Rod doesn’t agree with my explanation about the pass given to Hagee and McCain:

But Larison goes on to say that Hagee is getting a pass on his endorsement of McCain, or vice versa, because Hagee is pro-Zionist. I think this is way off. McCain isn’t being held responsible for Hagee because McCain didn’t spend 20 years sitting in the pews at Hagee’s church, and didn’t claim Hagee as his spiritual mentor. Everybody knows that McCain is not a particularly religious man, and doesn’t care for the religious right. Fault McCain for cynicism or weakness by making nice with them, and you’re on solid ground. But most people perfectly well understand that John Hagee’s theology has had little or no influence on John McCain’s thinking.

I’ll come to McCain in a moment. The most frequent reaction to the Wright controversy has not been, “Does this tell us what Obama really believes?”  Instead the reaction has usually been, “This shows terrible judgement, and reflects very poorly on him.”  Except for the most implacable critics, no pundit or blogger thinks Obama believes the things that Wright believes (Obama’s bigger problem is that quite a lot of Democratic primary voters do think this), and most have taken him at his word that he doesn’t believe them.  We float theories about why Obama stayed in the church and so on, but even Rod, who otherwise thinks Obama has been lying about what he knew about Wright and when he knew it, doesn’t claim that Obama believes these things.  So we’re not really talking about the influence on the candidate’s thinking, which makes the length of McCain and Hagee’s association and exposure to Hagee’s sermons (or lack thereof) far less relevant.  We’re determining what these associations say about a candidate’s judgement, and we’re also questioning whether presidential candidates should associate with such characters.  Normally, unfortunately, if an evangelical minister says something inflammatory or even mildly controversial, the media are all over it and remain fixated on it.  Not so with Hagee.  He received perhaps one news cycle of attention, and then vanished.  Remarkably, McCain gets credit for his obviously cynical manipulation of religious conservatives whom he viscerally dislikes–the very kind of thing that earns him the media’s endless devotion–and Obama effectively receives blame for being something like an intellectually serious and regular church-goer who has given some thought to what he believes.  (I’m sure the jokes have already been said, or will be soon if they haven’t, that Obama must be the only Democratic candidate in history who has suffered politically for being too frequent in attending church.)  Rather hilariously, Obama is simultaneously blamed as an opportunist looking for “street cred” and criticised as a willing disciple of Wright, as if there could have been no other explanation for his membership in the church.  Meanwhile, Hagee has mainstream political credibility because he happens to adopt the most extreme form of what Rod notes is a majority, popular position, and he is taken seriously not just by AIPAC but by a great number of political leaders of both parties who value him as an ally in advancing the “pro-Israel” cause.  In the real world, Wright is a small fry politically, while Hagee is a mover and shaker, so naturally we have been preoccupied with the small fry and ignoring the person who actually is in a position to make policy.  Hagee’s motives for taking the positions he does are not scrutinised very closely by most of the media, and the militarism that he preaches does not cause a ripple–it is only when he attacks Catholics in theological polemic that anyone bothers to notice, and even then it is mostly half-hearted.  “Oh, McCain rejects his comments?  Case closed!” 

When these associations have a direct and obvious relevance to important foreign policy questions, it seems appropriate to draw significant attention to what is absolutely a cynical alliance of convenience between McCain and Hagee.  Yes, we already know that McCain favours uncompromising, hard-line and militaristic policies, but Hagee’s endorsement reveals an important political dimension to this: McCain has allied himself with a prominent “pro-Israel” lobbyist (which, in political terms, is what Hagee is) to secure evangelical votes on the basis of his national security and Israel policy views.  McCain has joined together with someone who called the bombardment of Lebanon a “miracle from God.”    That’s fairly bloody-minded fanaticism, if you ask me, and I don’t throw around the label of fanatic very often: Hagee was justifying and glorifying the war in Lebanon, which included the bombardment of Lebanon’s civilian population.  I don’t know of anything that Wright has said that really equals this.  To the extent that you believe that Obama joined Trinity and embraced Wright to acquire political capital and “street cred,” how much more should we view McCain’s acceptance of Hagee’s support in the same way since we pretty clearly know that McCain has not joined together with him out of some profound sense of shared faith?  The alliance was made purely for political gain, which ought to make their association even more subject to scrutiny and challenge.  Ultimately, I care less whether Hagee influenced McCain’s thinking, which is already bad enough in my eyes, than I care about the public knowing what kind of people are influencing future administration policy on serious matters of war and peace.  Treating the two as a pair of pastors misrepresents the problem: Wright is a pastor (a wealthy, annoying pastor, but still just a pastor), while Hagee leads a significant lobbying organisation and is received by some of the biggest names in Washington as a friend and ally.  Wright’s influence on policy was always going to be vanishingly small anyway, and now it will be non-existent.  Hagee’s very real political influence will continue on.  That is the kind of influence the media ought to be scrutinising, not least since Hagee’s influence may have some impact on what the government actually does.  I think my original argument still holds up: Hagee’s influence is basically dismissed or ignored, because his views on policy do not seem especially outlandish or strange to the media, and the media are in any case hopelessly blind to McCain’s flaws.

