Perhaps it’s because I don’t live in northern Virginia, but so far this year I haven’t had much to say about the GOP primary challenger in Virginia’s 8th District, Amit Singh, but I should say a few words on the occasion of his defeat in the primary.  Richard and Danhavehad a lotmore to sayabout his campaign.  Singh was endorsed by Ron Paul himself, and represents one of a number of House and Senate Republican primary challengers who have been inspired by Paul’s presidential run to advance a more libertarian, small-government and non-interventionist line within the GOP.  It is actually quite heartening that Singh was able to garner 44% of the GOP vote in northern Virginia running on a platform that included scaling back overseas deployments in Europe and Asia.  I’m trying to think of many other Republican House candidates advocating anything similar, and I am not coming up with a lot of names.       

From the antiwar conservative perspective, his stance on the war was hardly ideal (notable is the lack of any call for withdrawal on any timetable), but he was clearly a far better alternative than his primary opponent.  Unless one insists on being a single-issue Iraq voter, in which case Moran has been right from the start, Singh was a reasonably attractive candidate and his success would have been a healthy development inside a moribund and confused GOP.  As little time as I have for the modern GOP, it does not serve the American interest to have one overreaching unified government replaced with another that is equally unaccountable and unchecked.  A GOP with more Amit Singhs and fewer Mark Ellmores as its elected leaders would function as a better opposition party in the short term and offer a more credible alternative to what the Democratic majority will offer over the long-term.   

If Ron Paul’s influence on U.S. politics is going to become a phenomenon more enduring than one or two election cycles, the movement that grows out of his campaign will need to include a great number of people who have been wrong, sometimes stunningly wrong, on major policy issues in the past or who have had professional backgrounds that make them suspect to opponents of expansive and intrusive government.  The current Libertarian nominee for President, Bob Barr, or Rep. Walter Jones are perfect examples of those who mistakenly supported the war in Iraq and the PATRIOT Act and have now come to oppose one or both of these.  Presumably, we on the antiwar and constitutionalist right should welcome those who have come to agree with us, if we would like to have any sort of influence on the government that is not trivial.

When asked which party should control Congress, Democrats win 52-33, which is the largest lead any party has had in 13 years and is a larger lead for the Democrats than they had two years ago.  Anyone who cites the high disapproval numbers for Congress as proof that the public has wearied of the Democratic majority is kidding himself.  We are probably looking at another year of a net gain of 30 seats for Democrats, and perhaps more than that depending on how the public mood changes over the summer with gas prices continuing to rise.  Since the GOP is likely to suffer through another horrible election, how bad will it be and where will they suffer losses? 

Looking over CQ‘s race ratings and the latest news, we can start with VA-11, Tom Davis’ seat, which is now considered a toss-up.  This isn’t entirely surprising, as it is a northern Virginia suburban district that has been trending towards the Democrats for some time along with the rest of northern Virginia.  Eleven other seats are extremely vulnerable or leaning towards the Democrats: Young’s At-Large district in Alaska, MN-03, NC-08, NJ-07, NM-01, NY-25, OH-15, OH-16, and WA-08 are all toss-ups, and the AZ-01 and IL-11 open seats are very likely to flip.  All except for Young and the North Carolina district held by Hayes are open seats that have been vacated for reasons of retirement, running for other offices or indictment, and Young is vulnerable because of the haze of corruption that has been hanging over Alaskan Republican politics for the last several years and threatens also to drag down Ted Stevens in the Senate.  Hayes’ seat seems to be in jeopardy (again) because of the same shift away from the GOP that elected Heath Shuler two years ago and may push Liddy Dole out of the Senate this year.  Of course, Hayes barely survived last time and faces a re-match against Larry Kissell, whom he defeated by 329 votes.  It seems quite likely, especially given Republican weakness even at the presidential level in N.C., that Hayes will be defeated. 

