This seems a tad ludicrous even for a campaign that has long since surpassed all others in self-importance.

Sullivan on Obama’s first national ad:

Obama shows he’s not going to allow the GOP and Fox News to define him as an alien, commie, Muslim, wimpy extremist.  Not without a fight anyway.

Then again, the absolute lack of subtlety and the almost desperate, “I’m really, really like you!” tone of the ad may convey an impression of insecurity to a skeptical or uninformed audience.  After all, shouldn’t it go without saying that people running for President love America?  I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a given that politicians have such virtues, and you can make the argument that the America a lot of pols love is a fictitious one that wars against the real one all the time, but it’s the sort of thing that you’d thing a major party candidate would take as granted.  Perhaps the heavy-handedness of the ad is what will make it work, but won’t it remind many audiences of the controversies and rumours that the ad is so pointedly trying to counteract?  Doesn’t this lead to running the campaign according to his opponents’ rules?  Isn’t this an eighteen-state ad buy equivalent of “Lt. John Kerry, reporting for duty”?     

Also, on a different point, can Obama really have Kansan patriotism?  I’m curious what others think, because to describe it that way seems like a stretch.  Yes, his grandparents and mother were from there, but he wasn’t.  I can hardly claim to have Coloradoan patriotism, even though I was born there, much less could I really claim to be a New Jersey patriot because my ancestors lived there.  Can you be a patriot of a place where you’ve never lived?  Discuss.

So in the last month Obama has actually lost ground in Colorado, which is one of the states that he needs to flip to be able to win without Ohio.  Third party support is impressively high at 8%, and 7% are undecided.  50% believe Obama to be too inexperienced, and his favs have dropped to just 50%.  The good news for him is that he has a strong lead among independents (14% of independents prefer a third party candidate) and he does get 77% among Democrats, but the inexperience question reveals some dangers for him: 25% of Democrats think he is too inexperienced, as do 41% of independents.  If those who take this view and those who aren’t sure either way swing to McCain, Colorado slips out of reach.

Rasmussen also shows Obama still trailing in Florida and basically tied in Ohio.  Someone’s model of likely voters–Rasmussen or Quinnipiac’s–is badly off.

Clearly, Bob Wright is a keen observer of Obama’s foreign policy and the political scene.  The Nader references in this diavlog got me to thinking again about how much of a Nader effect there could be this year.  I am on record as laughing at Nader’s candidacy, but he could still be a significant problem for Obama in certain states.  Here is a not-entirely-outlandish scenario: upset by Obama’s support for the PATRIOT Act, his record on Lebanon and his latest AIPAC speech, Arab-Americans, Muslims and progressives in a highly competitive state such as Michigan opt for Nader out of disillusionment with Obama that is made worse by episodes such as this.  Combined with the Green candidate’s vote, Nader could pull away a significant number of voters in a crucial swing state that has a relatively large Arab-American and Muslim population, thus potentially aiding McCain’s election.

Dan writes:

What Goldberg really doesn’t get, though, is that the Obamacons are not simply voting for a liberal because they don’t like the “conservative” — in supporting Obama, they seem themselves as supporting the more conservative candidate, who may be liberal on economic matters and a whole host of other issues besides, but who will at least conserve our liberties and keep the peace rather than starting unprovoked wars.

This is where I think my opposition to Obamacons comes from.  To the extent that anyone on the right genuinely believes that Obama “will at least conserve our liberties and keep the peace rather than starting unprovoked wars,” they are simply wrong.  Obama’s position on the PATRIOT Act and the 2006 Lebanon war are two obvious examples of why they are wrong, and we could argue about how many more examples there are, but as I’ve said before it really requires a tremendous act of imagination for a conservative to expect anything better (i.e., more conservative) from Obama (except maybe on Iraq).  The strongest argument the Obamacons have is that their candidate is not McCain.  This is the argument they need to keep repeating, rather than straining credulity with frankly wishful thinking that Obama will “conserve our liberties and keep the peace.”  It’s true that Goldberg misses this aspect of the Obamacon argument, but then I’m not sure it’s an aspect Obamacons should really want other people to notice.

Update: Right on cue, Obama signs off on the new FISA bill to the disappointment of at least some of his supporters.  Meanwhile, the rather weak defense of the Democrats as a whole isn’t terribly impressive either, since it was also true of the Iraq war authorisation that more Democrats in the House voted no than voted yes.  However, pretty much the entire leadership was lined up on the wrong side of the issue, as Yglesias never fails to mention now, but I’m pretty sure if you used the “more Democrats opposed it than supported it, and don’t pay attention to what the leadership did” argument about Iraq these days Yglesias would laugh in your face.  On one of the more controversial pieces of legislation related to antiterrorism, the Democrats and their presidential nominee opted for the Kerry-Daschle path of least resistance.  Fortunately, I hear that Obama may eventually challenge the status quo on something.  We just have yet to see any meaningful examples of this.   

