Philip Klein can rest easy–anything that he finds troubling or worse about Wright’s foreign policy views is simply not to be found in Obama’s views.  Obama’s remark about Palestinian suffering was a one-time thing during campaigning in Iowa, which I suppose you can read as either a slip-up “revealing” his true beliefs or an isolated incident that has no deeper meaning.  His abasement before AIPAC, his vote backing the campaign in Lebanon and his campaign literature all paint a clear picture of someone who not only wants to demonstrate his “pro-Israel” position, but who has not shown any evidence, except for one remark about distinguishing between “pro-Israel” and “pro-Likud” positions, that he would change anything about current policy towards Israel.  Yes, the line about cynicism was silly, but when it comes to policy questions he takes all the conventional views.  In the issue currently online, Scott makes the argument that Obama may potentially represent a shift towards a more even-handed approach to Israel and Palestine, and I think that would be a very good development, but even if Scott is right in reading the “hints” that he sees, I’m not sure that I see where Obama gains the political capital to make moves towards that even-handedness.  In short, even if Obama did hold some of the views that worry Klein, he would be so busy trying to prove that he was a supporter of Israel that he couldn’t afford to make meaningful moves away from a reflexively “pro-Israel” position as we have come to know it during the past seven years. 

Indeed, in Obama’s speech at AIPAC he said, “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad’s regime is a threat to all of us.”  He spoke out against the Mecca agreement, which should lay to rest any concerns that he is secretly keen on Hamas.  Obama said furthermore, in a line that echoes then-Gov. Bush’s critique of Clinton’s last minute negotiations: “No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.”  For exactly the same reasons that Klein was right to challenge Prof. Bacevich’s support for Obama partly on foreign policy grounds (which does not necessarily mean that Bacevich disagrees with Obama on all of these things), he should have no worries about what an Obama administration would do with respect to Israel.  If the last seven years have proved satisfactory, Obama offers more of the same in this particular area.

Even granting all the usual caveats about how early it is and how much can change and understanding that the Democratic primary fight is dragging down their candidate’s numbers, the new SUSA polling in several states has to be pretty sobering for Obama backers.  McCain ties Obama in Massachusetts right now, leads in Missouri by fourteen, leads in Ohio by seven, and is effectively tied in Minnesota and trails by just four in Wisconsin.  Oh, yes, and McCain leads in Kentucky by a measly 36 (for some perspective, Kerry lost Kentucky badly, but “only” by 20 points). 

If Missouri retains its traditional role as a bellwether and these numbers hold up (obviously two pretty large ifs), it’s going to be McCain in a walk.  Some of the most telling numbers from the Missouri crosstabs: just 62% of Democrats there back Obama and he gets just 35% of independents and 11% of Republicans.  McCain beats him in every region of the state except Kansas City, where it is essentially a tie at 47-46.  By comparison 83% of Democrats back Clinton, as do 37% of independents and just 5% of Republicans, which is why she runs just two behind McCain.  Once again, the youngest voters (18-34 year olds in this poll) are the most anti-Obama, backing McCain 59-35.  I have noticed another pattern from numerous polls: 50-64 year olds tend to support Obama more than the others, while 65+ tend to be among the most opposed.  Those who are about the same age as Obama tend to be pretty representative of the population as a whole in how they break for Obama on a state-by-state basis.  It seems that Boomers, who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, are most susceptible to Obama’s appeal and his promise to move “beyond” the debates of the Boomer generation, while those of us who most desperately want to get beyond those debates tend not to support him.  Make of that what you will. 

Update: The Kentucky numbers are one way of gauging reaction to the Wright controversy: Obama has dropped 25 points in Kentucky since the start of March.  SUSA’s main page details Obama’s slide in a number of states.

Obama fans really have it out for their candidate.  Many of them seem bent on casting his candidacy in terms that are simultaneously politically dangerous for him in the election and profoundly insulting to approximately 4-5 billion people around the world.  Here is Igal Moria (via Sullivan):

Put yourself in the shoes of a youngster in Africa, Iraq or Indonesia: can you imagine what effect it would have to see the non-white face of Obama –of Barack Hussein Obama – as the figurehead of the United States? Do you know how vital it would be for the psychology of youngsters in the developing world to be infected by the relentless positivity that Obama exudes?