Since its creation in 1968, New Mexico’s 1st District has never elected a Democrat.  As an open seat in a Democratic-trending district, NM-01 may finally flip, but the dynamic may have changed to the extent that alienated Republicans and independents who refused to vote for Heather Wilson and who even voted for Madrid last time may be inclined to support the Republican, Darren White.  Wilson won by the narrowest of margins, but White might be able to improve on her showing because of his local popularity as county sheriff.  I assumed Madrid would win last time, but this year I am not so sure that the Democrats can take it over.

The Ohio, New York, New Jersey and Minnesota open seats listed above are probably going to be lost to the Democrats.  In addition to the 25th District, the 26th, vacated by Tom Reynolds of Foley scandal and failed NRCC chairmanship fame, is also very vulnerable despite its official ranking.  The open seat vacated by Fossella on Long Staten Island is unusually vulnerable as a suburban district in the Northeast where the GOP label is in particularly bad disrepute (thanks in part to the news about Fossella’s extra family).  Florida’s 13th District only very narrowly went for Buchanan last time amid much controversy about vote-counting (as usual), so it is likely quite vulnerable.  Schmidt and Chabot in Ohio and Gerlach in Pennsylvania will be hard-pressed to survive another Democratic wave.  I assume that at least two out of these three lose.   Idaho’s 1st is never guaranteed, considering how unlikeable Sali is, and Wyoming’s At-Large will probably once again be more competitive than Wyoming should ever be.  Cubin was the candidate, as you may recall, who derided and mocked the wheelchair-bound Libertarian candidate after a debate.  All of the competitive Illinois districts –6th, 10th and 18th–are probably going to be even more competitive this year.  The open seat in MD-01, brought about by the short-sighted tactics of the Club for Growth, is likely going to be vulnerable, and the same goes for FL-15 and NM-02.  The incumbents in Michigan and the ever-embattled Chris Shays in Connecticut will have great difficulty resisting another wave.  Safer than most of the others, but still at risk are Kuhl and English, who faced stiff challenges last cycle but who were able to put together solid wins.

All of this is subject to change, but it is easy to see how the Democrats can get to a 30-seat gain this year in the House.  the best chances the GOP has are the open seat in Alabama and FL-16, Mark Foley’s old district.  Nancy Boyda’s endorsement of Obama may come back to haunt her in her district, partly because she succeeded against Jim Ryun because she kept her distance from national Democrats last cycle.  It may be a mistake for her to associate herself with the national party now that she is an incumbent, but it’s not clear that the Republicans will be able to recover that seat.

The conventional wisdom has started to congeal (that seems the best way to describe the process) that the election will primarily over whether the public will accept Obama, the relative unknown and newcomer to the scene, and this will end up turning, as it did in 1980, on whether the public becomes comfortable with someone whose ideas on a lot of things are purported to be (by his critics at least) far out of the mainstream.  The comparison to Reagan in ’80 and Reagan’s success in the debate with Carter should give the Obama campaign pause, since Obama has had some notoriously awful debate performances.  He hasn’t had one lately, since he never agreed to another debate after the debacle in Philadelphia in April. 

It seems to me that he also has a higher bar to clear than Reagan did.  His opponents attempted to portray Reagan as dangerous and reckless in his ideas, but they did not have the advantage of using the same charge of inexperience against a former two-term governor (which would have been a bit rich coming from the Carter campaign in any case).  So far Obama has deflected this charge by making a perfectly reasonable argument that judgement matters more than long years in Washington, but the obvious counter to this argument is that Obama doesn’t have long years of experience in government of any kind and has had few occasions to demonstrate this judgement when actually in an official position to exercise it.  Strangely, this would matter a lot less if he were running a conventional me-too, “centrist” campaign, but he proposes to make a number of significant policy changes.  The more significant the departure (or just the perceived departure) from the status quo, the more powerful the “inexperience” charge becomes.  (This is a point Stark makes in his column.)  It doesn’t necessarily matter that he is advancing an agenda that is, on the whole, quite popular.  It becomes a question not of whether the candidate has the right proposals and policies, but whether he can be relied on to carry them out competently.  Competence, not ideology–this could, very ironically, effectively become the motto for the McCain campaign, despite the fact that McCain doesn’t have any record of judgement or competence and wears the same ideological blinders as Mr. Bush.  Then again, Hillary Clinton didn’t actually have a record of experience, but she managed to flog that issue for a full six months and made life very difficult for Obama.  After the last eight years, the desire for a competent administration, even one that does not pursue the policies that one would like in every or most areas, may be very strong, especially among those voters who do not yet have strong preferences for one of the candidates.   

