Reihan takes another strong line on the VP selection by the Democratic nominee:

The question is no longer whether Barack Obama should select Jim Webb as his nominee. It is whether he can justify not doing so.

I don’t think that’s the question.  As sociologically fun as an Obama-Webb ticket would be, let’s stop and consider this for a moment.  Leave aside for the moment that Webb has all but said that he will flee the country if someone tries to make him the running mate (this is only a small exaggeration of how much he doesn’t want the job, further confirming in everyone’s mind that he is probably the only one who deserves it).  Webb’s success in shepherding the “new GI Bill” through the Senate is an impressive achievement, and it does the junior Senator from Virginia credit that he has carried the genuine concern he showed during his career and during his ’06 campaign for veterans into the Senate to good effect.  Those of us on the right who cheered his election can take some satisfaction that he is proving to be a very capable legislator, and he is showing the President the way as he said he would.  Still, I am amazed that the first thought when confronted with “a masterful legislative tactician” in one party or the other is, “How can we get this man into the Naval Observatory and waste his talents?”  There are plenty of objections to putting two first-term Senators on the same ticket as it is, and if it is true that virtually no one votes for the Vice President it’s not clear that Webb brings concrete benefits to the campaign, even if he would clearly be an asset in a Democratic administration.  Meanwhile, like the even more ludicrous idea of putting Bobby Jindal on the Republican ticket, selecting Webb all but ensures that any hopes of executive office that Webb might have hinge on the outcome of the election.  Losing VP nominees may go back to their old jobs or are never heard from again.  In this case, what’s best for Obama may not be good for Webb, Virginia or the Senate Democrats.     

Likewise, it shocks me when I read about people seriously contemplating Mark Warner as Obama’s running mate.  In the case of Webb, assuming the Democrats win the presidential race, you would be depriving the Senate Democrats of one of their most promising new members and opening up a narrowly won Senate seat to a fresh contest after Gov. Kaine appoints a placeholder for the bulk of Webb’s term.  In the case of Warner, this abandons a sure-thing Democratic victory in the election to replace John Warner and throws some poor last-minute replacement into the middle of a campaign he will have a much harder time winning.  Unless Obama’s election hinges on Virginia alone, and it’s not clear that this is the state he needs to worry about the most, Mark Warner would do a new Obama administration a lot more good in the Senate as an additional Democratic vote in support of his agenda than he would as a VP nominee who might not even be needed in order to carry Virginia. 

Strangely enough, Ohio and Pennsylvania appear to be less likely wins than Virginia right now, and as Reihan and I have been saying for some time in different ways it is the party that can appeal to those voters of the “lower-middle” in the Midwest that will probably prevail.  Webb may help some with these voters with his populist message, but then why not the Ohio populist Strickland who was just elected with 60% of the vote?  On the other hand, if the selection should have many years of executive experience, Rendell remains a decent choice.  A Sebelius choice just seems bizarre, and were he to choose her it would be almost a request to be defeated.  Rasmussen Reports has the numbers:

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of Kansas voters are more likely to vote for Obama is Sebelius is on the ticket while 34% say they are less likely to vote for Obama with Sebelius as the Vice-Presidential candidate.

Not only does Sebelius not help Obama in Kansas, where he gets trounced anyway, but she actually seems to hurt him (!) where one might think she would be a valuable asset.  Also, SUSA’s running mate match-ups, while hardly ideal measurements given how little-known many of the named candidates are, show that Obama either losesmanyswingstates or runs much more weakly when Sebelius is on the ticket.  In fact, the one running mate with whom Obama consistently runs better is John Edwards.  Presumably some significant part of this is name recognition and familiarity, but it does seem worth remembering that Sebelius’ snoozeworthy response to the State of the Union has been the public’s only experience with Sebelius and it may have done some lasting damage to her national reputation.   

Meanwhile, I think Reihan is still in fulminating mode:

Even if Webb murdered someone in an alleyway in a fit of pique or been paid vast sums by the Chinese Politburo for detailed intelligence about American naval vessels, he would still be a far stronger and more appealing vice presidential nominee than Hillary Clinton.

In short, Heads in the Sand does not make a convincing defense of liberal internationalism. ~Austin Bramwell

Mr. Bramwell’s dislike of foreign policy school labels makes this statement much less powerful than it could be, since presumably he doesn’t think that there is any argument that could credibly defend what he considers to be the foolishness of reducing all problems to a “single solution.”  Bramwell writes:

The way of the distinguished commentator on foreign affairs is to reduce all problems to a single solution—realism, neoconservatism, internationalism, isolationism—while assuming that one’s opponents do the same. 

