James asks in response to this Romney post:

But what if Mr. Global Capital is also Mr. Nationalist Bailout?

As the man has already told us, he doesn’t believe in bailouts–he believes in “workouts”!  And here you were thinking that Huckabee was the only fitness nut in this race.

Rasmussen has new polls from Missouri and Alabama, showing statistical ties between Huckabee and McCain with Romney about ten points behind in both states.  Not surprisingly, Giuliani is not a factor in these states.  Together with the strong lead Huckabee seems to have in Georgia, it seems unlikely that Romney is going get much traction at all anywhere in the South.

What happened in 2006, what were the two big factors? George Bush and Iraq. Iraq’s going better, and George Bush isn’t on the ticket. ~Sen. John Ensign

Ensign heads the NRSC, which means that he is supposed to be one of the main Republican strategists for the upcoming elections.  He seems entirely too confident that the war won’t be a significant net negative for the Republicans this year, but at least he understands it was a large part of what harmed them in ’06.  This is one of the relatively few times I have heard a leading Republican figure acknowledge that Iraq was a major factor in the defeat in 2006 in the last year.  However, it appears that Ensign hasn’t really absorbed what this means:

It [Iraq] just becomes more of a non-issue [bold mine-DL], I think is what it does. You see it keeps dropping farther and farther down on people’s radars, they may be opposed to the war but it’s not as important. But national security is still important to people, and who can handle national security.

The latest Pew survey shows that 27% say that Iraq is the “most important problem facing the nation”–this view is most frequent among Democrats, but 25% of independents (and 21% of Republicans) say the same.  The economy does take first place, and the GOP is not faring well in public opinion there, either.  Even if you say that Iraq is only the second-most important issue, that is almost as far from a “non-issue” as it gets.  It’s hard not to conclude that Republican leaders remain as oblivious to the majority’s view of the war as they have ever been in the last two years.

Ensign is probably right when he says:

This election is going to be about independent voters. You know, our base is fine, their base is fine. It’s going to be about independents. Who attracts independents on issues, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s health care, whether it’s education, those kinds of issues that are core issues anymore, I think whichever candidates communicate the best, who has the best solutions.

If that’s right (and he may again be too optimistic about Republican voters), the GOP is pretty well sunk.  Independents have been trending towards the Democrats for the last year and show no signs of coming back anytime soon.

Then there was this bit about the New Mexico race:

He’s an ultra-liberal Udall. Udalls are pretty left-wing, but you know it’ll be a good contrast down there, but you know, it’s certainly a swing state, a tougher state, kind of a purple state.

They have a little advantage because we have a primary and they don’t. At the same time, that doesn’t mean you can’t win. We saw that in Virginia. Virginia had a primary, George Allen didn’t. He lost. So it still depends on who runs the good races.

So the NM GOP is in good shape, provided that Tom Udall runs the worst Senate campaign in American history.  The Republicans are going to be tearing each other down for the next four months, while Udall has every advantage.  Whichever one emerges to compete with him, he is going to win by a pretty sizeable margin.  Talk of “purple states” is misleading this year.  New Mexico is essentially a Democratic state that occasionally votes for Republican executives on state and federal levels for a change of pace.  New Mexico is quite uncanny in matching the results of presidential races and the national mood, and I don’t see a lot of New Mexicans voting for the Republican candidates this year.

Meanwhile, someone check Ensign’s office for hallucinogens:

I think we can actually sneak back into the majority on our best case scenario. I think we could get to 51. I think worst case scenario — 45, 46. That would be a real bad night, if we have a real bad night, we’re 45. A good night for us staying 48, 49, that’s a real good night. A great night is 51.

