One of the things that continues to dog Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential bid, which he made official earlier today, is that he is not terribly successful at raising large amounts of money*. As Walter Shapiro explains in his article on Pawlenty, the later start to the presidential race this cycle compounds this problem, as Pawlenty has less time for the necessary fundraising between now and the first contests early next year than candidates have had in recent cycles. This is another aspect of Pawlenty’s larger political dilemma.

Pawlenty’s candidacy doesn’t have any obvious rationale. In fact, the former Minnesota governor has trouble coming up with a reason why he is running at all. He doesn’t unnerve any major constituency in the party in the way that Huntsman does and Daniels did, but he isn’t that closely identified with any of them. He inspires neither intense loyalty nor especially strong dislike. Pawlenty is a compromise candidate in a party that is largely tired of having to settle for what they can get. The few things that distinguish him and make him somewhat interesting to some conservatives, such as his working-class background and conversion to evangelical Protestanism, are things that make him seem to be just enough of a working-class Huckabee-like populist to give some Republicans pause. This means that people with money are probably going to be disinclined to give some of that money to him just as they were unwilling to support Huckabee financially.
Meanwhile, Pawlenty’s actual record is so reliably and generically mainstream Republican that he appears merely adequate rather than exciting.

Unlike Huckabee, Pawlenty projects neither the charisma to sustain a campaign through free media appearances, nor does he have the natural opening to build networks of evangelical volunteers that the former pastor had. Imagine a campaign almost as cash-strapped as Huckabee’s, but with an unremarkable, plodding figure at the center of it instead of the bass guitar-playing evangelical comedian that Huckabee played throughout the 2007-08 contest. That will give you a good idea of the obstacles that await Pawlenty.

* I should note that Shapiro describes Pawlenty as an “insider” competing with Romney and Huntsman for establishment support. He really isn’t that much of an “insider,” but he seems to have decided on a campaign strategy that requires him to act like one.

Over the weekend, Huntsman made some surprising statements on Libya and Afghanistan that seemed partly to vindicate my original commentary on the potential of a Huntsman candidacy back in 2009. One of the most troubling things about Huntsman was that he was a McCain supporter and surrounded himself with former McCain staffers, and this suggested, among other things, that he would prove to be yet another tiresome foreign policy hawk in addition to being weak on immigration. It’s still possible that Huntsman will end up as more of a hawk on many other issues, and he seems intent on positioning himself as a McCain-like “centrist” on some domestic issues, but at least when it comes to the administration’s Libya blunder he has shown himself to be the anti-McCain on policy as well as in temperament.

Unlike the hawks already in the 2012 race, Huntsman has some understanding of foreign policy derived from experience as a diplomat. Two years ago, I raised the possibility that this meant that Huntsman would be more able and possibly more willing to break with the prevailing views in the party on foreign policy. Of course, I acknowledged at the time that it was his background as a diplomat and his work in the administration that guaranteed that he would never be accepted by his party. His statements on Libya and Afghanistan have made certain that party and movement activists and leaders will want nothing to do with him. Huntsman has already been denounced as an “isolationist” by one of the usual suspects, and perhaps even more damningly (in the eyes of Republican voters) as a “dove” by others.

Huntsman has no realistic chance at the nomination, but his participation in the debates may prove useful in that he can expose the shallowness and ignorance of much of the rest of the field when it comes to foreign affairs. To the extent that he can help undermine Romney and reveal him to be a poorly-informed demagogue on these issues, he will be doing us all a service. Meanwhile, along with Paul, Johnson, and Bachmann, Huntsman will bring the number of clear opponents of the Libyan war to four, which will put them more or less on an equal footing with the reliably interventionist candidates in Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, and Santorum.

Update: As Jim Antle points out, Huntsman has also recently made the usual foolish hawkish noises on Iran.

Even America’s recent humanitarian interventions—Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya—have aimed at saving lives, not installing democracy. ~Peter Beinart

That’s a stroke of luck, since not a single one of them has succeeded in producing anything that we would recognize as a functioning liberal democracy. The ongoing non-democratic project of neo-colonial administration in Bosnia continues to be one of the strongest rebukes to the idea that Western interventionists know or care how to create the conditions for liberal democratic politics. Most of them have been failures on the count of saving lives, too, but other than that they’ve been very impressive operations.

Beinart naturally regards the realist tag as something of an insult or an embarrassment to be explained away. In fact, there was a time when Obama very deliberately presented himself as someone operating more in the tradition of the elder Bush, and this was a widely-shared view of Obama’s overall foreign policy. What was lost in the discussion of Obama-as-realist was that it was the elder Bush who sent American forces to Somalia on the wooliest of humanitarian missions, and it was his administration that recognized the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The elder Bush was the one who spoke positively of a “new world order” that alarmed many traditional realists. Had the elder Bush been the thoroughgoing realist that realists today sometimes like to remember, it is doubtful that he would have done many or all of these things. The more significant point here is that Presidents identified with realism or “pragmatism” can still make bad mistakes.

The problem with the younger Bush’s would-be universalism wasn’t that he wasn’t universalist enough in practice. The problem was that he pursued insane policies in the name of universalism. Bush used universalist rhetoric and arguments to justify his greatest mistakes, and it was only after the disasters started unfolding that Beinart and those like him discovered that they had been wrong to support his policies. For the most part, aside from the significant exception of Libya, Obama still seems unwilling to be that reckless, but when he has erred, as he did in Libya, he wraps up his error of judgment in the rhetoric of universal rights and moralism. The lesson from all of this isn’t that it’s completely wrong to call Obama a realist, but that realists can also make terrible mistakes when they allow themselves to be caught up in universalist pretensions.

