  When Clinton was the frontrunner, Romney was constantly blathering about the evils of Europe that she wanted to impose on us, and his campaign strategy specifically includedbashingthe French as if the last several years had never happened.  The point is that these attacks are putting Obama in an already existing anti-European frame and taking it for granted that their target audiences will associate the perceived and imagined flaws of Europeans with Obama. 

To a degree, these two intend to portray Obama as less American, just as this sort has done to conservative critics of the war who were also against killing Serbs in unprovoked wars, but the important thing to bear in mind is that they believe that anything and anyone that does not hew to the GOP line on pretty much everything is vaguely French.  It is reflexive disdain for Europeans, which is not limited to the jingoists, that makes such framing possible.  In other words, the real problem with the remarks is more the thoughtless anti-Europeanism than just the use of anti-Europeanism to attack a particular candidate.  Any candidate at odds with the GOP will receive similar treatment, which is why focusing on how this affects Obama alone obscures the larger problem with this garbage.  I might add at this point that this is exactly how nationalism continues to distort our political life, but obviously I am trapped in the past and concerned with irrelevant problems. 

Viewed another way, associating Obama more closely with Europe does him a favour in a couple of that his own visit to Europe probably won’t do: it improbably aligns him with the history and civilisation to which Americans belong, and obscures the fact that he has rarely ever visited Europe before.  There is something very odd and ineffective about an attack that tries to make Obama seem strange and alien by saying that he is too European.  

It’s worth noting that Obama was right that more Americans should learn foreign languages, but in the context of addressing bilingualism among immigrants it was unusually clumsy.  As politically stupid things to say go, this is one of the big ones–over two-thirds of Americans support some form of English-only measures.  There are also perfectly good reasons why many Americans don’t bother to learn foreign languages.  For starters, many school systems inundate kids with Spanish classes, despite the far greater professional and scholarly value of German, French, Russian, to which you might nowadays add Arabic, Chinese and Hindi.  This is something of a vicious cycle: Spanish classes are most common, because there are more teachers available for them, and there are more teachers available for them because a huge percentage of beginning foreign-language students in the U.S. study Spanish.  Second, many Americans have no need to learn foreign languages to do their work, and obviously we live on a vast continent where English is the main language of communication for most people, which reduces the practical use of foreign language skills on a regular basis.  To some extent, you could say that I am multilingual, but my knowledge of most languages I have studied is fairly passive and oriented toward reading (which is mainly what I use most of my languages for), and this is partly a function of having few occasions Stateside to use any of them regularly.     

Update: Obama should be careful what he wishes for when urges people to study Spanish:

“Amigo! Amigo!” Mr. Bush called out cheerily in Spanish when he spotted the Italian prime minister. “How you doing, Silvio? Good to see you!”

Yuval Levin observes that Obama’s response to charges that he has reversed himself several times in recent weeks is disingenuous, which it is, since the candidate very carefully evades discussing the actual charges.  You can see how some of the charges bounce off of him, since he was generally a free trader before he became the fire-breathing enemy of NAFTA in Ohio, but that then drives home the point that his statements about NAFTA in Ohio weren’t just “overheated” but also basically dishonest.  He had said that he believed in an individual right to bear arms before Heller was decided, but when asked about the D.C. gun ban in the past he sad he believed it was constitutional.  Suddenly, post-“cling,” when the Court decided otherwise he discovered a new interpretation that put him on the side of the Court’s majority.  Well, he does love consensus, doesn’t he?  Obviously, the flip on the FISA bill, which he vowed to filibuster in its current form and now will support, is substantively the worst and the most obvious of them all, and it is the one the candidate’s boosters have been most shameless in defending.  It is fairly insulting to say that those who think he has changed positions on these particular items haven’t been paying close enough attention, since obviously the first people who even noticed some of these reversals were those who pay attention to the campaign every day.  On cue, Sullivan refers to these as “apparent” reversals, as if there were some doubt that there had been a change.

