Similarly, had John McCain lost with Tim Pawlenty as his running mate in 2008 (and he would have), Pawlenty would have had at least as good a shot as Mitt Romney of taking the nomination this time around, his uninspiring persona notwithstanding. ~Noah Millman

It’s an intriguing suggestion, but I doubt it. Losing VP nominees rarely return later to become their party’s nominee, and when it has happened it has sometimes been many elections after the VP nomination. Yes, it happened in 1984 and 1996, but Mondale had been the Vice President when the Democrats lost in 1980, and Dole had to wait twenty years for “his turn” to arrive. Except for Mondale and Dole, no postwar losing VP nominee has prevailed or even been all that competitive in later contests. Quayle expressed interest in running during the 2000 cycle, but he couldn’t raise any money, and some conservatives talked up a Kemp candidacy at the same time to no avail. This is why a VP nomination for Pawlenty in 2008 wouldn’t have done him much good, and it is why Palin is not considered “next in line.”

Had Pawlenty been chosen in 2008, he would have been saddled with all of the baggage of the association with McCain without any of the benefits of the independent cult of personality that grew up around Palin. People wouldn’t have been asking, “Why can’t we have Pawlenty/McCain?” as some of Palin’s fans said about her. They would have been complaining that there was hardly any difference between the two of them, and the muttering and dissatisfaction with McCain would have bled over onto Pawlenty.

Pawlenty would not have had the opportunity to distance himself from all of the positions that he had taken before then, and he would have had to endorse some positions as McCain’s running mate that conservatives disliked. McCain supported a cap-and-trade position during the campaign, and Pawlenty would have had no difficulty agreeing with that. He would have been introduced to the country as a proud supporter of cap-and-trade instead of an embarrassed former supporter. Instead of being able to dodge the bailout issue by claiming to be a merely “reluctant” supporter, he would have been forced to defend McCain’s support of it.

Reinventing himself as the enemy of bailouts is already not very credible, but it would be even less so if he had been McCain’s VP choice. Unlike Palin, he would not have legions of die-hard fans who couldn’t care less about policy. One mixed blessing for Pawlenty is that he would already be nationally known, but everyone would have already formed an opinion about him, and it would have made it harder for him to run later as a “fresh face.” While Pawlenty may have resented being passed over in 2008, he ought to appreciate now that McCain unwittingly did him a favor by allowing him to remain in relative obscurity.

Ben Smith notices an early Pawlenty blunder:

REPORTER: U.S. foreign policy towards Iran [unintelligible] how would you address contradictions in the U.S? On the one hand we are opposing Iranian policy, but on the other hand by U.S. reconfigurating that part of the world we made Iran dominating Iraq and now we are pinning it on dominating of Pakistan. How would you address this contradiction in our foreign policy?

PAWLENTY: You’re talking about Iran?

REPORTER: Exactly.

PAWLENTY: Yeah, well I think the situation now in Iran is such that Secretary Gates is negotiating with whether the United States military will be there beyond the end of this year. And they’re looking to the Iranians to see if they invite the Americans to stay, invite us to stay. And if they do invite us to stay at some very reduced level I think the United States will be wise, until we make sure that they get to the next level of stability, to accept that invitation. So if Iran makes that invitation by the end of the year, leaving a residual force, a greatly reduced force, but a residual force that would be there for a temporary amount of time. Until they could establish much better air security, until they can develop their intelligence —

The reporter corrects him at this point, and Pawlenty gamely tries to recover. The most that can be said for Pawlenty in this episode is that he is giving better foreign policy answers than Herman Cain. It’s also fair to say that he’s already doing worse than then-Gov. Bush was doing at this point in 1999. It’s pretty clear that he was rehearsing a bad answer on the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, which had almost nothing to do with the question he was asked. He was asked a question about contradictions in U.S. regional policy related to the expansion of Iranian influence, and he wasn’t even attempting to answer that question. He went through his answer substituting the words Iran and Iranians without missing a beat, and that is probably because his grasp of these subjects remains very superficial. If it had just been the name of the country, everyone might be able to shrug it off as a slip of the tongue, but it was more than that.

