Reihan shows his usual wisdom and insight in his diavlog rant against Eliot Spitzer, whom he correctly describes as someone who has been a “creep” (and “scuzzbucket”) for a very long time.

Rod dubs the comparison between Wright and Hagee a “false equivalence,” which is true.  The two cases aren’t equivalent.  Hagee’s connection to McCain and McCain’s embrace of Hagee are much worse and shouldn’t be equated directly to Obama’s relationship with Wright.  Wright is a pastor at the end of his career, whereas Hagee is a major political operator in his own right with many friends on the Hill.  He is therefore someone deserving of much more scrutiny for the appalling views he holds, and the same goes for politicians who ally themselves with him.  Hagee runs a significant lobbying organisation dedicated to hard-line military and foreign policy in the Near East and his positions are premised at least partly on apocalypticism.  These are matters that have a great deal more relevance to the election of the next President than whether Jeremiah Wright has bizarre ideas with which Obama claims to disagree.  Yet, of course, it is because of his foreign policy views that Hagee is not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny, just as his political allies are let off the hook.  The unstated attitude seems to be, “Sure, he hates Catholics, but he likes Israel in his own way, doesn’t want to withdraw from Iraq and does want to bomb Iran, and that’s what matters.”  Militarism apparently covers a multitude of sins.

Where Obama’s religion should really concern voters is in his embrace of the Social Gospel and the implications this has for his understanding of the role of government.  It is legitimate if voters want to question his church’s theology or not vote for him because of his membership in this particular church (or in the UCC generally), but it seems rather strange to hold Obama accountable for a pastor when he explicitly disavows the pastor’s outrageous views while allowing McCain to accept Hagee’s endorsement without much fuss, despite the fact that Hagee has endorsed McCain because they share the same dangerous views about policy.  People worry that Obama holds the extreme views of his pastor, when there is ample evidence in his own record that he already holds views of the far left, but most seem unmoved at the prospect that McCain agrees on policy with an avowedly fanatical man despite his obvious disbelief in the religious ideas that motivate Hagee to take the policy positions that he does.   

P.S.  Obviously, I am going easy on McCain and letting him off the hook!

Jim Antle writes:

That Obama was not aware of Wright’s statements until he began his presidential campaign is a bit hard to believe, and any evidence that Obama was in fact present for controversial sermons or speeches could be damaging. It’s also hard to believe that this statement would be enough to end the controversy if it was a Republican attending, say, John Hagee’s church.

That may be, but the example of Hagee specifically is an interesting one, since it seems clear that the media have shown relatively little interest in making much out of McCain’s acceptance of Hagee’s endorsement, just as the mainstream media showed relatively little interest when Huckabee did attend John Hagee’s church in the weeks leading up to Iowa as part of his effort to bid for evangelical votes (which, as we know, boosted him to victory in the caucuses).  Huckabee was the media darling at the time, and so he escaped without much negative coverage, just as McCain is the eternal media darling whose failures and pandering will always be described as unfortunate-but-necessary deviations from his glorious reformist purity.  Because Huckabee was the insurgent and the long-shot, his association directly with Hagee’s church was scarcely noticed outside of conservative Catholic circles.  Since the media’s favourite in McCain had essentially won the nomination by the time Hagee endorsed him and no one thought that McCain shared Hagee’s religious views, there was no strong impulse to rake McCain over the coals because of this. 

This fits in with a broader pattern of media treatment of McCain’s relationship with evangelicals.  Since journalists know that he doesn’t like them and doesn’t identify with them, his acceptance of Hagee’s endorsement and his commencement address at Liberty are written off as shameless but unavoidable instances of pandering that they assume he despises doing.  They have made him into their heroic Republican who bucks the party base, so any episode when he embraces the base it is interpreted as insincere and meaningless.  In this way, McCain can pander to evangelicals in this way and not lose credibility in the eyes of journalists, while Romney could engage in equally unpersuasive contortions of principle and be deemed nothing other than a fraud (which ties in to resentments against Romney because he abandoned his former social liberalism to become an implausible culture warrior).  