James writes on Romney’s re-creation of himself, which may actually be who Romney would remain if he stopped trying to be all things to whichever group he is addressing at the moment, and he sees something worthwhile:

I can handle that, because, finally, I think Romney would make a much better President than candidate. When he runs — and when he’s run — in the mode he was in tonight, he does great. When he runs as he did during the late Iowa-early NH phase, he’s a magnet for calumny, mockery, and contempt. Such a wild swing is rather alarming to see in a candidate, but let’s not forget this is a heavily contested and very confused primary campaign for the nomination of a party whose President seriously damaged its brand, tradition, trust, and track record. Romney’s great advantage from the beginning was as a sober, alert, sharp fellow capable of turning around a party that had lost its way. When trying to run for the base that still loves Bush just cuz, he’s a disaster, ineffective and unconvincing. But how could he avoid posturing in that way given the early dynamics of the primary season? Let’s all hope those days are over: neither Romney nor his party has any use for the contorted Mitt, and Republicans all have something to appreciate in what seems so obviously to be the Real Romney.

I understand James’ point, and he’s right that there is something more agreeable about a candidate who sticks to what he knows and stops pretending to be the authority on matters where he has no credibility.  On his “superpower” remark, I will add this: he did say “in the region,” which seems to me to be an even more bizarre  comment.  Superpowers are powers that can project power to different continents and regions of the world.  A regional power is just that–a regional power.  Superpowers can be and obviously are also regional powers, but they would additionally have to be powers that could meaningfully project power almost anywhere in the world beyond their own region.  Jihadis, despite their transnational character, do not possess that kind of power and, I suspect, never will. 

One thing that comes to mind about Romney’s new persona is this: has he stopped pretending in time for it to make a difference?  After all, just as Mr. Bush has trashed the Republican “brand,” Romney has harmed the value of his campaign’s brand with his issue acrobatics and chameleon-like shifts.  The value of a “brand” is significantly tied to its reliability and stability.  Does Romney have enough time in the next week and a half to reassure voters in Florida and elsewhere that he will not resume his contortionist act when he starts campaigning in the rest of the country?  Probably not.  Like Thompson’s last-minute discovery of enthusiasm, Romney’s new persona comes too late to do him much good.

On the larger Republican dilemma: they seem to be headed towards a McCain nomination, assuming Romney cannot somehow eke out a victory in Florida, which means a general election candidate taking the unpopular (and also wrong) positions on two of the major policy questions of the day.  On one side, his nomination will depress conservative turnout somewhat, whether or not the establishment comes to terms with his candidacy, and on the other his fabled ability to attract independents will ultimately be undone by his position on the war.  The Republicans have waited too long to throw up the barricades to stop this and they wasted their energy on other targets, as I have noted before in my remarks on the anti-Huckabee campaign.  If they do succeed in stopping McCain, the alternative will be someone who personifies globalisation just as McCain personifies militarism, which will not, contrary to the developing conventional wisdom, be a boon for the GOP in a year in which a recession may well have been going for months by Election Day. 

At the risk of repeating myself, I will say that the party and movement leaders have trapped themselves in this bind by ruling out absolutely the idea of a Huckabee nomination and aiming so much of their criticism at him in the last six weeks.  Arguably, he is the one leading candidate who could poach on Democratic territory with rhetoric about economic anxiety while nonetheless pushing an agenda broadly favourable to economic conservatives, and the one who could also maintain the GOP line on the war while moving away rhetorically and to some extent substantively (at least apparently on Iran) from the administration on foreign policy.  Selecting Romney as the VP could have then united the party and possibly alleviate residual fears about his economic heterodoxies, both real and imagined, and given the Republicans a reasonably good chance to compete.  A Romney-led ticket wouldn’t generate enough turnout for a number of reasons and it could be easily put on the defensive in an election that turns on the economy.  Even if Romney somehow prevails against McCain, I don’t see how he becomes the President even with his original problem-solver persona.

Via Sullivan, this Focus on the Family candidate guide is something to behold.  How far out do your views on the Iraq war have to be for you to believe that Mike Huckabee is somehow insufficiently supportive of it?  Responding to a statement that Huckabee made that “we broke it, we have to fix it,” one man on the candidate guide video declares in disbelief, “We didn’t break Iraq.   Saddam Hussein broke it!…To say that we broke it, we have to fix it, rings a bit hollow.”  This is crazy stuff.  No wonder Huckabee can’t gain any traction on foreign policy, even when he repeats the party line on the war, “Islamofascism” and takes a position on the Palestinians far more extreme than Likud’s.