Can someone explain to me why Pawlenty has been granted the automatic status of being one of the three “serious” Republican candidates? When an acknowledged long-shot candidate flubs something like this, it gets reported and the candidate takes some hits, but no one thinks it matters very much because the long-shot is never going to get anywhere near the nomination. For whatever reason, Pawlenty’s candidacy has been taken seriously from the beginning. As Pawlenty’s foreign policy understanding is placed under greater scrutiny and most likely found lacking, will journalists continue to take his candidacy seriously?

In the middle of a very long diatribe against Obama, Walter Russell Mead trots out one of his overused arguments and takes it to new extremes:

As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.

It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted [bold mine-DL].

Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God.

This is littered with a number of falsehoods and half-truths. First, let’s consider the half-truths. Israel matters in American politics as much as it does because well-organized, dedicated activists have worked hard over the last four decades to make it so. There are some religious Americans who see support for Israel in religious terms and in terms of shared “values.” Then there is the vast majority of Americans that doesn’t see the relationship in these terms.

It is a ridiculous exaggeration to say that “the public mind believes that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith.” For a large part of the public, the issues are and should be unrelated. This is fortunate, since remarkably few Americans actually see Israel as an allyof the United States. Being “pro-Israel” matters because there are strong disincentives to being anything else, and these don’t typically come from the voters. It is true that there are many Christian Zionists in America who roughly fit the description Mead presents here, but their understanding of the relationship between America and the State of Israel and of the relationship of God to the two states is very unrepresentative of most Americans. I am on fairly safe ground saying that most Americans, including most Christians, do not see the establishment in the Holy Land of a secular democratic republic by socialists as vindication of the “religion of the Bible.”

Now let’s look at the falsehoods. Israel does not matter as much it does in American politics because of mystical connections in the American soul, nor is it because of similarities between our nationalist ideologies. When American nationalists appropriate the idea of being a chosen people, this sets up America as a parallel or replacement of Israel, and it openly denies the uniqueness of the covenant made with Israel.

Mead continues:

Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value.

No, it stems from awareness on the part of members of Congress that there is no incentive in being seen taking a position strongly opposed by “pro-Israel” groups and the Israeli government. This isn’t because of “the pervasive sense that Israel is an American value” (whatever that could mean). It is because “pro-Israel” activists will withdraw support from critical politicians and direct support to their rivals. In that respect, there is nothing mystical or deep to be found. It is simple interest-group politics.

Matt Yglesias offers a useful corrective to this pseudo-spiritual hogwash:

Protecting Israel is a special project taken on by the United States. The reasons may be good and bad, but it’s a burden we undertake. Israel does us no favors and is no use to us. Recognizing that fact hardly solves the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict, but it ought to be the starting point for what Americans should debate–not Israel’s policy toward its Palestinian subjects but America’s policy toward Israel.

As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the weakness of France and Britain is their lack of a local partner who is as powerful and representative as they pretend [bold mine-DL]. In the rebel capital Benghazi there is little sign of the leaders of the transitional national council, which is scarcely surprising, because so much of their time is spent in Paris and London.

———

The aim of Nato intervention was supposedly to limit civilian casualties, but its leaders have blundered into a political strategy that makes a prolonged conflict and heavy civilian loss of life inevitable.
~Patrick Cockburn

At his new blog, Micah Zenko grades the NATO war in Libya, and gives it a D on the protection of civilians. Zenko explains:

It is unknowable how many would have died in the absence of an outside military intervention. However, before NATO intervened, the number of civilians killed in Libya was comparable to fatalities in the uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, and Syria. The Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, estimated that “500 to 700 persons had been killed in February alone when Libyan security forces had fired live ammunition at demonstrators.” In two months, deaths have escalated dramatically. Last week, a Libyan rebel spokesperson estimated that at least 15,000 people had been killed in the civil war. A running Wikipedia page that uses open-source information, finds 4,900 to 5,800 deaths, and another 900 to 3,100 people missing in Libya.

As the war drags on, it is increasingly likely that intervention will not have helped and will have made things significantly worse. This is what makes the refusal to consider seriously offers of cease-fire so hard to understand. While hostilities continue, relief aid cannot make it to the country’s civilian population, and people trapped in besieged cities such as Misurata cannot be evacuated or provided with the food, water, fuel, and medicine that they very much need. By prolonging and intensifying the conflict, the U.S. and NATO are exacerbating the humanitarian situation in the country for the entire population. A negotiated settlement is imperative if the war is not to create a humanitarian catastrophe larger than the one it was supposed to prevent.