Contrary to what has often been said during the last few months, I think the general election is going to turn even more on matters of biography and personality than the nomination fight did.  During the primaries, the relative lack of policy differences between Clinton and Obama made the campaign fairly biography- and character-oriented, but I would suggest that the greater the policy differences between the candidates the more important matters of biography and character are going to become.  Counterintuitively, this is why Obama’s need for a series of pivotal moments to persuade the public that he can be trusted with the Presidency is more dangerous for him than it was for other relative newcomers to the national scene, because he is proposing enough of a significant change in course that he will have to be especially persuasive and he will probably have to do it in a format (i.e., in debates) where he has been much weaker. 

This is really what the “inexperence” charge comes down to: who are you, what have you done and why should I trust you?  In his decades in the House and the Senate, McCain has accomplished relatively little, and he has taken leadership roles on legislation mostly in the last decade as he has been building his national profile for the sake of his two presidential runs,  but he has very effectively used the media to define himself as he wants to be portrayed that has created the illusion that he is a trustworthy teller of truths and opponent of corruption.  Those who talk about the paucity or length of Obama’s legislative record ultimately miss the point.  McCain’s record won’t bear much scrutiny, either, if one is looking for meaningful accomplishments.  Yet the number of co-sponsored bills and passed legislative acts is almost beside the point, and only interest groups, activists and obsessive political junkies will pay attention to these anyway. 

As frustrating as it is to watch, because it often yields horrible results later, presidential elections turn not just on which candidate has shown “leadership,” but on which candidate can create the illusion that he has shown leadership when, in fact, he has done nothing particularly worthwhile.  Thus Bush sold himself as a governor who worked well with the opposition (never mind that his position was constitutionally very weak), and then won re-election on the basis of perpetuating a war he had started.  Bizarrely, Bush’s remarkable inability to adapt and his tendency to embark on ill-conceived crusades was taken as proof of deeply-held conviction and a willingness to act, which somehow proved that he was more of a “leader” than the overly deliberative Kerry.  Looking at the general election match-up between McCain and Obama, I get a cold, dreadful feeling of deja vu.  

McCain will weave an absurd story about himself in which he has played the heroic corruption-fighter and outspoken defender of unpopular causes (even though these causes are usually always very popular with his most important constituency, journalists), while the very nature of Obama’s swift ascension through the political ranks suggests, in the words of John Kass, “a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers.”  That was Tom Bevan‘s point earlier this week.  At the same time, it is easy to imagine that Obama’s virtue of thoughfulness will be twisted into the flaw of indecisiveness.  I think this is the gamble the McCain campaign is making when they make a major issue out of Obama’s willingness to enter into talks with “rogue” governments.  The policy idea itself makes sense under certain circumstances, and McCain risks revealing again just how attached he is to the administration’s failed foreign policy approach, but I am guessing McCain thinks that if he can portray Obama as the candidate of talk and set himself up as the candidate of action (as meaningless and misleading as this dichotomy actually is) that he will prevail in the election.  If he can thereby goad Obama into making additional rash promises to be willing to “take action” (against, say, Iran), he succeeds in blurring the differences between the two of them, which helps to undermine the theme of Obama’s campaign and make McCain’s own foreign policy views seem less extreme.    