Once again, an Obama fan can shout Obama’s full name from the rooftops and make wild claims about the efficacy of his face to restore American reputation around the world.  Obviously, that view doesn’t contain anything condescending or insulting about foreigners or about Obama, because it is said in a complimentary tone. 

Here’s Moria again:

But I believe that what is good for Israel is a US president who is good for the world. A US president with whom the Palestinian boys would identify [bold mine-DL] would make Israel, and the whole world, more secure. It would inspire people everywhere to embrace what America represents – modernity, freedom, civil society, and democracy.

In light of the latest hubbub on the right over Obama’s church and its newsletter, I cannot imagine a message that Obama wants voters to hear less than the claim that Palestinian boys would identify with him.  Perhaps Mr. Moria isn’t aware that American public opinion on Israel and Palestine is skewed very heavily against the Palestinians, but if he is aware he has to be a little bit crazy to say this.  He already has had enough trouble persuading voters that he really is just as “pro-Israel” as his record would suggest, and he will already have to jump through a great many hoops to demonstrate this.  Do his fans want him to have to jump through still more?    

Now, you might ask first of all: why on earth would these Palestinian boys identify with him?  I don’t think they would, because they would understand, or would be told quickly enough, that he essentially holds the current administration’s position on Israel and Palestine.  If there is an assumption that he somehow represents any kind of break with the status quo on Israel, I don’t think it is founded on anything he has said or done since being in the Senate.  It is founded on a fairly dubious and, when you think about it, fairly condescending view that says that Arabs and many other people around the world are going to see Obama as being somehow like them, which will in turn change their attitude about America, as if their sentiments about the United States were founded in nothing more than a passing dislike because they weren’t attracted to the look of previous Presidents.  This assumes that foreign publics are extremely superficial in their judgements, and it reinforces the idea that, but for American efforts, people around the world would not embrace “modernity, freedom, civil society, and democracy.”  Some may embrace them, some may not, but what Americans and Westerners generally have to get out of their heads is the idea that the embrace or rejection of these things has much to do with us or how we present ourselves in the world.  Certainly, ham-fisted efforts to export these things with the sword will cause more resistance than there would otherwise be, but typically the peoples who want these things will go about pursuing them to one degree or another and those who see them as antithetical to their way of life or traditions or religion would resist them regardless.   

This is a huge assumption that Obama fans often make about the man’s potential to change foreign perceptions of America, which seems to require that you believe that foreign perceptions of America are driven almost entirely by superficial and symbolic things and that the problem with America’s reputation is not what our government has done in our name but rather with the packaging of America.  This is the Bush administration’s argument that the problem is not content, but marketing, not policy, but “getting the message out” that we are all swell and friendly.  Obama’s virtue, then, is that he will show the world that Americans are actually swell and friendly, so they will immediately drop whatever objections they may have to the (as they see it) baneful cultural influences of Americanisation or the forcible export of democracy or U.S. hegemony in their region.  This is crazy.  Mr. Bush gave us Karen Hughes to run a public relations campaign in lieu of real public diplomacy; the Obama fans present Obama as a more appealing Karen Hughes.

Over the past few days I have thinking about what to say about the passing of Metropolitan Laurus, who served as the first hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad and led the reconciliation with the Moscow Patriarchate.  He reposed this past Sunday.  There is more to say, and I will be working on a longer post, but for now I will be brief.  May God grant him rest where the righteous repose, and make his memory to be eternal.  Vechnaya pamyat!

Philip Klein criticises Prof. Bacevich’s article more or less along the same lines that I did earlier this week, but one of his final statements strikes me as wrong:

But more than anything, I think the self-delusion exhibited by Bacevich in his article underscores how formidable Obama can be.