Second Update: Regarding the FISA bill, I see via Greenwald that New Mexico’s Tom Udall was one of the nays–good for him.  Once he is in the Senate, there will be another Democratic member in that chamber to resist executive power grabs (assuming, of course, that he remains willing to resist power grabs by a Democratic administration in the event that we have one).

P.S. Jim asked in the post linked earlier how civil libertarian Obamacons would react to their champion’s rather less-than-heroic stand on a civil liberties issue–one of those issues that is supposed to mark Obama as the “more conservative” or preferable alternative–and we have one answer.  Of course, telecom immunity is not the only questionable thing in the bill.  That just happens to be the added bonus for the administration.  As usual when it comes to these matters, Russ Feingold makes sense:

And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power.  Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration.

Meanwhile, Obama’s aversion to confronting power appears yet again.

The reaction to the shocking revelation obvious truth that Obama is a more or less conventional free trader has been quite strong (see Mr. Robert’s article for a prime example of how “support” for Obama on the right is purely and understandably an expression of anti-Republican sentiment).  Obama opposed CAFTA back when he was preparing to get labour endorsements, and bashed NAFTA when he was trying–and failing–to prevail in the Ohio primary, but he has been quite clear that he is well within the consensus that supports free trade.  So in addition to condescending to small-town America, he is also uninterested in defending its interests.  As with foreign policy, on the policies of immigration and trade where the bipartisan consensus is most wrong and most at odds with a majority of Americans, Obama sides with the political class (as well he might, since he is part of that class!).  Goolsbee let slip privately to the Canadians what Obama is now saying publicly: it was all for show. 

This does not surprise, though Jim Antle is correct that this is a case where Obama has pandered to the Democratic base and tried to have it both ways.  Following up on my earlier observation about Obama’s domestic policies, I would add that this is the one exception where his formal position is to “the right” of what he has sometimes said on the campaign trail, and it is yet another example of how Obama will not challenge the status quo in any meaningful way and has no interest in the sort of fundamental policy change that his partisans clearly want.  If there are powerful interests that must be confronted, if great political risk is involved, Obama remains the guy who “won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers.”  Essentially, this seems to confirm the criticism that Clinton and Edwards and a large part of the netroots made against him during the primaries: he won’t fight.  This also drives home the point that I have tried to make before, which is that for all of his apparent sympathy for working- and middle-class voters, he does not propose to do anything for them with respect to trade or immigration or concerning the related problem of growing income inequality. 

At the same time, it’s worth noting that putting Webb on the ticket at this point would make Webb doubly miserable.  Not only is he not temperamentally suited for the VP nominee role (i.e., he is independent-minded and likes to say what he thinks), but since a significant part of his campaign in ’06 was based in appeals to “economic fairness” and opposing at least some free trade deals it is difficult to see how he would serve effectively in an administration that was essentially yielding to neoliberalism*.  If Webb thinks this is a Time to Fight, Obama gives the impression through his unwillingness to oppose entrenched interests that it is always time to yield.

*Referring here to the theory of liberalising international trade, not the domestic variety.

P.S.  The Nation article quotes from David Sirota, who has been one of the progressives on Obama’s case for the longest time, and with this latest news his earlier critiques seem to have been vindicated.  Back in December 2006, Sirota had Obama’s number on trade, and he said then:

But if this aversion to confronting power previews the rest of his campaign, there will indeed be a major opening for a real populist candidate to win the nomination and the presidency.

Perhaps there was such an opening briefly, and Edwards tried to exploit that unsuccessfully, but it was not to be.  Sirota sums up well the problem with Obama with that phrase “aversion to confronting power.”  If you want to understand how Obama will govern, just think about how he can avoid confrontation with entrenched interests and that is likely what he will do.

Would James laugh at regionalism in Greece?  Actually, he might laugh loudest about this, but I thought his remark about small-country regionalism was a little odd.  He wrote:

Spanish regionalism seems absurd because the regions in question are almost laughably small and self-sufficient, from a large-country perspective, only in a petty and dissatisfying way. Back in the old days, Western political theorists worried that a large republic was impossible. De Maistre joked that in all history’s rolls of the regime dice, the side marked LARGE REPUBLIC [his caps] never came up. Not even once.

