Jay Cost takes up the cause of arguing that the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries matter.  That now makes twoofus.  Cost goes out on a pretty sturdy limb:

Minimally, I will predict that West Virginia will be either her best or her second best finish, behind only Arkansas. Kentucky should come in right behind the two. This alone should be enough to induce some caution. I think it is too hasty to declare her finished just days before two of her three best states.

The problem for Democrats is that she is finished despite the fact that her two best states will reveal glaring problems with their presumptive nominee.  The superdelegates aren’t going to throw him overboard because of Kentucky and West Virginia, but their predicament is that they probably should but cannot and will not do it.

Whatever else you want to say about Michael Gerson (and I could say a lot), he is just really, really weird: 

A president is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols. He is supposed to be the face-painted superfan at every home game; to wear red, white and blue boxers on special marital occasions[bold mine-DL]; to get misty-eyed during the most obscure patriotic hymns.

More significantly, this passage is filled with more than a little irony: 

It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans.  

But one of the points that David Kuo made in his book is that there were plenty of people in the Bush White House who shared similar laughs at the expense of these people, which is actually in some ways worse, since these are the people who voted Bush into office.  Did Gerson join in the laughter?  Maybe not, but he worked alongside people who viewed these people as rubes and pawns to be used.  We await the Gersonian moralising against Bushian elitism, knowing that it will never come.

I have good news for my postmodern, post-Smyrniot colleague: James has a street (hodos) named after him, which is even more remarkable since the Greek for James is Iakovos.  Maybe the street is named for both Mr. Apostolopoulos and James at the same time–what a mark of distinction for Mr. Apostolopoulos. 

At Taki’s Magazine, Richard puts the conservative dilemma this way:

If we went for Baldwin, our vote would be perceived as, “Wow, those guys are to the right of John McCain!” This is not helpful. 

Helpful to whom?  I think it’s very helpful to keep framing all the things that are wrong with McCain as evidence of the leftward drift of the Republican Party; I also think it’s true.  I suppose it isn’t helpful if we want to pretend that we are not, in fact, to the right of McCain and that there is a new right/left divide defined in such a way that we are the moderates.  But we are to the right of McCain, and that’s a good thing.  Does that win votes?  Well, no.  But if you’re inclined to vote for Chuck Baldwin in the first place, winning votes is not exactly your priority.  A more interesting result might be a different reaction: “Wow, those guys far to the right of John McCain are much more sane and prudent than he is!”  That simultaneously works to discredit him and help us.  Meanwhile, voting for Obama could inspire the reaction, “Wow, those guys are to the left of Hillary Clinton!”

P.S. Richard, there is a cure.  It’s called pessimism.

Ross reads my mind.

Ross cites some notable figures given by Michael Franc about the profile of donors to the different parties, but I have to call a foul when I see someone refer to John McCain as a “populist,” even if it is just in passing.  If McCain is a populist, I am a Sandanista.  Aside from his silly gas-tax pander, which is also not really populist and is exactly the kind of phony economic populism you would expect from him, McCain has almost never taken a position that one could confuse for populism (i.e., supporting a wide distribution of wealth and power or having government actually serve the interests of citizens).  

One reason why Democrats are hauling in more CEO and corporate donations is that they are poised to dominate the government, or at least increase their majorities in both houses.  The donations are a kind of insurance.  If the Congressional GOP didn’t have the look of a three-day old horse carcass that had been picked clean by vultures, they would probably be getting many of the donations that are now going to the Dems, and they were getting many more such donations in the bad old days of the DeLay era.  Nonetheless, corporate donors have been more generous to the Democrats generally since the ’90s when the Clintons began cultivating friends in the the financial sector.  The other reason is that there is obviously no connection between being a top corporate executive and being interested in what the GOP is selling if the Democrats are perfectly willing to accommodate you.  In many ways, corporate executives, especially those who work for multinationals, are going to be more inclined to the views of progressive globalists, and the latter will often find the Democratic Party more amenable to them on a host of issues.  What seems to be missing from this analysis and from Ross’ response is any discussion of the GOP leadership’s complete disconnect from its own political base in its consistent, egregious tilt towards corporate interests.  One of the continuing problems that will bedevil Ross and Reihan’s project, which has some worthy elements, is that the GOP has been and will to some degree always be a party that more often than not serves corporate interests.  They aren’t going to act like a “working-class party” anytime soon.  That has its merits and flaws, but it means that those Sam’s Club Republicans will continue to have their interests unrepresented.