But it isn’t as if realism employs a “single solution” to diverse problems, when it is arguably the most flexible and adaptable of all the “schools” in its willingness to use any number of different tools and institutional mechanisms to advance perceived national interests.  What everyone can recognise as a shorthand for a series of complex arguments and assumptions about international relations is for Bramwell an exercise in simplification and a “lower level of mental performance.”  Shorthand labels are useful in arguments, to the extent that they can sum up and define a position without having to restate the position and the objections to it.  They can become substitutes for arguments and be reduced to epithets hurled with scorn (the inclusion of “isolationism” in Bramwell’s list is misleading, since such a thing doesn’t exist and the term has always been nothing more than an epithet from the beginning), but properly used they can be descriptive, clarifying and time-saving.  The labels provide something like an ideal type that creates a standard against which one can measure the substance of a foreign policy proposal.  Labels are signs that explain to the audience what it can expect and how it should read a text.  They are a necessary and unavoidable part of any discussion, and they are not “simple solutions,” but rather pointers towards a series of discrete proposals and “solutions,” assuming that we want to adopt a liberal attitude towards these things and assume that international relations are filled with problems to be solved rather than realities to be managed.

In fact, the critique Bramwell makes of Yglesias’ book is a more or less realist critique of liberal internationalism from the right: states will act rationally in their perceived interest, multilateral institutions cannot constrain powerful state actors and so are largely irrelevant to the realities of international relations and even the “successful” multilateral institutions that seem to demonstrate the potential for collective security are chimeras.  In short, Yglesias could not have made a successful defense of liberal internationalism that would satisfy Bramwell because Bramwell believes, as many right-leaning realists would, that international relations are governed by powerful state actors that use multilateral institutions only when it serves their interests and otherwise discard and violate the “norms” that are supposed to control state action.  More to the point, Yglesias could not have made a successful defense of liberal internationalism because liberal internationalism is not a credible foreign policy vision, and Bramwell’s critique of it helps to explain why that is so.

More interesting to conservative readers might be Bramwell’s deployment of his notion of legitimacy in the review:

In the face of such massive public ignorance, the Democrats probably could not have opposed the Iraq invasion and won. Voters do not pay close enough attention to politics to grasp the counterintuitive conclusion that the president wanted to invade a country that had not attacked us. Indeed, at the highest levels of wisdom, perhaps we should be grateful that the public never quite got it. Greater public awareness of the reasons, or lack thereof, behind the invasion could have sparked a crisis of legitimacy. It may be better to continue to waste lives and treasure in Iraq than to allow our institutions to come under fundamental attack. The people must not know the truth.

Goodness knows what goes on at the “highest levels of wisdom,” but I am certainly glad not to be at a place where I could make such a claim.  This paragraph encapsulates far better than I ever could have in my earlier post why Bramwell’s definition of conservatism as the “defense of the legitimacy of institutions” is both basically wrong and profoundly irresponsible.  This is a kind of legitimism that puts the welfare of the state ahead of the interests of the country and the people, and it assumes that corrupt institutions that usurp authority and violate the fundamental law of the land should be preserved as they are rather than come under fundamental attack.  If I thought that this was what conservatism required, I could not be a conservative, since this would require me to betray my country for the sake of the state.  Fortunately, I believe that this sort of legitimism has nothing to do with being a conservative.

Overlooked in this paragraph is the fact that most of the people today do know the truth that Hussein had no part in 9/11 and had no meaningful ties to Al Qaeda, and they know that they were consistently misinformed by the government with hints and claims to the contrary.  There has been a crisis of legitimacy ever since the invasion, because the government acted illegally and dishonestly in launching the invasion.  The proper response to government abuse is to root it out, not make excuses for it.  Indeed, that is often the only way to preserve the legitimacy of our institutions and so preserve them from more radical and total rejection later on. 

Newsweek’s national poll is showing the same thing as Rasmussen did earlier in the week and Pew showed several months ago: Democratic defections in a McCain v. Obama race are approximately 20% (19% in this poll), while Obama is drawing 7% of what everyone acknowledges to be a much smaller pool of Republicans.  If that held up, that would almost double the Democratic cross-over vote in 2004.  Arguably, Democratic party ID has surged enough in the last four years that the Democrats might be able to afford, just barely, losing a fifth of their voters to the other side, but in a super-Democratic year in the wake of a failed Republican administration defections on this scale seem bizarre. 