Cockburn considers the possibility of a negotiated settlement:

Could the war be ended earlier by negotiation? Here, again, the problem is the weakness of the organised opposition. If they have the backing of enhanced Nato military involvement they can take power. Without it, they can’t. They therefore have every incentive to demand that Gaddafi goes as a precondition for a ceasefire and negotiations. Since only Gaddafi can deliver a ceasefire and meaningful talks, this means the war will be fought to a finish. The departure of Gaddafi should be the aim of negotiations not their starting point.

As I have said before, U.S. and NATO support for the rebels has given them every incentive to pursue maximalist goals and reject any cease-fire or negotiations in the meantime. By empowering one side in a civil war and giving them every sign that our governments intend to fight on until their ultimate objectives are achieved, the U.S., France, and Britain have made any negotiated settlement practically impossible. That prolongs U.S. and NATO involvement, but more important it extends and worsens the plight of the Libyan population for the sake of advancing the political cause of the rebels.

Andrew on the new GOP 2012 Gallup poll:

Weigel can’t quite cop to the fact that he has misread Palin’s strength. This poll, moreover, was conducted before yesterday’s flurry of signs that Palin is actually running. Notice that Palin has three times Bachmann’s support and is within the margin of error next to the front-runner.

Weigel hasn’t misread her strength, if strength is what you want to call it. As Weigel observed:

But we’re talking about the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee who has been the subject of multiple books (including two of her own), two documentaries, and in some months as much as 50 percent of all media coverage of the GOP field. Fifteen percent? That’s actually about half of what she got in the very first survey of this primary, a February 2009 CNN poll.

Put another way, one of the best-known Republicans in the country now receives just 15% in a national poll after having overshadowed all other prospective candidates for the last two and a half years. If she became a candidate, that could change, but it’s telling that her numbers in national Republican polls have been in decline ever since 2009. For someone who is supposed to inspire so much enthusiasm among rank-and-file Republicans, having “three times Bachmann’s support” is a damning indictment of weakness. It’s fair to say that Romney is a remarkably weak front-runner for the same reason.

What’s more interesting about the new poll is the result that excludes Palin:

Palin supporters don’t gravitate towards any one candidate, but split up among several other Republicans.  Even when Palin is excluded from the poll, Bachmann doesn’t gain much traction, and Pawlenty gains almost nothing.  Aside from Cain’s sudden surge, the most significant news from this poll is that Pawlenty continues to get nowhere with Republican voters.

It must be hard to rework the same tedious comparisons to 1930s international politics so that they seem different or interesting, but even by these low standards Hanson’s latest effort isn’t very good:

A newly confident, united, and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances over feeling used and abused. Sound familiar? A weak Britain and France had almost no confidence in their own declining militaries — sort of like the sad spectacle of their impotence in Libya that we have witnessed over the last two months.

Where to begin? Britain and France have too much confidence in their shrinking militaries. By one count, France is currently engaged in six significant foreign military operations overseas. The sad spectacle in Libya is the product of two governments that don’t have the means to wage major wars on their own but want to do it anyway. This would be almost the exact opposite of the British and French unwillingness to use force to settle political disputes. Instead of the “spirit of Locarno,” we have the hyper-active bellicosity of Sarkozy. What Hanson seems to be trying to say is that Victor Davis Hanson has no confidence in the British and French militaries.

As everyone will have noticed right away, the Germany comparison is painfully wrong. It makes all the difference in the world that Germans currently feel put upon because they are being called on to bail out weaker European economies. This is a problem that comes from having the wealthiest, most productive European economy. It is a radically different sort of resentment from the one that Germans felt toward the former Allies for war reparations, demilitarization, disarmament, and being forced to accept responsibility for WWI. Today Germans are being berated by their neighbors for being too peaceful. Suffice it to say, this was not the main concern with Germany in the 1930s.

These are just some of the bad comparisons that Hanson makes to advance the tired argument that a “post-American” world order could be similar to the world order between WWI and WWII. Hanson writes:

In other words, the post-American world could look a lot like the rather terrifying pre-American version of seven decades past. Why in the world would we wish to return to it?

Why indeed? Of course, no one wishes this, and it isn’t at all likely to happen. Hanson’s argument seems to be based on the lazy conceit that if American hegemony ends or diminishes the world will revert to the world as it was before that hegemony existed. I understand that this is a useful scare tactic to justify continuing hegemonic policies, but why does he think it’s true? Because of a handful of poorly-drawn, inaccurate comparisons between the 1930s and today?