James writes:

It’s Hillary’s campaign that’s been running on hallucinations — the political journalism equivalent of nitrous oxide.

But remember the other campaign whose success once seemed so far-fetched that imagining it was premised on heavy drinking* followed by a real-life nitrous oxide chaser, and then consider the possibilities.

*Not Crown Royal!

For voters younger than he, Obama is the closest they’ve ever had to a political leader of their own generation….And for the next-older cohort, at least the self-conscious ones who tend to dominate the cultural definition of any generation, Obama flatters their driving desire to imagine themselves forever young. He’s technically a baby-boomer, but still comes across as a boy wonder, which allows people in their fifties to feel reassured that they’re not yet decrepit. Plus if all the kids love him and we also love him, that means we’re still kinda sorta youthful ourselves, right? It’s related to the generation-gaplessness that modern parents enjoy feeling when they and their children watch Stephen Colbert together, and listen to the same music (Feist!) on their identical iPods. ~Kurt Andersen

James should have a field day with this paragraph alone, but before he pounces I would make a few points.  First, there has always been an element of Boomer wish-fulfillment in Obama’s candidacy, since liberals of that generation may still remember the 1960s as the era when their cause was prematurely snuffed out and they see Obama as the revival of something similar to what they saw in the Kennedys and so on.  Andersen has described another important part of Obama boosterism, which has been confirmed in the past by anecdotes of superdelegates being swayed by their children’s enthusiasm for the candidate, and this is an incessant need for Boomers to retain the appearance of being hip and an equally powerful drive among the “grups” (or “gruppies”) to avoid acknowledging as much as possible that they are, in fact, now in their thirties and even forties.  The “Obama Generation” spans generations, since successive generations are engaged in ongoing denial that they are actually ageing, but it relies heavily on the “grups” and the youngest voters.  

Notably, when Obama loses large numbers of the thirtysomething set, this coincides with a significant loss of overall support, as polling from Nevada has shown.  Meanwhile, in the states where Obama is less popular overall the youngest cohorts are not necessarily more supportive than their elders, but may be less so, at which point some of his greatest reserves are to be found among the Boomers.  That doesn’t mean that most Boomers back him, but that their levels of support are more consistent from state to state than among other generations and they are more constant over time.  Obamaism may be a fad for the young, but for a certain kind of Boomer it is a long-deferred dream come true.

Otherwise quite sensible, Mark Krikorian praises Cinco de Mayo because ” it’s always a cause for celebration when the French get beaten.”*  This creates some internal contradictions in the reflexive Francophobia that has been an annoying tic on the right for the last six years: if the French are beaten in a battle, that means that they actually fought in a battle, which suggests that they do not automatically surrender to their enemies.  That’s a difficult paradox to resolve. 

Of course, there are plenty of occasions when the French or their forerunners among the Franks were victorious that should make us very happy, starting with Poitiers and ending at least with Yorktown.  In light of what came later, I doubt too many Americans would be interested in popping corks to mark the anniversary of the fall of Dienbienphu.  For my part, I have always viewed Cinco de Mayo as a rather sad holiday, since it is notable mainly because it is one of the only occasions in history when the Mexicans have ever prevailed over anyone.  Now it has been commodified and turned into an excuse for middle-class whites to drink Cuervo to excess, but without the attendant integration and respect that attaches to the Irish for St. Patrick’s Day. 

* Yes, I realise this is at least partly tongue-in-cheek, but I’m tired of the attitude behind such jokes.