According to Newsweek, Obama leads among independents by just four, and overall they are tied at 46%.  Obviously, the outcome will hinge mainly on the 8% undecided, as it always seems to do, and we have reason to believe that voters who remain undecided until fairly late are very focused on candidates’ character and nebulous (and sometimes false) estimations of the candidates’ “values.”  Indeed, based on the profile of the undecided voter that Hayes gives, they are not all together naturally Obama-friendly.  How did Hayes describe them?  For starters, he said they are “not as rational as you think,” “they don’t enjoy politics,” a number are what Hayes defined as “crypto-racist and isolationist” (i.e., they didn’t think Iraqis could develop a functioning democratic government, which strikes me as neither of those things) and “they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument–accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington–that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.”  Why then would be they attracted to the candidate who has claimed that the security of the United States is “inextricably tied” to the security of the rest of the world?  If they don’t enjoy politics, will they respond well to the standard Michelle Obama lines about being required to remain involved in politics?  If you think of politics as a necessary but unpleasant chore, do you want a candidate who promises to give you a lot more chores?  I doubt it.  Obama’s campaign puts a great emphasis on voter rationality and savvy, and he seems to assume that if he makes a coherent, serious policy argument then he will win people over, but undecided voters are not issue-oriented and don’t always make the connection between things they care about and the candidates who are closest to them.

James takes a whack at my critique of the anti-unity ticket argument:

The issue from which we can run but not hide is that Hillary Clinton is unsuitable — as a matter of judgment about her personality, her being, her character, her selfhood, her identity, her her — for high office.

Well, okay, but if we started excluding people from consideration for VP just because they are unsuitable for high office, we would rapidly run out of options.  But James really starts undermining his cause when he paints scenarios such as this one:

She is almost ideally suited to the attack robot role as well. During a Vice Presidential debate, no doubt, large long green claw-tipped tentacles would emerge from somewhere behind Clinton’s podium, curl around poor Mitt Romney with a sickening shlurrrp,and guide his dazed, poison-paralyzed body toward the huge bristling maw of teeth that viewers would suddenly discover had displaced Clinton’s human body onstage.

Is this supposed to discourage the idea of selecting Clinton for VP?  Not only would it liven up those Vice Presidential debates, but I think Clinton’s public image might really improve if people began to think of her as a bristling maw of teeth instead of the calculating wife of a former President that they take her to be right now.  Her supporters often say that the public doesn’t know the real Hillary–this would be their chance to get to know her.  James says that it would show sound judgement if Obama chose Clinton, “assuming that politics is a filthy sinkhole into which anyone with the thinnest hope of serving their country must hurl themselves with maximum passion and in which they must wallow about with minimum compunction.”  Yet that is more or less what politics is, and I must say that James has defined it very thoroughly.

James keeps going:

But it seems to me quite plain that caving in to a Clinton on his ticket would reveal a fatal weakness in Obama’s whole rationale as a candidate.  Actually, let me strengthen that point: it would be anegation of his purpose on planet Earth.

Again with the language of capitulation and surrender!  Why is it “caving” when he brings his rival into the fold?  Isn’t that a demonstration of control, strength, and command?  To use a pop culture reference that I’m sure James can appreciate: he is Roslin; she is Zarek.  There’s simply no way to look at such an alliance and see it as a concession on his part to include her.  Think of it, Clinton-haters: she will become his lackey, his gofer to be sent on trivial tasks to the Senate and forced to linger at second-rate diplomatic venues and assigned some symbolic but ultimately meaningless “task force” or “council” where she will take soundings and brings reports back to him that he will ignore as he crafts his agenda with Secretaries Lugar and Hagel and cuts her out of the loop again and again.  Just imagine–the Vice Presidency once more reduced to its laughable shadow of real power, an office fit only for mockery and electoral runners-up. 

Besides, is Obama’s “new politics” really so fragile, so orchid-like that it cannot withstand the harsh climatic conditions of the pestilential fog that is our political atmosphere?  Is the rationale for his candidacy so wafer-thin that it cannot endure a tactical alliance with That Woman?  Would he, in fact, poof out of existence if he were to choose her as his running mate?  If there is anything worth supporting in Obama’s “new politics,” it seems to me that the answers to all of these questions must be no.

James entitled his post, “Bury Hillary,” but, as James understands only too well given his evident familiarity with the lore of the undead, burying the creature simply delays the inevitable until it re-emerges and works its revenge in the sequel.  In that light, it may be best not to make her  angry.