The reality is that the largest economic powers of Asia and Europe have strong interests in preventing and avoiding large-scale war in their regions, and the territorial disputes and expansionism that fueled the destructive wars of the 20th century are not the main threats to international peace today. The major international wars of the last decade are largely those that have been launched or escalated by Western powers, which ought to be acting as status quo powers, and there are no revisionist powers of the kind that existed in the period between the world wars. To believe that the world is going to revert to a “pre-American” order simply because the U.S. does not engage in hyper-active intervention around the globe is to believe that all of the other nations of the world have learned nothing from the experience of the last century.

George Will made a list of “plausible” Republican candidates two months ago, and this list has been shrinking ever since so that it now contains just Tim Pawlenty. Earlier this month, he said that there were only three people who were likely to be inaugurated in January 2013: Obama, Daniels, and Pawlenty. Daniels is out, and Will isn’t going to back Obama, so Pawlenty has become Will’s last remaining favorite. The trouble is that he doesn’t seem to have checked what Pawlenty has been saying until now, and he finds some of it very unsatisfactory:

To make the most of his momentum, he should stop criticizing Barack Obama’s Libyan intervention as insufficiently ambitious. Sounding like a dime-store Teddy Roosevelt (the real TR was bad enough), Pawlenty recently told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “I would tell Gaddafi he’s got x number of days to get his affairs in order and go or we’re going to go get him.”

Such chest-thumping bluster is not presidential, and it is not Pawlenty’s real persona. He actually is a temperate Midwesterner, socially and fiscally conservative.

Pawlenty is hardly alone in engaging in such bluster, and foreign policy pandering does strange things to people. It may not be his “real persona” any more than it Sarah Palin’s “real persona” when she began mouthing phrases given to her by Randy Scheunemann, but that is the national political persona he has adopted as a presidential candidate. He is stuck with it now, and so are his supporters. Then again, Pawlenty might be quite sincere in his reckless hawkishness. Pawlenty was a loyal McCain supporter throughout the 2007-08 process when others jumped ship as McCain’s campaign faltered in 2007. Why wouldn’t we expect him to imitate McCain’s own dime-store Teddy Roosevelt act?

Besides, if he wants to remain one of the approved “main contenders” Pawlenty can’t afford to be dubbed an “isolationist” by Republican hawks. Aside from the few trade missions he frequently boasts about, he has no specialized knowledge about international affairs, so he makes up for it by blustering and shouting. Unlike Huntsman, he has no foreign experience or expertise to fall back on, and unlike Bachmann he doesn’t sit on any relevant committees that might give him even a small amount of credibility when speaking on national security issues. Unfortunately, it is partly because he is considered a “temperate Midwesterner” that he has to overcompensate by sounding like the most aggressive hawk in the room. Will might have noticed this during the last two years when Pawlenty was demagoguing every foreign policy issue that came up.

Let’s assume Ryan gets in and loses and, say, Tim Pawlenty wins the nomination. After “pushing off” from Ryan in the primaries, Pawlenty would be far better situated to tell Obama in the general, “Look, you’re running against Paul Ryan. He’s not on this stage. I am. I beat Paul Ryan. Deal with me and my ideas.”

In many ways, if Ryan doesn’t run we’ll have a similar problem to the one we had in 2008. There was no stand-in for Bush in the primaries, so there was nobody the candidates could differentiate themselves from in order to be the “not-Bush” or “anti-Bush” candidate. By the time McCain won the nomination, Obama could claim that electing McCain would amount to a third Bush administration. Without Ryan, the man of the moment, in the race, and without an obvious stand-in for him, the Republicans will be saddled with the Ryan plan whether they endorse it or not. And that means Obama will be able to run against a demonically caricatured Ryan instead of the actual nominee. ~Jonah Goldberg

This is still a terrible idea. Imagine for a moment that Dick Cheney had decided to run in 2007-08, and he ran explicitly as the candidate in favor of continuing Bush’s policies in the most uncompromising way. The problem facing the 2008 field would have been worse than the one they had. Instead of being able to duck the Bush legacy and avoid mentioning as much as possible, which is usually what they did (and it was why they never stopped talking about Reagan), they would have been confronting it at every debate. On all of the issues that made Bush-Cheney so unpopular, they would all feel compelled to agree directly with Cheney. In fact, on most of the national security and foreign policy issues that made Bush and Cheney unpopular, they did agree with Cheney, but they didn’t have to stand next to him on stage while they did so. As Ross pointed out in the spring of 2007, “If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.” For the most part, the GOP field in 2008 did not run from Bush or Bushism, and the candidate substantively most aligned with Bush became the nominee.