This gives Obama far too much credit.  Prof. Bacevich isn’t engaging in any self-delusion.  He may be unduly optimistic about Obama’s chances to end the war, but it seems clear that he has come to this position in spite of everything that he knows about Obama.  Before he can make the pro-Obama suggestion, he has to remove the traditional resistance to the idea of supporting a Democrat for President, and the main way to do that is to show how the GOP is not only not going to advance the conservative views he has outlined but in many cases will embrace their opposites.  As I read Bacevich, Obama becomes just barely tolerable because the GOP has failed so badly and lost all credibility.  Bacevich has taken this position with his eyes wide open, so to speak, and does not indulge the comforting falsehoods that Obama channels Burke and the like.  That means that Obama’s appeal on the right will probably end up being confined to a very few who are so strongly antiwar that they are simply dead-set against McCain winning and will do what is necessary to prevent that from happening.  As the nominating contest itself has shown, there aren’t a lot of these people, and it seems to me that Obama might get about half of them at the most.  This is not a measure of how formidable Obama is, but instead it is a measure of how utterly unacceptable McCain is to everyone on the antiwar right and how far some are willing to go to thwart McCain’s ambitions.  For some of the reasons Klein outlines, as well as others that I have given before, I cannot bring myself to that point, but I understand that the main reason why some of my colleagues can and have has almost nothing to do with Obama and a great deal to do with McCain.

Ross says:

The conservative idea of a candidate who’s “transformational” on race is someone who sounds like Bill Cosby and works with Ward Connerly, and that just isn’t what Obama’s doing; hence the Right’s disappointment, which in many cases is curdling into dismissiveness and outright dislike. 

That’s true, but then what that means that when conservatives say they want someone who is “transformational” on race, they want a black public figure agreeing with conservatives on policy and personal behaviour.  That’s fair enough, since that would be a kind of change, but it is almost a mirror image of parts of Obama’s speech: race relations will improve for the better if everyone unites to support the right (i.e., my) policy proposals.  Again, that’s not surprising, but that raises the question of why anyone held out much hope that Obama would be such a “transformational” figure.  He is pretty far to the left, and his nods to the right are essentially head-fakes.  The disappointment that some on the right seem to be feeling comes from having mistaken this effort at distraction as a form of acknowledgement and respect.

To read the Corner today was to be reminded that some are immune to the grace and hope and civility that Reagan summoned at his best; the anger and bitterness is so palpably fueled by fear and racism it really does mark a moment of revelation to me. ~Andrew Sullivan

No one will confuse me for a friend of The Corner, but whatever disagreements I have with them the responses I saw today in reaction to Obama’s speech were not only well within reasonable bounds, but also some of them were making good sense in their criticism of some of the details and policy substance of the speech.  There were also severalpeople who responded mostly favourably to the speech–Charles Murray was not on his own.  It is becoming depressingly common for Obama supporters to trot out accusations of racism whenever someone frowns in their hero’s direction.  Frankly, if they really believe what the man says, this is unworthy of the candidate they are promoting.  If an Obama presidency means four years of his fans’ hectoring everyone else about their racial hang-ups (because Obama is smart enough not to do this), it is unlikely that Obama will ever win the election. 

Also, Sullivan didn’t need readers to update him that Obama’s speech would be received poorly, would be viewed as condescension and would be ridiculed widely on the right.  This is not because of “fear and racism,” but on the contrary reveals the degree to which what George Will called the “exquisite” sensitivity we have all been conditioned to possess has completely consumed the modern conservative movement to the point where many mainstream conservatives are, if anything, more preciously p.c. than university speech code enforcers.  In an expression of “turnabout is fair play,” rather than denounce these anti-racism witch hunts in principle as ludicrous thought policing, many conservatives have decided that it is fine to play this game so long as a Democratic ox is being gored.  

I am more sanguine about Obama’s Wright problem, in part because I was not aggrieved by Rep. Paul’s association with that newsletter business, and because I generally regard most anti-racism crusades as a lot of hyperventilating by professional activists and hacks.  It still puzzles me how angry and even hateful words are regarded as virtual stoning offenses, but warmongering is a mainstream, respectable, even “responsible” thing to do.  For the most part, the former are awful but do no real harm, while the latter leads to the slaughter of thousands, but it is the former that disqualifies someone while the latter is virtually a requirement to wield executive power. 

The telling point is that most of Wright’s critics on the right were primarily offended by his “anti-Americanism,” a term that they deploy so frequently that one wonders if even they know what they mean by it any longer.  It was his offenses against their sense of what nationalism requires that have bothered them the most.  Meanwhile, the reaction in Middle America generally will often be similar to the one this reader reported: mockery and disbelief.  Imagine that you are someone living in the middle of the country and have been lectured to your entire life about the prejudices that you need to overcome, and then you hear that Obama, the great reconciler, has ties to someone who possesses what you have been conditioned your entire life to believe is the absolute worst sort of sentiment, and then add to that the recognition that Obama’s actual politics are far removed from yours and then guess what the response will be to his speech addressing this issue.  The very resentments that Obama was explaining in his speech, for which he demonstrated at least some understanding, were inevitably going to be summoned up by any major speech he gave on this question; it is a pity that his supporters cannot make some similar display of understanding.  For my part, I have given Obama the benefit of the doubt on this, probably to the annoyance of many of my readers–should the same courtesy not be extended to his critics?

