A GOP victory is not absolutely out of the question, of course, but getting there would take a forward-looking agenda, unparalleled message discipline, a strict focus on the millions of independent voters, an innovative candidate and campaign and a lot of luck.

In other words, don’t bet on it. 

————

A successful Republican candidate in Ohio will have learned how to articulate a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland [bold mine-DL]. Without the support of the anxious working class, Ohio will also turn deep blue. And so will the United States. ~Frank Luntz

Now where have I heard this suggestionbefore? 

It is in the realm of possibility that the GOP could put forward a candidate who could make this sort of pitch to Ohioans and other Midwesterners, but the likely spokesmen for such an appeal are either not running (Pawlenty) or are trailing badly in all polls (Huckabee, The Other Thompson, Hunter).  Fred has been dusting off the old anti-Washington populist lines, but when it comes to policy he seems to offer nothing that could be called, whether as a compliment or criticism, innovative.  Fred’s popularity is the result of a longing for the tried and true path of down-home elite-bashing that has served the GOP, whose leaders are about as elite as they get, so well, but he has never made a name for himself in pushing actual populist policies with respect to trade or economic policy.  A former lobbyist and trial lawyer, Fred is also personally a terrible torch-bearer for the GOP in the Midwest. 

Romney’s message stresses concepts of opportunity and innovation, but his economic views are those of the corporate executive and as master of the downsizing, streamlining “turnaround.”  There is probably no worse candidate for the GOP in Ohio than Romney, who embodies everything about corporate America and Republican free trade policies that a lot of voters in Ohio (and elsewhere)currently despise.  Nominating Romney (which Republicans are not going to do in any case) would be a signal of just how far out of touch the party had become.  His nomination would probably be a prelude to epic political disaster.

Giuliani and McCain poll better in named match-ups with Democratic contenders than the other two “leading” candidates, but on trade and economic policy they have nothing to offer Ohio, Pennsylvania and other Midwestern states.  Leave aside their foreign policy craziness for a moment, and remember (if you somehow had forgotten) that these two are the strongest pro-immigration advocates in the field.  That will not, already does not, play well with Republican voters, and it likely will not play very well with the electorate in Ohio, either.  Needless to say, the state that went for Bush in ’04 at least partly thanks to the gay “marriage” ban referendum is not going to be a good fit for Giuliani. 

The Republicans need to be able to compete in Ohio and Midwestern states like Ohio, and they appear to be gearing up to nominate a candidate that will make them relatively more competitive in either the South (Fred), California (McCain), the Northeast (Giuliani) or nowhere in particular (Romney).  They have apparently learned nothing from the close call in 2004 and the repudiation of 2006.  Quite apart from tone-deafness on the war, many Republicans seem to be of the mind that if they say the words “low unemployment” and “recovery” often enough that it will persuade all those voters who feel real economic insecurity (even though they are employed) that all is well. 

Bill Kristol’s latest exercise in optimism in place of analysis is the latest to mistake economic indicators for political reality.  It might be worth noting that the recession had ended by the middle of 1992, but that didn’t mean much to those still feeling the effects of the recession.  Likewise, we may have been enjoying a reasonably good multi-year recovery, but that raises the questions: good for whom and how widely distributed have the fruits of the recovery been? 

Indeed, the endless chirping of certain pundits about ever-higher indexes in the stock market may have the opposite effect of the one intended by the boosters of the “Bush recovery.”  Far from persuading those who are anxious about the state of the economy in their part of the country, it simply reinforces their sense that the interests of finance and corporations do not seem to coincide with their own.  It persuades them that the last few years have been quite good for some, and rather less spectacular for everyone else, which makes them much more receptive to economic populist messages that purport to explain this gap and propose alleged remedies for it.  The mentality that makes Kristol’s article possible is the same one that will send the GOP to an impressive defeat next year.

It isn’t exactly the redeployment Warner and Lugar want.  American forces may not be going to the cooler heights of Kurdistan anytime soon, but it seems likely that some Iraqi parliamentarians will be taking their holidays there.  They did already give up their July vacation time and have still managed to go nowhere with any of the legislative agenda before them.  The worst thing that can be said of the Iraqi parliament is that it is irrelevant whether or not it is in session in August or at any time thereafter.  The final results in terms of legislation and political reconciliation will be roughly the same. 

