At Taki’s Magazine, I have two newposts up on the subject.  Here is Paul Gottfried’s response to my first post, which I try to address in the other one.

Fine, one more post on the endless Wright controversy.  Onseveraloccasions, I have argued that there is a double standard being applied in the treatment of Hagee and Wright, but it isn’t the double standard that is being routinely trotted out in recent days.   Frank Rich sums up this view:

But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

Of course, one of the reasons why the Wright business provokes many conservatives is the resentment of a double standard when it comes to racial attitudes, whether perceived or real, that is deployed against whites and conservatives in particular.  If Joe Biden so much as makes a bad joke, it’s treated as if it were a three-alarm fire, Geraldine Ferraro’s basically innocent remark “has no place in our politics” (as Obama likes to put it) and we heard  a cacophony about what Obama called the “quiet violence” of Don Imus (and those are just some of the most prominent episodes in the last year or so), but all Obama needs to do to satisfy most journalists is to disavow his pastor.  Heaven help an actual conservative who utters some poorly chosen words, because no one else will save him.  So if there is a double standard on racial matters, it is one that is indisputably working to Obama’s advantage, at least as far as the media are concerned, while the white Democratic voters who are moving away from him are probably doing so at least in part because they know full well that they would be ostracised or fired if they were to utter anything even 1/100th as incendiary or provocative as the things that Wright says on a daily basis.  I suspect that this grates on some people.  As I have been trying to say before, what we should want to see is an end to this mindless policing of thought, speech and association, but as long as we do have it let’s be clear about who usually benefits from the double standard. 

Of course, it is absolutely legitimate to take a candidate’s associates into account when you vote, but then it seems to me that those who have closely associated themselves with Mr. Bush have a great deal of explaining to do–will they disavow him, his errors and his crimes?  (Of course, we know they won’t.)  After all, ironically enough, McCain owes Bush for some significant part of his political success in a couple of ways: in a very direct way, many from Bush’s campaign backed McCain early on and made him the heir apparent, which, despite the failures of 2007, helped to carry him on to win the nomination, and in a negative way Bush provided McCain with the perfect foil against which he could cast himself as the reformer and independent-minded McCain of myth.  McCain owes his current position to Mr. Bush much more than Obama owes his to Wright, yet there is no expectation that he will meaningfully repudiate Mr. Bush more than he has, which isn’t very much.   

There is absolutely a double standard being applied to Wright and Hagee that lets Hagee (and, by extension, McCain) off the hook, and it is pretty obvious why.  Hagee is the head of an influential lobby that supports Israel and takes the hardest imaginable line on policy in the Near East, so the combination of a “pro-Israel” position and a reflexively pro-war view secures Hagee and anyone who associates with him from any serious criticism.  In other words, he has taken what is somehow considered a “respectable” and “mainstream” view on these policies, and this inoculates him to other criticism that he has awful views of Catholics.  Meanwhile, Wright’s policy views with respect to Israel and the Near East are diametrically opposed to Hagee’s (and, for that matter, to most of Obama’s views), and it is as much for this (and the “anti-Americanism” charge) that the media focus on him with so much more intensity, and it is for this reason that Obama had to throw in that fairly blatant pandering line on Israel in his Philadelphia speech that otherwise had nothing to do with foreign policy.  Wright has said offensive, untrue and stupid things; Hagee has actively promoted dangerous, destructive and stupid policies and gloried in the bombardment of civilian populations.  The latter is treated as a “legitimate” policy view that should not be stigmatised or challenged, while the former must be vigorously policed and punished.  Lieberman calls Hagee a “man of God,” while Wright is deemed by pundits left and right to be a crackpot.  Would that we could work up as much indignation for the terrible policies that Hagee regularly endorses and promotes as we have for words that are basically irrelevant to the business of government. 

Besides, there is a general double standard that is going to define the entire campaign: McCain was a media darling before most people knew who Obama was.  Not just any white politician, much less a Republican, could normally get away with being tied to Hagee as easily as he has, but McCain is basically untouchable by the media because the media refuse to question his judgement, which most of them have already decided is sound and reliable.  When he panders, his admirers in the press corps make excuses for him (“he doesn’t really believe that!”); when he gets things amazingly wrong, they cover for him (“he has tremendous experience and knowledge on national security!”); when he tells what are obviously lies, the bold teller of truths is given a pass because the journalists know, deep down, that at least McCain feels really bad about lying.  McCain could associate with known criminals and terrorists, and the media would find a way to put it in a good light (“he was gathering intel on their operations!”).

