Yglesias:

Nobody under 40 really remembers it, but the recession around the middle of Reagan’s first term was really, really, really bad. It licked inflation, but at the cost of sky-high unemployment and the worst recession since the Great Depression. And even then the public’s view of their personal finances was rosier than it is now.

Many more people say that their finances have become worse in the last year rather than better, but that this result is probably quite misleading even if we are trying to compare the public’s mood about the economy today against the mood in the early ’80s.  If you own any equities, the last year has been rather ugly on the whole, and now that there are many more stockholders today as a percentage of the general population than there were in 1981 it is not hard to imagine that in a volatile market those stockholders would say that their finances have worsened.  Add to these the people caught up in the collapse of the housing bubble, and you will come up with a very large part of the population.  So there are a lot of Americans suffering from financial losses or anxiety about potential losses who were not exposed to risk in the same way in the early ’80s.  In a roundabout way, this is actually a testament to the success of the economic expansion over the past three decades, since it reflects in part how many more people are benefiting from, while also suffering from the risks of, participating in equities markets.   

Of course, electorally the recession of ’81-’82 was not very good for Republicans in Congress (they lost a net of 27 seats in the House), so as a matter of the political significance of the public’s view of their finances these numbers have to be deeply troubling to the GOP today.  This is all the more remarkable given that the economy has not yet gone into recession and may not do so.

To turn to more edifying and important matters, Ross raises an interesting point about theodicy:

It’s my impression – and it’s only an impression, which is why I’d like to see someone do the necessary intellectual spadework to refute it or back it up – that this argument has gained increasing currency even as our material conditions have dramatically improved; which is to say, the less suffering a particular population experiences, the more likely the suffering it does experience will be cited as evidence against the existence of a benevolent deity.

Ross’ impression seems right to me, and you might call it the modern luxury of impiety.  If you are relying heavily on agriculture that depends on favourable weather and freedom from blights, as people for most of history did, and you are exposed to the ravages of famine or plague without the protections of extensive food surpluses or medical treatment, the irrationality of blasphemy and doubting God’s benevolence becomes much clearer.  At the same time, enjoying plenitude and wealth allows those with the most advantages the luxury of worrying not so much about the suffering that they experience, since they tend to experience relatively little, and worrying a lot more about suffering elsewhere.  Questioning God’s benevolence in this context becomes akin to the “pornography of compassion,” as Dr. Fleming has called it, in which people feel obliged to make a great display of how much they care about suffering on the other side of the world–in this case, they care so much that they feel obliged to curse God.  With the exception of natural disasters, which are the things that you might think would cause more doubt than human cruelty, complaints against God for things that we do to each other are really quite bizarre.  First of all, if you believe that God did not create man with a sinful nature, but that man turned away from God, it is difficult to believe that God can be blamed for what we do to one another.  “But why does God permit it?” someone always asks.  The standard (and true) answer is that God permits it because He respects human freedom, up to and including the freedom to disobey, because neither obedience nor love would be of any value if it were not ultimately voluntary.  This is why it surprises me some that great horrors in history undermine faith in God’s goodness.  Actually, it doesn’t surprise me that much that it undermines faith in people who lived through those horrors, but it is a bit odd that those who were not there or not even alive when it was happening will cite such events as their “evidence” that either God does not exist or if He does then God is not good.  For these people there is not even the memory of the horror to contend with, but a more removed knowledge about the events, yet as often as not it is the latter who find great horrors more theologically significant than those who survived them. 

Yet what these people seem to be terrified of most is the possibility that God really has allowed man such an extensive freedom, and that God is nothing like the caricatured martinet dictator that the sad New Atheists portray Him to be.  Indeed, one gets the impression from many complaints against God for permitting suffering that they would very much welcome a deity who regimented and ordered their lives in order to provide maximal security and prosperity.  As modern life has become in many respects easier, more comfortable and more secure, perhaps many moderns find the freedom that God has permitted them to be overwhelming and bewildering and their complaints against God are framed in terms that might be used for complaints against their fellow men: “if God really loved us, He would intervene and fix everything.”  If you really cared about other people, you would want to meddle in their affairs to an obnoxious degree. 

Even though God does intervene in history in dramatic, powerful and world-changing ways (see the Incarnation), what troubles the doubters is that God does not intervene more often.  It’s as if they want to say, “Stop respecting my free will and just do something for me!”  That this sounds exactly like the statement of a spoiled child is appropriate, because that is what it is.  Then, in those moments of chastening and real trial that God permits or wills, the spoiled children whine even more when they are confronted with some small modicum of loving discipline.

