George Ajjan spoke about Ron Paul at his local county GOP nominating convention in mid-September.  He writes about that meeting and another New Jersey conservative convention here.

Not to jinx anything before the series is over, but I wouldn’t be much of an Astros fan living in the Southside of Chicago if I didn’t take a moment to enjoy the suffering and humiliation of the Cubs at the hands of the Diamondbacks thus far.  In Game 3, Arizona leads the Cubs 3-0 in the 4th, and it’s a best-of-five series.  It’s never over till it’s over, but it appears that the Cubs will not be advancing.  This is a very good thing. 

Update: It’s bottom of the seventh, and the Diamondbacks lead 4-1. Now bottom of the ninth, Arizona leading 5-1.  I think we can look forward to an all-Southwest NL Championship.  Rockies win in 5.

It’s not clear to me what advantage the NM Republicans gain by permitting a fratricidal Senate primary, but it seems that chatter that Steve Pearce (NM-02) plans to run for Domenici’s seat against Wilson is true.  Pearce’s district is much more solidly Republican, so if he were to somehow win the nomination his House seat would be safe.  With Wilson’s district, it is not at all clear that a rookie candidate could fend off another strong Democratic challenge.  The district has been trending away from the Republicans, and in a strong Democratic year an open seat there would be a likely pick-up for the Dems. 

Pearce stands a poor chance of competing statewide, and I think he must know this.  Pearce pursuing the Senate nomination would be more of a statement about intra-party control, an attempt to rout the moderate Republicans who have called the shots lo these many decades.  My guess is that some local conservatives want to oust Wilson come what may in the autumn.  Some of us back home never liked the way she was foisted on the district by Domenici, and now that he is departing the scene the knives may come out to get rid of a moderate squish that many Republicans in the First District never wanted.  Of course, it’s perfectly fair to note that the NM GOP doesn’t really have many other viable candidates for the Senate race.

The idea that Schumer might encourage Diane Denish to run is remarkable.  Denish gives the impression of being a nice enough woman, and would probably make an average candidate.  In a head-to-head match-up with Wilson, it’s not at all obvious that Denish would come out ahead.  Udall is probably their best bet.  I had all but forgotten about our mayor, Marty Chavez, whose last attempt at gaining statewide glory ended in failure.  Chavez enjoys reasonably good popularity in Albuquerque, but he has not been able to translate that into statewide appeal.  As I have said before, Madrid would be a disastrous choice.  In a big Democratic year, it might not matter who the nominee is, but that’s what some of us thought about the House race last year and Madrid proved us wrong.   

Update: Apparently, Udall will not run.  That seat has already become a lot more competitive.

Commenting on this, Alex Massie writes:

I’m as glib as the next clown but this just seems, well, glib and just another opportunistic stick with which to beat the Bush administration.

Mostly, Sullivan’s post seems to be a criticism of European governments rather than Bush.  I agree that Sullivan’s claim that Turkey is “[p]erhaps our most important ally” is strange.  The British don’t seem to get a lot of credit these days for their solidarity with us.  Turkey certainly remains a strategically important ally, but the current stance of its government on a possible U.S. troop withdrawal into Turkey would suggest that it is not our “most important ally.”  The worsening of U.S.-Turkish relations is lamentable in some ways, and it will be one of the long-term costs of the invasion of Iraq.  Some of the worsening of relations was the fault of our government and entirely avoidable, and some of it comes from internal political changes in Turkey.  Turkish opinion of the U.S. is extremely unfavourable right now, and that is going to shape Turkish politics and their regional policy for years to come.  Turkish interests will also continue to diverge from our own if we insist on confrontation with Iran while Turkey and Iran pursue bilateral trade and energy cooperation.  We can either begin adjusting to such realities of a post-invasion Near East, or we can watch previously solid allies drift away from us.  Washington’s enthusiasm for Turkish EU entry, meanwhile, has simply stiffened the spine of the opponents of such a move and associated the issue with the projection of American influence.  

However, delaying EU entry for Turkey is hardly “myopic.”  It is at the very least an example of prudent caution, especially after member states have been absorbing the costs of the last rounds of expansion.  Yes, accession talks have been going on for years, decades even, and they may well continue for years and decades more if all parties still want to pursue it, because there remain many serious problems with the way Turkey is governed that preclude its membership in the EU.  I have no affection for the EU, but it does have its standards and it means to keep them–that is the reality of the situation.  One also need not subscribe to theories of Muslim takeovers of Europe to recognise what a huge political change in the makeup of the EU it would be to bring in a nation of 60 million people.  Extending an even-more expanded Europe’s borders to Iraq and Iran also presents security risks that a great many Europeans reasonably don’t want to take on. 

There is some hint of criticism for Bush in Sullivan’s remarks that Turkey has been “left hanging in Iraq,” which is odd since Washington has tried to placate Turkey as much as possible on the question of the PKK.  As the article Sullivan links to shows, the AKP government has been gaining in popularity in Kurdish areas and has taken a more conciliatory stance towards expressions of Kurdish identity, which in turn has made the PKK less of a real political threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity.  The rise of the AKP has fortunately to some extent blunted the issue of the PKK presence in northern Iraq, and its election victory has chastened the military and undermined the latter’s influence in the country.  That may or may not be to Turkey’s ultimate benefit, but it has reduced somewhat the tensions over a possible military incursion. 