It should be noted, however, that the Iraqi parliament’s failure to pass any part of its legislative agenda (e.g., de-Baathification law, hydrocarbon law, provincial elections, etc.) is much like the larger Iraqi “failure” to build a functioning self-governing political system: success requires Iraq to be radically different in its ethnic and sectarian makeup from the way that Iraq actually is.  The entire enterprise has been set up to fail, and under these circumstances condemning Iraqi failure or Iraqi stubbornness or whatever it is that opportunistic pols would now like to blame for their failure to serve the interests of the American people is a bit like blaming the rain for being wet.  It may feel good to say it, but it is ridiculous.  The old knock on the Great Society seems applicable here: if you wanted to create a political system designed to maximise communal hatred, violence and non-cooperation, you could not have done much better than the government has done in Iraq.  (This is not to say that democratisation in Iraq could have been done if it had been handled differently, but it might not have resulted in such a terrific explosion of violence and deepening communal resentment.) 

The ’05 elections sharply politicised ethnicity and sectarian identity, encouraging the communalist violence that was already beginning, and the parties that prevailed in those elections reinforced and nurtured those divisions (divisions that are vital for their continued hold on power).  Now the government and parliament, which had its origins in this rather dreadful process, cannot find any consensus and so can pass no major laws, since there is virtually no sufficient minimal degree of common identity and shared priorities among the members.  This is a snapshot of the fatal flaw of Iraq as a “nation-state” that has explained much of its history in the 20th century.  As I’m sure others have said before, since there is no nation in Iraq, there will tend to be a great emphasis on the state as a substitute for a lack of any organic unity or natural affinities.  

In less obviously despotic systems, the state’s role in a multiethnic society is also bound to increase, either in its role of policing communal quarrels or as an instrument used in compelling a certain degree of good relations between different groups and through an institutional apparatus designed to protect minority interests.  It seems plausible that social solidarity will decrease as diversity increases, but it is by no means assured that the state will become either smaller or less intrusive as a result.  Lacking anything else, multiethnic societies will find their common loyalty in the institutions of the state or the state will use those institutions to coerce obedience of the different groups (or these societies will have some combination of the two).  The more “successful” multiethnic states have, in most cases, divvied up power among the different groups in some fashion or have attempted to act as a supposedly unbiased mediator of the different groups’ interests (this is the Austrian model, at least when it actually functioned properly).  Whenever the central state has become too closely identified with one group, the state tends either to resort to repressive measures against the increasingly alienated members of other groups (this has been the case with Iraq), or it will seek (usually in vain) to accommodate the demands of the other ethnicities, which can result in the complete breakup of the state (especially when, after a defeat in war, the central state has lost a large part of its authority with all member nations).  Lost on the democratists, as usual, is any awareness that it is mass democracy itself that makes imitation of the Austrian model all but impossible and makes it more likely that multiethnic societies will tend to suffer the fate of Iraq or Ivory Coast.

Jim Gilmore has dropped out of the presidential race, citing inability to raise funds.  Unlike every other public appearance he has made, he neglected to mention in his announcement that he was governor of Virginia on 9/11. 

And then there were nine.  (We are counting on Fred to get the field back to a nice round 10.)

I have already done most of the commenting on Mormonism that I am going to do, but since the topic has come up again in Ross’ latest bloggingheads and prompted a reply to Ross’ request for a clarification from Prof. Fox, a longtime friend of Eunomia, I thought I might add a few comments.  Prof. Fox writes:

For example: Matt Yglesias claims in the Bloggingheads video that the Mormon church teaches that “the New World, in pre–Columbian times, was dominated by two vast rival empires.” (Those would be “the Nephites,” the people who carried on the family name and traditions of an early prophet named Nephi, and “the Lamanites,” a group named after his brother and enemy, Laman.) While the history of Book of Mormon interpretation over the past 180 years is actually pretty complicated, the basic facts are that Matt here is correctly describing what most Mormons who read the book believed…up until about 20-30 years ago, that is. The Book of Mormon itself never suggests the existence of massive, continent-wide, roaming empires; rather, serious readers have come to recognize that in fact the book talks about a couple (or actually more than a couple) pretty densely populated yet nonetheless localized tribes, and nearly everything presented in the book as fact takes place, according to its own narrative, within an area that a person on foot could cross within week, if not less. This is what we Mormons called the “limited geography” thesis: specifically, that the book isn’t telling us the whole history of the Native Americans (which many Mormons admittedly thought the primary purpose of the book was for decades), but rather telling the story of some relatively restricted groups, whose story God thought important enough to make certain it would be preserved and brought forth in our day.