As I discussed last week, Obama is not faring well in West Virginia and Kentucky, and the new Rasmussen West Virginia poll shows that he has gained no ground in the last six weeks.  Trailing Clinton 56-27 overall, he loses all age groups and all income groups.  20% of black voters support Clinton, a figure that seems to be finding a parallel in some of the surveys of North Carolina and which have elsewhere been routinely dismissed as incredible.  He loses among men by 21 and among women by 36.  His unfavs are at 50% (remember that this is a closed primary), and even among those who say Iraq is the most important issue he trails by four.  As in the March poll, 40% say they are unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain.

57% of likely voters in the West Virginia primary say that they think it likely that Obama shares some of Wright’s views.  61% say that he denounced Wright out of political convenience.  17% remain unsure which candidate they will support, but it is not hard to imagine most of them breaking for Clinton and giving her a 40+ point win.  Tomorrow may or may not go well for Obama, but next week is going to be a horror show.

It was several steps above most chain steaks, but far below what you would get at a decent Manhattan steakhouse.  Then again, it was half the price. ~Rick Lyman

Well, yeah.  That’s the idea.  That seems like a fair-trade off for most folks, some of whom have never been to Manhattan and don’t particularly want to go.  However, after reading just the Outback review I find the condemnations that are pouring in against this review article to be a bit puzzling.  Lyman’s description of the Outback he visited sounds very much like any Outback you might go to around the country, and that is part of the appeal of chain restaurants.  Much as I generally find the proliferation of these chains to be troubling in some ways because of the uniformity and homogenisation they represent, they are very popular because they have more or less uniform standards nationwide and you know what you’re getting every time you walk in.  Plus, the food is usually decent.  In any case, as someone who actually likes the Outback chain (in my youth, it used to be a big deal during our Florida vacations to go to the original St. Petersburg Outback, and it was there that I developed my lifelong obsession with iced tea), I found nothing remotely condescending or anthropological about the review.  Normally, I am as ready as anyone to denounce arrogant New Yorkers for looking down on the rest of the country, but this time I just don’t see it.

One of the factors in the special election for Louisiana’s 6th District that no one seems to have said much about is the Katrina factor.  There are two aspects to this.  First, in the last three years there has been an influx of people from New Orleans into the Baton Rouge area, most of whom are black and likely to vote Democratic and some of whom probably contributed very directly to Cazayoux’s win this week.  The aftermath of Katrina has likely changed the demographics of the district enough in a short time so that Bush’s 55% 59% in 2004 is misleading as an indicator of Republican strength in the district, and that 2004 figure already shows some erosion of support from 2000.  It may be that the 6th was already trending towards the Democrats and was given an extra push in that direction by the population changes after the hurricane.  Second, there is probably some localised hostility to the Republican Party because of its association with the administration’s failures in relief efforts and because Mr. Bush quashed the plan proposed by the outgoing Republican House member, Richard Baker, for federal recovery assistance.  Add to that Jenkins’ serial losing streak in the state, and then consider that Jenkins lost by just under 3,000 votes and that turnout for this odd Saturday election was probably unusually low.  (Louisiana Secretary of State reported 23.5% turnout.)  IL-14 flipped on a Saturday special election, too, and that makes me think that these results may not be as meaningful as they at first appear.   

Update: Jim Antle says, “But there have been too many examples of this trend to explain away.”  But there haven’t been “too many examples of this trend.”  There hasn’t even been a trend.  There have been two examples this year of special elections that led to a seat flipping from Republican to Democratic control, and both can reasonably be explained in similar ways (with the added factor in Illinois that association with Obama is a plus for House candidates, not a liability).  Quin Hillyer provides the appropriate corrective. 

Second Update: Connected with the Katrina factor, the 6th district was already 33% black, which the influx of new residents after the hurricane increased. 

P.S. Another thought occurred to me–these days Barone is always going on about Obama’s strength in state capitals, so it is possible that the 6th district, which includes a state capital and a sizeable black population, is unusually friendly territory for Obama, making ad campaigns that try to tie Cazayoux to Obama seem even more short-sighted and useless.  The same does not apply to Mississippi’s 1st, where Childers has been quickly fleeing from any association with Obama, which is significant in itself.

Third Update: Jim Antle follows up on his earlier post, and I see that I have misread him when he is talking about trends.  He was referring to the secular anti-GOP trend that is very real, and no doubt he’s right when he says that “[t]here are good reasons to believe that Democrats will add to their congressional majorities in November.”  There certainly are good reasons to believe this, and I think we are in agreement that the Democrats are going to expand their majorities considerably.  There are nonetheless fewer reasons to think that this increased majority will include the gentlemen from Louisiana and Mississippi.