It is not in the least clear to me what this accomplishes, except to harden divisions among ourselves that should not even exist, but let’s come back to the heart of this entire controversy.  The problem that John Zmirak and others have had with the review is not especially that it was critical (how could it be, since John believes that the United States was right in entering WWII?), but that it included admittedly gratuitous references to David Irving.  This is supposed to have constituted a smear, yet in the context of the review Prof. Lukacs was contrasting the differences between the two.  You can argue that Irving’s name should never have entered into it and that there is no reason to make the comparison, but to hold that it is a “smear” to say that Mr. Buchanan is not like and different from Irving is to make the word smear utterly meaningless.   

I would reiterate that this fratricidal hurling of anathemas among people who, in fact, agree an overwhelming majority of the time is completely mad. 

P.S. Dylan Waco at Left Conservative has a good post on all of this as well.

Obama’s 2008 AIPAC speech reads very much like his 2007 speech, except that this one is perhaps even more overflowing with boilerplate pander lines than the last.  Here was a new item that I think he neglected last year:

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

It is not clear to me how those who want to see Obama as an advocate of “even-handedness” will be able to maintain the hope that he represents any significant change in U.S. policy. 

There were also some notable moments in self-contradiction:

And we should work with Europe, Japan and the Gulf states to find every avenue outside the U.N. to isolate the Iranian regime — from cutting off loan guarantees and expanding financial sanctions, to banning the export of refined petroleum to Iran, to boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization [bold mine-DL].

As every Clintonite remembers, Obama hung the Kyl-Lieberman amendment around Clinton’s neck for months and used it as an example of how Clinton was embracing the policies of the Bush administration (while his supporters simultaneously praised Obama for taking a position on launching strikes into Pakistan that was the policy of the Bush administration).  What did the Kyl-Lieberman amendment do?  It labeled the IRG’s Quds force a terrorist organisation, which Obama at the time interpreted (not entirely absurdly) as a prelude to justifying a military strike.  When it comes to talk at AIPAC, though, this sort of labeling becomes a good and right idea.  The GOP has already latched on to this inconsistency and will keep hammering on it. 

No doubt those who want to portray Obama as “weak” on Israel will conclude from this inconsistency that he says one thing to one group of people and another to a different group, which proves that he can’t be trusted, but what this really shows is that when he goes to an interest group’s conference he toes their line as carefully as he can.  The lesson is that he can’t be trusted to take real political risks or challenge entrenched interests for the sake of anything approaching real policy change.  What this tells me is that he will play antiwar and J Street-type voters for suckers with appealing rhetoric on Iran and then maintain the failed status quo. 

Then there was another rather striking statement:

And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region.

In the AIPAC speech, Obama thinks this is a very bad thing, but when he was talking to Jeffrey Goldberg he said something that his supporters insisted be read in exactly this way in order to deflect the unfair criticism that he was referring to Israel when he said:

But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy [bold mine-DL]. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

So something that infects all of our foreign policy, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has nothing to do with trouble elsewhere in the region?  Oh, okay.

James restates a common theme:

His triumph is questionable in terms of small-ball politics, but neither you, I, nor the Democratic party should worry much about that. In terms of the American character, it´s an important and refreshing reminder that we can, in fact, raise the bar when it comes to our politicians, and admire the luxury of our own high expectations both conscientiously and confidently.

But there is a caveat:

All of this is ruined, of course, if Obama caves and Hillary slithers onto the ticket.

It seems to me that everyone is getting ahead of themselves.  Tonight Obama will technically “clinch” the nomination by crossing the 2,118 delegate threshold almost regardless of how well or poorly he does in the last two primaries, at which point the Clinton campaign will say, “But, of course, all those Michigan delegates you claim you have aren’t really yours, so you’re not there yet, ha ha!”  This is what Michelle Obama complains about when she talks about how “they move the bar,” but “they” will keep “moving the bar” unless and until Obama cedes to Clinton a spot on the ticket.  What no one has been able to explain to me is how it is that Hillary Clinton, whom these same critics paint in the most lurid colours as the mistress of disorder and the spirit of chaos, will yield now when she refused to yield when it had become essentially mathematically impossible for her to take the pledged delegate lead.  According to her worst detractors, she is the epitome of blind egotism and the lust for power, but now she will step aside for the greater good?  Now that she can more or less reasonably claim to have a popular vote plurality, we’re supposed to believe that she will depart when she would not before?  I must brush up on my Clinton demonology, because it seems to me that you cannot believe that Clinton is a soul-sucking revenant who comes to destroy us all (as her more sympathetic critics have portrayed her this year) and believe that the race is over tonight.  Of course, it could be that she is not quite the nightmarish creature her enemies claim that she is, in which case including her on the ticket not only makes sense but does not compromise any high principles or expectations.     

