Everyoneseemsto agree that John McCain’s campaign ads are embarrassing and excruciating to watch.  Kaus noted the similarity to Bloomberg’s “can’t we all just get along?” bipartisanship spiel, and I was reminded immediately of every column ever written by David Broder, but let’s hang on a second.  How is it that when Obama says equally vapid things like “we are not as divided as our politics suggests,” he is praised as a demigod and his words become the lyrics to a treacly, saccharine anthem for hipsters, but stupid McCain ads rattling on (and on and on) about the same theme are regarded as insipid and condescending?  Granted, Obama delivers the line with more flair, and the awful announcer in most of the ads sounds like the narrator from a PBS documentary on marsupial grooming habits, but doesn’t it tell us something about the inherent emptiness of the unity talk that both Obama and McCain engage in that we can’t listen to it at length for more than a couple minutes without wanting to throw our computer/TV out the window?

P.S.  Contrary to the developing conventional wisdom, I think the Noah Daniels Powers Boothe-narrated ad was infinitely better than the others that they have rolled out recently, which tells you something about how bad the others are.  The slogan about “the American President Americans have been waiting for” sounds stupid; it is stupid.  But this is why it works much better than lame civics lectures about mutual respect or boring re-tellings of McCain’s inspiring English teacher.  It makes an incredibly simplistic point in a short amount of time.  (The bit in the English teacher ad about McCain counseling forgiveness for a honour code violator is like one of these stories panegyrists tell about the youthful exploits of emperors; it’s as if Washington used the myth about the cherry tree during an election campaign and actually expected people to believe it.)

Via Rod, I see that Spengler has written something profoundly awful.  Here is my response.

Update: Though I didn’t dwell on it in the original response, I should add that Spengler’s is an argument that virtually no one would employ when talking about the war dead of less ideologically charged wars or the fallen soldiers of any other polity.  It is reserved for the officially vilified peoples, but the mentality it reflects is one that could be used against anyone.

Ross answers Frum’s critique:

First and foremost, because it seemed to us that there was value, given the American Right’s present straits, in writing a book that focused very narrowly on domestic policy and debates over the welfare state, to the exclusion not only of foreign policy but also the domestic controversies over abortion, church-state separation, gay marriage, pornography and sundry other issues that have preoccupied conservatives for many years.

It would have been a pretty glaring error to exclude discussion of foreign policy if “Sam’s Club Republicanism” and Ross and Reihan’s reform conservatism generally necessarily entailed some significant shift in foreign policy, but from what I understand of them it doesn’t.  Not only is it true, as Ross says, that wading into the details of welfare policy is already controversial and involved enough without tying it to arguments about other kinds of policy, but because of the nature of the project my impression is that there is simply too much material to cover on this specific area to give any treatment to other, equally weighty matters in a manner that would give them their due.  No treatment can sometimes be better than cursory treatment.  Finally, there is a question of thematic coherence (to say nothing of Ross’ point that the co-authors may not see eye to eye on everything).  If you’re writing a book about a specific kind of social policy, you’re not going to spend much time thinking about NATO expansion one way or the other and there is no good way to tie in these other issues, short of dubious “national greatness” handwaving that somehow meaningfully links security policy with entitlement reform.

Perhaps they can also let the Szekely into NATO after independence.  Actually, they are currently seeking autonomy, but these things often don’t stop there.  As someone who is part Hungarian, I can’t say that I am entirely indifferent to the concerns of Hungarian minorities outside Hungary, but it is very risky to start going down this road of increased autonomy, especially when there is no question of Romania going along with it.  I appreciate James pointing out this story.  It seems that we are still at odds on how significant these stirrings of autonomist and separatist feeling will be.  Perhaps I have been lecturing on the Balkan Wars too much over the past few months, but when I see autonomist and separatist movements gaining momentum I am fairly confident that these movements will reach a point where the Great Powers cannot stop them from taking action.  The Powers ultimately have two means at their disposal, force and incentives, and nationalists tend to reject the latter and resent the former.  James’ confidence in a new concert of Powers also does not take into account the possibility that one or more of them will blunder or deliberately stoke a separatist cause for short-term gain (as the West just did in Kosovo, except that we didn’t gain anything from it).  Currently, Russia and China are playing the role of guardians of the existing international state system against the Western states that want to throw wrenches into it, and this is a very, very bad arrangement for rather obvious reasons.

