The campaign panel was certainly not boring — for me, the entertaining highlight was when Peter Wehner unironically compared John McCain to Pericles of Athens. ~Dan Drezner

Wehner probably didn’t intend the comparison (which is ridiculous in any case) to be an insult, but if you consider the closing years of Pericles’ career he presided over the beginning of the collapse of Athenian power and led Athens in the early years of a long war that it later lost in catastrophic fashion (and he was in some significant measure responsible for the outbreak of the war).  Then there is Pericles’ role in continuing the process of building up Athens’ hegemony over its allies in the Delian League, ultimately provoking the backlash by the allies that rallied around Sparta.  That actually does sound a bit like McCain.

Writing on the incoherence of McCain’s policy proposals, Sullivan gives as an example: “the League of Democracies that wouldn’t, for some reason, include India.”  At first, this struck me as something that McCain would do, since it makes no sense even from his own perspective, but it isn’t really true.  India wouldn’t want to join such a League, but McCain seems quite willing to extend an invitation to India, as he did by implication in his speech in Los Angeles when he classed India among the “leading democracies.”  It is Russia he is obsessed with excluding, and wants to oust them from the G-8 while bringing in Brazil and India, as he said in the same major World Affairs Council speech that I discuss in my column in the issue of TAC that is currently online.  If you think continuing to worsen our relations with Moscow is a priority, McCain’s foreign policy is plenty coherent.  It’s also terrible. 

For what it’s worth, he’s also committed to damaging relations with India, too, inasmuch as he wants to impose the same restrictions on them that Kyoto imposes on states that have ratified it.  Closing that loophole would remove one kind of objection to Kyoto, I suppose, but India would never ratify such measures and proposing it would sour relations.  Doing that also presupposes that making Kyoto’s ratification more politically viable is actually desirable.

(In case you missed it: There was a January New York Times story, which did not get the attention the reporting deserved, highlighting how this Canadian tycoon and major Bill Clinton benefactor was using his ties to the ex-president to win business with a ruthless dictatorship in Khazakstan.) ~The Politico

Despite the enriching cultural experience of Borat, the folks at Politico are still not well-versed enough in the finer points of Kazakh life, such that they don’t know how to spell the name of the country.  You also have to enjoy the reference to Kazakhstan’s “ruthless dictatorship,” which is one of our foremost Central Asian puppets allies.  Since this is supposed to be what “Obama wishes he could say,” are they claiming that Obama wishes he could insult Kazakhstan?

The new Rasmussen poll from New Hampshire can hardly be encouraging to Obama’s boosters.  Two months ago, Obama had a comfortable lead of thirteen over McCain in this heavily Democratic-trending state, but now trails by ten and his unfavs have shot up to 48%.  McCain wins every age group and all but one income group, and Obama draws just 68% of Democrats.  Young voters, who once went for Obama in large numbers, now give McCain a 52-46 edge in that group. 

54% say it is likely Obama shares some of Wright’s views, and 56% see his denunciation of the pastor simply as an act of political convenience.  The damage has been well and truly done.  Thus, in a state where 73% disapprove of Mr. Bush, McCain currently wins a majority of support.

In the past few weeks, I have been noting the remarkable resistance to Obama among Kentuckians, including Democrats, and the polling data by region support the anecdotal evidence supplied by George Packer in a recent post.  Opposition to Obama has deepened in just the last two weeks, especially in eastern Kentucky, where Clinton led by 63 in mid-April and now leads by 74.  These margins from eastern Kentucky are approaching the comical.  In eastern Kentucky, according to SUSA, Obama has lost 22 points in the month of April in the Democratic primary poll.  Statewide, Clinton’s lead remains basically unchanged throughout the month (currently 63-27), but the race has tended to polarise between Louisville and the rest of the state, in much the same way Pennsylvania did in the closing weeks of the campaign.  That’s potentially better news for Yarmuth, whose 3rd District seat is centered on Louisville, but terrible news for Obama.  It is solidifying, rather than weakening, the image of him as the urban, liberal candidate who has no traction in the rest of the country.  The Kentucky primary is 22 days away, and Obama has done nothing but go down around the state outside Louisville for the last 30 days. 

Young voters may generally be trending Democratic, but young Democrats are definitely not going for Obama in the primary (he loses 18-34 year olds to Clinton by 28) and young voters generally do not prefer him to McCain in Kentucky, which he loses 63-29 overall.  He loses to McCain among these 18-34 year old voters by 41 points, while Clinton leads McCain by one in the same group (she trails by just 2 in the overall results).  That’s a pretty staggering difference.  Counterintuitively, Obama is more likely to receive support from older Kentuckians in the general than from younger ones.  43% of Democrats back McCain, and 44% back Obama.  It’s an open question whether he can secure a majority of his own partisans against McCain in this state.   

West Virginia is similarly unfriendly territory.  Rasmussen’s latest poll, which is now over a month old and so may overestimate Obama’s level of support, showed Clinton ahead 55-27.  Looking ahead to the general, 41% of respondents in WV said they were unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain (25% said the same about Clinton).  41%!  Even the demographics where Obama is usually very strong do not support him overwhelmingly: he leads among 18-29 year old Democrats by 5 points, and the only income group where he is even competitive is the $100K+ earners (he still trails by three).