It will become increasingly clear that for the sake of party unity he will be compelled to choose her, and yet this necessary act will be received by many of his admirers as the complete betrayal of everything he stands for?  Talk about moving the bar!  Not only is he going to be forced into choosing her, but then he will be denounced as a charlatan when he does the only thing that Clinton’s partisans realistically leave open to him.  As a practical matter, if he does not choose her, what just happened on Saturday in settling Florida and Michigan, and Michigan in particular, is going to come back to haunt Obama and could provoke a convention fight that might spell disaster for whichever ticket emerges on the other side.   

Update: As expected, she will never go away.

As John Schwenkler notes, Bill Kristol affirms that McCain and Obama have essentially the same view on Iran and broader foreign policy except for Iraq, and Sullivan highlights this with an award (!) without noting that the claim that Obama and McCain are very close in their foreign policy views besides Iraq fundamentally undermines everything Obama purports to represent in foreign policy.  In the one area of policy that is truly screaming out the most for bold and dramatic breaks with the past, Obama largely embraces the failed Washington foreign policy consensus, as some of ushave been sayingfor nearly a year.  While it is somewhat refreshing to hear someone else acknowledge the reality that Obama is utterly conventional in his views on Near East and Israel policies, contrary to the excited warnings of negotiations with Hamas, pressuring Israel over settlements and other red herrings, this is exactly the aspect of Obama’s record and his platform that should give his antiwar supporters pause and make them think about what, if anything, Obama is really likely to change should he be elected. 

Perhaps antiwar voters will decide that they still prefer Obama solely because of his position on Iraq, but there should never be any illusions that he proposes sweeping changes in how the United States acts in the world.

You might say that being able to fit in at a chain restaurant’s salad bar should not be a meaningful qualification for high office, but then you are not David Brooks (via Orr):

Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can go into an Applebee’s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.

There’s just one problem with Obama’s “problem”: there is no salad bar at Applebee’s, much less one that you can go “into” (how big does he think salad bars are?), as those of us common rubes who have actually eaten at Applebee’s can attest.  It seems to me that Brooks was grasping for some symbol of the Everyman, had probably read or read about Applebee’s America at some point, remembered something about the “gut-level connection” its author mentions as a politically significant factor and then concluded, “To have a gut-level connection with the Everyman, one must eat at Applebee’s and, most important of all, one must eat at the salad bar.”  But then this betrays a crucial misunderstanding of the American rube, since all fans of chain restaurants know that most people don’t go to these places for anything so healthy as a salad. 

Update: Video here.  Apparently the “Applebee’s guy” responds well to transactional politics, even though the “Applebee’s guy” is likely to be middle-class and suburban, who are typically not the downscale voters that have resisted Obama’s appeal for the most part.

Sullivan:

“Far left” means a man that Joe Lieberman was thrilled to get to support his last Senate campaign.

Of course, Lieberman was thrilled to get any support in his last Senate campaign from national Democrats during the primary, but it might be worth pointing out that by voting record and ADA score Obama actually is to the left of Lieberman, who is, with the exception of his “centrist” (a.k.a., militarist) foreign policy views, pretty far to the left of center himself.  When defining someone as “far left” (or “far right”), it matters who is doing the defining.  From my perspective, the current administration is pretty far to the left, and Obama would be demonstrably farther to the left on most, if not all, things, so to the extent that the right-left spectrum has any meaning (questionable) how else would you define him?  To many far leftists, Obama appears to be a sell-out and someone willing to compromise with the GOP in unacceptable ways, but the irony of this complaint is that he is much closer to them than they or Obama’s conservative supporters believe. 

To be to the right of Hillary Clinton on nationalising health care is still pretty far out there for a lot of people in this country.  The relevant question is whether the country has moved significantly to the left, or indeed already was there when Bush was elected but had not yet fully expressed it electorally, and there is some evidence that it has when we look at some of the voting for the House or polling on specific policy issues.  That said, there seems to be tremendous stability at the presidential level in the voting coalitions, which is why, according to Rasmussen, McCain doggedly polls at around 45-46% and Obama anemically polls the same, which seems to mean that the center has not shifted all that much despite the last eight years.  That means that a nominee who is running on the most left-wing platform of any candidate since McGovern (as is Clinton, as was Edwards!) is effectively pretty far to the left.  If you’re a liberal or an Obama supporter, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that and presumably it is the reason why you’re supporting him (conservatives who are supporting him primarily because of the war are obviously the radical exception).  In theory, Obama’s potential was supposed to be that he would mainstream left-liberalism with the aid of his style, charisma and inclusive rhetoric, but the consolation for those on the left annoyed by his accommodating language was that he would be unabashedly governing as a left-liberal on the assumption that left-liberalism has the best answers. 