Gordon Brown has said he will not call a general election this autumn.

The PM said he wanted a chance to show the country his “vision for change” and to develop his policies further. ~BBC News

Via Alex Massie

Considering the talk less than two weeks ago that Labour regarded playing up the possibility of a snap election as a smart move that might end up destroying the Tories, the decision is remarkable.  As Nelson recounted before the Blackpool conference, a “Labour insider” told him:

We want this to be the end for the Tories. The talk about an early election is a gamble for us: if it focuses their minds, they may unify. But my money is on them thinking they have already lost, and starting to kick each other to death. 

Apparently they have kicked the habit of kicking one another to death.  As it happens, they unified and they have given the impression that they think they can win an election (they may be bluffing, but they are bluffing very convincingly).  Massie points us to this to explain Brown’s decision.  The move was described by the political editor of SkyNews as “one of the worst blows to a serving prime minister that I can remember in quarter of a century of covering politics.”  So that’s pretty bad, then, since that period would also include such impressive disasters as Thatcher’s poll tax fiasco and Black Wednesday.  Brown can take heart–it’s just “one of” the worst, not the worst overall.  

No general election means two more years during which pundits and pols can bash Brown for being an “unelected” leader.  Granted, no one should underestimate Tory capacity for self-destruction and fratricide, but something seems different this time.  It is irrational, but people respond well to shows of confidence regardless of substance or policy (this is why I’m afraid that Americans remained supportive of Mr. Bush long after reason should have told them to flee from him in droves).  Delaying the general election might have been technically the right tactical move, if there were going to be significant losses, but the symbolism of it is deadly for any ruling party.  Brown has effectively declared to all that he has no confidence in his party or his government, and this just a short time after he and his partisans apparently believed themselves to be on the verge of an historic knockout.     

It appears that my earlier post about “the lost leader” was timed correctly–it was just aimed at the wrong leader.

Update: It’s not just marginal districts, but the entire country that has turned on Labour.  This may be only temporary, but the Tories have enjoyed a 14-point swing to pull 3 ahead of Labour in the space of one week.  I know that public opinion can be fickle, but this is ridiculous. 

Forsyth writes at Spectator‘s Coffee House blog:

He is being denounced as weak by all and sundry while his reputation for straight-talking is in tatters. Never again will his opponents cower in front of him.

Opinion at The Guardian is no more favourable:

This will prompt a reassessment of the prime minister that will not be to his advantage. The one thing that everyone, friend or foe, reckoned that they knew about Mr Brown was that he was brilliant at politics. Whatever else they have thought about him, his enemies have always regarded him as awesome at the game. His allies have often described him as a grandmaster of political chess, a strategist so clever that he is able to look ahead a dozen moves. And yet by this weekend, the Prime Minister had got himself into a terrible position on the board. Here was a grandmaster who had managed to put himself into check.

In the same spirit as some of my remarks above, Nelson has dubbed today Brown’s “Black Saturday.”

The Scotsmaneditorialises that Brown has been “irreparably damaged.”

While we’re having fun rummaging through old Brooks columns, this one stands out for contradicting the last one pretty impressively.  Instead of being the cause of Republican collapse, all those “creedalcons,” as my Scene colleague Matt Feeney has dubbed them, were the lifeblood of the party–in 2005.  Remember the “clamoring of creeds” that were smothering the Burkeans?  Evidently, two years ago–before everything went truly, horribly wrong–all the clamoring, factionalism and ideology were good for the GOP:

Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they’ve found one faction to agree with.

There’s also this:

This feuding has meant that the meaning of conservatism is always shifting. Once, Republicans were isolationists. Now most Republicans, according to a New York Times poll, believe the U.S. should try to change dictatorships into democracies when it can. Meanwhile, 78 percent of Democrats believe the U.S. should not try to democratize authoritarian regimes.

Moreover, it’s not only feuding that has been the key to conservative success – it’s also what the feuding’s about. When modern conservatism became aware of itself, conservatives were so far out of power it wasn’t even worth thinking about policy prescriptions. They argued about the order of the universe, and how the social order should reflect the moral order. Different factions looked back to different philosophers – Burke, Aquinas, Hayek, Hamilton, Jefferson – to define what a just society should look like.

That first passage about interventionist foreign policy is notable, since it drives home that it wasn’t the ideologues pushing intervention alone who have brought the GOP to its current lowly state, but it was also a majority of Republicans themselves who bought into this nonsense.  Had there been more instinctive, temperamental Burkeans, it would not have been so easy to persuade so many Republicans that promoting democracy on the other side of the world was a realistic or desirable end.  The GOP has certainly driven away many temperamental conservatives, but what the last few years have shown us is that, depressingly, there weren’t that many Burkeans left to be driven away in the first place.  Even more depressingly, those poll results indicate that the opinions of most Republicans and Democrats on such issues can be moulded and transformed based on little more than the partisan affiliation of the administration carrying out the policy.  Ten years ago, I bet the results would have been almost exactly reversed when the other party was in the White House.

