Reihan has a smart article in The Spectator on social change in the U.S., and he gets extra points for making a clever trans-Atlantic electoral reference:

On 13 May, the Democrats had their own Crewe and Nantwich in Mississippi, where Democrat Travis Childers soundly defeated Republican Greg Davis.

While it is very clever, the comparison isn’t exact, since MS-01 was filled with registered Democrats who previously reliably voted for Republicans, party affiliations were not listed on the ballot and Childers had strong local connections that won him strong rural and small town support.  Crewe and Nantwich was more startling and more significant, because it represented a wholesale repudiation of Labour in a parliamentary by-election that confirmed the local election blowout victory the Tories had just had.  Flukey Democratic wins in Southern states are not necessarily unheard of–think of Doug Nick Lampson’s odd success in TX-22 two years ago–but Tory wins in by-elections are.  (In fairness, Reihan goes on to note the differences between our special elections and British by-elections.)

However, I have to take issue with Reihan’s description of LA-06 as a “conservative bastion” for reasons I have given before.  The demographics of the district shifted significantly between 2004 and 2008 because of Katrina refugees, and this was masked in electoral results in 2006 by the fact that the Democrats did not recruit a candidate with Cazayoux’s profile.  Indeed, they failed to recruit anyone.  Baker was unopposed in 2006 in a year when his traditional margin of victory would have likely been reduced noticeably.  Republicans were blindsided in Louisiana because they were still operating as if the Baton Rouge area was the same as it was four years earlier. 

Actually, in a way the Republican failure in LA-06 dramatically demonstrates the point Reihan is making: the GOP is basically oblivious to ongoing social change, including such basics as the political effects of demographic change.  This is one reason why they are continually refighting the last electoral war (or sometimes they are fighting two or three wars ago), because they seem fixated on how things were when the GOP and the President were still reasonably popular and they are not responding at all to the rapid changes that some of their own policies have (unwisely) unleashed.  Republicans continue to talk about “rebranding,” but what they have failed to see is that their traditional “market” has all but collapsed.

Buried within the Mary Grabar column that everyoneis ridiculing for its opening paragraph are the interesting and important claims made by Claes Ryn.  Unfortunately, the heart of Grabar’s argument has been lost on these critics because of the inclusion of the irrelevant remarks about the presidential election.  Grabar writes:

Claes G. Ryn, in the Fall 2007 50th anniversary issue of Modern Age, accurately attributes the decline of intellectual conservatism to an abandonment of tradition, philosophical foundations, and artistic expressions, for a focus on political pragmatism, manifested in a fondness for economics and business. Professor Ryn writes, “in trying to effect a renewal of American and Western society, winning and exercising political power cannot take the place of the patient and demanding intellectual and artistic efforts that, in time, might change the mind and the imagination of a people.”

What is unfortunate about Dr. Grabar’s column is that she seems to have missed that her own initial framing of the culture wars in terms of presidential politics and bizarre visions of Obama’s legions looting and pillaging in the quads partakes of the same preoccupation with politics that has contributed to the decline that she is lamenting in this paragraph.  Further, I would add that Dr. Grabar is not doing any favours for intellectual conservatism or the edification of students by making the academy seem so forbidding to conservatives that only a fool would want to embark on an academic career rather than take up the more practical and lucrative “fondness for economics and business.”  Certainly no one will come away from this column with the idea that conservatives should make any attempt to challenge the trends that she describes; she makes it plain that it is a fool’s errand.  Meanwhile, by connecting the state of educational institutions to an Obama victory in November, she reinforces the soul- and mind-killing obsession with party politics that has been as much the ruin of intellectual conservatism as the preference for economics and business.  With her first paragraph she undermines the rest of her message, which is one that conservatives desperately need to hear more often.