By 2007, McCain was more in agreement with Bush than any other Republican candidate. The main difference McCain had with the Bush administration was that he was not supportive of torturing detainees. In many of the most important respects, McCain’s campaign did promise to usher in a third Bush term. McCain was able to exploit the common misunderstanding that he was the antithesis of Bush on the grounds that they hated each other after the 2000 race, but having a Bush stand-in during the primaries would have made it impossible to sustain that conceit. Because McCain’s rivalry with Bush was fundamentally a personal one, and because it was not based in any meaningful policy differences, he could not have maintained the illusion that he was at odds with Cheney or someone like him, because he actually agreed with Cheney on most things.

If Ryan is absent from the race, that gives the other candidates some more room to maneuver. They can approve of Ryan’s overall goals without endorsing his plan in every detail, and they can do this without having to criticize Ryan or Ryan’s plan explicitly during the nominating contest. Once Ryan becomes a competitor in the race, the other candidates will bear in mind the condemnations heaped on Gingrich and will probably mute their criticisms, so there will be little of the “pushing off” Goldberg describes. Meanwhile, the other campaigns will use Ryan’s own rather underwhelming record on fiscal issues to discredit him, and Ryan will have wasted months of valuable time on a pointless presidential run.

Paul Ryan should ignore this sort of advice:

I think he could go all the way. I think he’s as close as we’ll ever get to an “Obama” candidate this year — a charismatic guy who taps into something in the zeitgeist and can articulate it in a compelling way.

The trouble is that he isn’t tapping into “the zeitgeist.” Obama was running against the legacy of one of the most unpopular Presidents in the postwar era, and he was identified with opposition to an overwhelmingly unpopular war. Ryan is proposing a significant policy change that is not at all popular, and if he ran he would be doing so against a reasonably popular incumbent President. His charisma is not the issue. On many other issues apart from budget questions, Ryan has unformed or merely conventional views that he has hardly ever had to defend. In all seriousness, do Republicans want to put a budget wonk Congressman with no executive experience up against an incumbent President? No, they don’t, and so the call for Ryan to join the race remains a cry of desperation rather than a credible alternative.

Will Wilkinson salutes Tim Pawlenty for attacking ethanol subsidies, and adds at the end:

David Frum asks whether Mr Pawlenty’s brave experiment in truth-telling is a “good way to manage expectations if he comes second or third or worse in Iowa, where Pawlenty is currently polling in single digits?” If he’s going to lose Iowa anyway, Mr Frum suggests Mr Pawlenty may be “smart to blow them off and score integrity points for later.” In any case, it’s good to hear the truth for once, never mind the motivation.

Yes, it is good to hear the truth, but what doesn’t make sense is why Pawlenty believes it is to his advantage to tell these truths to the constituencies he needs most. Every discussion of Pawlenty’s chances takes for granted that he must win or at least be extremely competitive in Iowa. He is nationally unknown, his fundraising is comparatively anemic, and he faces challenges from more charismatic, more conservative, and better-funded adversaries. So how does he begin his campaign? He tells Iowans that he wants to phase out ethanol subsidies, and he promises to tell financiers in New York that he opposes bailouts, and on top of it he is going to tell elderly voters in Florida that he wants to make changes to Medicare.

Of course, he didn’t oppose those bailouts when it was actually a test of political courage, and he has largely avoided committing to any existing Medicare reform proposal, and if Wilkinson is right Pawlenty’s support for a phase-out of subsidies is not nearly as politically toxic as it used to be. Pawlenty would like to acquire a reputation for political courage without having done much to demonstrate it in the past (and what politician wouldn’t?), but he seems to have things backwards. The time to be politically courageous was before now when Pawlenty was still in office. Attacking political sacred cows at the start of a long-shot presidential bid despite having no record for similar boldness in office seems to offer the worst of both worlds. The bold truth-telling can be dismissed as a campaign stunt, and it serves to alienate many of the voters and donors that an unknown such as Pawlenty must first win over.