CNN exit polls suggest that Huckabee may squeak out a narrow victory in Virginia (as usual, women just love Huck), despite polls that showed him down by twenty just a few days ago.  If Huckabee wins Virginia, despite the supposed massive advantages McCain ought to have in the north and in the Tidewater with military voters, plus McCain’s backing by all the major Virginia Republicans, isn’t that a clear signal that the race is still competitive?  If something similar happens in Maryland, does Romney start reconsidering the possibility that the race is not necessarily over? 

Update: CNN adjusted its exit polls to show a much wider McCain lead, and that seems to be confirmed by the reported results.

Virginia county results are showing tremendous Huckabee strength in the Valley and the Southside, as you might expect, but also a decent showing in counties such as King William and Portsmouth where I wouldn’t have thought he would run as well.  It will come down to how the two fare in northern Virginia.

Update: CNN has called the race for McCain, but his lead is very narrow.  Importantly, most voters chose someone else, and according to exits he just barely won voters who had served in the military.

As of 7:50 Central, Buena Vista, Charlottesville, Galax and Lynchburg have not yet reported.  Those could all provide a late surge for Huckabee.  It isn’t necessarily over, despite the announced projection.  It’s over.

Update: I should really pay no attention to those early exit polls.  The final result in Virginia was 50-41–not all that close.

Some might say that I am a little too idiosyncratic in my political and historical views, but I found this part of the review of Regnery’s Upstream (via Jeremy Lott) a bit odd:

Although I find myself in accord with most of Regnery’s interpretations, some of them would be regarded as idiosyncratic even by people who consider themselves conservative. He frankly regrets American entry into the First World War, which he sees as having established the circumstances that led to the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Adolf Hitler. He objects to domestic institutions like the income tax, direct election of senators, and many innovations of the Progressive movement (in which he locates the origins of vote-buying through redistributionist policies). He takes many Republican icons to task — most notably Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower — for veering too far from their stated philosophies. (Hoover, he explains, really became a spokesman for conservative ideas once he left the White House.) He reminds us that the Nixon administration — whose unlovely fruits included an embrace of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wage and price controls, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and minority set-asides — was (not surprisingly) devoid of any movement conservatives; indeed, many of the latter didn’t even want their president reelected in 1972. (“It was not that people liked Nixon — nobody ever liked Nixon,” he writes in one of his more lapidary phrases, “but that they were appalled by McGovern.”) The one movement conservative who managed to be elected to the White House, Ronald Reagan, was (not surprisingly, in Regnery’s view) the most successful.

I would qualify the point about WWI just slightly, since I think it was our entry that did more to allow for the Bolsheviks’ cause to flourish post-1918, when a different peace settlement could have allowed the Germans to participate in the anti-Bolshevik interventions during the Civil War (and also make those interventions more feasible and effective).  The idiocy of Kerensky and the insistence of Russian liberals to persist in fighting the war with Germany were key factors in giving the Bolsheviks their opportunity to gain power.  Nonetheless, there is nothing all that idiosyncratic about this view–this was a leading, if not the conservative view for a very long time.  Even if you don’t support repealing the 16th Amendment today on pragmatic grounds, I can’t think of very many on the right who wouldn’t object to the principle of the income tax (perhaps I am not imaginative enough).  Having seen what the 17th Amendment has given us, does anyone actually support the direct election of Senators?  Perhaps this is an all together too old-fashioned constitutionalist sensibility, but vesting the election of Senators in state legislatures was one means of ensuring that the interests of states would be represented at the federal level.

Joe Klein and I are seeingthings the same way:

Obama’s strength is inspiration, and it’s also his weakness. In the recent past, Democrats have favored candidates who offer meaty, detailed policy prescriptions — usually to the party’s detriment — and that is not Obama’s game. After his Iowa victory, his stump speech had become a soufflé untroubled by much substance of any sort. He has rectified that, to some extent. He now spends some time talking about the laments of average Americans he has met along the way; then he dives into a litany of solutions he has proposed to address the laments. But those are not nearly so convincing as Clinton’s versions of the same; of course, Clinton has a tragic deficit when it comes to inspiration.