Obama has often done worst of all in debates when confronted with the “gotcha” questions concerning various controversies, whether serious or absurd, and we have seen this reaction again in the latest flap over Jim Johnson.  When confronted with questions about his associates, he falls into his worst habit of playing the part of a dismissive, hyperean wise man who will not deign to lower himself to respond to such petty trivia…even when they are questions about the person running his vice presidential search committee.  “These aren’t folks who are working for me” might well become the “no controlling legal authority” meme that will haunt Obama for the next several months, because it does reveal something that Obama consistently does when challenged on his associations: first, he dismisses it as irrelevant or as a “distraction” (one of his preferred words), next he denies that the person is very closely tied to him, then he gets annoyed that people are asking him about such things, and finally the person leaves his campaign or he makes some statement distancing himself from them.  This is what all politicians do to one agree or another, but what may make it more significant in Obama’s case is this question of winning public trust.  If voters desperately want to depart from this administration’s policies, and they do, but they have reservations and are hesitant to vote in Obama, all these little episodes, perhaps not very important in isolation, gradually add up and create significant resistance to the candidate.

One of Sullivan’s readers whines about the use of the word empire:

This is not the British in Malaysia.

Quite true.  Unlike the British, our government seems to have no intention of leaving Iraq under any circumstances. 

One wonders if these people understand how British rule, or Roman rule for that matter, was extended to many of the places that later became “the empire.”  In many cases, the Romans and the British alike initially made a number of treaties with local rulers, who agreed to submit to occupation and taxation in exchange for being secured in their traditional (or usurped) rights, and over time these local rulers became merely figureheads to maintain a useful fiction that helped maintain the imperial system or they were liquidated/removed and replaced with direct imperial administration.  Our useful fiction is that the Iraqi government is a sovereign democratic one, we are currently demanding the right to occupy their country militarily, but we seem to have done without demanding the ability to tax Iraqis for our own revenues.  As far as I can tell, that is the only significant structural difference between a long-term military occupation of Iraq and old-style colonialism.  British rule in India did not begin with anything so obvious as a direct invasion, the elimination or expulsion of the old ruling class and the creation of an entirely new political order from stratch.  First, they merely did business with the existing rulers, then co-opted them and then the relationship became more coercive and hegemonic.  All the while the formal domestic institutions of a representative constitutional monarchy not only remained in place at home, but were gradually liberalising at the same time that the empire was expanding.  Not only is there no contradiction in having an officially democratic regime engage in imperialism, but it has happened several times in the history of modern democracies.  The “liberal imperialism” of Gladstone and the “Tory democracy” of the late 19th century helped fuel expansionist policies in Africa.  Roman rule throughout the Near East was the result of a series of treaties made with local kings (and, of course, backed up with military might).  Rome was just a republic making treaties with the legitimate rulers of various states, so why worry about empire?    

There is nothing “excessive” about the word empire to describe the political and military domination of other countries.  Hegemony may be slightly more precise, but the practical difference between hegemony and empire is not very great when hegemony entails the establishment of dozens of military bases on foreign soil.  Perhaps people who believe that Washington and Baghdad are merely negotiating a bilateral “status of forces” agreement as between two equal, sovereign states also think that the Batavian Republic was a free and independent state that just had a very friendly relationship with France.  Oh, but that couldn’t have been imperialism–France was democratic at the time!  France and the Batavian Republic also made a treaty, one that was quite disadvantageous to the Dutch but a treaty all the same, so that must have made the ensuing occupation all right.   

If there is one good thing that might come out of the disaster of the war in Iraq, it is that the absurd, excessive and naive faith that democracies are never aggressive and imperialistic may be shaken at least a little.

In one of his earliest foreign policy blunders on the trail, Obama said that he would launch strikes inside Pakistan against Al Qaeda targets without Islamabad’s permission, and his supporters have made a point of reminding everyone about this, as if they thought their candidate needed a dose of reckless hawkishness to compensate for something.  As it happens, this has also been the policy under the current administration, which doesn’t seem to embarrass the proponents of “turning the page.”  After all, what could go wrong with such a proposal?  Maybe something like this:

U.S.-led forces killed Pakistani troops in an airstrike along the volatile Afghan border that Pakistan’s army condemned on Wednesday as “completely unprovoked and cowardly.”

