If this is right, speculation about Clinton receiving the VP slot is pointless, but where would blogging be if we stopped speculating about things that aren’t going to happen? 

Reihan’s take on the possibility is still an interesting read.  Obviously Reihan is far from being sympathetic to Clinton, that much is certain, but even so this passage seemed to overstate things a bit:

Barack Obama’s appeal lies in his promise to move beyond the divisive politics of the past. Though this often appears to be an anodyne and content-free sentiment, one hopes there is at least something to it. A backroom deal with Clinton would make a mockery of Obama’s language of hope and change. It would make Obama appear weak, and it would reward Clinton for running a campaign more vicious than anything Lee Atwater could have cooked up [bold mine-DL].

There is a strange tension in this paragraph, and this tension is present in a lot of commentary about Obama.  On the one hand, Reihan hopes that there is more than “content-free sentiment” behind the appeal to unity and change, but then says that the real-world, practical business of politicking that might very well involve making alliances of convenience with parts of the old machine to achieve said change would “make a mockery” of the goal.  To refute charges of inexperience or naivete, the Obamas often emphasise that they came up through Chicago politics, and are therefore quite capable of the kinds of maneuvering and politicking necessary to push their agenda, but while they want the credit for this experience they don’t really want people to draw the obvious conclusion that Obama is a political operator (and perhaps a reasonably good one).  There seems to be an idea–one actually promoted to a degree by the campaign and Obama’s supporters–that if Obama is “just a politician” the entire exercise was in vain.  If he is “just a politician,” he will choose a VP nominee based in calculation of political need and carried out through the brokering of deals, some of which may indeed take place towards the rear of a building.  The Transcender would not stoop to make deals with such people, but if Washington is filled with such people (and it is), how would he go about accomplishing anything?  In other words, if Obama’s appeal is not ultimately content-free, it has to involve the kind of deal-making that a lot of observers seem to assume contradicts the “new politics.”  This means that the “new politics,” so defined, is guaranteed to fail. 

Supporters and sympathetic observers are rigging the game against Obama in some ways, and some of his rhetoric has provided them with the means to do this.  We saw how the “new politics” temporarily paralysed Obama during 2007 and prevented him from critiquing his opponents, because he had permitted his opponents to interpret his “new politics” mantra as the abandonment of anything that might remotely be defined as negative campaigning.  Now it seems as if the “new politics” is again going to trip up the campaign as it tries to unite the Democratic Party and engage in the sort of wheeling and dealing without which Democratic (or any kind of partisan) unity is almost unimaginable, because people are taking it for granted that there is something inappropriate for the “new politics” in such dealing. 

At the same time, there is an assumption in Reihan’s piece that giving the nod to Clinton would make Obama appear weak, yet this is just the sort of olive branch-offering that the proponent of a politics of “unity” ought to be able to offer in the confidence that he will be in charge of the campaign and the future administration.  (Having the head of your VP selection team choose himself makes you look weak, because it shows that you already delegated the decision-making to someone else, but choosing to keep your worst intra-party enemy close could be very shrewd.)  It might also very easily be argued that a refusal to do so demonstrates that Obama fears being undermined or overshadowed in some way by the more established political name and that this denotes greater weakness.  As for the matter of rewarding Clinton, rewards of this kind benefit the patron as much as, maybe more than, the recipient, because they reveal both magnanimity and generosity on the one hand and make a demonstration that he is the one in the position to give rewards on the other. 

Reihan anticipates this:

Magnanimity is one thing. Spinelessness is another. Yes, there will be a place for Clinton loyalists in any Democratic administration, even the most craven Clinton loyalists. But surely there has to be some limit.  

Perhaps there does have to be a limit, but this brings us to the worse-than-Atwater charge and the claim that the Clintons and their allies have launched “aggressive, hateful attacks” on Obama.  Allowing some exaggeration for effect, this is overkill.  More “vicious” than Atwater?  Even most of Atwater’s ads have not struck me as especially “vicious,” and by comparison with him Clinton’s campaign has played the role of pushover.  Even including Clinton’s recent clumsy, ham-fisted reference to “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” the Clinton campaign has not launched “aggressive, hateful attacks” on Obama.  More to the point, if the promise of Obama is to overcome divisions (whatever this is supposed to mean!), what would it say about his ability to do this to advance his agenda if he is unwilling or unable to patch up intra-party divisions?  After the pretty meager buffeting he has received, which has been gentle by almost any modern political standard, he is now so irreconcilably opposed to Clinton that he could not work alongside her in the same administration?  Reihan mentions the contest between Reagan and Bush, which seems to me from what I understand about it to have been every bit as bitterly fought as this one and probably more so.  “Change you can Xerox” is hardly the kind of boomerang charge that “voodoo economics” was; some of her critiques of his national security views will probably be reused by the GOP, but they were going to make these kinds of arguments anyway.  The fury directed at the Clintons by Obama supporters is not an encouraging sign for a future Obama administration, should there be one, since it suggests hypersensitivity about even the mildest criticisms of their candidate and an increasingly tiresome and alienating tendency to claim that arguments against him are “racially-tinged,” when there has been almost nothing that could be appropriately described as such.        