Tom Piatak is right to challenge Prof. Lukacs’ review of Mr. Buchanan’s book, but it seems to me he is quite wrong to pose the question: “Has Lukacs, in his eagerness to smite any dissent from the cult of Churchill, gone over to neoconservatism?”  Of course nothing of the kind has happened, and I think even the question is an unfair one.  I don’t think Tom seriously means to suggest that John Lukacs is neoconservative, which would reduce that term to meaningless nonsense.  However, if there is a view that this is the case, I would argue that there is nothing in the least neoconservative about how he has critiqued the book.  Neoconservatives were from their beginning the most obsessed with magnifying the Soviet threat and denouncing arms reduction treaties as “appeasement,” while Prof. Lukacs and George Kennan were basically correct in seeing the limitations of Soviet power and its eventual collapse under the power of the nationalisms of the subject peoples of eastern Europe.  Like Kennan, he has also correctly identified nationalism as the more powerful force in modern history. 

It remains debatable, however, that German rule over the conquered lands of eastern Europe and Russia would have been more enduring; one nation’s empire could inspire nationalist resistance among its subjects perhaps with even greater ferocity than a communist empire did.  Comparisons between Stalin and Ivan the Terrible may express a certain dislike of Russia, but they are not at all instructive.  The brutality of the Soviets had no meaningful precedent in Russian history, either.  It is likewise debatable that Russia was not “part and parcel of European culture, civilization, and tradition,” and this is seems to be one of those undesirable half-truths once we come to the early 20th century.  Metternich thought that Asia began on the east side of Vienna, but we know this to be a misguided view.  All of Europe dominated by Germany does not sound terribly pleasant to those who would have had to live under German hegemony, but it has ever been the mistake of the British at least since the time of Walpole to think that it mattered to Britain whether a nation dominated the rest of Europe.  Churchill’s view may have been consistent, but it may still have been wrong.  There is no contradiction between recognising a regime as evil and believing that war against it is unnecessary.  And if it is unnecessary, the war is therefore also wrong, particularly as it relates to one’s own national interest.  

P.S.  I incorrectly identified the Lukacs review as part of the 5/19 issue in a previous post.  This is a preview from the 6/2 issue.

Most people will probably read Obama’s Miami speech on Latin America policy and focus on the parts about Cuba and meeting with Raul Castro, but what I found striking was Obama’s account of the rise of left-populist governments in the hemisphere:

Since the Bush Administration launched a misguided war in Iraq, its policy in the Americas has been negligent toward our friends, ineffective with our adversaries, disinterested in the challenges that matter in peoples’ lives, and incapable of advancing our interests in the region. 

No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past. But the United States is so alienated from the rest of the Americas that this stale vision has gone unchallenged, and has even made inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua [bold mine-DL]. And Chavez and his allies are not the only ones filling the vacuum. While the United States fails to address the changing realities in the Americas, others from Europe and Asia – notably China – have stepped up their own engagement. Iran has drawn closer to Venezuela, and just the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits.

Obama does not delve into the absurdities of Santorumesque warnings about a Tehran-Caracas axis, but he drifts in that direction a lot more than one would like to see.  Why did the “stale vision” make inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua?  Nicaragua is a slightly different case that turned on Ortega’s pretense to taking a more accommodating view towards the Catholic Church, among other things, but in the case of Ecuador, Bolivia and, to a lesser extent, Argentina, the “stale vision” took over in direct reaction against the neoliberal (Argentina, Bolivia) and drug war (Bolivia, Ecuador) policies promoted by pro-American regimes throughout the continent.  There were also indigenous causes for the rise in popularity of a left-populism that seemed to serve the interests of the poor majorities in Bolivia and Venezuela, but frequently what propelled left-populists into power was a popular backlash against extensive U.S. involvement in their countries and what was perceived to be the co-opting of their governments for the sake of corporate and foreign interests.  The people in these countries were being alienated by these things, but it wasn’t for lack of engagement or involvement on Washington’s part–as usual, there was too much engagement of a particularly harmful sort.  The “stale vision” has made the inroads it has because of democracy and “people power,” the sort of thing that people in Washington praise when some form of it puts criminals and dictators into power on Russia’s doorstep but find very worrisome when it empowers coca farmers and socialists in our hemisphere.  What is notable about Obama’s critique of this in particular is that the left-populism he attacks here is just the extreme edge of the general leftwards movement of Latin American countries towards more social democratic models that is taking place everywhere, even to some extent in Chile.  No doubt he is correct that the left-populism on offer is stale and will fail, ultimately to the detriment of the poor majorities that empowered Morales, Chavez, Correa and the rest, but his outline for what “leadership” in Latin America would entail has a certain unreality to it. 

For example: 

So my policy towards the Americas will be guided by the simple principle that what’s good for the people of the Americas is good for the United States.