It is a strange thing that Southerners are for some reason being blamed of late for some undue attachment to the policies of Woodrow Wilson, when the South provided no less than two of the Senators of the six who opposed the declaration of war in 1917.  In an era when Southerners were keen to demonstrate their loyalty, and general servility to a pro-war executive was the rule all over the country, this seems to me to be a somewhat significant sign of Southern resistance rather than support.  Needless to say, there was little or no dissent from the Northeast.  It is also hardly a secret that the greatest proponents of the war were progressive Christians, not conservative and fundamentalist Christians, and these were typically concentrated more in the urban centers of the North.  Considerable resistance to the war and wartime policies of conscription emerged in the South, and “[w]hen war was finally declared in April 1917, some of the most vocal opponents were southern Democrats.”  Claude Kitchin of North Carolina is one counter-example of a Southern Democrat who continued in office after 1918–his constituents did not punish him for having opposed entry into the war.    

Vardaman’s later electoral defeat is taken as evidence of some Southern enthusiasm for Wilsonian fantasies, when it is unfortunately evidence of a much more dangerous tendency common to all Americans of punishing members of Congress who go against the executive.  Sen. Stone of Missouri died before the Armistice and the 1918 election, so we will never know if his consituents were going to vote him out.  Opponents of the war were relatively few and scattered all over the country (Lane from Oregon, Gronna from North Dakota, Norris from Nebraska, LaFollette from Wisconsin), yet they plainly represented the overwhelming majority of the population in 1917.  Yet, the fact remains that in 1918 some Democratic politicians who quite correctly and wisely voted against entry into the war were defeated, in part because they had gone against the President of their party and had been seen to side with his predominantly Republican opponents.  However, war hysteria managed to sink the careers of some Republican politicians in other parts of the country as well, including the well-known Jeannete Rankin of Montana.

Again, Sullivan seems to be misunderstanding the origins of mainstream conservatives’ special new contempt for Obama.  Sullivan describes it this way:

But to go from this to the vicious attempt to portray Obama as a fraud, an actor, and another phony politician is a sign of the hard right’s nervousness. When you listen to Sean Hannity, you hear someone who looks at Obama and sees every racial fear he has ever had about black Democrats personified. The difficulty of making distinctions between, say, Sharpton, Jackson and Obama is just too much for him. 

Leaving aside discussing what intellectual tasks are too difficult for Hannity (our time here on earth is limited, after all), the portrayal of Obama as a fraud is not a sign of nervousness.  There is something else going on here.  As I’ve saidbefore a couple times, there is a dynamic of disappointment and competition behind mainstream conservative attacks on Obama: his optimism and Americanism must be shown to be fraudulent, because they compete the competing mainstream conservative version of these things, and the assumption that they are fraudulent inspires feelings of disappointment and anger towards a liberal whom they had once hoped would be respectable and respectful of their views.  They and Obama are closer to one another than probably either side would like to admit, which is why you see so much pious sermonising attacking Obama from the left about the “racism” of his church while trying to find excuses to pin anti-Americanism on him with such dubious controversies as the flag pin.  In a related way, “pro-Israel” conservatives cannot, must not, admit the possibility that Obama is also just as “pro-Israel” as they are, because that would mean that there are alternative ways to be “pro-Israel” other than theirs.  This is not exactly nervousness, but the arrogant sense of superiority that any P.C. inquisitor has for his target, who does represent a challenge but whom they are quite confident they can destroy politically. 

His mainstream conservative critics’ attacks are operating at several levels.  The first is actually an expression of disappointment.  There was a time when many mainstream conservative pundits treated Obama as a refreshing departure from what they had become used to hearing from the left.  Viewed as cynically as possible, this started to collapse once he began winning most of the contests because he now became the main threat, but there was a more substantial reason for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in the early months.  The ferocity of the turn against Obama was partly a function of discovering things that any halfway interested observer could have found out about him or his associates a year or more earlier, but which they had never bothered to find out because they did not take him seriously.  The intensity of the reaction against him was the result of feeling that Obama had not lived up to the image, much of which they projected onto him, of Obama as an acceptable liberal politician (i.e., he became acceptable, because he seemed to be taking their views seriously, and anything that suggested that he was a more traditional liberal would destroy that image).  It wasn’t just that many of them were learning about many of the details of his background for the first time (having taken the superficial, patronising view of the candidate that many of his supporters also adopted in early days, derived from little more than a brief bio sketch and his 2004 convention speech), but that some of them actually believed the hype that he was moving “beyond” race and old ideological fights.  In one sense, they took Obama’s campaign rhetoric far too seriously, but simultaneously misunderstood what he meant by talking about “turning the page.”  But this conception of “transcendence,” which some of his supporters have seemed to share as well, was always bound to meet with disappointment, because it was never realistic and was something constructed by political observers more than by the candidate himself. 