Furthermore, in the twisted world of our foreign policy debates Hagee is counted as something of a mainstream Republican figure.  He attends AIPAC’s conferences as a speaker and he is someone who is taken seriously as the leader of an increasingly influential “pro-Israel” evangelical lobby.  It is inconceivable that Wright would receive praise from someone like Joe Lieberman as a “man of God”, and it is also difficult to imagine that if Wright had described a war, including the bombardment of innocent civilians, as a “miracle from God”–as Hagee did during the war in Lebanon–that he would be regarded as anything other than a fanatic.  Because Hagee takes the right views on Israel and glorifies the killing of Arab civilians, he becomes an acceptable figure in the national debate, while Wright is supposed to be relegated to the lunatic fringe, and this in part because he does not defend the policies leading to the mistreatment of Palestinians.  Indeed, this is one place where Obama has made clear time and again that he does not share his pastor’s concerns about such injustices all that often, and that he is quite independent of Wright’s influence when the time came to endorse the disproportionate response of Israel against Lebanon.  Wright has said false, hateful and dreadful things, but to my knowledge he has not publicly gloried in the killing of innocents or endorsed excessive, disproportionate uses of force as Hagee and Obama have respectively done.  Such is the strange nature of what counts as “controversial” in our discourse: advocating aggressive war, the bombing of civilians, torture and the possible first-strike use of tactical nukes are all considered debatable positions on policy and have all been offered by major candidates for the Presidency either during the campaign or in their previous work, but to engage in intemperate and indeed appalling rhetoric that will actually harm and maim no one is evidence of the need for exclusion from respectable society.  There is something deeply wrong about those priorities that seek to police thought, but which do little or nothing to challenge advocacy for deeply immoral actions.  If the one merits being driven out of the debate, how much more should the other merit even more severe consequences? 

Conservatives are accustomed to a double standard being applied in the press that favours black churches and disadvantages white evangelical ones, especially during political campaigns, but we really are seeing the reverse of that in these two cases.  Part of the reason for the reversal is that the sudden surge in interest in Obama’s church is part of the larger adjustment of the mainstream media away from its generally hands-off, fawning treatment of the candidate.  None of this information was secret, nor was it hard to find, but until recently there was little desire to draw attention to anything that might decisively throw the race to Clinton.  However, the surge in negative coverage now that Obama has an essentially unassailable pledged delegate lead may end up pushing more superdelegates to Clinton and make the nomination more difficult to acquire.

Update: Michael profiled Christians United for Israel last August.

Leave it to Michael Gerson to make me write a second pro-Obama post in one day.  But first, a digression.  Gerson writes:

John McCain’s nomination was assured by the success of the surge he had consistently advocated, against intense opposition.

This is ludicrous.  McCain was the frontrunner in the spring of 2007, long before anyone could have reasonably claimed that the “surge” had done anything (not that many pundits didn’t make outlandish claims), and there was in any case never any doubt in the Republican rank-and-file that the “surge” was the right thing to do.  On the contrary, if McCain’s nomination was ever assured it was assured by the collapse of his only real national rival, Mitt Romney, under the waves of the Huckaboom, whose beginning had literally nothing to do with the war in Iraq. 

Gerson points to Obama’s hedging on the war prior to his election to the Senate, which is accurate enough (part of the “fairy tale” Bill Clinton decried, for which he was widely denounced), and his rather un-heroic opposition once in the Senate.  This is unfortunately the truth of Obama’s rather timid, not audacious, Senate career.  Had Russ Feingold run for President, as he had once contemplated before ruling out a campaign, he would have gone nowhere, as we all know, despite his far more consistent and principled antiwar and civil libertarian stand against both Iraq and the PATRIOT Act.  But all of this does not vindicate the profound cynicism of Wehner and Gerson.  McCain showed no political courage in supporting the “surge.”  As a matter of GOP primary politics, anyone who showed the least bit of doubt about the efficacy of escalation failed utterly, and McCain has never been one, contrary to the legend, to let scruples get in the way of ambition.  Despite his lackluster efforts in the Senate, his lack of leadership on the war once in office and his virtually indistinguishable position from that of Hillary Clinton on withdrawal, there has always been more risk involved in opposing an ongoing war–no matter how meekly–than in endorsing the status quo.

Rod says:

But Jeremiah Wright is not just any far-out left-wing minister. He is Obama’s spiritual mentor, and has been for a long time. As we’ve learned from Obama’s biographical details, young Obama was lost and searching for an identity. His father had abandoned him, and he wasn’t sure where and how he fit in to the black community. He found a father figure in Wright and a connection to the black community in Wright’s church. The degree of separation between Obama and Wright, versus McCain and Hagee, is far less.