Respondents, including myself, have been so caught up in talking about Burke-this and ideology-that, that we have neglected to mention that the column doesn’t actually explain very well why the GOP’s support collapsed.  As it happens, the policies that have so disgusted people with the GOP have not been shared equally among the different “creeds” identified by Brooks.  There were scarcely any national policies enacted that might be traced back to the “free market” or “religious” conservatives.  NCLB, Medicare Part D and amnesty were all the fruit of “compassionate” conservatism, so called, and good old-fashioned attempted vote-buying with earmarks.  We know who was most responsible for Iraq, and it cannot be pinned on the libertarians and the “theocons,” though many of them went along with it.  It is the backlash against the costs of these policies, and, of course, the body blow to Mr. Bush’s administration that followed Katrina (whether or not pinning the blame on the administration for the whole thing is fair) and the debacle of Iraq, especially in 2006, that have put the GOP in its present condition.  

It wasn’t the tax cuts that alienated your average temperamental or “dispositional” conservative, but the egregious expansion of government and spending that contributed to building up massive amounts of debt and future liabilities.  Brooks neglected to note the role that Mr. Bush’s immigration follies had in alienating core conservatives.  Strong opposition to ESCR has certainly not been a great position electorally, but in general religious conservatives’ adamant defense of life is not losing the GOP that much and routinely brings in tens of millions of voters who might otherwise probably never want to be associated with the party.  No, it has been the combination of “compassion,” big government conservatism, Iraq and, of course, mega-incompetence that explain why the “dispositional” conservatives and others have abandoned the party.

Well, I guess everyone can change his mind over time, but what a change the last column was from this (via Yglesias):

The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy [bold mine-DL], have learned from centuries of conservative teaching – from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek – to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning [bold mine-DL].

So people in the administration are deeply immersed in the wisdom of the conservative intellectual tradition when they’re working on Africa policy, so they must just forget about it the rest of the time.  That makes sense, right?  Er, no.

Then again, maybe Brooks has a point.  There certainly never was any extensive “technocratic planning” done by this administration, and no one would accuse them of even trying to understand complex societies.  There are some who would love to attribute this to the mythical conspiracy whereby anti-government conservatives govern badly to prove that government can’t work, but it really is a case of this administration not knowing what they’re doing.  (It would also help this theory if there were a lot of conservatives in the administration.)

Give Paul Krugman a prize.  He has managed to make me say something in defense of Bill Kristol.  Krugman writes:

In anticipation of the veto, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, had this to say: “First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it’s a good idea. I’m happy that the president’s willing to do something bad for the kids.” Heh-heh-heh.

Most conservatives are more careful than Mr. Kristol. They try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren’t bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don’t think it’s a problem.

I don’t know whether Bill Kristol actually cares about sick or hungry children.  Maybe he doesn’t.  If his foreign policy arguments are anything to go by, he isn’t terribly bothered by children who get blown up by cluster bombs.  But, as I said, this is a defense.  What Kristol said was a joke at the expense of liberals who make everything a matter of protecting “the children.”  It doesn’t matter whether the policy in question will actually protect or help “the children”–what matters is the treacly, manipulative deceit that “the children” are receiving the help they so “desperately” need.  The policy might very well harm children, but these people will say that it is done “for the children,” much in the same way that Kristol’s foreign policy arguments advance continuous warfare as a boon and a glorious gift for the people in the war zones.  Therefore, when we hear appeals made in the name of “the children” today, it summons up a certain cynicism and an urge to mock the sanctimonious frauds (that would be Krugman) who lecture us on compassion, since it has been the experience of conservatives and even of people like Bill Kristol to be treated to the moral blackmail that if you oppose some ghastly government intervention you hate children (much as Mr. Bush once lectured opponents of his ghastly war that to oppose “liberation” and democracy promotion was to be racist).  Someone with a sense of irony, or indeed a sense of humour would get all this.  Krugman has neither.

I would add to this that Mr. Bush’s veto, in the wake of his own massive entitlement expansions and his general reluctance to veto anything at any time, is politically just about the most idiotic thing he could have ever done.  He cannot lift his pen to veto any piece of shady earmarked appropriations or expansion of government that benefits corporate interests, but he will be sure to resist S-CHIP because he supposedly cares so deeply about fiscal restraint.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.  Heather Wilson is such a non-conservative and terrible member of the Republican caucus that a National Review contributor and I can agree on something for a change.  It is strange that the outrage against Wilson’s decided lack of conservatism (she is pro-choice, pro-amnesty and, of course, pro-war) has only come now over her rebellion over S-CHIP, but I guess it’s better late than never.  Wilson’s reason for backing S-CHIP really is very simple: she barely survived her last re-election, and the next one would not be any easier if she voted with the White House on what will undoubtedly be a popular program.  Especially if she plans to run for Senate, she has to have something she can brag about in a statewide race in New Mexico, where Democrats and independents outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.