The then state senator who was considered the pride of Chicago’s progressives–that is to say, the candidate in the Senate primary who was to the left of most of his competition–can be fairly described as a leftist, and the only reason to fear such a label is if such a political alignment really does put the candidate so far out of the mainstream that he is not electorally viable.  The meme is not exhausted, or else there would be no reason to challenge its use.  Whether it still has the same political punch that it once did is an open question, but the description of Obama as being far to the left would not worry Obama supporters if it were either manifestly untrue or lacking in power.  Arguably, relative to, say, a Russ Feingold, Obama may be closer to the center, but not that much closer.  Then again, Obama has had higher ratings from NARAL than Feingold and a higher ADA than Ted Kennedy in the past.  As the linked page shows, during the relevant period Obama had an average higher rating from several progressive interest groups than any of his colleagues–so how is it outrageous to say that he is far left?  These interest group ratings are imperfect and are focused on some pieces of legislation at the expense of other votes, but they are one way to quantify someone’s political leanings.   

It seems to me that his conservative supporters are allergic to this description of him because they are aware of how that label has been used to sink Democratic nominee after Democratic nominee, and so they want to insist that Obama is not politically what, in reality, he is and has been for his entire career.  It seems to me that this is to recommend the same halting, fearful sort of campaign in which the Democrat has to run away from what he actually believes to be “common sense” (as Obama has described his own views) for fear of being “tarred” with the beliefs that he holds.  This is the same kind of lack of confidence that has plagued Democratic responses to the charge of being a liberal or “weak on national security” for decades.  

Meanwhile, this objection seems particularly strained:

“Far left” means well to the racial right of Jesse Jackson.

As a matter of policy, how is this even accurate?  Because Obama does not lead street protests and engage in the rhetoric of racial grievance–matters of tactics and expression–he is to Jesse Jackson’s right?  In what significant way is his current position on affirmatve action really any different from Jackson’s?  He has gestured vaguely towards replacing racial preferences with class-based preferences, but he is always doing that–gesturing vaguely towards reforming this or that policy, and then predictably endorsing the traditional party line when it comes time to vote on anything. 

Then there is this sort of thing, which I’m not sure his supporters want to keep stressing:

“Far left” means retaining the right to bomb Pakistan if al Qaeda is deemed a threat there.

That’s right.  He supports violating allied sovereignty without the ally’s consent, which is the same position that George Bush holds.  It is in his attitudes towards the use of force and intervention abroad where the “far left” label does not apply very well, because in this area of policy he is firmly entrenched in the Washington consensus that supports U.S. hegemony and will consistently disappoint his progressive supporters who think of him as representing a significant break from past U.S. foreign policy. 

Update: A more comprehensive list of Obama’s ratings can be found here.  As you can see, his ADA varies from year to year, but the overall impression from his ratings is that he consistently and predictably votes with liberal interest groups, which is what you would expect from a left-liberal Democrat.

Though I am a bit late coming to this story, Dionne has a column on the denial of Communion to Prof. Kmiec on account of his endorsement of Obama that deserves some comment.  I havediscussedKmiec‘s endorsement and his arguments before, and while I have not found them persuasive it seems clear that he has maintained a recognisably pro-life view throughout.  He has gone out of his way to propose that Obama adopt a measure advanced by Democrats for Life that could, in theory, reduce the number of abortions significantly in the near term, and he has certainly wrestled with the problem of Obama’s support for legal abortion.  The most unfortunate thing is that Prof. Kmiec has consistently taken Obama at his word that he respects pro-life views, which has given Kmiec the false hope that Obama will take pro-life arguments seriously to the point of embracing them or implementing pro-lifers’ proposals in the context of retaining legal abortion.  What matters in Kmiec’s case is his intent, and clearly he is not supporting Obama in order to promote a grave evil.  The mistake that Kmiec has made, which is the same mistake that many pro-life Obama supporters are making, is to believe that Obama has any intention of following through as a matter of policy on his rhetoric of listening to all sides and building consensus.   

Even so, if Kmiec has participated in a grave moral evil simply by endorsing Obama, how much more have all those tens and hundreds of thousands of Catholic Democrats across the Rust Belt and elsewhere who have actually cast votes for Hillary Clinton?  The question answers itself–obviously he has not so participated.