The Romney video states, quite inaccurately, that Romney has acknowledged that Mormonism is “not a Christian faith.”  He has done no such thing, and every informed observer knows that he hasn’t.  Viewed one way, this is a transparently pro-Romney deception aimed at putting the religion question to the side.  Then again, considering the target audience, the Romney campaign could reasonably complain that Focus on the Family has injected anti-Mormonism into its campaign video in a direct attempt to undermine his candidacy.  Whatever the intent was, the effect of this video will be to remind the audience that Romney is not a Christian, which is probably exactly the opposite of what his campaign wants to see from such organisations.  Huckabee’s people are trying to spin this as an endorsement of Romney, but if it is it is one of the most poorly-worded endorsements ever.

In the latest bloggingheads between Rod and Reza Aslan, Aslan suggested that the “Republicans fear Obama” idea that I commented on before is actually a ploy to trick Democrats into backing the weaker candidate.  That might be true for a handful of people, but I think the Republicans genuinely fear a progressive Democrat whose public image has not pigeonholed him as the left-wing politician that he obviously is, because the key to Republican electoral strategy every four years is to label the Democratic nomine as being “too far to the left” and therefore unrepresentative.  I think there is an idea that Obama’s unity talk makes his progressivism seem non-threatening; the conciliatory approach he uses, which so annoys many hard-core progressives, sets his opponents at ease and, so I assume, Republicans fear that this then sets them up for a fall.  I think this is completely wrong, but Republican fear of Obama is unavoidably tied to Republican admiration for Obama; since I have no particular admiration for him, and I don’t put much credit in the “atmospherics” that he tries to generate, I don’t see him as a general election threat.  Indeed, in any other cycle where the Democrats do not possess so many inherent advantages, Obama would probably never have been able to reach this point.  It is actually rather bizarre to fear the less nationally competitive, more progressive candidate in the general election, while assuming that the “centrist,” albeit widely disliked, is the one who will be easy to defeat.  Likewise, it is bizarre for Democrats to fear the one candidate closely tied to the two policies that have so badly discredited the GOP with the country and with its own voters, but I think they do truly fear McCain, even though running against McCain would almost guarantee them victory.

Despite this, Mandell Ganchrow, a former Orthodox Union president and longtime leader of a major pro-Israel political action committee, recently posted an item on his Web site suggesting Obama’s early exposure to Islam could make him a danger to Israel.

“In the Jewish religion when someone is far away from observance, however at a certain time he has a spark of Jewishness, we call it a ‘pintele Yid’ — a smattering, or a deep-seated unconscious attachment to one’s roots,” Ganchrow wrote. “With a Muslim father, and being surrounded in his early youth in a Muslim environment, is there such a thing as a ‘pintele Muslim,’ with deep-seated feelings which could color decisions re: terrorism and the Middle East?” ~The Jewish Week

Via Sullivan

This wouldn’t be quite so ludicrous if Obama had ever shown the slighest hint of disagreeing with most U.S. policies in the Near East and had ever gone beyond beyond standard left-liberal criticisms of the treatment of Palestinians.  Of course, except for Iraq (which a rather large number of non-Muslims who actually knew something about the Near East also opposed), he hasn’t.  I have argued before that this perception of an affinity for Muslims or attachment to the Islamic world would hurt him politically, and that it was crazy for him and his supporters to keep emphasising his foreign roots and attachments.  Whatever else you want to say about this, it really isn’t a vote-getter. 