Even with all the good will and right intentions in the world, no politician can move “beyond” race or ideology in any case, and mainstream conservatives were even more bitterly disappointed to find that the “post-racial” candidate held fairly conventional liberal views on social policies related to race.  Modifications to affirmative action that would move it towards a class-based system of preferences do not strike most conservatives as a major concession, and may actually appear more undesirable.  The “conversation” that these critics want to have is one in which Obama concludes that conservative views on affirmative action, crime and all the rest are basically right, and so the disappointment with Obama ratcheted up after his Philadelphia speech, which quite a lot of mainstream conservative pundits decried as both dishonest and revealing of the “real” Obama.  The “conversation” mainstream conservatives seem to have wanted was for everyone to stop having any discussion of race, when it has become quite clear that Obama is not interested in that.  Of course, the condescending view of white resentments, like the later “cling” remarks, were always going to provoke harsh criticism, and rightly so in those cases.  

The pile-on is not simply intended to thwart Obama, but to serve as an example to others, which is what this kind of thought policing is most concerned with doing.  One constantly hears cries on talk radio and elsewhere from white conservatives that there is a double standard of treatment, but instead of following that complaint to its logical conclusion–the policing of thoughts and words is what is truly damaging and unacceptable–they opt instead to hammer away on Obama after having spent decades complaining about the very same policing.  The goal is to take ownership of the tools of thought policing for their side to augment their policy arguments and the record of their preferred party, because it is only through this kind of intimidation that can mask the record of stunning failure of the last eight years.  Liberals should be familiar with this, since they have done much the same thing for decades.  So employing these tools may be a sign of the weakness of one’s arguments, but it is not a sign of nervousness.  Indeed, I expect that mainstream conservatives today are feeling much more calm about the prospect of an Obama nomination than they have at almost any time before now.  They assume that these tactics will work to sink his candidacy, and they are probably right.  Ironically, in the remarks Obama made earlier this week about Wright he accepted the logic of the very methods that will be used throughout the year to defeat him.  Instead of breaking out of the “smallness of our politics,” which are made as petty as they are because of this kind of thought and speech and association-policing, Obama succumbed.

Dan and Dave Weigel seem to have read too much into my post on those New Hampshire poll results, but that is partly my fault when I put the word doom in the title.  I don’t know whether Wright has fatally wounded Obama, and after many repeated, spectacular wrong calls in this election (remember the famous Thompson v. Clinton showdown?) I really try to stay out of the prediction business these days.  It strikes me as significant that there has been a 23-point swing against Obama in two months in a state that is considered to be Democratic-leaning.  I didn’t mean to say by this that Obama is necessarily “finished,” but New Hampshire does offer a case where Obama should have most of the advantages and has lost ground to someone who represents the continuation of all the things that most people in New Hampshire oppose.  If we want to see how a McCain victory could happen, New Hampshire’s polling movement may be instructive. 

Then again, I am probably more easily persuaded than most that Obama has suffered irreparable damage, since I already assumed him to be a weak general election candidate.  Back at the height of the enthusiasm for Obama, I brazenly declared that the Democrats had marched themselves off a cliff, but at the time I was thinking of Obama’s problems mostly in terms of the more conventional baggage of being inexperienced and far to the left.  A week before that, I had already made what was probably one of the first Obama-as-McGovern ’72 arguments, and I was assuming this to be the case well before Wright exploded onto the national scene, to say nothing of the San Francisco “cling” remarks. 

All that said, there is no way to know whether campaigns are finished in this cycle–I assumed McCain’s was finished months ago, and that was very wrong.  After Obama had won all of the contests after February 5, everyone assumed that Clinton was on the verge of elimination, but she keeps going.  Three months ago, people were talking as if Obama could transmute lead into gold, and perhaps in another three months things will have changed around completely and the structual advantages for the Democrats will take over and give them a huge lead.  One reason I am skeptical of this is that challengers, which has typically meant Democratic candidates in the last 30 years, usually poll strongly early on and then keep losing ground.  There is always a convention bounce, but the challenger typically suffers an overall loss of support as the campaign grinds on.  The ’08 cycle has not reliably followed previous patterns because of the changes in the primary calendar and the sheer length of the campaign, so none of that may matter, but we have no reason to think that the Democratic nominee will substantially gain lasting support in the remaining months of the campaign.