However, the official LDS version of the Book of Mormon has this passage (Helaman 3:8):

And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea ^awest to the sea east.

And again, Helaman 11:20:

And thus it did come to pass that the people of Nephi began to prosper again in the land, and began to build up their waste places, and began to multiply and spread, even until they did ^acover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east.

There may be ways to reconcile this language with the “limited geography” thesis (perhaps the land between the two seas is exceedingly small?), and I won’t pretend that I am anything close to being thoroughly versed in these matters, but it appears at first glance that the earlier prevailing view of vast territories is one that seems to have some direct support in a central LDS scriptural text. 

Incidentally, there are other things that will leap out at the reader of the online version of the Book of Mormon (especially since they are hyperlinked).  For instance, there are several references to weapons made of steel.  Leaving aside the technological question, this creates another problem.  The official site does the cross-referencing work for you, pointing you to citations from the Bible that (in the traditional King James language) also refer to steel.  This seems a strange thing to draw attention to, since these passages about steel weapons from the Bible are English mistranslations of the adjective for a bow made of bronze (toxon chalkoun in the Septuagint versions of 2 Sam. 22:35 and Ps. 18:34/LXX 17:34), which tends to confirm that the language was taken directly from the King James mistranslation rather than echoing the content of the Old Testament books to which it is being compared. 

These are probably familiar arguments to Prof. Fox and others, and they may therefore be as tiresome to them as shocked secularist discoveries of contradictions between the Gospel accounts are to me.  Nonetheless, if a Mormon defense of the historicity of their scriptures’ claims is to persuade anyone, it will need to sort out these contradictions.

Until this week I thought we were entering the last stages of the Iraq war.  Roughly 40 percent to 60 percent of Republican senators have privately given up on the war. Senior G.O.P. officials have told President Bush that they are unwilling to see their party destroyed by this issue. ~David Brooks

The latter have a funny way of showing their unwillingness.  Had these officials actually been unwilling to let this happen at a time when their unwillingness might have counted for something, they could have started impressing on Mr. Bush and the Congressional GOP that the war was breaking the party last year or even the year before.  This was already happening, but it was vehemently denied by the “we are winning” crowd.  However, as far as much of the GOP was concerned, 2005 was the year of purple thumbs and impending victory (not to mention all those Iraqi cell phone users) and 2006 was an election year where it usually did not do to campaign against the President (even if few wanted him to campaign on their behalf).  Now that they are faced with the equivalent of either Stevensonian failure or Wilsonian meltdown, no wonder these officials have become so “unwilling.”  Last year, the official party message was that the public was not against the war, but the mismanagement of the war.  The official line was that a Democratic majority that pushed for the end of the war would be repudiated by The Land Formerly Known As Bush Country.  Last year party officials were certainly anxious about the war, but most didn’t actually believe that the war would destroy the GOP.  They also believed that they would suffer only a mild rebuke at the polls (and there were more than a few people who cited the 1998 elections, in which Democrats unusually gained seats, as the model they half-expected 2006 to follow).  They have not had a good track record recently.

This other figure on Republican Senators is a bit surprising to me, since I’m pretty sure only about 30% of the Senate GOP (no more than maybe 14 members) has given any real indication of dissatisfaction with the administration’s current plan.  They are so few that you can remember them all by name: Warner, Voinovich, Lugar, Hagel, Collins, Snowe, Coleman, Bennett, Smith, Domenici, Alexander, Gregg, Sununu, and (if you are really generous) Brownback.  It seems bizarre to me to give up privately on a war and then go through all the motions and give the speeches required to keep the same war going.  The upper limit of this figure means that for every one Republican Senator speaking out against the current plan and in favour of the ISG recommendations, there could be one who believes more or less the same things but refuses to declare his position.