The real question ought to be whether adding her to the ticket offers a real advantage in the general election, or if it will become a distraction or burden for the campaign.  In the end, he won’t choose her, but he would be very smart to choose someone from her side of the party.  Strickland’s name has been mentioned many times, and that would probably be a good choice.  He shouldn’t need Rendell, but he might have to select him if it seems that Pennsylvania could slip away and if Rendell could really deliver the state (a daunting proposition for any politician these days, no matter how popular). 

That said, I think Reihan’s concluding statement also goes too far:

If Obama really does select Clinton as his running mate, he will have demonstrated that he doesn’t have the capacity for judgment we expect from a president.

Let’s test this proposition.  It’s true that Clinton is unpopular, and that may be a good reason not to choose her, but for the role of VP nominee and then Vice President is she really “weak”?  I think it is widely acknowledged even by people who loathe her (count me as one of those) that she consistently performs better in debates and demonstrates small-bore policy knowledge pretty effectively, and the two main roles of a VP nominee in a campaign are serving as the attack dog and facing off in debates against the other party’s VP nominee.  She is almost ideally suited to the attack dog role, and she would probably handle the Republican VP nominee well enough.  Are there states that Obama would lose because of a Clinton VP pick?  I don’t know, and I tend to doubt it (except for Johnson and maybe Eagleton, VP selections don’t usually have much electoral importance in the modern era), but we do know that she does receive more of a hearing in some important swing and old border states where resistance to Obama is tremendously strong.  Would adding her weaken that resistance, or make no difference?  Again, no one knows, but it is not nearly so self-evident that she would make a “weak” selection for VP, and choosing her would not necessarily mark Obama as lacking in judgement.

I have neglected mentioning the excellent articles in the current online issue of TAC, including Prof. Bacevich on Petraeus and the results of the “surge,” Dan McCarthy on the developing Ron Paul movement, and Scott McConnell on Obama.  If you haven’t looked at them yet, I recommend them all to you.

Yglesias points to George Will’s review of Nixonland, noting Will’s complaint that Perlstein dismissively referred to ARVN as a “joke.”  That must mean that George Will was a vehement, outspoken critic of Fred Thompson when he insultingly ignored or belittled the sacrifices of allied war dead in his regular stump speech routine (“This country has shed more blood for the liberty of other countries than all other countries put together”), right?  That would be incorrect.  As far as I can determine, Will never said anything about this, even though the Post ran a much-maligned and somewhat flawed critique of this claim.  So the rules are clear: repeatedly ignoring and belittling the sacrifice of British and Commonwealth forces (among others) in two wars to engage in national preening are fine, but making one passing remark about a South Vietnamese army that actually was pretty ineffective in defending its country is a terrible insult. 

P.S. Other things in Will’s review are more worthwhile.

But this is actually a sticking point in the Paul campaign: Some people in his circle want him to swing his weight behind McCain once the primaries are over. At the moment, they’re being overruled. ~Dave Weigel

I have to assume that they will keep being overruled, and the idea of Paul endorsing McCain is risible.  But it is telling that there are some in the campaign who want this to happen.  My first guess would be that they are the same ones who wanted throw long-time Paul loyalists to wolves like Kirchick* over the newsletters business to satisfy squeamish supporters.  I can think of few things that would wreck the grassroots enthusiasm Rep. Paul has stirred up, but an endorsement of McCain might do it.    

* Wolves are actually decent animals, so it’s not really fair to compare them to Kirchick.

Looking at the praise being heaped on David Cameron lately, you’d think he had done a great deal.  Obviously, I have beenverycriticalofCameron since he first ascended to the leadership, and it seems to me that he still has yet to prove that he can lead the Tories to general election success.  It is true that Labour was routed in local council elections (again), and it is true that Brown avoided calling a general election last year out of fear of a severely reduced majority or outright defeat.  It is also true that Cameron raked him over the coals in very satisfying fashion in the weeks that followed, and Cameron saved himself from being ousted last year in yet another round of Tory bloodletting by giving a bravura performance at Blackpool.  That he was in some real danger of a revolt on the eve of party conference should remind us that the veneer of unity and success that the Tories have at the moment is extremely thin and will not endure many setbacks.  Whether or not the “modernisers” in the party are successful in making the Tories electable again (I will believe it when I see it in a general election win), it is much more open to question whether their model has any bearing for Republicans.  Brooks thinks that it does, while casually ignoring all those areas in which the Tories are taking positions on the war and crime that might actually help revive the GOP over here if the latter imitated them.  Boris Johnson’s fairly remarkable mayoral victory is a good example of the differences between the British and American cases: the sort of candidate who can win the mayoralty of a major European city is not going to translate readily to most parts of America.  Meanwhile, Brooks acknowledges:

Some of this is famously gauzy, and Cameron is often disdained as a mere charmer. But politically it works. 

