Speaking of Halperin’s list, Ross notes that many of the tactics recommended to McCain were tried and did not succeed.  This is basically true, but it is unclear whether the same attacks will have such limited impact in the general electorate, especially among voters who are relatively ill-informed and the late-deciding voters who remain “undecided” for an infuriatingly long period of time.*  It is clear that Clinton’s surrogates were terrible messengers for these attacks, particularly when they framed it as a “concern” about what the Republicans could do later.  Viewed entirely cynically as a matter of tactics, there were two problems with this approach: it tied the allegations back to the Clinton campaign in one way or another, which ultimately worked to her detriment, and it expressed these “concerns” in the least convincing way possible: “I’m not saying it’s a problem, I’m just saying that someone else might think it’s a problem.”  Between the 527s and the usual suspects of the Smearbund working on different angles of Obama’s record and his associations (the latter have already been hard at work trying to demonise Obama’s foreign policy advisors), you will have relatively untraceable attacks on the one hand and potentially very damaging smear campaigns on the other that will keep coming back to the Wright-Farrakhan connection and Obama’s connections, such as they are, to Ayers and Khalidi.  Informed voters typically scoff at these sorts of attacks, but they have a real and negative effect on the target.  (Farrakhan’s “kind remarks” and his response to them last night are already causing Obama some trouble.) 

Attacks work psychologically because they create negative associations with the candidate that weaken his support, and they probably work best among voters who have the least information about a candidate.  Even once the attacks are proven to be false, the candidate never recovers all that support fully.  The purpose of such attacks is obviously to sow doubt and uncertainty about trusting a candidate, to make it seem as if he is not what you thought he was, and so make you less likely to support him.  Since Obama’s strength seems to be generating higher levels of turnout than usual, lines of attack that simply suppress turnout all together, rather than attempt to shift votes to the other candidate, are what we are most likely to see.  The 527s are crucial to this, because McCain and his people cannot allow themselves to be directly linked to any of it.  His campaign would need to not be directly involved with putting out any of these attacks, and McCain would make a point of repudiating them.  The same recommendation goes for the Obama campaign about keeping its distance from pro-Obama 527s that will be trying to dig up and circulate whatever they can on McCain.

The problem with candidacies defined so completely by biography, as Obama and McCain’s candidacies clearly are, is that everything in a candidate’s biography then becomes more or less fair game, and the political incentives for using the candidate’s family and friends to attack him become very great.  Far from having the most high-minded and respectful campaign in memory between two media darlings, we are probably about to embark on one that will be remembered for its bitterness and the sheer volume of third-party personal attacks made, because it is precisely in the candidates’ integrity and biography that their electoral strength resides.

*N.B. This post is intended as analysis, not advocacy.

P.S.  Spengler is generally quite good on a lot of things, but he deploys some pretty sketchy psychoanalysis to make his point in this article (via Sullivan), which advances the Schiffren hypothesis to another level of paranoid.  (Naturally, Schiffren was the one who linked to it.)  But this Spengler piece isan extreme form of the kind of attack on Obama through his family and friends that you can expect to see more of in coming months.  Critics will use his other associations with Rezko, more reasonably, to call his judgement into question, which is to strike at the thing that Obama proposes makes him most fit to be President.  Referring to the Rezko deal he made a “boneheaded mistake,” you can see the negative ad writing itself: “Do we want a President who makes boneheaded mistakes?” And so on.

Ross points to Halperin’s list of “things McCain can do” to derail Obama that Clinton could not do, or at least not do successfully, which includes this amusing one:

Link biography (experience/courage) and leadership (straight talk) to a vision animated by detail – accentuating Obama’s relative lack of specificity.

When giving advice, it’s a good idea to consider whether it would be appropriate for the recipient.  McCain has always been a terrible candidate for spouting details, and he is generally known to be a weak candidate on policy specifics.  That may be part of his charm, so to speak, and it may be an important reason why he prevailed over Mitt “The Weeds Are Important” Romney, but it isn’t something that he is going to change dramatically over the course of the next few months.  The Obama campaign will be able to make a lot of hay out of how few major pieces of legislation McCain has pushed through in all his time in Congress, and they will have over two decades of votes to dredge up and take out of context.  As I was saying a little while ago, this emphasis on specifics and substance is a trick played on candidates by the media and the small number of politically obsessed voters–they want, as Uhrquhart might say, “to make ’em jump.”

Last night Obama said that Russian support of Serbia to block Kosovo independence would be “unacceptable,” which means that he finds the illegal partition of Serbia to be acceptable–see how that plays in Cleveland.  That means that he supports our government’s violation of international law in recognising Kosovo, and then went on to suggest that the countries that have recognised Kosovo have “certain obligations” to stop Kosovo from being invaded.  It’s true that he didn’t bluntly say that he would resist a Russian-backed invasion, but he implied as much.  So he endorsed the administration’s reckless recognition of Kosovo, where we have literally no national interest, and then compounded that error by saying that the recognition imposed obligations on us to defend the “sovereignty” of Kosovo.  Obama supports the violation of Serbian sovereignty and the U.N. Charter, and then thinks that we have obligations as part of “the international community” to stop another state from upholding that sovereignty.  Hegemonists have a very clear rule about state sovereignty: it is essential to international order when they want to make it count, and it is an archaic relic of the 17th century when it gets in their way.  Obama has learned this rule quite well already.   