One reason why there is a “deadlock,” as Brooks puts it, is that the 60 or so members who support redeployment and the ISG report occupy a position that essentially favours the continuation of the war for an indeterminate period of time.  They represent a distinct, but not significantly different, position from the “surge”-supporting McLiebermanites to the extent that they accept every bit of conventional wisdom about Iraq (beginning with the story that “we have vital interests there” and getting worse from there) and actually provide enormous political cover for the “surge” supporters by advancing an argument that the U.S. presence in Iraq must continue in some form.  By disagreeing simply over the how and the where of this continuation of our presence, the “centrist” and “realist” position–which, in my opinion, is neither of these things–effectively empowers the most vehement war supporters to continue in the current course, since the latter can continue to argue that their approach is the better method.  Lacking any substantive disagreement about the importance of Iraq to U.S. interests and in the absence of an alternative that does not revert back to a 2006-style priority of force protection (i.e., the very kind of deployment some of these same people were criticising for its failure to provide security for Iraqis), this ISG-loving “centrism” is in its way as bad and objectionable as the “comprehensive reform” “centrism” was when it came to immigration.  As with the immigration bill, Iraq “centrism” is obnoxious and unsuccessful because it combines what might be called the worst of both worlds: it offers no chance of resolving any of the things that the “surge” is also failing to resolve, but neither does it offer a way out of Iraq for our soldiers.  Instead of “going long” or “going home” (which are, to my mind, the only coherent positions available) this muddled middle embraces “going round and round.”  That the “centrists” on either side of the aisle cannot even manage to work together on their pointless agenda adds just the perfect touch of incompetence.

You might call me a pessimist on the glory of democratic Kurdistan.  Therefore, I am not exactly won over by this sort of talk:

If we rescue Kurdistan, moreover, it does retrieve a sliver of the original hope.

They will be free of Saddam; they will be a Muslim democracy deeply grateful to the United States; they will be a Sunni society that is not hostile to the West; their economy could boom; their freedoms could flourish further. The Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope for some Persians who want to live in a free society and lack an obvious regional role model [bold mine-DL]. I fear, alas, that Arab culture is simply immune to modern democratic norms – at least for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discourage democrats or liberals [ed.–so we should discourage them?]; but that we should have no illusions about their viability in Arab society. Mercifully, the Middle East is not all Arab dysfunction. The Turks, the Jews, the Kurds and the Persians offer much hope.

Note that Kurdistan is apparently in need of “rescuing.”  From whom?  Oh, yes, the Turks.  But not just the Turks–it is apparently in need of rescue from its own regional overlords.  That makes all this talk about rescuing Kurdistan seem a bit bizarre–if we must rescue Kurdistan from both Turk and Kurd, the “rescue” mission would appear to be as futile and senseless as the “model of transformation” theory.  The statement quoted above is also riddled with the subjunctive, ever the mood of the optimist: these things might happen and it could lead to something better.  Well, okay, there are always many different possibilities, but are any of these proposed outcomes likely?  Optimists are great ones to talk about possibilities, but seem decidedly less curious about finding out which ones are more probable than others.  Supposing that Turks and Kurds can somehow “work it out” and the massing Turkish forces on the northern Iraqi border are just out for a summer hike, isn’t Turkey (at least according to its boosters) already supposedly something like a “regional role model”?  Wasn’t the point of democratising Iraq that it was a predominantly Arab country and would therefore be a beacon (or whatever they were calling it back then) to reformers in other Arab states?  Wasn’t Turkey considered less suitable as a model for reform because Arabs and other non-Turks remembered with some resentment the Ottoman yoke?  Since we’re pretending that Turkey is some sort of free society–unless you want to, you know, speak freely–I suppose we can also pretend that these previous objections never mattered, and that the rest of the region will take inspiration from Turks (whom the other nations dislike or resent) and the Kurds (whom most of the other nations look down on).  Let the rescue begin! 

Additionally, this is a fascinating distinction between Arabs and everybody else, and it is as close to full-on essentialism as I think I have ever seen Sullivan endorse.  (Ross is appropriately skeptical of the promise of the Kurdish Eden.)  I see that Sullivan is talking about “Arab culture,” but he speaks about “Arab culture” as if it were somehow so thoroughly different from the cultures of other Near Eastern peoples as to have no meaningful relationship with them.  Especially when it comes to other largely Muslim nations, this distinction becomes even more tenuous.  What is there about Kurds that makes their culture more amenable to liberal democracy than Arab culture?  The differences are not as great as one might suppose.  It is easy to see why. 

