If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the past couple of days, my home computer has suffered a hard drive crash, so I am limited to blogging from wherever I can find an open terminal.  Blogging will be infrequent over the next few days until the problem is fixed, but I will be commenting on things from time to time.  Until then, look at the online version of the new issue of the magazine and myposts on Jerry Muller’s ethnonationalism essay in Foreign Affairs.

Krugman has another anti-Obama column, in which he makes this rather odd claim:

Now, nobody would mistake Mr. Obama for a Republican — although contrary to claims by both supporters and opponents, his voting record places him, with Senator Clinton, more or less in the center of the Democratic Party, rather than in its progressive wing.

If progressives want to insist that Obama isn’t part of their party’s progressive wing, that’s their prerogative.  I have noted for some time some progressive activists’ dissatisfaction with Obama’s “unity” routine, but I think Krugman’s claim still fails some basic empirical tests.  Obama’s average ADA rating for the last three years is 90, which understates things.  Perhaps someone will argue that ADA ratings are unreliable or selective, or that they cannot capture the differences between a “centrist” such as Obama and real progressives, but by one of the standard measures of such things Obama rates as being pretty far to the left.  His 2007 rating of 75 was the result of a number of missed votes (undoubtedly missed because of his campaign schedule) and followed 2006 and 2005 ratings of 95 and 100 respectively.  If that is evidence of being at “the center” of the Democratic Party, I don’t know what you have to do to be progressive.

There are plenty of caveats to make about this new Rasmussen poll from New Jersey: this early in the year Clinton is almost certainly bound to run much better than Obama in a state that borders New York, especially when so many people in New Jersey are part of New York’s media market, and despite what feels like saturation coverage to those of us who follow the campaign closely Obama remains less well-known nationally.  Obama did not campaign heavily in New Jersey, acknowledging Clinton’s advantages there on February 5, so he will have made less of an impression even among the state’s Democratic primary electorate, and he will have made even less of an impression among other voters.  Even so, the difference is striking: Clinton leads 50-39 in New Jersey, as you might expect in a state that has voted Democratic in the presidential election for the last four cycles, but in an Obama v. McCain race McCain leads 45-43.  Relative to Clinton, Obama loses five points among men and nine points among women.  He loses seven points among Democrats, pulling in just 65%, and five points among liberals.  He draws only half as many Republicans (10%), he gets eight fewer points among conservatives (12%) and twelve fewer among moderates (43%).  Even among his core of independents he runs four points weaker, though he does still win independents against McCain.

Now, get ready for this: the poll shows that 18-29 year olds in New Jersey back McCain over Obama 61-29 (Clinton runs ten points better).  Unless there has been some massive error here, the kids in Jersey are not that excited about hope (or, arguably, they still have no idea who Obama is).  Preferences by income group are revealing: Clinton runs more competitively against McCain in all groups but one, while Obama trails among lower-income groups and leads among the higher-income earners.  Obama’s weakness in New Jersey is presumably closely related to his fairly high unfav rating (45%) in the state.  According to Rasmussen, he receives a 50% “very unfavorable” rating from 18-29 year olds, which is the highest very unfav rating from any demographic group in this poll (only those who chose national security as their top issue view him more unfavourably at 65%).  In total, Obama has a 61% unfav rating among 18-29 year olds in the state, which, as you can see, is exactly the same percentage that backed McCain.  This turns an important part of what a lot of us have assumed about Obama’s core supporters on its head, at least in this part of the country: young people in New Jersey apparently really dislike him.  Perhaps they endured one insipid dipdive video too many.  I feel their pain.     

Some of the numbers from this poll seem strange, and I want to follow up in the future when Rasmussen releases their next one to see if these patterns hold up, but as of right now it appears as if New Jersey could theoretically be in play if Obama is the nominee.  Given the fundamental strengths that the Democrats have in this election, that simply shouldn’t be happening in this cycle.  Something strange is going on.

Well, we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and look what happened. ~Karl Rove

Yes, if only it hadn’t been for the “isolationists”!  This is a perfect example of 1984-style inversion of the truth.  This is the sort of warped, twisted interpretation of reality that ought to reduce the Republicans to a 20% rump for half a century, but since such interpretations flourish thanks to ignorance and self-serving myths that will not happen. 