As I have said before, one of the structural reasons why the academy has drifted left for decades is that the lifestyle of academics is not especially conducive to stable, settled family life, so that what you might call the ‘natural’ conservatism that comes from family life does not enter the scene until well after the academics are more or less fully formed in their attitudes and prejudices.  Likewise, the academy does not tend to attract those who need to support a family, especially a large one, because the financial burdens of paying for graduate school and paltry income early on in teaching careers along with the frequent demand for mobility are incompatible with supporting a family.  Once the leftward drift begins, it steadily reinforces itself as those liable to pull these institutions back to the right, so to speak, go into other lines of work where their values are rewarded rather than constantly put under scrutiny and question.  The work of imagination is in some respects more demanding, because it entails not only defending received traditions but also reproducing and building on them.  That is more laborious and time-consuming than the transitory party and movement boosterism, but its effects will also be more enduring and not as reversible.  As I argue in a forthcoming column, conservatives need to remember that it is supposed to be their central insight that culture can change politics, which makes one wonder why conservatives (myself included) spend so much of their time on politics rather than engaging in the creative and imaginative work of fashioning the culture they want for their posterity.

The enormous disappointment-generating machine that is the Obama campaign has been working overtime lately.  The latest to feel its effects is Uri Avnery:

The transparent fawning of Obama on the Israel lobby stands out more than similar efforts by the other candidates.

Why? Because his dizzying success in the primaries was entirely due to his promise to bring about a change, to put an end to the rotten practices of Washington and to replace the old cynics with a young, brave person who does not compromise his principles.

And lo and behold, the very first thing he does after securing the nomination of his party is to compromise his principles.

If it’s any consolation to Mr. Avnery, there was nothing in the AIPAC speech that compromised Obama’s principles, since this speech was almost identical to the one he gave last year and is entirely consistent with every major statement and action he has made concerning Israel.  Contrary to the hopes of his admirers and the accusations of his critics, when it comes to Israel and most of America’s Near East policy he is utterly conventional.  Avnery is right that opposing the war was a move that would not win any favour with “pro-Israel” forces, but it was much easier to take such a stand during a Democratic Senate primary in one of the most Democratic and antiwar states in America than it is during a presidential election.  The thing that should worry Obamaites about the AIPAC speech isn’t just the embarrassing pandering, but that as someone in national office Obama will not go against such a major lobby during the election, which suggests that he may never do so.  More worrying for his fans has to be the possibility that Obama gave the speech he did because he genuinely believes everything he said, and that his opposition to the war in Iraq was essentially a fluke and not at all representative of how he understands the U.S. role in the Near East and the world.  Of course, it is entirely consistent to be more or less conventionally “pro-Israel” and antiwar concerning Iraq, since almost everyone acknowledges that the war has been very bad for Israel and has empowered Iran in ways that have been detrimental to Israel, but politically it is a strange position to be in because the supporters of hawkish Israeli policies and hawkish American policies tend to align with one another.  Obama is an odd man out in this respect, since he is quite happy to support Israeli hawkishness, even to the point of unequivocally backing their counterproductive and failed war in Lebanon (he might have called it a “rash and dumb war we can believe in”), while demonstrating more prudence when it comes to the American use of force in the region.  His admirers will still say that half a loaf is better than none, but the plaintive cry of Mr. Avnery in this column is representative of a lot of Obama’s admirers who are discovering day by day that there is not much about U.S. foreign policy that Obama will change.  The thing is that he never promised he would change U.S. foreign policy in large ways–this was something that his admirers imputed to him because they assumed that it had to be true. 

Update: More lamentations about Obama’s AIPAC speech here, here, here, here and here.  Meanwhile, the Post is quite satisfied.

Andrew Ferguson leads you on a tour of Hyde Park, which is supposed to persuade you of…well, I’m not quite sure what, but I suppose it must be an attempt to make you think that Hyde Park is a frightening and alien landscape.  I won’t pretend that Hyde Park isn’t quite unusual in some ways, since it is an area tied to a major research university in the middle of the South Side, but as a place of exceptionally far-out left wingery it is frankly nothing compared to Berkeley or the People’s Republic of Madison.  Obviously, because of the demographics of the South Side and the culture of at least some parts of the University Hyde Park is quite far to the left politically, while the neighbourhood’s churches range from the predictably liberal Protestant to the charismatic evangelical.  Support for Obama is ubiquitous here, as you would expect, and many students have been serving as campaign workers for him.  But it isn’t as if he overshadows everything here, either.  My limited connection to Obama’s presence in the neighbourhood was once over four years ago when I was stopped on the street by a man with a petition to get Obama on the ballot when he was running for Senate, but as a New Mexico voter I coudn’t sign it.  Aside from the typical yard signs and buttons, you might otherwise not know that you’re living in the heart of Obama country if you happened to be visiting. 