At the time De Maistre told his joke, he was correct, and one might ask whether it is still true.  The Antifederalists, after thumbing through their Montesqieu, kept insisting that the Constitution centralised too much power and attempted to create what they liked to call an “extended” republic whose size would invite, indeed demand, increased power at the center to govern effectively.  In the end, the federal republic was consolidated because it came to pass that an extended republic that was not consolidated would break up along regional or sectional lines according to the political differences between blocs of states.  Madison’s sleight-of-hand about factions is an amazing piece of work, and he is rightly acclaimed for the clever argument he makes about this, even though it turned out to be almost entirely wrong.  In a small republic, factions would be too dangerous, so you needed to have a larger republic that would allow these factional forces to balance each other.  The trouble is that they have a centrifugal effect, which causes the center to exert more and more control to hold the entire system together up to and including the use of force, which from the old-fashioned republican perspective would mean the death of republicanism and the beginning of something else. 

The survival of regionalism and cultural diversity and their expression through political autonomism even within small, largely homogenous states is a reminder that the centrifugal effects of regional difference are the natural forces that keep resisting the drive to centralise power in a national government.  They are reminders of how many existing political and cultural identities had to be suppressed and homogenised to create even relatively small nation-states.  To the extent that regionalism in Europe is effectively an ally of supra-national consolidation into the E.U., I’m not sure that it will ultimately survive, and it may simply be a symptom of the weakening of the nation-state, but for my part I find small-country regionalism reassuring that attempts to consolidate diverse regions under a single national regime on much smaller geographical scale have ultimately been unsuccessful.  That hints at the possibility that the success of decentralism here is not so much of a matter of if as it is of when.

On the main blog, Dan has made an argument for non-interventionism as the best, indeed only, way to pursue a prudent foreign policy that will avoid such blunders as the war in Iraq or the deployment to Somalia.  While restating his confidence in the virtues of Pax Americana, Ross rejects “stringent non-interventionism” but essentially agrees with Dan’s following point:

If you want a prudent foreign policy that keeps America out of unwinnable wars in places like Iraq and Somalia, you should support noninterventionism. Neither neoconservatism nor liberal interventionism nor old-fashioned Cold War conservatism will ever be cautious enough to avoid such entanglements.

Ross makes it very clear that he doesn’t embrace a thoroughgoing non-interventionism, and he thinks that the costs from any of the blunders we might care to name are more than made up for by the (exaggerated) benefits of Pax Americana, but he allows that the blunders are simply part of upholding this order.  On this point, Ross says:

I think my disagreement with the non-interventionist point of view comes down to the question of whether the benefits that flow from the Pax Americana that’s been created by America’s quasi-imperial role in the world are worth the blunders that more-or-less inevitably accompany it.   

Given that these inevitable blunders will happen, there is the possibility of relatively greater prudence (e.g., Eisenhower’s administration), but he admits that future blunders will be part of any attempt to serve as the guarantor of world order (which is what admirers of Pax Americana think has been happening).  So Ross has ceded Dan’s main point quoted above, and it is therefore crucial to Ross’ position that the benefits of Pax Americana are as great for America and the world as he claims.  However, the incidence of cross-border warfare does not seem to have been less since 1991, especially considering that the U.S. and our allies have launched a number of invasions or attacks on sovereign states in the last 17 years.  Wars with massive casualties have been fewer, but it’s questionable how much of this can be attributed to our “quasi-imperial role.” 

Having armed and deputised the Ethiopians to invade Somalia, Washington can take credit for at least one other invasion in this decade besides Iraq.  While Colombia recently had reason to launch a cross-border raid into Ecuador and Washington supported the action, this act violated the OAS Charter (to which the U.S. is a signatory and which is supposedly part of the architecture of international order that we uphold).  The people of Lebanon two years ago seem to have missed out on the benefits of the peace, and Washington could not have been more supportive of the war against Lebanon.  More recently, as we all know, Turkey has launched attacks across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan with Washington’s grudging permission.  The assumption that you must make about Pax Americana to think that it is working to stop cross-border warfare is that in the absence of U.S. hegemony there would be many more instances of this and the wars would be longer and bloodier than they have been.  This is doubtful.     

Meanwhile, the most dangerous borders in the world between Pakistan and India are precisely those where the U.S. has been most ineffective in discouraging cross-border attacks by Pakistan-backed militants.  The Kargil war and the heightened tensions in earlier part of this decade following the attack on the Indian Parliament were kept from escalating largely thanks to India’s deterrent and cooler heads prevailing on both sides.  As it was, whatever beneficial influence Washington had in easing tensions during these episodes was minimal, and to the extent that Washington has favoured Pakistan for decades, armed its military and raised it to non-NATO ally status the guarantor of the peace has been facilitating the violation of the peace.  Obviously, the Congo wars that have killed millions and at one time involved as many as seven central and southern African nations are not even on the radar if we are going to pretend that there has been a significant decrease in major cross-border warfare.  Relative to what?    