The reason that voters under the age of 30 are now significantly more Democratic than older voters is that they are much less likely to be married, white, and Christian. ~Alan Abramowitz

Steve Sailer’s article in February identified the strong correlations between marriage and children, and the affordability of both, and support for Republican candidates.  This would seem to confirm that finding in a dramatic way, and it reveals much more profound long-term problems for Republicans and cultural conservatives in the coming decades.  It shows that the collapse of party identification with the Republicans in my age group is the result of significant structural changes in the rising generation.  Bush’s misrule and the war in Iraq are likely compounding factors, reinforcing the existing tendency of unmarried, non-Christian and nonwhite voters to support the Democrats, but probably even if these had never happened the pro-Democratic leaning of most 18-29 year olds today would be roughly what it is.  The deeper problem for the GOP is that there is not really much that it can do about this.  Meanwhile, this trend reveals the bankruptcy of trying to fight the culture war primarily through political means.  Not only has little concrete progress been made, but while the GOP has been biding its time and using cultural conservatives to win elections the next generation has become a naturally pro-Democratic constituency for the reasons Sailer has outlined.  Furthermore, even if the rising generation ends up marrying and even becoming regular church-goers in the future, voting patterns tend to be set early in life, which means that this generation is not going to come back to the GOP later.  Beyond that, as marriage is generally being put off longer and longer for professional or other reasons, this pattern will keep recurring with every new cohort of 18-29 year olds.  Cultural change has devoured the future of the Republican Party as it exists today.  This is somewhat fitting, since it never saw fit to do much more than strike poses about culture change in any case.

Esor im yarin tesa baghchi mechn man galov,

Today I saw my beloved walking in the garden,

Gedinen zartavetsav im yari voske nalov.

The ground was decorated by my love’s golden heel.

Blbooli pes ptut eka vardi vra dzen talov,

Like the nightingale going around the rose, calling.

Junun elav khiks glkhes, sirts tkhoor ackhes lalov.

Mad with love my mind left my head, my heart is sad, my eyes weep.

Hoys unim im Stightsoghemen mir dushmann eli es halov.

I have hope from my Creator, let our enemy be in this state.

Yar, ed koo naz oo ghamzov jans pel oo pand is ari, 

Love with your grace and coquetry you have imprisoned and enchanted my body,

Khmil is eshkhov sharbatn proshnirt ghand is ari,

You drank the syrup with love, your lips became sugary.

Khatookhalov, kaghtsr lizvov shat indzpesin band is ari,

With beautiful features, your sweet tongue, you have imprisoned many like me.

Toor danakn, indzi spane, mi asi rishkhant is ari. 

Stab me with the knife, kill me, don’t say that you have mocked me.

Chunki mahes yarimen e, toogh li mirnim lav gozalov.

Because my death is from my beloved, let me die with a beautiful one.

Tarin tasnerkoo amis maziret hoosats kooli.

Twelve months of the year your hair is braided.

Proshemet mighr e katoom, tooghnis yakhed tats kooli.

From your lips flows honey, if you allow your collar will be wet.

Goornan shnchi tsaghki nman karmir vardet bats kooli.

Like a spring breath your bred rose will be open.

Inch ogoot e koo baghmnchoon gharib blboolen lats kooli.

What is the use of your gardener, the wandering nightingale will be crying.

Moorvat chunis, ptut gooka baghchi vra chkchkalov. 

You have no mercy, it is crying as it goes around the garden.

Yip koo sooratn kashin naghshumen shnook koo tas.

When they draw your face, you give the picture the gift. 

Koo vrvras chragi pes saghcumen shnook koo tas.

You crackle like a torch, you give the gift to the torchstand.

Mshkov liken broli pes taghchumen shnook koo tas.

Full of fragrant oil like crystal, you give the gift to the shelf.

Bats koolis karmir vardi pes baghchumen shnook koo tas.

When you will open like a red rose, you give the gift to the garden.

Kamin dibchi mechn hootet gooka vrvralov.

When the wind touches your petal, your fragrance comes wafting.

Yis el oorish yar chunim, es glkhen vagh imatsi.

I have no other beloved, know this right from the start.

Angatch ara, matagh im kiz, es khoskes sagh imatsi.

Listen, I will die for you, know my entire speech.

Mtik ara koo Stightsoghin tooz-namag-agh imatsi.

Look at your Creator, know the salt.

Sayat Novin mi jegretsni eshkhemet toosagh imatsi.

Don’t make Sayat Nova angry, know I am a prisoner of your love.

Khilks glkhemen taril is koo, bemurvat, gardish talov.

You have taken away my mind, ruthless one, with your walk.

While I’m working on new translations, here is a Sayat Nova poem I translated and here is the music that goes with it.

James mentioned Haifa Wehbe in a recent post, which is as good an excuse as any to have a new series of random foreign pop culture posts in the coming days.  Here is a video of one of Haifa Wehbe’s songs, and here is an old favourite of mine from her fellow Lebanese star Nawal al-Zoghbi.  Coming in the near future, I will try to revive my old series of Armenian poetry-related posts.