I would like to use some of my personal history to explore just how ridiculous this line of criticism of Obama is.  First, as any long-time readers know, I am not a fan of Obama and I think he would make a terrible President.  The problem with his foreign policy views is not that they are too passive or “friendly” (or whatever counts as a grave sin in the eyes of such people) to Near Eastern and Islamic countries, but that he is essentially indistinguishable from the foreign policy consensus views of Washington, except when he overcompensates out of fear of looking “weak” by proposing sending American forces into Pakistan whether or not Islamabad agrees.  In other words, when he isn’t being merely conventional, he may be more dangerous than the people we have in power now.  This is not the result of his family background or upbringing, but a result of his inexperience and his misguided ideas about the U.S. role in the world that many of his colleagues share. 

As has been brought up elsewhere, for a very short time (about six months) I professed Islam (albeit pretty idiosyncratically–I doubt if my “conversion” would have ever been recognised as a proper one), mostly out of an attraction at the time to a somewhat coherent monotheism that was neither Jewish nor Christian, since I had been raised with no real religious education and had been conditioned by my multiculti private schools to an aversion to Christianity about whose teachings I knew relatively little and which I understood even less.  After a few years of syncretistic dabbling in various religious literatures, I came to Islam, mostly through the English translations of Rumi and the like, but rather like the dabbling before it this was not, on reflection, a serious conversion and it was one I could never enter into fully.  (Incidentally, anyone who would like to make more out of this than that is wasting his time.)  In a way slightly similar to Obama’s conversion to Christianity, I approached Orthodoxy at first intellectually that then became more firmly grounded in a practicing Orthodox parish.  So while I have no sympathy with Obama’s politics, I have found the persistent effort to label him falsely as a Muslim or crypto-Muslim, when he very definitely decided, as I did, to become a Christian (however liberal a denomination he may have joined), and the credulity of stupid voters to believe this falsehood, to be obnoxious.  There are dozens of reasons not to support Obama.  But the problem is not that he was raised for a few years in Indonesia with an Indonesian step-father or that his grandfather was a Muslim, but that he actually claims that living for a few years in Indonesia in his youth and having a Kenyan grandmother still living in a village in Kenya give him relevant foreign policy experience.  The problem is not where he grew up, but that he is substituting a kind of symbolic capital for expertise.   

As for the effect of my brief time as a self-described Muslim on my policy views, my attitude towards the world overseas had been poisoned much more by reading The Economist and The Wall Street Journal than by reading the Qur’an.  I had far more sympathy for Bosnian Muslims and Chechens as an ignorant American teenager than as a putative Muslim thanks to interventionist agitation on their behalf.  By the time of this brief Islamic phase, I had stopped thinking of foreign policy as a morality play in which other countries could be simplistically portrayed as incarnate evil.  Indeed, perhaps this kind of thinking only really works for thoroughly secular people who must find their great moral struggles in politics rather than in asceticism and worship.  Who knows?  In any case, Western media reported incessantly that the perpetually evil Slavs were the villains of the story, and that  it was as simple as that, and, young, foolish kid that I was, I believed them.  Mujahideen in the Balkans?  Why worry?  Truthfully, as a result of reading Chroniclesmore regularly, becoming better educated in European and Near Eastern history and becoming more familiar with Christianity, I began to move away from the pro-jihadist positions of the WSJ, Weekly Standard and the like, while the war against Yugoslavia and its aftermath finally brought me around to the non-interventionist views that I have held ever since.  I base my current views on what is in the American interest and how justice obliges us to act towards other nations.      

If there were anything to this idea that Obama’s experience of growing up around and among Muslims (for a relatively shot period of his life in his earliest youth) would have an effect on his policy views, he would have to have policy views that were not virtually identical with every other conventional Democratic hawk.  

P.S.  Ross, Yglesias and Ambinder talk about Obama and the Muslim charge.

On the other hand, James, Chuck Norris has the good sense to stop making sequels of his old movies when he’s in his 60s, for which we can all be grateful.  He has voluntarily relegated himself to the infomercial and WorldNetDaily set, where we wish Sly would go.  Doesn’t that translate into some sort of political advantage for his favoured candidate?

Mike Huckabee recites from the warmonger hymnal, plus weird references to Jordan!  Why hawks have a problem with Huckabee, I will never understand.  Opponents of the war are the ones who should find Huckabee to be unacceptable.