Yes, politically it works because for the moment it is still just on paper and has not been tried, and the Tories have the fortune to be facing one of the most unpopular governments in recent decades.  Yet what the brief revival in Tory fortunes shows is how much the Tories have simply conceded to the legacy of New Labour, just as the success of Democrats here in closely divided and conservative districts reveals how much they have conceded to cultural conservatism in recruiting their candidates.  Me-tooism can and will win elections, at least for a while, but ultimately it leaves no legacy and empowers the other party by endorsing or being seen to endorse its principles.

Where I think Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard continually went wrong was in their absolute insistence on aping most of the worst trends in the Bush Era, particularly as regards foreign policy, and the conscious cultivation of a kind of Tory neoconservatism in some circles.  Where Cameron has seemed to go wrong in the last two years is in his obsession with striking poses and engaging in symbolic repudiations of the old Thatcherite model.  I can hardly disagree in principle with the goal of “denser social networks” or the promotion of decentralism, assuming that these are what they seem to be and not codes for government initiatives akin to Blair’s devolution and regionalism, but it seems to me that the constant talk about “society” carries within it a misguided hostility to Thatcher and forgets that every half-baked scheme of the left has employed rhetoric about society that prompted Thatcher’s famous rejection of the abstraction.

We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. ~An Evangelical Manifesto

Related to the previous post, this is an attitude in the manifesto that strikes me as far more troubling and obnoxious than any perceiveddefensiveness.  No Christians today trace their heritage to Constantine (nor have any Christians at any other time done this).  Indeed, the implicit claim is that there are Christians who do trace their heritage to Constantine, and so are actually schismatics who supposedly reject Christ and prefer Constantine.  (It is an old polemical move to identify oneself with Christ and others with another individual to demonstrate the sectarian, rather than catholic, nature of the opposition.)  Obviously, I’m Orthodox, so I am bound to be unsympathetic to certain myths and conceits that are at the heart of some Reformed arguments, especially when they are based on shoddy history.  I don’t find it surprising when Evangelicals (I don’t want to insult them any longer with a lower case e) make absurd claims about Constantine or people tracing their heritage to Constantine, because that is part of their reading of church history, but I don’t quite understand what these (basically unfounded) shots at Constantine are supposed to do except establish the manifesto-writers liberal bona fides as believers in the wall of separation.  As opposed to whom?  Oh, right, the fundamentalists and Constantinian running dogs. 

It’s also true that this manifesto seems to lack what most manifestoes have, namely a plan of action or a set of proposed goals or common purposes.  Instead, you get a good deal of teeth-gnashing about past failures (how many times did they begin a sentence with the phrase “all too often”?) and the lame lukewarmness one will often get from mistaking difference-splitting for the broad and royal way.

Undoubtedly, many people would place all Christians in this category, because of the Emperor Constantine and the state-sponsored oppression he inaugurated [bold mine-DL], leading to the dangerous alliance between church and state continued in European church-state relations down to the present. ~An Evangelical Manifesto

Most of the manifesto is actually pretty unremarkable and even a little dull, to be quite honest, but this single passage reveals such a stunning ignorance of history that something needs to be said.  Constantine, whom we in the Orthodox Church venerate as a saint, did not inaugurate “state-sponsored oppression.”  It is a lie to say that he did, but it is one that you will hear repeated frequently in liberal (and sometimes conservative) Protestant polemics against “Constantinianism” or the “Constantinian Church” as something opposed to the Church of Christ.  Under Constantine, pagan temples were not closed, nor were pagan practices proscribed by law.  Unless you were a recalcitrant Arian or Donatist bishop (or St. Athanasios!), Constantine did not bother with punishing or exiling you.  Two points should be made very clearly: the later model of church-state relations was principally a legacy of Theodosios I and later Byzantine emperors, and this should be balanced by a recognition of just how little oppression there was under most Byzantine emperors.  There were legal disabilities imposed on pagans and heretics, but there was no programmatic persecution or regular use of force against dissenters.  Orthodox effectively received preferential treatment under law, but in practice dissenting Christians were mostly left in peace.  Almost everything people think they know about the “dangerous alliance of church and state” is interpreted through the lens of the Wars of Religion in early modernity, which they mistake as typical or representative of how church-state relations functioned in previous eras.

Following up on the last posts on West Virginia and Kentucky, I would note that Obama’s level of support in West Virginia today (according to ARG) is essentially identical to his level of support in March 2007.  A little over one fifth of West Virginia Democrats backed Obama then, and the same people still back him.  He has gained no ground in 14 months.  ARG’s crosstabs have Obama losing the white vote by 50 points.

“Viva Obamus“?  I like phony Latin as much as anyone, but it can’t be this silly.