First, a few things should be stated clearly about Hagee and McCain.  This is supposed to be a free country, and Hagee is free to express his dreadful views, as is Wright, and I am exceedingly tired of the hunt to shut people out of political discourse because they or people they associate with do not toe this or that line.  Watching certain libertarians pathetically pursue mainstream “respectability” in the wake of the newsletters business with the Paul campaign was enough to make me ill.  These are the sorts of people who will abandon their most popular spokesman in over a generation so that they can retain “credibility” in the eyes of people who wish them dead.  Meanwhile, the thing that should really disturb people is the dangerous policies that Hagee, McCain and Obama have endorsed in the past in the Near East.  Bashing Catholics is distasteful and wrong, but Hagee has done far more concrete damage by lending his name and his influence to the excessive bombing of Lebanon. 

Also, there is such a thing as loyalty, and one of the best things that can be said about Obama is that he seems to understand that loyalty entails keeping faith with friends and colleagues after it has become politically dangerous to do so.  A lot of people give his church grief for preaching against an aspirational “middle-classness,” and I understand the objections to this view, but at its core this view entails a call to solidarity with your community and a willingness to remain loyal to that community even though better opportunities may beckon beyond the horizon.   

Obama really shouldn’t have to answer for what Wright says, but I also think that his loyalty to Wright should not be an occasion for bashing the man.  There are plenty of things in his record, or the lack thereof, that provide reasons to find fault with Obama.  Despite the manifest unfairness about the way that the Paul campaign was treated over statements in decades-old newsletters that were objectively far less offensive than things Wright has said in very recent memory, especially when compared to the pass Obama has received and continues to receive from the media, and despite the profoundly dishonest double standard applied to Paul and Obama, I am not interested in criticising Obama along these lines.  Obviously, I don’t share Wright’s views, and Obama claims not to share all of them, but I have to ask seriously what kind of man Obama would be if he disowned his spiritual father for the sake of the approval of others (who may not give their approval even if he did what is being demanded).  No one that I would want to entrust with any office of importance, that’s for sure.

That is the real difference between Obama’s modest distancing of himself from Wright and McCain’s embarrassing embrace of Hagee.  McCain does not belong to Hagee’s congregation, he has no duties or obligations to him, and yet he welcomes Hagee’s support in the most cynical fashion.  We take McCain’s claim that he disagrees with Hagee’s dreadful views at face value, while he receives credit from Hagee’s endorsement as evidence that social conservatives and pro-Israel evangelicals have given him their seal of approval.  Hagee is absurdly accepted as a mainstream figure because he strikes the “right” pose on Israel policy, whatever his own reasons for doing so, while Wright receives opprobrium at least in part because he does not.  At the same time, Obama rejects Wright’s ludicrous and objectionable views, but for some reason he must go beyond that and publicly turn against the man who brought him into the church.  That strikes me as a deeply disturbing demand.  If Obama is to be judged by the far-left company he keeps, one need only peruse his voting record.

No doubt Obama would be better off politicaly, and it would help his career, if he dropped Wright like a stone, but he would be a far more respectable and decent man if he refused to throw his mentor under the bus to appease the media, his critics and even his admirers.  I still wouldn’t vote for him, but I could have some respect for him as someone with a degree of integrity.

Update: Obama has written a response to the controversy.

Second Update: Wright has left the campaign, and Obama appeared on MSNBC on Friday to address the matter.

Steven Stark is a sharp political analyst, and he correctly identifies McCain’s priorities for the general election.  These are:

* He has to win more than his share of the rust-belt swing states — such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Michigan — that are likely to decide the election.

* He has to do this by appealing to a large number of working-class, often Catholic swing voters in industrial states — the so-called Reagan Democrats.

* He has to convince enough voters that Obama is too inexperienced to handle the foreign-policy and terrorism threats facing the nation.

* And he has to hold the Republican Party together by discouraging a far-right third-party candidacy while maintaining his appeal to Independents.

As much disaffection with McCain as there is, I think this last concern is the least of McCain’s worries.  Rust Belt electoral success is a must for the GOP nominee, and right now McCain is surprisingly well-positioned to exploit the ongoing implosion of the Democratic contenders.  He has been drawing strong support from Catholic voters throughout the primaries.  So McCain already has several of his objectives in sight and should be able to reach them, barring major blunders or genuine scandal.  A major third party challenge from the right becomes a real threat only to the extent that the Democrats appear to be flailing and collapsing, which creates an opening for more disaffected conservatives to cast protest votes that they assume will not affect the outcome.  There is a base of support nationwide for a third party candidate that could possibly lead to a 7-10% result, but in a close race most of these voters will probably end up siding with the major party candidate they find least distasteful.  The logic that compels restrictionists to continue holding their noses and enabling pro-amnesty national Republicans will apply once again.     