There is an odd, anachronistic formality to Obama’s stump speech: it is always the same. It sets his audiences afire, but it does not reach very far beyond them. It is no accident that Obama is nearly invincible in caucus states, where the ability to mobilize a hard core of activists is key — but not so strong in primaries, where more diverse masses of people are involved. He should be very worried that this nomination is likely to be decided in the big working-class primary states of Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania.

This is just the sort of thing that Obama cannot afford, and which he would be wise to disown immediately, but it ties into something I wrote earlier about the globo-man persona he and his admirers have been crafting for him during the campaign:

The other problem with this talk of Obama as a bridge-builder with the Islamic world is that people might take it rather too seriously and see him as being too close to the Islamic world.  The logic of “only Nixon could go to China” applies here as well.  Someone who is already seen, rightly or wrongly, as personally close to or understanding of the ‘other’ has much more difficulty engaging in the kinds of negotiations or contacts that Obama proposes to have. 

Instead of appearing to be too close or associated with the Islamic world, here there is a danger of getting a reputation for sympathy for “rogue” states, and for Cuba in particular.  Obama has gone out of his way to make clear that he is willing to negotiate with hostile and “rogue” regimes, which is, in principle, a reasonable and defensible position, and one where I happen to think Obama is right.  However, his early formulations of this position were clumsy and excessive, as I argued in the magazine last September:

Moving from Bush’s approach that disdains diplomacy as a sign of weakness, he proposes to make a travesty of diplomacy by conducting it cavalierly and without purpose.

Nonetheless, his sane willingness to ease travel restrictions to Cuba and his willingness to meet with leaders of Syria and Iran have been evidence that some small good might come from an Obama foreign policy, deeply flawed as it otherwise is.  However, this symbolic blunder at his Houston campaign office feeds into a narrative that Obama is not just taking different, defensible views on how the United States should conduct its foreign policy, but that he is, or at least members of his campaign are, somehow sympathetic to some of these regimes.  (To some extent, Obama’s campaign workers will be forgiven by many observers because Che chic is the sort of ignorant, fashionable “hero”-worship that rather a lot of young college lefties have engaged in at one time or another, and it will be treated as a sort of harmless stupidity.)  Of course, I don’t think Obama is sympathetic to the mindless Che admiration that evidently grips some of the people who work for him, nor has he shown himself to be in any way sympathetic to the Castro regime, and such views should not be imputed to him.  Even so, if symbolism feeds an already-existing assumption or perception about a candidate it will catch on and turn people against him (i.e., he wants to talk to Castro because he and his supporters are basically in agreement with the revolution).  At that point, earlier episodes, such as the ridiculous “flag pin controversy,” re-emerge in the news and take on new significance.

With Shadegg’s unexpected retirement, that brings the total number of open seats that the Republicans will be defending to either 22 (per CQ) or 26 (per Ambinder) or 29 (per Politico), plus four vacancies of members who have already resigned or died.  Many of these open seats are in safe Republican territory, but at least eight are toss-ups and four are only leaning Republican.  The GOP has at least 28 vulnerable (toss-up or lean Republican) seats in this cycle. 

P.S. To put this in context, Democrats lost 22 open seats in 1994.