Recognising separatist states, especially in Europe where our chief interest is stability, is how the Balkan Wars of the ’90s became international conflicts that drew in outside powers.  It is how the West could make the wars of Yugoslav succession into an occasion for isolating and humiliating the rump Yugoslavia and backing up the historic proxies of…Germany, bizarrely enough.  It is through the persistent mistaken belief that outside powers have some stake in the conflicts of the Balkans that great powers collide with one another and risk a more general war.

Instead of being brought down by all this Farrakhan talk, we should have some choreography by Farah Khan instead. 

P.S.  Yes, it’s been a long day.

Obama On The Lookout 

If they try to pigeonhole him [Obama] as a liberal, he will refuse to perch in such a hole. He is a golden falcon, not a fat pigeon. ~Tony Blankley

So I was listening to the debate tonight as I was working on something else, and I heard Clinton flub Medvedev’s name.  Like Philip Klein, I thought it was a blunder on her part.  I didn’t pay much attention to this, since I was recovering from my horror after listening to Obama’s answer on Kosovo, which was far worse than what I expected (and I was already expecting something pretty bad).  For someone not interested in “rash” or “dumb” wars, he seemed to leave the door open to fighting the Russians over Kosovo much more than he should have (i.e., not at all).  This is simply crazy, and it amazes me that he keeps getting away with saying such reckless things. 

Back to Clinton.  Granted, I pay attention to the scene in Russia more than most, I go to a Russian church and I have taken a little bit of Russian, so maybe I’m bound to know how to pronounce Medvedev’s name, but I don’t think it’s a “gotcha question” for someone aspiring to be the President to know the name of the future President of the only other state with a nuclear arsenal on the scale of Russia’s and to be able to say it without stumbling.  In another era, not that long ago, being unable to come up with the name of the Soviet premier would have been viewed as a major lapse; if this blunder had been committed by Bush in 2000 or Obama today, the “inexperience” angle would be played up for all it was worth.  Frankly, being unable to name the leaders of other major powers around the world ought to count against a candidate.  It’s not as if you’re being asked to name the prime minister of the Netherlands (Balkenende) or the the president of Indonesia (Yudhoyono).

Where did the day go?  I have been running around all day for one thing or another, and I am worn out.  In coming days, I hope to have some new Bolingbroke material to blog about.  The old line from The Craftsman may not adorn Eunomia now, but the spirit of my favourite reactionary radical lives on.

I said, ‘That’s a very un-American thing to say.’ I mean, this is a country that based on religious freedom. ~Josh Romney

Obviously, Mormons are free to take offense at evangelical and other Christian opposition to their religion, and I would be surprised if they didn’t, but could we please be spared this “un-American” argument?  First of all, it’s not very edifying, since it assumes that there’s something “un-American” about disagreements that inevitably arise between religions in a pluralistic society.  It also implies that the content of a religion is ultimately irrelevant to public life, and that the price of pluralism is the devaluing of truth.  Those assumptions are themselves extremely dangerous to a healthy religious pluralism in a free society.  It is supposed to be “un-American” to make these disagreements a reason for not voting for someone, which isn’t persuasive at all.  The more often I hear this argument, the more I resent the idea that you are somehow lacking in patriotism or American-ness if you take seriously that a candidate has significantly different fundamental beliefs that you don’t and can’t hold.  Besides, simply as a matter of tactics, berating people for being bad Americans is not a terribly good way of persuading them.

I’m not picking on him, I hope, but the reason that Biggio struggled in clutch situations and against good pitchers couldn’t be more obvious. He was an overachiever, and he knew what he was doing. Against a weak pitcher, a pitcher not really in command of his material, Biggio could take control of the at bat and drive it toward a good conclusion. When the pitcher was not really focused, Biggio was. But when the pressure was on and there was somebody on the mound who knew what he was doing, Biggio had limited ability to step up. Maybe this was not as true in the 1990s. I hope. We’ll figure the data and put it online. ~Bill James

Speaking as a long-time Astros fan (since 1984), I have followed all of Biggio’s career in Houston.  Besides his ability on the field and his consistent, if quiet, offense, I appreciated the increasingly rare example of a player staying with the same team for decades.  However, Biggio’s accomplishments aside, from the time I really started paying attention every year to the regular season, I noticed that Biggio was one of the worst clutch hitters ever.  He swung at and struck out on more low-and-outside pitches that just about anyone I had ever seen, and year after year he would fall for the same pitch.  This seemed to get worse in playoff games, but that was probably the effect of disappointment that once again the Astros had left two men stranded on base in yet another inning during a game they ended up losing 2-1 or 4-2.  I would love to have my impressions be wrong, but after watching the Astros for nearly twenty years with Biggio on the team I am pretty confident that James’ hypothesis will be demonstrated by the evidence.