But this is not always the case, or rather it redefines what is good for the United States according to what is good for other nations and then, thanks to this redefinition, it can never be proven wrong.  An argument can be made that pushing neoliberalism on Latin America has been bad for Latin America and for the United States, but I don’t think that’s what Obama means. 

Next he says, “The United States must be a relentless advocate for democracy.”  Not terribly surprising, but what does Obama make of the fact that the democracy he wants to advocate relentlessly has produced, by his own admission, a number of governments that are not going to be good for the countries they govern?  He acknowledges that Chavez is elected, but does not “govern democratically,” as if democratic despots are unimaginable.  Generally, when Obama says democracy he is actually referring to the undemocratic structures of constitutional states: “strong legislatures, independent judiciaries, free press, vibrant civil society, honest police forces, religious freedom, and the rule of law.”  Democracy qua democracy is easily the enemy of almost all of these, so I wonder why we keep talking about it as if it were the unimpeachable good.

His vision of a souped-up drug war sounds ominous:

We have to do our part. And that is why a core part of this effort will be a northbound-southbound strategy. We need tougher border security, and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. But we must address the material heading south as well. As President, I’ll make it clear that we’re coming after the guns, we’re coming after the money laundering, and we’re coming after the vehicles that enable this crime. And we’ll crack down on the demand for drugs in our own communities, and restore funding for drug task forces and the COPS program. We must win the fights on our own streets if we’re going to secure the region. 

Doesn’t that have just the slightest ring of “we’re fighting them here so we don’t have to fight them over there”?

With impeccable credentials among social conservatives and an affable personality, Huckabee is conservative but not in a way that would scare anyone. ~Reid Wilson

That’s true, except for about 85% of the conservative movement elite.

The latest online TAC is up, including Prof. Lukacs’ review of Pat Buchanan’s new book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.  I am still wading into the book, so I will withhold comment for now, but obviously you could not ask for a better person to review a book concerning WWII.  Once the spring quarter is over, I intend to catch up on my book blogging, which I have neglected so dreadfully this year.  Peter Hitchens has the cover article on Hugo Chavez, Bill Kauffman writes on the virtues of the New Left and Margaret Liu McConnell discusses marriage and attempted redefinitions of it.  Also available online are Austin Bramwell’s review of Yglesias’ Heads in the Sand, as well as a review of Against Happiness by Peter Wood.  I should have something to say about the latter review, given my reputation for gloominess.

Do my eyes deceive me, or did Sullivan write:

One more thing: for Obama to pick Clinton [sic] needs to be – and be seen to be – an act of strength, not weakness. It must be diplomacy not appeasement [bold mine-DL].

Then one of his readers chimed in with a line of argument straight out of the Misopogon (a title that should amuse Sullivan to no end):

If he cannot stand up to Bill and Hillary, how can we be confident that he can negotiate from a position of strength with Kim Jong-il?

As someone who has been mildly critical of Obama’s original proposal about negotiations with “rogue” states in the past, but who finds the charge of appeasement that has been flung at Obama in recent weeks absolutely crazy, I am baffled that Obama supporters would want to frame Obama’s VP selection in terms that are maximally beneficial to his general election opponent.  To listen to them talk about selecting Clinton as his running mate in terms of “diplomacy, not appeasement,” it’s as if there’s some remote danger that if he chooses her in the “wrong” way (the appeasing way) that her hordes of well-armed Appalachian folk will storm the convention hall in Denver and annex it to West Virginia.  Should Obama choose Clinton, perhaps in deference to the legions of delegates she will have at the convention, these arguments will be turned back around on their candidate and cited as proof that the choice proves that he is weak, naive and an appeaser–even his own supporters have said as much!  (Indeed, one gets the feeling that his supporters are trying to make the choice of Clinton so radioactive with these arguments that Obama could not choose her even if that made the most sense.)  There is, of course, another view of Obama selecting Clinton that holds that it would make him appear to be a “wuss” (Kaus), which is just about as profound as thinking of international disputes in terms of “toughness” and “appeasement.”  In this view, choosing Clinton, even if it was a politically smart move, is by definition an act of weakness.   

The use of terms diplomacy and appeasement in this context confuses domestic political accommodations with the categories of international relations, casts a political opponent in the role of a potentially aggressive dictator and treats intra-party divisions as if they were disputes between armed camps.  Such is the new era of unity and amity!  It also compromises Obama’s attempt to break out of the rhetorical trap in which negotiation is supposedly tantamount to surrender by applying that bankrupt paradigm to domestic political maneuvering as well.   

P.S.  Reihan has qualified his original argument against the Obama-Clinton ticket in response to a criticism I wrote about it.