Loose talk about putting Jindal on the ticket is a sure sign of how bad the alternative choices seem to be.  This isn’t to say that Jindal wouldn’t make a good selection on the merits, but it would deprive Louisiana of an energetic and competent governor at exactly the wrong time, and it would deprive local Republicans of their de facto leader in the wake of the notable, but not necessarily very significant special election result in Louisiana’s 6th that has put the Democrat, Cazayoux, in the House.  Jindal should stay put in Baton Rouge and follow through on what he promised to do. 

Besides, if I am wrong about how competitive the presidential election will be and it turns out to be a major Democratic year with McCain playing the role of Dole, any higher ambitions Jindal might have had will go out the window, probably forever.  That’s bad for him, but also bad for the GOP and perhaps even for the country.  Republicans don’t have an endless supply of popular and conservative governors, and they can’t go around frittering them away in reckless VP selections.  The conventional wisdom, which was correct then and and now, is that McCain doesn’t need someone from the South, and if he does need a Southern governor to shore up the ticket in the South all is lost anyway.  So Jindal doesn’t necessarily add that much to the ticket, and the danger of him appearing as a green pol being promoted too quickly is real. 

Does Cazayoux’s win portend general election doom for the GOP?  I am doubtful.  I am beginning to think that special elections for the House turn on the specific candidates and local conditions much more than they reflect national trends, and the NRCC, not exactly awash in strategic genius, has chosen to fight these elections by constantly invoking Nancy Pelosi and Obama.  This seems to shout in a loud voice, “We have no ideas!  We have no agenda!”  And, of course, they have no ideas and no agenda, which is a problem, but it strikes me as very strange that the GOP actually wants to nationalise the House races by tying local Democrats to national liberal figures.  If you nationalise the House races in this climate, you’re sunk.  If you can appeal to local interests, you might have a chance.  If, that is, Republicans can remember how to appeal to local interests, instead of nattering on about the evil of earmarks.   

Update: Ross takes a similar view.

Second Update: Jim Antle agrees–we’re on our way to a blogger consensus!

At The Current, Reihan lets his run wild:

On the domestic front, one can imagine Wright building bridges to small government conservatives by calling for sweeping decentralization, the better to empower neighborhoods and churches.

I appreciate Reihan’s experiment, and he is right that Wright would be a more “interesting” candidate, since his every public appearance would become the occasion for a new firestorm of controversy.  If he ran for office, it would be a good time to be a blogger. 

As completely implausible as this alliance of right-wing decentralists and Jeremiah Wright might be, there’s a lot to be said for this kind of thing generally.  If I understand it correctly, Wright’s communitarianism, like a lot of left communitarianism, comes from the legacy of not expecting public authority to do much for, and to do a good deal against, your community; rightist decentralism comes out of a similar conviction borne of a similar distrust of concentrated and distant power.  Where they differ is that the former has promoted self-reliance (at least to some extent) on the assumption that no one else will provide much of anything, much less the right kind of assistance, and the latter wants to go back towards a world of more or less self-supporting communities on the assumption that there are only too many people willing to offer assistance as a means of acquiring leverage and power over your community.  In the end, however, I am skeptical that most minority communities will ever be fully supportive of a decentralist agenda, even though in many parts of the country it would empower them more than any arrangement under the current system would.           

Reihan is making another very important point elsewhere in this short item, which is that to have a truly vigorous and serious debate there needs to be many more stark clashes of differing perspectives.  This again goes to the heart of the problem with the Obama campaign: it is premised on the idea that there is too much division, when every major calamity or failure of policy has been a product of bipartisan consensus, and that we need more unity and collaboration, when we actually need more frequent and more pointed disagreement about fundamental assumptions concerning the role of government, America’s role in the world, the distribution of power and wealth, and the desirability of channeling or blocking cultural change.  In the last eight years, we have had a unified government, and it has done a great deal of damage.  Even when the opposition party acquires some power, it is cowed and intimidated out of using it because it is simply not permitted in “serious” circles to advance in a meaningful way policies consistent with views diametically opposed to those of the administration.  The trouble is that we have not been divided enough.  The variety of political views in America does not receive its proper representation, and even when we are discussing actual policy (rather than “hope”) we are instead treated to the spectacle of quibbling over the minutiae of how best to run the empire and expand the government.