U.S. officials confirmed that three aircraft launched about a dozen bombs following a clash between Taliban militants and Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces late Tuesday. Pakistan says the strikes killed 11 of its paramilitary troops.

The Pakistani army said the coalition airstrike hit a post of the paramilitary Frontier Corps and was a “completely unprovoked and cowardly act.”

It launched a strong protest and reserved “the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression,” the military said in a statement.

In addition to violating Pakistani sovereignty and potentially destabilising a somewhat friendly and very important allied government, we can also add the possibility of killing allied soldiers by mistake to the rather long list of reasons why Obama and Bush have been wrong about this and, shockingly, McCain has been the sober voice of reason by comparison.  No, that last part is not a joke.  As if the Pakistani military were not demoralised enough as it is by being compelled to fight a hard counterinsurgency on our behalf, they now have to worry about their paramilitary units being mistaken for Taliban. 

To recap: one of Obama’s advisors, Gen. McPeak, once made a claim in an old interview about resistance to change in U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine coming in part from “New York and Miami,” which almost everyone sought to make into an invidious “anti-Semitic” statement.  Today comes news that the McCain camp has won the support of a major Jewish donor from south Florida, who had previously been a major contributor to Democratic campaigns, because of Obama’s alleged weakness on Israel.

As The Hill explains:

Jewish support is especially important in Florida, a crucial swing state where Obama trails McCain in recent polls. Jewish voters make up about 5 percent of the electorate in that state. Florida’s Jewish community is also a lucrative source of political fundraising. [bold mine-DL]

Jewish Democrats are concerned about Obama’s stance toward Israel, and many big donors from this group supported Clinton. McCain has moved aggressively in recent days to win their allegiance since Clinton dropped her White House bid.    

 
“Her dropping out was huge in terms of potential for crossover voting and crossover support,” said Cantor.
Jewish Democrats are concerned about Obama for several reasons. While stumping in Iowa last year, Obama told Democratic activists, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
 

Some Jewish voters interpreted the statement as a sign that Obama would be overly sympathetic to the Palestinian side in future peace negotiations with Israel. And some are concerned about a senior Obama adviser’s comments regarding the influence of American Jews on foreign policy. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff, told the Portland Oregonian newspaper in 2003 that the political influence of the Jewish community had hampered efforts to negotiate peace in the Middle East [bold mine-DL].

So here we have a case of a prominent south Florida donor breaking with the Democrats because of concerns about Obama’s support for Israel, and these concerns are based at least partly on the claims by McPeak that Jewish voters in south Florida serve as an impediment in making significant changes to U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine.  So we are seeing a candidate losing some important backing in south Florida because of merely perceived insufficient support for Israel, and that perception is driven in no small part by the fact that one of the candidate’s advisors said that there is no change in policy because politicians are afraid of being punished by Jewish voters in south Florida for deviating from the status quo on Israel.  The very thing McPeak was describing is happening for all to see, and people are even attributing part of it to the fact that McPeak once noted this phenomenon five years ago.  Obviously, McPeak is crazy.

The irony of all this is that Obama proposes to change absolutely nothing about U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine, yet he is still being treated as if he would because some people in his orbit have been impolitic enough to explain part of the reason why nothing changes very much.  Even though Obama’s position on Israel is essentially indistinguishable from that of Clinton, McCain or the Bush administration, he is suffering the political cost of the mere perception that his position is somehow different.  If that doesn’t drive home the validity of McPeak’s observations from 2003, I’m not sure what could.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years. ~Thomas Friedman

No exaggeration is needed.  Very little is better than nothing.  In other words, instead of doing absolutely nothing to improve America’s image and much to damage it, Obama’s nomination has had a modestly positive effect for the time being. 