Perhaps it is absurd to try to be more restrictionist than Tancredo, but here goes: this strikes me as incredible, and on par with the kind of temporising of pro-lifers who would back Giuliani.  Endorsing Romney was bad enough, but at least Romney was doing a decent job pretending that he cared about illegal immigration.  Writing on the prospects of the Barr candidacy, Jim Antle points us to Tancredo’s backing (but not endorsing) of McCain and draws attention to Tancredo’s lame justification:

Despite Barr’s immigration stands, Tancredo said he could not support him because of his foreign policy stands, including “a blind spot on radical Islam.”

So this would be the second time this year Tancredo has subordinated his principles on immigration to rather dubious expediency.  It is impossible to judge Tancredo’s charge against Barr, since it is very vague, but since this is a standard trope used against anyone who doesn’t want executive usurpation or infringements on constitutional liberties I am inclined to dismiss it as empty rhetoric.

I tend to agree with Ross that the survey of historians that concluded Bush to be the worst President in history cannot be taken very seriously.  First of all, it is almost impossible for contemporaries to give a balanced assessment of a President, especially one who has become as unpopular as this one, and as historians we should know that the full effects of Bush’s decisions will not be known for decades.  Second, most presidential historians are big fans of Presidents who usurped power, waged wars, abused their offices and did Big Things, so it is really unfair to laud all the others who did this and then disregard Bush, whose “accomplishments” in these areas are remarkable.  Yglesias is right about this, and perhaps in time Bush’s reputation will be rehabilitated, with even less justification, just as Truman’s was. 

Still, I think you can put together a pretty damning moral indictment of his administration as one of the least honest and most unjust administrations, but that is a rather different question, and even then he is still a piker compared to FDR, Lincoln and Wilson.  When historians judge heads of state they normally try to separate their moral disapproval of the man’s actions as much as possible and to consider his historical significance and his importance to later political and institutional history.  Typically, American Presidents receive poor rankings in these occasional polls of historians if they are perceived to have left no enduring legacy (hence the embarrassing legacy-hunting that mediocre Presidents engage in as a way of being remembered as more significant than they were).  Since President Bush has mired us in Iraq and ensured that the next administration will have to pick up the pieces, he will certainly be remembered as one of the more significant Presidents, but not necessarily in a positive way.  If in another five or ten years, God forbid, some Iraqi-born jihadi radicalised by 5+ years of war in his home country launches a significant terrorist attack against U.S interests, Bush’s legacy will be remembered very differently.  Likewise, I expect his father’s legacy will be seen as much worse in another 50 or 75 years than most of us today seem to regard it to the extent that his involvement in the first Gulf War ensnared the United States in the Gulf and contributed to the conditions that have brought us to the current pass.

Clark Stooksbury, Gerald Russello and Leon Hadar all make important points in response to Dr. Gottfried’s article and this item I posted at Taki’s Magazine.  Let me try to address them.

Mr. Russello makes the fair, and fairly depressing, observation that “the resonance of unlimited immigration and aggressive war is stronger in the average American than most paleocons like to admit.”  With respect to the former, I am not sure that there has been much persuasion involved, but simply the creation of a mass immigration problem in the teeth of popular discontent, followed by the proponents of mass immigration declaring, “Well, look at the mess we’ve created–you can’t just deport all these people, so you have to follow our lead in fixing it!”  Meanwhile, discontent with this arrangement is diffuse and often inchoate, but I would argue that “the average American” is much closer to us than he is to the policy status quo, much less the fantasies of open borders and unlimited immigration.  At least three candidates were fighting over the restrictionist vote after Tancredo dropped out, and their tallies taken together were much greater than McCain’s share of the vote.  Pressure to get control of immigration enforcement must be significant enough in the country, since the North Carolina blue dog Democrat Heath Shuler has been pushing a bill that mandates a new enforcement mechanism (McCain seems to have had a role in keeping the bill from the floor).  Significant majorities want restrictions on the level of immigration, but they have little effective representation in Washington, and they will have an opponent in the White House no matter who wins.  In anticipation of my later remarks, I should say that I find it remarkable that all of us, myself included, have gone round and round on conservatives and Obama and have scarcely touched how far to the left Obama is on immigration; he makes McCain seem like a Minuteman by comparison.  On this question, divided government may prove to be a restrictionist’s best friend given the bad alternatives.  (Conversely, a McCain administration confronted with a large Democratic majority might succumb to the errors of Bush the Elder and yield on domestic policy while pursuing his foreign ambitions.) 

