In his anti-Giuliani article, Hadley Arkes helps back up my earlier post:

The Bush administration has been pervaded with pro-lifers in the agencies, the Department of Justice, and even the White House staff. And yet nothing in that force of pro-lifers has produced an administration willing to take initiatives in the pro-life cause [bold mine-DL]. Nor has there been any move, emanating from the White House, to enforce even the pro-life measures that have been enacted—including, most notably, the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, the act that cast the protections of the law on a child who survived an abortion. All this from a president who seems earnestly pro-life. Could we really expect more from a president who earnestly believes there is a right to abortion, with the decision finally left to the pregnant woman in collaboration with her doctor?

The cause of that “and yet…” observation is a failure to lead, or rather an unwillingness to lead on the part of the President, which is precisely the flaw that he sees in Giuliani’s position.  He also makes the pragmatic electoral case for backing Romney (he believes Romney to be genuine, whereas I think Romney wouldn’t know authenticity if it ran him over in the street), reinforcing the impression that is being created by the polls and the lackluster performance of a certain ex-actor that Romney is becoming the pro-lifers’ last-ditch hope against Giuliani. 

By the way, Prof. Arkes makes some excellent points, but is it really a good idea to liken the continuation of the GOP as the pro-life party to the Purges?  Goodness knows we already hear enough from outraged secularists and moderates about the oppressive grip of social conservatives and their schemes for domination–comparisons like this, however innocent their intent, don’t help combat these kinds of arguments.

Ross is right when he says this in response to Chait:

Romney hasn’t been giving speeches about how Mormon theology is consonant with Trinitarian Christianity. Instead, he’s been dodging those kind of questions, while giving speeches arguing that his religious beliefs lead him to the same policy conclusions about abortion, same-sex marriage, and so forth, that conservative Catholics and evangelicals tend to reach. He’s arguing that his positions on the issues are more important than their theological underpinnings, in other words, not the other way around.

As the Byron York piece on Romney related, the rare exception to this strategy of evasion took place when Romney thought he wasn’t being recorded and was being challenged very directly to embrace and display his religion.  One of the things that has irritated some Mormons is Romney’s reluctance to speak about his religion, combined with his rare attempts to smooth over the differences (as he did when he was interviewed by Stephanopoulos), since it has given them (and others) the impression that he is somehow embarrassed or ashamed to speak publicly about it.  He says that this is entirely untrue and is proud of his religion–just not so proud that he wants to tell you about it.  When Romney evades these questions or his supporters make lame arguments about how we’re not choosing a “theologian-in-chief,” it declares to religious conservatives that he thinks that his religion is actually irrelevant to his “values.”  In Romney’s case, this is not hard to believe, since he has been a lifelong Mormon and has only very recently discerned that his faith, into which others should not pry, authorises or inspires policy views that it had never inspired before.  At that point, being a “person of faith” becomes rather more like a box that must be checked rather than being the core of the man.

As I have said more than once, one of Romney’s difficulties with religious conservatives is that he appeals to them thanks to the logic Ross mentioned (values, not theology) when I assume that many religious conservatives think that it matters how you obtain and arrive at those “values” and how you ground them in your religious teachings.  This may not take precedence over everything, but the assumption Romney is making is that it doesn’t matter how he has arrived at sharing the same “values,” so long as he shares them.  Yet what made George Bush such a favourite of evangelicals is that they could identify with how he had arrived at his beliefs and his conclusions.  Perhaps this is an idiosyncratic objection on my part, but few things annoy me more than when people try to reduce witnessing a living faith and acting as leaven in the world to an adherence to a set of “values” and when they then give precedence to those “values” over actual doctrinal truths.  That is fundamentally what Romney’s candidacy represents, it seems antithetical to what religious conservatives claim to believe, and it is why I expect that his currently broad but shallow support will collapse.

There is an idea out there that Republicans want Clinton to be the Democratic nominee (supposedly because she is easier to defeat), and this may be the preference of some party leaders, but a lot of Republican voters apparently have a very different view.  Pew has a new poll showing that Obama leads the Republican choice for Democratic nominee, well ahead of Clinton.  On the other side, more Democrats would prefer to see a Giuliani or McCain-headed ticket for the GOP.  Why Obama leads the field among Republican voters is frankly something of a mystery to me, but only 11% of Republicans want to see a Clinton nomination.  If she were really so vulnerable as some say, those numbers should be a lot higher.

But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. ~David Brooks

Really?  I mean, really?  By whom?  Even some musicians in relatively conventional alternative rock (if you can call it that) have strong blues roots.  Take, for example, Chris Cornell (whose blues influences are more evident in his first solo album than in his work with different bands). 

Update: James shows that he is one of the seventeen people on earth who are familiar with Euphoria Morning (that’s the first solo album mentioned above).  Bravo!

If anything, Romney is the anti-Huckabee. There is not the slightest hint that his religion has constrained his politics in any way. ~Richard Cohen

Neither has truth, shame or conscience.  Why let religion get in the way when these have no power over him?

Congratulations to my readers:

Via Garance Franke-Ruta

Not that I put much stock in these measurements of blogs, but of the blogs and sites I checked only The American Scene, What’s Wrong With the World, Dan McCarthy’s blog, the group blog Exit Strategies and The New Atlantis receive the same result.  I hope this is at least partly a measure of the quality of Eunomia and not simply a function of my sometimes difficult and long-winded writing style.