Everyone else has weighed in on Obama’s speech, so I doubt I’ll add anything to what’s already been said, but a few things struck me.  First, Yuval Levin is right that the speech reads much better than it sounds, which is the reverse of how Obama’s speeches usually work.  When Obama goes into explanatory, rather than hortatory, mode, his speaking style becomes unremarkable–not bad, but not memorable or moving, either.  As explanations go, the speech itself was rhetorically brilliant, at least at times, and made the best of a politically treacherous situation that it possibly could have.  Besides the frequent reaction that it went on too long, the speech received praise mostly from those who were willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and received scorn from everyone who had already decided at the end of last week that Obama is now radioactive (though apparently it brought John Tabin to the verge of tears).  The length is a problem, because that will limit its circulation and its impact, and it will leave the distillation of the speech’s message to intermediaries, who will necessarily simplify what Obama clearly tried to make a very complicated speech.  The fact that Obama is even giving a speech like this, while politically necessary, is nonetheless politically damaging, insofar as his campaign has thrived because Obama has been talking about policies that do not polarise voters along racial lines, and he spent a good part of this speech on these very policies, education and affirmative action being the most contentious among them.  It is absolutely true, as John McWhorter says, that for Obama to give a speech like this as a black politician was bold and remarkable, but I think it will mostly reassure those who were very ready to be reassured and not many more.  

The general audience that will be hearing clips of the speech or reading unfavourably framed citations in various columns may or may not believe that Obama rejects Wright’s more extreme views, but many of them are positively going to dislike the explanation.  In our political discourse any attempt to explain something is taken as an attempt to defend and justify it, and it will always be portrayed that way by opponents.  That isn’t what Obama was doing, but it won’t matter.  A political culture that can build a mass movement around simple and utterly vacuous statements (“change we can believe in” springs to mind) is also one that does not reward candidates who can appreciate the “contradictions” within their controversial associates.  Of course, we remember that in the campaign against John Kerry the word “nuance” itself became an insult, as if subtlety and qualification were undesirable, but in a mass media age and in a mass democracy nuance usually creates one of two impressions: dishonesty or confusion.  This is one of those impossible situations in which Obama could only have navigated this speech by being highly cerebral, and yet politically it is exactly the wrong moment for him to engage in his “on this hand, on the other hand” reasoning.  As appalling as I find this reality, Obama needed to follow his wife’s debate advice (“don’t think, feel”) and instead made an attempt to think his way through a controversy that has stirred visceral reactions.    

Especially on second reading, the speech seems to me to engage in the usual Obama moves of acknowledging an opponent’s concerns right before piling on advocacy for his own preferred policies.  There’s nothing terribly remarkable about this sort of move, but it is not evidence of someone who can build coalitions across party and ideological lines.  Appealing to white working-class voters with something like a “fight the real enemy” appeal to class solidarity against the rich is the sort of thing that will unnerve more voters than it wins over, while the entire section in which he expresses understanding for white resentments against affirmative action, busing and the like will come across to its intended audience as condescension.  Whether or not Obama intends to be condescending, the combination of his professorial delivery and analytical style probably reminds working-class voters that he can’t really identify with them and makes it more difficult for them to identify with him.  He targets corporations as the villains of the piece, but is himself a half-hearted critic of NAFTA and the very policies that he, the progressive globalist, normally supports, which drives home the impression that he is no more on the side of working-class voters than any other national politician. 