There is also something about Hyde Park that Ferguson misrepresents when he says:

Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store.

This is misleading, since it treats the arrival of Treasure Island as an all together new development, when it serves as the replacement for the Co-Op that finally closed down earlier this year.  His following description of the Co-Op is likewise misleading, and it suggests that he never actually visited it when it was still open and fully functioning.  He refers to its “empty shelves and accumulated gunk [that] attested to its Soviet-like disdain for market forces.”  Ooh, Soviet-like!  That’s scary!  True enough, the Co-Op operated at a consistent loss and was finally forced into bankruptcy, but before its demise became known its shelves weren’t empty and I cannot recall seeing any “gunk” accumulated there.  If you go to the Treasure Island today, you will find a store that looks almost identical in every respect to the one it replaced (though their wine selection is at present worse).   

Ferguson also invokes Brookline as a symbol of Dukakis’ alienation from the rest of the country, which is strange, since I’ve been to Brookline and found it quite normal as well, at least as suburbs go.  They have a Greek Orthodox seminary in Brookline, which I found to be an impressive institution during my brief visit there last year.  Perhaps it’s a measure of how long I’ve been here, but as “rootless” as modern Hyde Park may be, or as recent as its current character may be, it is more of a neighbourhood than most of the other places I’ve been in Chicagoland. 

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul. ~Mark Morford (who is apparently not kidding)

Of course, the moment you read that bit about these “spiritually advanced people,” you should start keeping a lookout for the nearest Scientologist offering to use his Tech to help you advance.   

I was ahead of the curve in noticing something related to this Obama-worship:  

This is someone who says, “Obviously, you are all terribly wrong, but I am such a good guy that I am going to indulge you in your false notions out of compassion for your suffering.”  The Messiah references have been all wrong–this is Obama as bodhisattva.  “You cling to your delusions, but I am here to teach you a path of liberation from all such attachments.” 

If he has these magical powers, perhaps the Obama campaign could arrange to have the city of San Francisco sealed inside its own pocket of the space-time continuum until the election is over.

There has been a slight uptick in Obama’s national polling since he has “clinched” the nomination and it is showing up in a number of different tracking polls, but what is so striking about this uptick is how modest and small it is.  Yes, things can change, but isn’t a more or less immediate improvement the definition of receiving a “bump” from something?  If Obama’s numbers go up two or three weeks from now, this will not be a “bump” from locking up the nomination, but from something else.  Obama has been in his position as presumptive nominee for almost a week since the last primary, and yet the weekend polling seems to have shown very little movement.  Some boosters used to boast of the possibility of a ten point gain after the nomination was wrapped up, and in most polls he has gained perhaps two or three.  For the first time ever, if leaners are included, he has reached 50% in the Rasmussen tracking poll this week, and this is a mark McCain has gone over a number of times.  Count me as one underwhelmed by the rallying ’round Obama.

For those who have been asking, here is a post updating you on Chuck Baldwin’s campaign as the Constitution Party nominee.  There is a story floating around (via Third Party Watch) that Baldwin’s campaign manager has been quoted saying things that would distance the campaign from the legacy of the Revolution, but the campaign swiftly swatted down any suggestion that Baldwin’s people were taking such steps.  It would have made no sense if they had tried to distance themselves from Paul and his supporters, since Baldwin is one of the obvious alternatives for Paul voters, especially those who are culturally and religiously conservative and can’t quite see themselves backing a Libertarian ticket (especially one with the ludicrous Wayne Allyn Root on it).  More important for the practical success of the campaign, there is a rumour that the alleged “Ron Paul billionaire” will provide a few million dollars to Baldwin to aid in ballot access.  According to the story, the funding comes on the condition that Baldwin keep hammering on the issues of sound money and the evils of the Fed, which should give our goldbug friends someone to support.  It’s not entirely clear to me that this is what the CP needs to make its priority, but then again Baldwin’s campaign has almost non-existent financial backing as it is.  In terms of visibility and media attention, Baldwin-Castle ’08 unfortunately doesn’t have anywhere near the draw of Barr-Root or even the absurd McKinney’s Green ticket.