Viewed in a certain way, you can argue that everything Obama has done is consistent with his general views and his habit of avoiding confrontation, but this is not very flattering for Obama and it is even less flattering for his conservative admirers.  As a supporter of the PATRIOT Act, Obama has never exactly been a champion on civil liberties, so when he said that he would filibuster the FISA bill it was may have been nothing more than pandering and a refusal to court confrontation during the primaries.  Once he became the nominee, he wanted to avoid confrontation with the telecoms and the executive, which was easy enough since he has been a fair-weather civil libertarian all along, because to be anything else would be to court resistance and opposition from entrenched power in the government and the media.  On the whole, a pattern emerges where Obama will never challenge a constituency or an interest group at the time when it can damage or derail his advancement, but once he has used them he will be quite willing to throw supporters overboard to appease the demands of the political establishment.  I guess this is what some people consider to be smart politics, but it makes you realise how apt Samuelson’s old line about Obama representing the “sanctification of the status quo” really was.  Even more appropriate was Samuelson’s judgement:

By Obama’s own moral standards, Obama fails.

P.S.  Obama has voted for cloture, which paves the way for bringing the legislation to the floor for a vote.  As far as I’m concerned, that negates any significance of voting with Dodd and Feingold on their amendment regarding telecom immunity.

Update: Obama also voted for final passage.  Greenwald has a new post on the legislation.

There seems to be quite the concerted effort to obscure what the “compromise” FISA legislation does.  There is a lot of reassuring language about oversight and safeguards, which ignores the heart of the issue.  This is it:

The new FISA bill that Obama supports vests new categories of warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President (.pdf), and allows the Government, for the first time, to tap physically into U.S. telecommunications networks inside our country with no individual warrant requirement. To claim that this new bill creates “an independent monitor [to] watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people” is truly misleading, since the new FISA bill actually does the opposite — it frees the Government from exactly that monitoring in all sorts of broad categories.

What does this mean in practice?  From Balkinization, here is part of the answer:

This sort of “vacuum” surveillance could not be approved under the old FISA scheme, which requires either that the calls be wholly international, or that the interception be made overseas, or that the NSA demonstrate evidence in advance that the target is an agent of a foreign power. Under the new law, the NSA can engage in surveillance where none of those three criteria are met.

There is no obvious limit to the communications that could be targeted for surveillance.  Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional and dangerous to a free society.  At the very least, we should understand that the “compromise” bill will give a Congressional rubber-stamp to unconstitutional acts by the federal government on an ongoing basis.

The disappointment-generating machine that is the Obamacampaign is firing on all cylinders, judging from laments such as this one:

Only an idiot would think or hope that a politician going through the crucible of a presidential campaign could hold fast to every position, steer clear of the stumbling blocks of nuance and never make a mistake. But Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader — more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most.

You would be able to listen to him without worrying about what the meaning of “is” is.

This is why so many of Senator Obama’s strongest supporters are uneasy, upset, dismayed and even angry at the candidate who is now emerging in the bright light of summer.

One issue or another might not have made much difference. Tacking toward the center in a general election is as common as kissing babies in a campaign, and lord knows the Democrats need to expand their coalition.

But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.

The word that you keep seeing in columns and posts about Obama’s recent reversals is “lurch.”  In fact, lurch is the wrong word to describe what has been happening.  The entire process has had much more of the feel of a stage magician using misdirection to make you see things that aren’t real and ignore those that are.  When he makes complete 180-degree turns on a given question, he will either maintain that he never really changed his position or that the reason you think that he changed his position is that some campaign staffer (who probably doesn’t even work for him, if you press him) goofed up.  Occasionally, such as with the FISA legislation, the change will be too obvious to deny, so he plays on the audience’s expectations that in the future he will actually revert back to his earlier position. 

Here’s Obama today according to The Caucus:

“One of the things you find as you go through this campaign, everyone becomes so cynical about politics,” Mr. Obama said.  There is an “assumption that your must be doing everything for political reasons.”