What makes no sense, then, is the argument that choosing Tom Ridge as VP assists McCain in reaching most of his objectives.  If choosing Mike Huckabee is “doubling your trouble” with movement conservatives, as Rove put it, choosing Ridge is like jumping through a plate glass window into a lake of burning fire.  Selecting Ridge will provoke the third party challenge from the right that McCain can’t afford over abortion (remember that McCain has been desperately clinging to his generally pro-life voting record as one of the proofs of his own conservatism), or at the very least it would repel many of the Catholics drawn to the GOP because of life issues, thus actively undermining the ticket in one of the areas where McCain currently has some strength.  While Ridge would probably help the ticket in Pennsylvania because of the home state connection, it’s not clear what he offers that would shore up McCain’s position in neighbouring states.  In general, choosing anyone who has been a Bush Cabinet member reinforces the image of running for a third Bush term, and choosing Ridge, whose tenure at DHS was not all together popular, compounds this mistake. 

If Americans remember Tom Ridge at all, they remember him as the DHS Secretary who was continually harrassing them with announcements about the changes in the alert level (the reasons for which he could not, of course, explain in any detail in public) and holding preposterous press conferences about buying sufficient stores of duct tape.  (And, yes, I understand that this was part of a larger program of encouraging voluntary preparedness for disasters, but it was presented very badly, which hardly recommends Ridge for a leading role in selling the ticket to the public.)  As someone responsible for border security as head of DHS at the time when border security was even weaker than today, Ridge would compound McCain’s problems with restrictionists who already have difficulty trusting McCain on anything related to the border.  He was the face of the hyper-paranoid stage of the “war on terror,” back when people were supposed to believe that Bin Laden was coming to get them in Dubuque and Cedar Rapids.  What better target could you give Obama than that?  I suppose if you wanted the first in the line of succession to be a figure of fun and relentless mockery, you might choose Tom Ridge.   

The problems don’t stop there.  When Ridge’s name was floated as a VP nominee in 2000, John Miller wrote a profile of the then-governor that would not reassure wary conservatives.  Miller wrote back then:

Ridge is not a conservative who happens to be pro-choice; he’s a liberal Republican who happens to have done a handful of conservative things as governor. Putting him on the ticket is a fateful bargain. Perhaps he can overcome pro-life outrage and help Bush get elected this year. But at what cost down the road?

On the whole, everything that conservatives found unacceptable about Mike Huckabee on fiscal, domestic and foreign policy Tom Ridge has in spades and he’s not a social conservative on top of it.  Ridge’s so-called “dove” instincts may or may not still apply today, in which he case he would be even more unacceptable to the majority of the GOP that is reflexively hawkish.  Given the concerns about McCain’s advanced age, Ridge would be judged not just as a ticket-balancing or election-winning choice but as possibly being the next President, and it is fairly inconceivable that most Republicans would ever willingly choose Tom Ridge for President, so they will not abide him as VP.

Among likely Pennsylvania Democratic primary voters, Obama trails by 13 and has slightly higher unfav ratings (27 to Clinton’s 22).  To address Noam Scheiber’s point about a different Pennsylvania poll, it seems that there is a sizeable number (30%) of white Democrats who are unlikely or very unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain in the general.  According to Rasmussen, even 8% of black Democrats are unlikely or very unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain.  17% of white Democrats and 23% of black Democrats are unlikely or very unlikely to vote for Clinton against McCain.  Obama’s unfavs among white Democrats are 33%, which is comparable to Clinton’s unfavs among black Democrats (30%).  Overall, 78% of respondents say they are somewhat or very likely to vote for Clinton against McCain, and just 71% say the same about Obama.  18% are unlikely/very unlikely to vote for Clinton, while 26% say the same about Obama.   

As the general election polling from Pennsylvania makes clear, Obama does as well as he does in the match-up with McCain because he draws enough Republican and independent support to offset the Democratic defections that he would likely suffer.  Clinton draws fewer non-Democrats, but retains enough Democrats to do slightly better against McCain than Obama according to current preferences.

There are many Democrats who think Clinton should have dropped out by now to save their party from a destructive bout of fratricide, but I think there is a far more powerful argument to be made that she should drop out so that her supporters will stop assaulting the world with things like this. 