You have to enjoy how Friedman threw in the (bipartisan) opposition to the Dubai ports deal, as if the average Egyptian could be bothered with whether some company from the UAE was permitted to oversee various American ports.  If it does bother some of them, perhaps we could put it to the Egyptians this way–do you want the British running the Canal again?  Of course they don’t, and if it counts as “xenophobic” to insist on being able to secure your ports and waterways then almost every nation on earth is going to be found guilty.

Presumably, when Obama was at 41% in Rasmussen tracking poll, this was also deeply meaningful.  Or maybe not, since things have now swung back the other way.  The general election is likely to be very close, and I think we can expect seesawing national polls for the next several months.  If Obama loses ground over the summer, it does not mean that he is doomed, and if McCan takes the lead it is not at all certain that he can actually win.  What is certain is that it should never have been this close.  So it is interesting to see how much importance Obama boosters are putting on the risibly small “bump” that Obama has received from effectively securing the nomination.  They must be a little concerned that their candidate keeps running behind the generic Democratic ballot (at least when not counting leaners) and cannot seem to expand beyond the boundaries of the old Gore-Kerry coalitions despite incredibly favourable circumstances.

Update: John Cole questions my claim about Obama boosters, so I should provide some linksthatshowthe kind of thing I mean.  Yes, this post was mostly a response to Sullivan and to some of my more Obamaniac commenters, and so I should have specified that I was really referring in this case to one particular Obama booster.  So let’s leave aside the business about Obama boosters.  In any case, isn’t it surprising (and, from an anti-GOP perspective, depressing) that in this most Democratic of years the Democratic nominee has reached 50% for just the first time in national polls against the representative of a deeply loathed party?

The new argument against Obama from some on the right is that he is supposedly interested in cutting “defense spending.”  The non-interventionist would respond that we spend very little on actual defense, but I suspect the joke would be lost on anyone who thinks that Obama wants to slash the Pentagon’s budget.  Here is Obama’s view of what the military budget should be in the future:

We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines. Bolstering these forces is about more than meeting quotas. We must recruit the very best and invest in their capacity to succeed. That means providing our servicemen and servicewomen with first-rate equipment, armor, incentives, and training — including in foreign languages and other critical skills. Each major defense program should be reevaluated in light of current needs, gaps in the field, and likely future threat scenarios. Our military will have to rebuild some capabilities and transform others. At the same time, we need to commit sufficient funding to enable the National Guard to regain a state of readiness.

This would necessarily involve large increases above current spending levels.  His campaign website restates all of these points almost verbatim. 

I take Klein’s point that Obama’s record is thin and it is difficult to know for certain whether Obama would follow through on these proposals, but very clearly his stated, official position is to expand military spending and domestic spending significantly.  If you think that federal spending on both is excessive, as I do, this is a demonstrably worse position than any other candidate’s, and I suspect many Obama voters would agree that expanding the size of the military is not a top priority for them.  Obama presumably doesn’t think there needs to be a trade-off between exploding the budget with new domestic initiatives and doing the same with new military funding, since he intends on raising the rates of several different taxes and levying a new one every now and then. 

As Obama has been moving into the general election, he has not needed to move towards the “center” on foreign policy because he was largely already there last year.  Remarkably, for someone who claims that he will challenge the “mindset” that led to the war in Iraq and wants to “turn the page” on the practices of the administration, Obama offers quite a lot of continuity with this administration.  Why his critics would want to emphasise the possibility of his stark differences with Mr. Bush, when this will only make him more popular, is truly beyond me.  Once revealed as offering little in the way of the “change” that he preaches in the area of policy that has most damaged the administration’s reputation, Obama’s appeal ought to collapse like a house of cards.          

P.S.  I do have to agree with Klein, however, that his dodging of the questions about Jim Johnson’s dodgy loans is pathetic.  Whatever one thinks about the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis, having those who are possibly ethically challenged be the ones responsible for vetting the list of possible VP selections is not really consistent with the high-minded, open and transparent government-reform shtick.  Updated: Johnson, who doesn’t “work” for Obama, just resigned from the VP selection process.  What was an irrelevant “game” yesterday has become a serious problem today that warrants his departure.