The bottom line is that the conservative position is pro-citizenship and the libertarian position, as I understand it, is anti-citizenship. ~James Poulos

Raimondo would quibble with defining that as “the libertarian position,” but otherwise I think James is right.  Fundamentally, the disagreement between James and WillWilkinson (and between myself and Wilkinson in the past) centers on a few basic things: we think citizenship entails certain rights and privileges non-citizens do not receive, and we think national sovereignty is a legitimate element of political organisation and the enforcement of it is a proper function of national governments.  Further, we think that such a government can both legally and morally deny to non-citizens the rights and privileges that citizens possess, because non-citizens have no necessary or inborn claim on the goods of another polity, just as American citizens have no such just claim on other polities.  While I can’t speak for James, I would say that this is because people have rights only as citizens of a particular polity, and that the actual polity to which Americans belong at present is a nation-state (albeit one that maintains certain forms and fictions of being a confederation of several states), while “human rights to movement and free association” as such do not exist.    

Now Wilkinson is confused by people who would prefer to privilege smaller, more local communities, but who also insist on affirming national sovereignty.  Of course, were we to call for establishing a “tightly-knit gemeinschaft” we would be confronted by Wilkinson, champion of the leveling and expansive nation-state that transcends the petty bonds of region and town, because as sure he today deems the nation-state the vehicle of arbitrary limitations on these “rights” he would have made the same argument on behalf of the centralising nation-state 150 years ago, and the logic of his position is one that favours ever-larger political entities governed by ever-more remote, centralised political authorities, lest we have any untoward rubes somewhere denying someone “access” to the goods to which they are allegedly morally entitled.  The implied profusion of rights and the attacks on institutions as barriers or threats to those rights must necessarily lead to the empowerment of a superior authority that will check and police the lower authorities in order to guarantee these “rights,” and so each additional “human right” is another invitation for a central or continental or, eventually, global government to step in and “protect” individuals from one another and from their more local authorities.   

As Dr. Fleming observed quite correctly in The Morality of Everyday Life, the more rights we assert the more power we must give to an authority to adjudicate disputes over those rights.  Thus, as ever, the pursuit of liberty through the weakening of intermediary institutions subjects the individual to the remote, centralised power of a distant government over which he will have negligible influence, and it is, of  course, always wrapped in gauzy sentimentality and liberal use of epithets such as “chauvinist.”  For my part, I would sooner defend national sovereignty than support the weakening and undermining of it in the name of internationalism or moral do-gooding, because the nation-state serves as the smallest-scale form of political organisation capable of resisting worse and more pernicious transformations of our country.  Nation-states that lose or abandon their sovereignty for the sake of some transnational politics or moral goods eventually lose control over their own futures, since they yield meaningful control over most major policy decisions to higher levels of authority and will never be able to recall it once given.

A Sullivan reader writes:

“You might have a new one in charge.” he said, “Obama!” He seemed fairly enthusiastic, but when I told him that Obama’s full name was Barack Hussein Obama, the man’s face lit up. He couldn’t believe it and starting shouting ecstatically to one of his employees, “Barack Hussein Obama!” I told him that Obama wasn’t a Muslim but had lived in Indonesia. In any case, this didn’t matter to the man. He was so excited that a man with this name might be president of the United States. It was clear that he would tell many people he knew about Obama’s name and that to them, this means something important and even profound [bold mine-DL].

Obviously, I am not an Obama supporter, nor do I think for the most part that an Obama victory in November would be “good for the country” in foreign relations or domestic politics, so I sometimes have to remind myself that the people repeating these stories actually like Obama and are not working overtime to undermine his candidacy.  While I have denounced the false claim that Obama is a Muslim, since it is false and clearly intended to do damage to his reputation, I have said on numerous occasions that it is folly for Obama’s elite admirers both here and overseas to keep emphasising just how “globalised” Obama is.  The more people you have stressing how “important” and “profound” Obama’s middle name is to Palestinian Muslims and the like, the worse it will be for Obama come November (should he be the nominee).  I agree with what Scott wrote in the 1/28 issue:

This world-man aura is not without appeal, especially after eight years of a president deaf to what foreigners think and feel. But taken as far as Obama does, it would be an electoral liability.   