In other recent CP news, there is a candidate running for the House in New Jersey’s 2nd District, Peter Boyce.  The Republican incumbent, Frank LoBiondo, is in a district that is rated as safe Republican by CQ, so it’s possible that Boyce could have a decent showing and still not flip the seat to the Democrats.  However, LoBiondo’s margins of victory have always been large and the third party presence has been anemic at best.  The Libertarians managed to get 1% six years ago, and that is the best that any third party challenger has done.   

Update: Here is video of Baldwin talking about medical marijuana and foreign policy (via).

When I checked with it to ask for a list of prominent conservative supporters, the [Obama] campaign seemed genuinely unaware that such supporters even existed. ~Bruce Bartlett

Via Sullivan

I expect that they are as mystified by the phenomenon as I am, because they would also have great difficulty understanding why conservatives would support Obama.  Such is their concern for transcendence and unity–be forewarned, hopesters.  Indeed, the emphasis of Bartlett’s piece on Obama’s rhetoric and style underscores the lack of substantive reasons for such support.  “Sympathy” for school vouchers is like so many other examples of Obama’s interest in policy reforms that conservatives and libertarians find attractive–it is a line used to show that Obama is thoughtful and reflective, but it ultimately suggests no strong interest in advancing said reform and it commits him to nothing.  The campaign knows as well as anyone that the following statement is not really true:

Conservatives of almost all ideological flavors (even, gasp, some supply-siders) have been drawn to Obama–out of a genuine affection and a belief that he may actually better embody movement ideals than McCain [bold mine-DL].

Yet this is exactly what several of them are not saying at all.  This is what their critics accuse them of saying as a way of ridiculing them.  A couple of them have said something like this from time to time, but on the whole the enthusiasm for Obama derives from the important reality that Obama is not John McCain.  There is a desire to punish the GOP for Bushism, and so they rally around the most practical vehicle for defeating the inheritor of Bushism.  This is very clear from what most of them say in their own arguments. 

Prof. Bacevich’s oft-cited article, which is indeed much more interesting as a discussion of what conservatism is rather than as a justification for why conservatives should opt for Obama, is a perfect case in point.  The article offers a fine definition of conservatism and a brilliant, withering assault on the failures and flaws of the GOP and McCain.  The positive case for Obama is all but non-existent (there is reason to think he would end the war), and it is laced with caveats:

None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama’s run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.

If this is an endorsement, who needs criticism?   

P.S.  Ambinder has some useful graphs that make it quite clear that almost no one thinks of Obama as conservative, and not all that many think he is a moderate.

Mark Halperin has another one of his lists, this time outlining the things that McCain is underestimating as the general election starts.  Number 10:

That in modern America, perception is often reality and style often beats substance.

Perhaps McCain underestimates this for some reason, but it seems to me that he is the one Republican candidate, aside from perhaps Mike Huckabee, who understands this better than anyone and has used it to his advantage many times already.  McCain and his loyal backers are counting on the perception that McCain is the anti-Bush, the independent maverick truth-teller, will trump the reality that he represents a continuation of almost every policy of Mr. Bush’s administration, and they are being aided in this on a regular basis by gullible or sympathetic pundits and journalists who keep framing every McCain move as an instance of “McCain distancing himself from the Bush administration.”  McCain regularly won among anti-Bush voters in the GOP primaries, and this perception of independence from the conventional GOP line seems to be a reason for his continuing appeal to independents and his ability to outpoll his own party label by ten points or more.  In the eyes of the media, McCain must necessarily be distancing himself from Bush, because they “know” that McCain is the Good Republican and Bush is the antithesis of this.  They are also counting on McCain’s ability to get by without having a clue about numerous areas of policy.  They probably anticipate that he will once again be able to prevail by muttering boilerplate about opposing wasteful spending and the dreaded earmark with the odd gas tax holiday pander thrown in for good measure.  It’s worked before, so why not on a larger scale with the general electorate? 

What Halperin also misses here is that in any contest between Obama and McCain, Obama is the substantive, policy-oriented candidate, while McCain is the one offering mostly pious bromides about victory, service and being American.  If style often beats substance, Obama is in trouble because, as his supporters tirelessly remind us, Obama does have a substantive policy agenda (even if he doesn’t spend as much time talking about it and a lot of his boosters don’t care what it is) and McCain’s entire campaign has been even more driven by biography and character than Obama’s.