Via Yglesias

With all caveats about eight months being left in the campaign and all the rest, here is some new polling on general election match-ups in Pennsylvania.  Strategic Vision shows Obama slightly more competitive than Clinton, but still trailing by three in Pennsylvania (47-44).  Rasmussen has the McCain v. Obama contest as a dead heat right now at 44-43, and it shows some noticeably greater erosion of Democratic support for Obama compared to Clinton.  McCain wins 21% of Democrats away from Obama, compared with just 14% from Clinton, but, as you might expect, he still wins independents (but gets just 49%) and she loses them (receiving 45%).  This much confirms the impression that Clinton is polarising and drives independents to McCain who might otherwise remain undecided.  Obama has support from just 66% of Democrats, as 9% prefer some third party candidate and 3% remain unsure.  Obama’s Republican voters (17%) and McCain’s inability to consolidate the Republican vote (he gets just 74%) are the things keeping the race as close as it is.  Overall, McCain leads Clinton 46-44, so once again the size of the coalitions of both candidates is roughly the same but they have different compositions.

Obama keeps losing the 18-29 year olds by incredibly large margins.  They prefer McCain over Obama 55-35.  30-39 year olds help keep it close, giving Obama an even more lopsided lead in their group, 55-33.  Obama loses 40-49 year olds and 65+ by large margins of 16 and 15 respectively, and just nudges ahead 47-45 among the 50-64 crowd.  The unfav ratings for Obama among the 18-29 group are amazing: 51% have a “very unfavorable” view and 15% have a “somewhat unfavorable view.”  His fav/unfav ratings among the youngest voters seem to be sharply divided between those view him very positively (28%) and very negatively.  In some amusing and puzzling irony, the candidate who wants to “turn the page” and who claims to represent the choice of the future is deeply polarising among the youngest voters who would, one might think, be most susceptible to such talk.  The candidate who talks endlessly about unity divides voters my age and younger more sharply than Hillary Clinton.  (She also loses 18-29 year olds by a huge margin against McCain, but her fav/unfav ratings are not quite so starkly opposed.)  Perhaps resistance to Obama among the youngest voters is greatest because they potentially have the most to lose and will take on the largest share of future burdens, and so are least inclined to take a chance on Obama.  Perhaps this generation is, as conventional wisdom would have it, not as preoccupied with racial categories, and so they are much less preoccupied with the symbolism of racial reconciliation.  While Obama wins overwhelmingly among young Democrats and Dem-leaning independents, most of my generation isn’t buying into the cult, and I think this is a very healthy sign.  

Theories as to why most of my generation seems to dislike Obama so deeply are welcome in the comments.

Update: Then again, 18-29 year olds in Pennsylvania shockingly give Bush some of his best job performance ratings (48% with 30% giving him an “excellent” rating), so the picture is decidedly mixed.  True, 45% rate his performance as “poor,” and a slim majority gives him negative marks, but disapproval of Bush is much higher in every other age group.  Unfortunately, strong dislike for Obama seems to be related to the unusually strong support for Bush among the youngest voters.  Bizarrely, these are the voters who have spent a large part of their politically conscious lives under the Bush administration and even now this many of them give him good ratings.  Perhaps it is because they have so little against which to compare the failure of the administration that so many still approve of Mr. Bush.  They are also far and away the most optimistic age group when it comes to Iraq–48% think conditions will be better in Iraq in six months.  Young voters’ support for McCain is beginning to make more sense all the time, even if their perceptions of reality are strangely warped.

Second Update: After looking at the results for voters aged 18-29 in Michigan (56-33 for McCain), New Jersey (61-29 for McCain) and Washington (52-39 for McCain) that show young voters turning against Obama, I went back to check the other states to see if the pattern holds true elsewhere.  In Minnesota, 18-29 year olds are very pro-Obama (62-28 over McCain).  In New Hampshire, they narrowly support him 48-44, and 18-29 year olds in Wisconsin back him 49-39.  Iowa is a “lean Democratic” state, and the 18-29 year olds back McCain 53-34.  However, in New Mexico Obama leads in this age group 53-33.  Young Nevadans split three ways 36-34-30, giving Obama a small lead in a state where he did have a large lead last month.  In Florida, where he trailed McCain badly last month, he wins 18-29 year olds 65-31.  In most states the youth vote is not disproportionately supportive of Obama, and in many cases is strongly opposed.  That is something that deserves further investigation and explanation.