Note: you have the odd situation these days where an Obama supporter relates stories that emphasise Obama’s middle name and the positive reaction from a Muslim audience to that name, this is supposed to show Obama’s potential as world-uniting saviour, but when a Clinton ally claims to be praising the same thing it is regarded as an underhanded trick aimed at stirring up distrust and something that seems to have required an apology!  Whatever the intent of Clintonites, the Kerrey critics were right about one thing: this is information you don’t want to have circulating widely among voters.

Obama wins; then faces John McCain in the general election in an epic generational battle between two candidates who are calling the country to a sense of common interest and who are both about bringing the country together across party lines.

Now that would be a campaign worth the price of admission. ~Matthew Dowd

So it would be worthless? 

The least persuasive part of this argument is the claim that the Democratic superdelegates will follow the voters’ preference.  They will not.  They will select whichever candidate they think has the best chance of winning, and unless most of them become badly confused in the next few weeks and months they will understand that the Democrats’ best chance remains Hillary Clinton, as chilling a thought as that is for all of us.  I have seen the national polls, and I have read many anecdotal accounts that seem to say that many people will simply refuse to vote for Clinton, but I have also encountered enough anti-McCain sentiment that it is simply inconceivable that he actually prevails in an election against her.  It will be Clinton v. Dole all over again, perhaps a little closer but with the same outcome.  If it is Obama v. McCain, there will indeed be an “epic generational battle,” and the results might look something like 1972* because most voters who bestir themselves to choose a major party candidate will side with McCain in such a battle.  Those who want to stop McCain from being President have to hope that the Democrats do not take themselves over the cliff with Obama.  Obama’s chances improve if his nomination encourages dissident conservatives and Republicans to throw in their lot with a third party as a protest against McCain, but this seems unlikely.  On the policies that have deeply alienated many on the right from McCain, Obama is certainly no better and his other policies are so costly or overly ambitious that they will drive voters to McCain in spite of McCain’s flaws.  For a short time in November 2006, I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that democratic politics occasionally produced modestly decent outcomes, but the last 14 months have again disabused me of that quite transitory illusion. 

Rarely have there ever been two prospective presidential match-ups that inspire more dread in me than these, and never before has the argument to stop legitimising the entire process by not participating in it carried more weight with me.  With these general election candidates, it even seems as if casting a protest vote would be tainted.  This November will be just my third presidential election for which I am eligible, and at present I am not at all inclined to cast a ballot.      

*Okay, so it probably won’t be a 49-state sweep, but it will be lopsided.

Update: I should flesh out a bit more the argument for Obama’s weakness in the general election.  First of all, McCain may be more competitive among Latino voters than other Republicans would have been, and Obama is likely to be weaker with the same voters than Clinton would be.  Whether this can actually tip an otherwise solid Democratic state into the Republican column is hard to say, but it will likely lock down New Mexico and Florida for McCain (it doesn’t help that Obama will not have actively campaigned there during the primary season because of the DNC ban).  Plus, all the military personnel and families who live in those states probably have to make McCain the odds-on favourite there even in a difficult year for the NM Republicans.  The winner in New Mexico almost always prevails nationally (2000 and 1976 are the only exceptions to this of which I am aware), because the candidate who can win New Mexico can appeal to a broad array of interests and demographic groups in sufficient numbers to succeed across the country.  Obama probably cannot minimise the GOP draw among black voters beyond the tiny 8% garnered by Bush in 2000.  The question remains whether Obama’s belated gestures towards protectionism can overcome concerns about his voting record on social issues in key Midwestern states.  Given Pawlenty’s support for McCain and Obama’s win there last week, Minnesota may be shaping up to be a major battleground state along with Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Add to this anxiety about the cost of Obama’s proposed policies, disaffection related to the Muslim rumour and Obama’s background, and qualms about inexperience and you have the recipe for a significant defeat.

We understand why many of Obama’s victories “don’t count” in the eyes of the Clinton campaign, but while we’re at it we shouldn’t forget the New Mexico Democrats–they simply can’t count.