Certainly, Obama’s supporters have to believe that what he has been doing recently has been for “political reasons,” unless he would like them to believe that he wants to trample on the Fourth Amendment.  If his flip on the FISA legislation wasn’t done for political reasons, why on earth would he have done it?  You know, aside from the obvious answer that he wants to increase the power of the executive to make it more powerful for the time when he is President.

What is more disturbing than all of this is the willingness of his cult followers supporters to believe his latest statements, even though they might directly contradict something he said not very long before.  His oracular utterances don’t need to be consistent, because they are his statements, which must make them true, right?  This is what happens when people are optimistic: they expect things that cannot happen and are then made all the more bitter and dissatisfied when those expectations are not met.  Optimism is one of the worst mental and spiritual afflictions, because it feeds desire and attachment more than almost anything else, and so necessarily leads to the misery that comes from the dashing of unrealistic hopes. 

Update: Tom Bevan notes the remarkable agreement between Herbert and Lowry, and says:

On the other hand, the fact that polar political opposites have come to the same unflattering conclusion about your political maneuvering is a warning sign that you are in danger of damaging your brand and losing support among some portions of the electorate.

James notes the formation of a new Serbian government described in this article.  The article is the usual sort of moral preening-as-political reporting one has come to expect from the IHT and other papers when discussing all things Balkan.  Take this absurd sentence for starters:

Kostunica, a nationalist, helped lead the revolution that overthrew Milosevic in 2000 but has since embraced an anti-Western position [bold mine-DL].

No doubt in the limited imagination of IHT reporters, there were/are only two positions for Serbs to take: an anti-Milosevic/pro-Western line and an anti-Western (and therefore pro-Milosevic) line.  The idea that a Serbian nationalist might respond poorly to the collective anti-Serbian line of American and western European governments seems to be quite beyond this correspondent.  It must be Kostunica who has “embraced” an anti-Western position; he cannot be responding to provocations and insults from the West.  More to the point, the article’s interpretation makes no sense. How is an alliance between the Socialists and Democrats necessarily “unlikely”?  They are both parties of the left, and they are basically in agreement about the main controversial issue of the day, which is that Serbia should retain sovereignty over Kosovo.  Even though the Democrats are more inclined to play lackeys to the West, Tadic opposes Kosovo independence.       

Meanwhile, it’s not clear to me that James’ response to this news makes that much sense when you consider the following sentence from the article:

Cvetkovic said he would fight to ensure that Kosovo remains part of Serbia [bold mine-DL]. He said Belgrade would continue to provide economic support for ethnic Serbs in the territory, which declared independence in February.

Even if the Democrats supported letting Kosovo go (which they don’t), opposing Kosovo independence would have to have been a condition of establishing the coalition government.  If the EU insists on making Serbian membership conditional on letting Kosovo go, it is EU membership that Serbia will abandon. 

It has been a mere four months since Kosovo “independence” was declared.  The folly of attempting to partition Serbia has only just begun to have its effects on the region and the rest of the international system.

In Obamaworld, apparently wrecking the Fourth Amendment is roughly equivalent to ridiculing some obscure rapper.  The only thing more depressing than the conceit that supporting unconstitutional measures is a way to “signal” to swing voters that you are not a radical loon bent on “ideological purity,” which is basically to make defending the Constitution a position held only by radicals and extremists, is the dishonest representation of support for the compromise legislation as being a pro-civil liberties position.  Ellsberg wrote at Antiwar’s blog the other day:

What the administration seeks, and this bill provides, is permanent warrantless surveillance.

Greenwald has more, and here is his response to Obama’s statement on the FISA bill.

Update: John Nichols traces the history of Obama’s position on the FISA bill.  Inasmuch as his opposition to this bill powered him to victory in Wisconsin, which was, as most of us acknowledged at the time, the beginning of the end for Clinton, he owes his nomination to the stand that he has now repudiated.