Meanwhile, any explanation of the causes of anger, whether you find the description of the causes compelling or not, is likely to go over very badly, again because it will be perceived by many as a justification of anger and thus of extremism.  It was, of couse, the ultimate example of Obama’s own lack of awareness or a depressing instance of lame pandering and damage control that he could explain the causes of black and white resentments in America and then turn around and be so utterly party-line in his criticism of Wright’s views of Near East conflicts:

a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Obviously, he is protecting himself against a larger backlash by taking an utterly conventional and simplistic position on this, in which Israeli policies evidently have nothing to do with Palestinian or Lebanese anger and frustration.  (Radical Islam does have a significant and powerful role in organising and directing the anger and frustration created by Israeli actions and policies, and then using those things to launch atrocious attacks on civilians, but its appeal doesn’t come out of nowhere.)  In other words, this kind of understanding is sufficient for his community, but it doesn’t apply to other peoples. 

I should add that the worst part of the speech was the pairing of his grandmother with Wright.  If Obama’s loyalty to Wright is admirable in light of the political risk involved, his use of his grandmother in the speech was just as awful and unnecessary.  Of course he isn’t going to disown his grandmother, and no one would have expected him to, and comparing the two was completely inappropriate.

Include this in the file of “Obama supporters who have no arguments.”  The problem that his fans seem to have with my criticisms of Obama is that I look at the rest of his foreign policy, and not just the parts where I might agree with him.  If they want to pretend that he didn’t support the bombardment of Lebanon, would have supported the war against Yugoslavia and is willing to contemplate bombing Iran, I suppose that’s “fine,” too.  Yes, sir, he’s some antiwar candidate!

P.S.  Not that I ever said he did, would Obama agree with the Euston Manifesto?  I think it would be absurd to claim that he doesn’t agree with almost everything in it.  Obama clearly does support wars for “humanitarian” intervention, which is something that I thought his supporters would find laudable.

Update: The author follows up with a response, in which he says:

But to simultaenously [sic] argue that he wants to save armed liberalism and is also an inveterate uppity America-hater just won’t wash.

Of course, I have never said anything of the kind, and I have gone out of my way (and probably annoyed a lot of my readers) to reject the attacks on Obama along these lines, be they the false Muslim rumours or the “Obama’s mother taught him to hate America” arguments.  The argument that Obama doesn’t hold the deeply troubling views that he espoused just last year, but really has maintained his antiwar position on Iraq throughout and will put it into action, doesn’t persuade.  He has had a consistent foreign policy message, expressed in his early statements, his Foreign Affairs essay and in his campaign literature, and it is in keeping with the implications of his claim that American security is inextricably tied to the security of all other nations.  If you think that is a desirable way of thinking about American foreign policy, Obama is your man.  If you think is the cause of endless meddling and conflict throughout the world, as I tend to think it is, it is at the very least worth bearing in mind and it is probably a good reason to be wary of the candidate.  It may be that, on the whole, Obama offers a more amenable foreign policy agenda, but there is real potential for the same dangers that exist with McCain.  It seems reckless to ignore that.  If antiwar voters want to back Obama, I can see their reasoning, but they should make that decision with as much information as possible, and they should be aware of the rest of Obama’s policy positions beyond the better-known ones that happen to coincide with their own. 

You can argue, as some have, that the views he expressed in the past weren’t so troubling, or you could argue that I and other non-interventionists and antiwar writers have exaggerated the significance of his past remarks and his actual foreign policy voting record.  I don’t see how Obama gets to have credit for the views where he has taken the right position, but shouldn’t receive criticism for views that show him to be much more activist and aggressive in his foreign policy than most people think he is.  If he can defend his support for what the author calls “the rape of Lebanon,” I would be interested to hear how he thinks it is that different, as a matter of principle or strategy, from what was done in Iraq (except that it was briefer and on a smaller scale).  He said he opposed “rash” and “dumb” wars, but didn’t oppose U.S. backing for a war that was both.  If we are supposed to trust him on his judgement, what does it say about his judgement that he went with the herd in backing Israel to the hilt in what almost everyone acknowledges was one of the greatest military blunders of their history?  Shouldn’t the Iraq war have made him even more cautious about backing such a campaign?  Shouldn’t his supposedly more nuanced understanding of what it means to be “pro-Israel” have warned him against reflexively deferring (to use Samantha Power’s language) to the Israeli government’s assessment of the campaign?  He does not seem to think that his position on Lebanon is a cause for regret or embarrassment–the foreign policy section of his website highlights as proof of his “pro-Israel” bona fides.  Do we dismiss that as necessary election-year posturing?  But if we do, why do we then assume that his antiwar convictions on Iraq are any deeper or more reliable?