Now Kentucky has been a “red” state in recent elections, but this SUSA polling shows that it could be competitive this year as it was in the ’90s (Clinton won here both times), unless Obama is the nominee.  West Virginia has been a “red” state for the past two cycles, but is not obviously out of reach for the Democrats (having voted for Clinton twice), but Obama seems to do unusually poorly in these states.  These were also states that Carter won in ’76, as did Truman in ’48.  The last Democrat to lose Kentucky and (technically) win the general election was Kennedy, but even Kennedy carried West Virginia.  So no Democrat has won the White House in the last 60 years and not won at least one of these states, and all but one winner has won both.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that a Democratic candidate must win these states, but it suggests that a Democratic candidate who has the ability to carry the old Border states is probably able to win the general election and one who cannot will not.

The title of James’ post on Georgia, responding to Freddy’s post from earlier in the week, pretty well sums up my response to this line of criticism from Jonathan Kulick.  There are several problems with Kulick’s view of why Americans and NATO should stand up for Georgia, beginning with the strange idea that “freedom and democracy” have something to do with the current regime of Saakashvili.  Unless and until friends of Georgia can begin to acknowledge that Saakashvili is consistently doing great harm to Georgian interests and to the prospects of sustainable representative government in that country, they will continue to be viewed by Georgia’s neighbours, skeptics of NATO expansion and more than a few European governments as willing dupes for unwise, unjustifiable policies aimed at Western hegemony in the Caucasus rather than the well-wishers of the Georgian people that they claim to be.  In point of fact, neither I nor any of my colleagues treats Georgia as a “whipping boy.”  I have profound sympathy for the suffering landofGeorgiaandits people, as I have stated time and again.  It is Saakashvili and his hangers-on that I criticise and I wish the U.S. would stop lending such unstinting support to such an unworthy character for a country that is, as Kulick correctly states, “not obviously central to American interests.”  In fact, it is not even tangential to American interests, which is all the more reason why Washington should have no hand in propping up someone like Saakashvili to the detriment of ordinary Georgians.

Perhaps I was not clear in my earlier post, but I seem to have given the impression that I think that Southerners never supported foreign wars and were never involved in the development of American nationalism.  Very plainly, I don’t think that, and based on what I have written before about nationalism, expansionism and expansionist wars I couldn’t possibly think that.  The Democratic-Republicans and the Southern Democracy were ardently expansionistic, as everyone knows, Calhoun was a War Hawk in 1812, support for the Mexican war was heavily concentrated in the South and the war was perceived as a war for the interests of the slave states.  Expansion was very much a Democratic and particularly a Southern Democratic project, it was a case of nationalist enthusiasm, and it paved the way for the consolidation that came later.  As for the nationalism of Southerners, Jackson opposed nullification and Taylor was a fierce opponent of any suggestion of disunion.  There was, however, still some significant difference between this kind of Unionism rightly called and the consolidated nationalism of the people who came later, but they are both examples of American nationalism coming at the expense of regional or sectional loyalties.  With respect to foreign policy, we also cannot ignore the cross-cutting effects of party and region.  The people in any given region may oppose a particular policy or entry into a particular war, but if their representatives belong to the party of the President they are likely to fall in line with the White House. 

The extent to which “Jacksonians” were and are nationalists is the extent to which they have also embraced basic democratic myths about the identity of the people with “their” government, and the extent to which they closely identify country and government, but typically it has not been Jacksonians who have embarked on foreign wars in the 20th and 21st centuries.  In large part, this is because Jacksonians were not the ones who dominated in the political or foreign policy establishments.  That does not mean that they are antiwar as such, but it does mean that they are not the driving force behind American involvement in war.  Further, I would say that the Jacksonians are the classic case of Americans who feel strong patriotic attachments to their country and their homes and then have these natural affinities turned towards abstract nationalist goals.

At Taki’s Magazine, I have a fewnewposts from the last two weeks.  There should be a couple more up in the next day or so.

While Ross is right that McCain’s symbolic moves are going to be insufficient, I would remind him that Mr. Bush spoke to the NAACP’s national meeting when he was a candidate in 2000.  For his trouble, he received 8% of the black vote and before that he saw the NAACP run that charming ad associating Bush with the murder of James Byrd because he refused to sign hate-crime legislation.  The most remarkable thing is that he ever went back to address the group.  Between his support for mass immigration and the war, it seems to me that McCain is almost uniquely ill-suited to winning more support from black voters, which makes you wonder why he is putting as much time and effort into wooing them as he is (aside, of course, from the fact that Jack Kemp is whispering in his ear).  There is simply no chance that any national Republican will ever consider changing significantly drug laws or the prosecution of the drug war, just as there is no chance of any Republican seriously challenging sentencing guidelines or embarking on meaningful prison reform.  There is no incentive for them to do this, and it is in its way as much of a fool’s errand as pushing bad immigration policy to shore up the GOP’s position with Hispanics.