As for aggressive war, I am inclined to agree that there is a good deal of support for this sort of policy, though some significant part of this support relies on maintaining the fiction that the aggressive war is a war of self-defense, or at least a “preventive” kind of self-defense.  Nonetheless, the last 18 years have seen enough unprovoked and unjustified military actions around the world with solid majorities backing all of them to vindicate Mr. Russello’s point.  The odds are especially stacked against non-interventionists on the right, as this election year has shown us, since a thoroughgoing opponent of the war on moral and legal grounds gets little traction.  A pragmatic revulsion at the incompetence and bungling of the war in previous years motivates some significant part of antiwar sentiment on the right, and it is difficult to mobilise people with such sentiments with full-throated condemnations of aggression and empire. 

The others critique the assumption that Obama will be the worse of the two.  Clark says:

I don’t believe that Obama will be worse than McCain and he would have to work awfully hard to be worse than Bush. If he gets us out of Iraq and doesn’t start a war with Iran he might turn out to be a halfway decent president.

Of course, everything rests on that conditional statement.  For what it’s worth, I don’t know that Obama will be worse, but I see the potential for him to be just as bad.  As it happens, I share Dr. Hadar’s impatience with trying to game the system by basing my vote on what politically strategic goals it might advance, which is exactly why I think backing Obama does not make sense.  To justify it, there seems to be a tendency to build up an ornate architecture of rationalisations of what his victory will represent, when what it will represent is the endorsement of reckless liberal internationalism more ambitious than the New Frontier.  We can develop elaborate arguments about what an Obama administration might do that we would find more agreeable, but so much of it, whether on Israel-Palestine, NAFTA or even Iraq is at best based on things Obama did before he was on the national stage or things he has said in an election year.  When the pressure has been on and he has been in the national spotlight, to say that he has been uninspiring in terms of what he has done with respect to foreign policy would be an understatement.

Alex Massie correctly notes:

Of course, much of Colombia’s violence is exacerbated by the United States’ lunatic and criminal drug policies, but last time I checked I didn’t see any Democratic presidential candidate calling for the abandonment of Plan Colombia.

I have a column on this very subject in the current (4/7) issue of TAC.  The drug war and wrongheaded militarisation policies in Latin America committed in the name of “drug interdiction” are two areas of U.S. policy that enjoy tremendous support in Washington.  It is telling that Democratic objections at home are focused on the free trade pact, and not on the counterproductive and dead-end intervention in Colombia’s internal conflicts.  Given the recent electoral fortunes of parties and presidents that were seen as too closely tied to Washington, an argument can be made (and I make part of it in the column) that the worst thing to do Uribe right now is to give him the free trade deal that he says he wants.  Getting the free trade deal might help him in the short term, but it will create the same kind of backlash against neoliberalism that empowered all of the populists in the countries surrounding Colombia.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is actively courting the vice presidential nomination, Republican strategist Dan Senor said.

“Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for this,” Senor said this morning on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

According to Senor, Rice has been cozying up to the Republican elite. ~Political Radar

SteveClemons was one of the first to pick up on Secretary Rice’s political maneuverings, and I was one of the first, at least this year, to ridicule the idea of a Condi Rice selection for the VP slot.  Here Philip Klein and I are in complete agreement for a change.  It seems like a terrible choice to make, but I suppose Secretary Rice wouldn’t be where she is today if it weren’t for a series of terrible choices to promote her to higher and higher levels within the government.  One barrier to another promotion is that voters will get to have a say in whether or not she gets the job. 

Then again, I have some relatives who would be over the moon at the prospect of a McCain/Rice ticket (they like McCain, but they love Condi–it’s weird).  Maybe this is one of those cases where all the people who know a lot about a public official fail to see the attractiveness of the candidate to low-information voters.  These voters probably don’t know that Rice was the worst NSA since the position was created or that U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated to their worst post-Cold War low during her tenure at State.  Maybe they heard some gushing commentary about her fashion sense and her piano-playing, and that’s all they need to know.  Nonetheless, if McCain doesn’t want to blow his chance at winning the election he will not select her. 

P.S.  Bonus trivia question: who was the last appointed Cabinet member to be named to a presidential ticket?

Update: For whatever it’s worth, McCain heaped praise on Rice when he was asked about this report.  May I also add that the blatantly tokenist argument advanced in support of selecting Secretary Rice is another reason why McCain shouldn’t pick her.  Plus, it seems as if her public denials of any interest in the job are genuine.  On the other hand, her fav ratings are very positive, which suggests that most people haven’t paid very close attention to what she has actually done.  The notable thing about the numbers is that her favourability hasn’t changed significantly over the last three years.  Among Republicans, 77% view her positively, as do 54% of independents.  This is inexplicable to me, but there it is.   

Ambinder says that there is currently no interest in the McCain camp for including her on the short list.