The Kurds’ “stateless” existence has meant that they, perhaps more than others that have had a national state(s) of their own, have melded and adopted more cultural norms of their neighbours than others.  This is also not simply a question of shared culture among Muslims, but of shared culture among all peoples of the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.  The distinctions between the different nations should certainly not and really cannot be overlooked, but Western observers’ rediscovered confidence in understanding the importance of ethnicity in foreign affairs has become a bit overzealous.  The trouble with Arab culture, as Sullivan seems to be telling it, is that it is the product of Arabs, and there’s simply nothing to be done with Arabs.  The Kurds, on the other hand, well, these are people you can work with….It doesn’t actually make a lot of sense.  Are the structures of Kurdish social and family life so radically different from those of their neighbours that they are not likely to suffer from all of the same political pathologies?  

In the past, certain optimists believed that some of the biggest problems in the Near East were a lack of democracy and the absence of a robust civil society.  Fix those problems, and things would begin going the right way–the region would be transformed!  Now other optimists (haven’t we learned by now to stop being optimistic?) wish to tell us about the Kurdish (or Turkish or “Persian”) exception to the Near Eastern rule.  It turns out, they tell us, that the Near Eastern rule is actually just an Arab rule.  Even though the new proposed “arc of hope” does absolutely nothing to address the original “swamp” question that encouraged all of the original nonsense, and even though it means that the roots of the problem are even deeper and even less easily remedied, if they can be at all, this is supposed to be some consolation.

Sullivan ends his post with a rationale for his position:

It seems to me we should be investing in those places that have a chance, rather than further antagonizing those regions that have yet to develop any politics but violence, paranoia and graft.

Well, all right, but by that standard–at least according to some the latest evidence from Kurdistan–we should be clearing out of Kurdistan.  Indeed, using that standard, we should be investing our resources more heavily in Chile and Thailand than we put into in any country between the Tauros and the Hindu Kush.

Someone writes to Sullivan:

Liberals are instinctively opposed to racial pride, nationalism, religious bigotry, and leader-worship–and we saw it in spades with George Bush and Bushism.

After all, if you don’t count 20th century progressive support for eugenics and sterilisation policies, the French Revolution (or, for that matter, almost any 19th century national movement), 19th and 20th century liberal nationalism, the Kulturkampf in Germany and Austria, WWI, and the adulation bestowed on FDR, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King (the last three mostly posthumously), when have liberals ever been associated with any of those things?  Arguably, left-liberals today show fewer signs of some of these past liberal enthusiasms, but that would show this claim of “instinctive” opposition to be rather hollow.

Intensive Arabic has been going pretty well, but as we are now on Day 18 of 45 I have started to feel a little run down.  In fact, after reading a short article about a Dubai Islamic studies graduate student today, I just so happened to find a UAE dirham in my pocket that had been given to me in change for my tea earlier that day.  The single dirham coin is the same shape and colour as a quarter, so it might easily pass for one if the cashier didn’t look closely enough.  When I first saw it, I thought I had started hallucinating Arabic writing on money.  That may give you a sense of my state of mind.  The good news  is that I can make out everything on the coin.

And those were the polite ones, who were otherwise impressed with Obama. “I can’t imagine if he were informed he would come before 10,000 people and say what he said,” says New Jersey Education Association President Joyce Powell. ~Ruth Marcus

This is to misunderstand Obama, as Marcus notes.  It isn’t as if Obama doesn’t know that merit pay is unpopular with teachers’ unions.  He knows full well that it is.  He seems to have a strategy of saying unpopular things to interest groups in the hope of proving that his “transformation” of politics is not just a slogan–not that he otherwise has much more to offer than rhetorical jabs at entrenched interests.  So he goes to Detroit and bashes automakers, and now tells teachers’ unions what they do not want to hear.  No one will say that he is beholden to this or that lobby!  (When he appeared at AIPAC, though, his adherence to the appropriate script was complete–there are some lobbies with which you simply do not play the game of being Mr. Above It All.)  In the end, he will probably find himself not winning a lot of endorsements, either.