Of course, at FoxNews he gets away with such obvious lies.

Despite Clinton’s best efforts to imitate Fritz’s ’84 run with her slogans (“where’s the beef?”) and advertising (“the red phone”!), she is in the rather difficult position of banking on a late surge in the final months of the campaign that would allow her to make a Gary Hart-like argument for the nomination that she had won over most of the voters who had voted in the most recent contests.  So what she is reduced to saying is that she’s a lot like Mondale, except less successful.

So we can see from this morning’s This Week that David Axelrod is not a good television surrogate, and we are reminded again that Obama has failed over the course of the last year to hold any hearings with respect to NATO support for the war in Afghanistan in his capacity as Chairman of the Subcommittee on European Affairs.  Indeed, during his chairmanship the subcommittee has not held any policyhearings.  Obama supporters fans usually dismiss this as trivia, but it goes directly to his credibility as an advocate of greater U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which he just reiterated this week, because it is through his subcommittee that the Foreign Relations Committee gathers important information about European governments and NATO.  These are obviously critical to the Afghanistan mission. 

As someone who has been in an official position, albeit only for a year, to draw attention to NATO’s limited support for the Afghanistan mission and to show some leadership in his role as Senator, he has not done so.  The response will be: “Well, okay, but he was running for President!  He can’t be in two places at the same time!”  Well, exactly.  In a three-year U.S. Senate career he has been part of the majority for just over one, and in that year he has done literally nothing about a policy whose importance he is supposed to rate very highly because he has been too busy working for a promotion that would allow him to wield far greater power.  Further, if Obama is running on his superior judgement, what does it say about his judgement that he considered campaigning throughout 2007 more pressing and important than doing the work his constituents elected him to do?   

As Conason’s December piece in Slate said:

Ritch points out that as subcommittee chair, Obama could have examined a wide variety of urgent matters, from the role of NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq to European energy policy and European responses to climate change — and of course, the undermining of the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by the Bush administration. There is, indeed, almost no issue of current global interest that would have fallen outside the subcommittee’s purview.      

Also, for someone whose subcommittee oversaw European affairs, it is remarkable that he has apparently not been to Europe very often and certainly not since taking over his chairmanship.  Obama and his backers like to talk about his biography as the source of a different perspective on foreign relations, but what can it say about his practical foreign policy experience that in the time he has been on the Foreign Relations Committee he has not actually visited the region whose relationship with the U.S. was his responsibility to oversee?  The neglect of Europe is not limited to Obama’s time in the Senate, but can also be seen in the absence of any statements on Europe, NATO or Russia in his formal campaign literature or in his foreign policy addresses, except insofar as it relates to his nonproliferation agenda.  It is particularly in light of his relative lack of interest in European affairs that makes his loose talk about “obligations” to Kosovo sound all the more disturbing.

This seems guaranteed to annoy a lot of the right people for the wrong reasons:

Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.

Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary.

If he did end up winning, putting Hagel in his Cabinet wouldn’t really put my mind at ease, but then I havebeenanunusuallyharshcritic of Sen. Hagel’s claim to being “an opponent of the Iraq war” and of his foreign policy views more generally, but I can see how it would reassure a lot of people that we would have someone reasonably competent at the Pentagon (plus Lugar at State?) under Obama.  While this may be consistent with his “unity” theme, I don’t see how it helps consolidate his support among the party regulars, and I expect a new round of complaints in the netroots to be coming soon.  It would certainly be something if a victorious Obama gave both Defense and State appointments to more or less “realist” Republicans–can you imagine the backlash from both parties?  So much for “change you can believe in”!  The funny thing is that a Hagel selection would inevitably draw more scorn from all those Republicans who decided that Hagel was persona non grata for expressing some skepticism about the war early last year.  It would still probably annoy a lot of partisans who wanted the post for one of their own, and instead of being a reassuring sign of bipartisan governance it would be received as confirmation in the eyes of his mainstream critics that Hagel is just a RINO and that Obama associates with “appeasers,” which is strangely how many Republicans see Hagel.  Update: On cue, Ledeen takes this line more or less exactly

For my part, I wouldn’t find it reassuring at all, since the last time we had a Defense Secretary from the other party in a Democratic administration we had the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (another war Hagel supported), and Hagel is almost as much of an interventionist as Obama.  One thing that should give everyone pause is that it’s entirely conceivable that Hagel could serve readily enough in a McCain administration, too.