James has taken his disgust with Hillary Clinton to the big time with a column in The Guardian, in which he rejects the suggestion that she be made the VP candidate.  As a matter of electoral calculation, I think he is basically right.  She will not cover Obama’s weaknesses, which I doubt can be covered over effectively, and she will weigh him down with all of her own preoccupations and baggage.  For Clinton, it really is all or nothing, and in the end that means that she will get nothing.

Anyone who invokes Alan Keyes as an authority must be having a hard time proving his case, and I think that especially applies to Sean Higgins’ article that alleges that Obama is an agnostic (“The Unbeliever” is the title).  Let’s be clear about something: Obama is a liberal Protestant, which means that by definition his kind of Christianity is not going to mesh with mine or Alan Keyes’ or most conservatives’, in part because his denomination emphasises the Social Gospel and the activism associated with that, but also because it belongs to a very different theological tradition.  The unwittingly hilarious adoption of the very literalist idea that we should not place a period “where God has put a comma” is a perfect example of how the UCC almost makes a dogma out of the idea of evolving, adaptable religion.  Obama has read and actually likes Reinhold Niebuhr, which I assure you is exceedingly rare among anyone who is not genuinely interested in Christian theology, however liberal its form.  As a rule, agnostics would not bother to read Niebuhr or, having read him, would either become convinced atheists as a result of boredom or would become Christians.  Everyone who knows much about Obama understands that he came to Christianity intellectually, as one might expect given his style and personality, and this is the one place where I am most sympathetic to Obama, because my conversion was similarly not produced by a blinding flash or light or a tolle, lege moment, but was the result of a gradual process of reflection, study and a slowly dawning understanding why God became man to save us.  It’s true that there was a single moment when I understood that Christianity had to be true and that Christ was, is God, but even that came through reading a quote from Berdayev.  Am I an agnostic because I was not thrown to the ground by a vision?  This line of attack is misguided. 

It seems to me that Obama was annoyed by Keyes for a couple of reasons: Keyes is an histrionic looney, who would annoy anyone who had to debate him for any length of time, and it is insulting to have one’s faith and integrity attacked by a ludricrous Pharisaical showman.  I think Obama’s views on, and more importantly his votes and actions related to, abortion are entirely incompatible with faith in Christ, but we should be very clear that even this would make him at most a bad Christian, not an “unbeliever.”  Unless we would play the role of the Pharisee, we should be careful not to declare someone to be agnostic because he does not live out that faith as he should (or, more to the point, as we think he should).  As someone who came to the Faith by an intellectual and fairly academic route, I would say that arguments that assume that all conversions happen in the same way are going to get things badly wrong quite often.  I grew up without much in the way of religious instruction, and I was educated at very secular private schools, and I went through the same syncretistic and multiculti phase that Obama did, so I think I probably relate to his conversion to Christianity better than most and I take umbrage at the suggestion that it is somehow less than genuine or phoney or staged for effect.  If it is, there is no way that you or I can possibly know that; God alone knows.  Let’s have some humility. 

Update: Mr. Higgins offers this most unresponsive of responses.  I’ll grant the point–Mr. Higgins wasn’t citing Keyes as an authority.  He was employing him as a rhetorical club, which is a much more suitable role for Keyes to play.  So, very well then, Higgins cited Obama about the exchange with Keyes, but this citation does not support the larger claim.  If you were accused of a lack of faith by a bombastic clown, it would get under your skin, too.  The overriding point that Mr. Higgins did not even begin to prove his case remains. 

Posting will likely be light starting tomorrow and through the weekend.  I will be driving to and then very briefly attending the Medieval Studies Conference at Kalamazoo tomorrow to talk about Maronites and (you guessed it) monotheletism, and otherwise I’ll be caught up with teaching responsibilities for the next few days.  The burningObamaconissues of our day will have to wait.