I must have turned off the debate, or perhaps I was simply overwhelmed by stupefying boredom, by the time Chris Dodd gave a bad answer at last week’s debate.  He said (via Sullivan):

Secondly, this doesn’t mean — elections are only one note, as they say, in the tune of democracy. Be careful what you wish for. If there were totally free elections, in many of the countries we’re talking about today, the Islamic Jihad or the Islamic Brotherhood would win 85 percent of the vote.

This post is a pretty good summary of what was wrong with this statement, but let me just add a couple more points.  The question Dodd was answering was about Pakistan, where the specific groups Islamic Jihad and Al-Ikhwan do not exist.  There are Islamist parties in Pakistan and there are jihadists in Pakistan, as we all know, but in the context of talking about Pakistan Dodd’s answer was even more awful than it appears to be out of context.  Here I definitely agree with Hamid that Dodd is just lumping together every kind of Islamist no matter the country, which is the same sloppy analysis that gives rise of the nonsense term “Islamofascism” that I wrote about for my column in the 11/19 TAC.  Worse still, his answer contributes to this general sense of looming disaster that Washington cultivates to justify supporting Musharraf indefinitely, regardless of how destabilising Musharraf’s own rule has become.  If many Republicans have been obsessed with Tehran 1979 and “Iran’s 28-year war” against America, as the more fanatical of them see it, leading Democrats this year are not above invoking the spectre of the Shah to scare people into paralysis and an acceptance of aimless, dangerous Pakistan policy.  Call it “Carter’s Revenge.”    

Critics of democratisation, including myself, generally have a few reasons for urging caution and skepticism about democracy promotion as a foreign policy tool and as a foreign policy goal.  One is the argument from national interest, which is quite clear: promoting democratisation in a country that will lead to an increasingly hostile or uncooperative government is unwise.  Another is a pragmatic argument that tries to consider the welfare of the people in the country: democratisation can empower those forces in the society that are most likely to turn the instruments of mass politics into the power base of an illiberal and repressive system.  A related concern is that democratisation will be forced on a society too rapidly and it will end up falling back on pre-existing family and communal structures in political organisation, fragmenting and dividing the country along ethnic, sectarian or other lines.  Yet another is that democracy promotion in practice has little to do with cultivating institutions of representative government and civil society, but very often involves propping up hand-picked lackeys whose purpose is to align their countries with Washington’s economic and political objectives in a given region.  Unfortunately for many nations, this is frequently what democratisation actually means.

Forget vague rumours about alleged real estate kickbacks.  The real rumour problem Obama is having is the (false) claim that he is a Muslim.  From the Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden’s blog:

Mrs and Mrs Kerns spoke glowingly of Mr Obama’s speeches, his intelligence and his education. They appeared to care not a whit about his colour. But they won’t vote for him. Why? They think he might be a Muslim.

Now this is something I’ve heard all over the country – in Stanhope, Iowa; in Columbia, South Carolina; in Bedford, New Hampshire to name just three places that spring to mind. The Obama campaign realises it’s not going to go away and they’re going to have to deal with it. But once something like this is out there on the internet, it’s not going to be easy to put the genie back in the bottle.

This is what I was talking about last week.  For every pundit and journalist who thinks it is wonderful how Obama will supposedly “bridge” the gaps between America and the rest of the world, you probably have a hundred people who not only don’t see him this way but who are dead-set against him because they perceive him to be too close, or even connected to, the Islamic world.  (This may be the result of deliberate campaigns to portray him as a Muslim, or simply the result of confusion, ignorance or a deduction from his middle name.)  Obama, who is probably the most active candidate on the Democratic side in “outreach” to evangelical Christians, is now in a position where he has to dispel doubts about “his religion” when it isn’t even his religion.  As we already know, this false perception of Obama has been promoted and encouraged by chain e-mails describing Obama as a Muslim, and we have seen in poll after poll the only thing a presidential candidate could be that is more unpopular than a Muslim is an atheist.  It is the political kiss of death for a presidential candidate, and this idea has apparently gained a surprising currency and wide acceptance.

Then there are posts about Obama that might seem to be helpful and positive for him, stressing his importance for America’s standing in the world, that are actually going to reinforce the false preconceptions many people have about Obama:

Barack Obama represents “the only hope for the US in the Muslim world,” according to Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Because Obama’s father was a Muslim, he “could lead a reconciliation between the Muslim countries and the US.”  

Even if that were true (and I don’t agree with this kind of thinking at all), every time someone reminds voters that Obama has Muslim ancestors he is that much less likely to win.  It shouldn’t matter what his absentee father’s religion was, and it shouldn’t even matter what his stepfather’s religion was, but it seems as if it does matter.

Noted by Reid Wilson and delighting the Kossacks, New Jersey Rep. Mike Ferguson has announced his retirement from the House, bringing the total of open, currently Republican-held seats for the cycle to 17.  Presently, the Democrats have only six open seats to hold.  Including Ferguson,  at least eight  of the districts that the GOP needs to hold are much more competitive and more likely to change hands, and the Democrats face no similar challenge with their seats.

Wilson concludes:

A Kean bid would be the GOP’s best hope in keeping a district that gave President Bush just a 3,000-vote margin over Al Gore in 2000, and a wider 6-point edge in 2004. Still, the loss of a seasoned campaigner like Ferguson is another blow to the NRCC, which can’t take much more punishment these days.

Update: Chris Cilizza adds that Kean Jr. has definitely ruled out a House run for next year, which puts NJ-07 well within the Democrats’ reach.  The Democrats, meanwhile, are going to have a candidate who nearly won the district last time.  Wilson has more.