What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. ~Frank Rich

So Obama’s patriotism fatally weakens him?  That’s certainly a new interpretation.  I’m going to guess that Rich doesn’t know what Kryptonite is.

Rich’s column is yet another in a series of columns defending Obama against criticism of his Pakistan position.  The defense of this position seems to be: the Bush administration is already doing this, and McCain is also a crazy sabre-rattler, so what’s the problem?  There seems to be no effort to consider whether U.S. strikes inside Pakistan without Islamabad’s knowledge is actually sound policy, especially in the current context when Musharraf appears to be on the way out and the PML-Q was routed in parliamentary elections.  Even though the administration’s recklessness in every other part of the world is cited as the rationale for breaking with current policies, the same recklessness directed against one of the most volatile and strategically significant allies in Asia now counts as wisdom because Obama has agreed.  David Freddoso remarked on this opportunism of Obama supporters a few days ago:

…I don’t like what we did in Pakistan, and I really don’t like the fact that we’re bragging about it, or that a presidential candidate would openly discuss it as an option. And if Obama hadn’t recommended it in August in a bid to gain political credibility, then you wouldn’t be defending it, either.

In fact, you can be sure that if Obama had not specifically recommended doing this many who are now cheering the position would have cited this (correctly) as evidence of the administration’s aimless and counterproductive Pakistan policy.  Obama’s foreign policy judgement may prove to be his actual “political Kryptonite,” since almost every other judgement besides Iraq that he has made has been biased towards an aggressive and interventionist stance.  When a candidate can make the bellicose McCain appear to be more sane on a major foreign policy question, he has definitely made the wrong political move and has likely endorsed a terrible policy.  

To follow up on the very popular Obama post below, it’s worth noting that Rasmussen state-by-state polling also shows Democratic defections from an Obama-led ticket, either to McCain or to a third party.  According to Rasmussen, in Iowa, where it all began, Obama runs three points ahead of McCain right now, but 11% want “some other candidate.”  Among Democrats, he receives only 75% with 10% backing McCain and 13% opting for “some other candidate.”  There is potentially more space than usual for an independent or third-party candidate in this election rather than less.  In Iowa Obama’s problem does seem to be concentrated most among liberals, 14% of whom opted for “some other candidate” and 10% of whom chose McCain.  McCain’s weakness with the right could have been and was predicted, but Obama’s weakness with the left will probably come as a surprise to those who have not been following the campaign extremely closely.  McCain has his share of problems in Iowa, too, since he gets only 68% of conservatives, losing 18 to Obama and 10 to “some other candidate.” 

Surely, New Hampshire is better for Obama, since he leads by a much wider margin, right?  Well, yes and no.  Obviously, New Hampshire has been trending Democratic for the last several years, and he has strong support from independents, but even here he draws just 78% of Democrats and 79% of liberals.  What gives him such a commanding lead is the pathetic level of support McCain gets from conservatives (60%) and Republicans (64%).  For a while I have been thinking of an Obama v. McCain race as a “race to the bottom,” but couldn’t really put my finger on why this phrase kept occurring to me.  Now I think I have it: both party bases seem remarkably dissatisfied (the Republican more volubly so), and the winner will be the one whose base is least dispirited and disaffected from the nominee.

I have already discussed the amazing extent of Democratic defections in New Mexico that make the race there a dead-heat between McCain and Obama.  Next, consider Ohio, where McCain was essentially tied with Obama 42-41 (9% opting for another candidate) as of last week.  Ohio was one of the great slaughterhouses of Republican candidates in ’06 and was presumed to be trending strongly Democratic.  I cannot find crosstabs for this poll.  A 2/24 Wisconsin poll shows Obama and McCain essentially tied 44-43, and Obama again gets 76% of Democrats and just 70% of liberals.  And these are all states that Rasmussen describes as “leaning Democratic.”  The pattern appears again in Nevada, where Obama leads McCain by 12 but gets just 72% of Democrats.  It’s the same for Pennsylvania, where Obama holds a wide lead by virtue of McCain’s even larger problems with his own party but only gets 72% of Democrats.