The point in listing all of these interruptions of the peace is not say that Washington needs to do more and try harder to enforce the unenforceable peace, but that a hegemonic role can also fuel instability and even the hegemon has little to do with preventing India and Pakistan from going to war (and indeed, in the 1971 war, we modestly aided the Pakistanis).  Given the limited resources of any nation, there will not and cannot be a meaningful Pax Americana or its equivalent that extends to the whole world.  By and large, what people are referring to is the peaceful development of Europe and Japan while they have been under American protection.  This has been impressive, but if that is where most of the benefits are our presence is no longer required. 

Also, most of the postwar benefits that are attributed to Pax Americana were the product of the freezing of many conflicts by the Cold War.  (This general freeze did not, of course, stop multiple major international wars on the Subcontinent that killed and displaced millions, nor did it stop the Iraqi invasion of Iran or the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, to cite a few prominent examples.)  Once the USSR disappeared as a global player, the peace began unraveling in many parts of the world because the relative peace was not a product of our superpower position or our entanglements around the world, but to the extent that it existed was a product of the highly unusual superpower rivalry that ended almost two decades ago.  The benefits are considerably less obvious than they might have once seemed, and if we restricted our attention to the benefit to the United States it is even less clear that Americans benefit from a Pax Americana that inevitably (as Ross says) involves colossal blunders that require the deployment of a huge part of our land forces for many years, trillions of dollars spent and tens of thousands dead and wounded.      

Update: James joins the conversation and offers a conclusion that I find fairly acceptable:

To make this work, we badly need to restore Europe and Japan to security independence, and we need to continue to advance the interests of India, and we need maybe above all not to make enemies of the Russians. If Europe remains weak, if Japan remains toothless, if India falters, and if Russia is demonized, we lose — and we lose because our unnatural position of globally hegemonic intervention cannot, and should not, be maintained, much less intensified.

This is more or less what I and several others here and elsewhere have been urging for years.  Dr. Trifkovic in particular has been making the case for a “Northern Alliance” with the Russians and has correctly seen the current administration’s efforts to develop a better relationship with India as one of its few at least partial successes, and it has become a standard refrain among non-interventionists and sympathetic realists that Europe, Japan, South Korea (and, yes, even Taiwan) can provide for their own defense now and really should be providing for their own defense.

While I can’t imagine anything more irrelevant to the presidential campaign than the GreatBlingControversy, the existence of such a controversy does say something about the unrealistic and unfair expectations of many observers who are sympathetic to Obama.  There has been an obsession in some quarters with Obama’s possible role-model role for young black men, as if there were not already successful and admirable role models before now.  This business about overcoming the forces of “bling” is just the latest in the absurd preoccupation with Obama’s election as the mechanism for transforming the black community away from whatever it is the observer doesn’t like about it (which is, incidentally, one of the secondary sources of controversy over Obama’s association with Wright–he “let down” his admirers who probably thought that Obama was “better” than that), which is in turn based to a large degree on thinking of that community as a monolith in terms that are, as Coates points out, at best outdated and generally obnoxious. 

Then you notice something.  No one proposes electorally-driven social change for other groups of people in the same way.  When was the last time anyone argued that selecting Jim Webb on the presidential ticket would actually change the habits of Scots-Irish folks?  I don’t think a supporter of gun control has ever asked, “Can Webb get them to stop clinging to their guns?”  On the contrary, the rationale for selecting Webb has been that he can supposedly “reach” these voters in ways Obama can’t because he is one of them.  Even though this claim about his electoral support is not really true, at least it makes some sense in theory.  The notion that Webb could change the folkways of “his people” even if he wanted to would be laughed out of the room, so why wouldn’t everyone automatically respond in the same way when people make outlandish claims about some imagined Obama Effect?  Can anyone imagine the same sorts of arguments being made about Hispanics if Bill Richardson had somehow become the nominee?  Not really, and that points towards the completely unrealistic and unfair expectation that Obama’s election will bring about some social or cultural transformation on a large scale.  No politician can do that without extensive coercion, and it’s not clear to me that anyone should necessarily want a politician to be having this effect even if he could.       

This sort of argument is related to the equally far-fetched idea that relations with the rest of the world will be dramatically improved simply through Obama’s election.  In this view, symbolism and imagery are all important, as if America’s reputation in the world has fallen because of who the President is and what he represents rather than because of what he has done.  Likewise, in this bizarre debate over Obama’s effect on the use of “bling” the assumption on Battiata’s part is that Obama’s election will promulgate some new set of norms, as if the highest elected black official influences the habits of an entire community.  This is simply a new kind of paternalism, according to which people are supposed to imitate their superiors.