Beinart continues:

The more strongly a country backed America’s wars, the less Bush’s freedom talk applied to it….

Of course, that is precisely what is happening under Obama as well. Did we hear anything from Obama today about the universal rights of Qataris and Emiratis? No, we didn’t. They are faithfully supporting the Libyan war, and have provided the U.S. and NATO with political cover among Arab nations, and so Obama has nothing whatever to say about their involvement in suppressing Bahraini dissent. Bahrain and Yemen receive the weakest of rhetorical rebukes. The closer we look, the more we find that Obama’s “moral universalism” is not that much more substantive than Bush’s, and his willingness to look the other way or say nothing about allied abuses is not significantly less. That isn’t really intended as a criticism of Obama. It is intended as a refutation of the tedious partisan hagiographers who would now like to make Obama into some sort of moral visionary because he has given a few speeches and started a war in the name of universal rights.

When I listened to Obama’s speech delivered at the State Department earlier today in preparation for my next column, I didn’t find anything terribly interesting about the section on Israel and Palestine. Indeed, what little news there was in that section consisted of confirmations that the administration flatly opposes the Palestinian bid for statehood recognition at the U.N., which in itself is hardly shocking. So I was more than a little surprised that there would be such a flood of manufactured outrageover one of the least remarkable parts of the speech. At most, what Obama said represents the tiniest of incremental changes, which for some reason some administration supporters want to applaud as “bold” and “daring” and many critics want to denounce as treacherous. It isn’t bold, and it isn’t treacherous.

This is very much like the outrage over the demand for a settlement freeze in the past two years. Opposition to settlements has been standard U.S. policy for decades, but Obama created some waves by making an issue out of it. The key to his opponents’ success on settlements was pretending that something completely unremarkable and entirely reasonable was an unspeakably monstrous idea, which then lead to Obama quickly backpedaling away from doing anything to advance his unremarkable consensus position. That seems to be the pattern. First, Obama re-states the rather bland U.S. policy consensus. Next, his critics treat this as a dramatic and radical change to current policy when it isn’t anything of the sort, and the Israeli government pretends that the consensus view is some new, horrible imposition that cannot be tolerated. At the same time, Obama’s political foes declare that he has betrayed Israel, which ought to reveal them as buffoons but instead somehow makes them seem more “credible” on foreign policy. After all of this, Obama backs down and stops saying anything about the uncontroversial position that caused the phony controversy.

I don’t really understand why Obama gave this speech, I don’t see what he was hoping to accomplish with it, and there seems to be general agreement that it was fairly underwhelming and lacking significant proposals of what the U.S. is going to do differently. As I argue in the new column, the lack of attention to Libya was striking, and it was all the more so given the Libyan war’s supposed importance for “aligning our values and interests” and supporting protest movements elsewhere. The complete omission of any mention of the GCC’s intervention in Bahrain was also very odd. The two areas other than Israel/Palestine where U.S. policy is most directly implicated right now (i.e., Libya and the Gulf) received scant or no attention, and what attention Obama did pay to Libya was essentially a repeat of his March 28 speech justifying intervention.

Update: Exum concludes his reaction with these remarks:

Overall, though, I was underwhelmed and suspect most Arabs will be as well. But maybe the early analysis is right, and this speech was more aimed at a U.S. audience than at the peoples of the region itself.

If that’s the case, I definitely don’t understand why he gave the speech. To put it bluntly, most of the U.S. audience isn’t terribly concerned about administration policy towards Bahrain or Syria or even Egypt, and Americans are mainly concerned about Libya now only because the administration dragged the U.S. into Libya. If the speech was geared towards the small fraction of the population in the U.S. that follows event in the region closely, I still don’t see what it accomplished.

Ross:

But some of Gingrich’s more enthusiastic critics are failing the test as well, by behaving as if the Ryan budget represents some kind of sacred right-wing writ. Unless American politics changes beyond recognition, Ryan’s plan cannot and will not become the law of the land in its current form. And while it has many virtues, it has many flaws as well. Its example should call Republican presidential candidates to a greater seriousness about Medicare reform than most conservative politicians have manifested to date. But it cannot, and must not, become a rigid litmus test: That way lies intellectual sclerosis, and political disaster [bold mine-DL].

It’s still true that “greater seriousness about Medicare reform” is politically disastrous for either party. One reason is that the other party has every incentive to demagogue the issue for short-term gain. That was why Republicans demagogued health care legislation for its cuts to Medicare, and presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the Medicare status quo. Politically, it worked. They carried the day with older voters, and maximized their midterm election advantage. The GOP rode the election wave to a majority in the House partly by defending the same “unserious status quo ante” that Gingrich was out there defending over the weekend. Gingrich deserves no sympathy, because he has tried and keeps trying to have it both ways, and he has jumped back and forth on more than one issue in the space of a few weeks or months this year. On the question of whether there must be major changes to entitlements or not, it’s important to emphasize that Gingrich gave the wrong but popular answer.

However, the overwhelmingly hostile conservative reaction to Gingrich is interesting because he is now being denounced for making the explicit political case against Ryan’s proposal that the entire party leadership endorsed less openly in the year before the midterms. This is instructive. This is how policy debates often function inside the GOP and the conservative movement. Once a position has become the party line, what came before it is irrelevant. Previously reliable people suddenly become deviationists because they fail to keep up with the shifting requirements of movement and party loyalty. This is how we end up with defenses of the budget plan of a supporter of Medicare Part D as a new unquestionable standard of fiscal responsibility.

As Austin Bramwell wrote almost five years ago:

Second, conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker.

Last year, Ryan’s original plan was an interesting proposal that few of his colleagues openly supported and everyone knew was going nowhere. This year, conservatives are expected to line up behind Ryan’s less satisfactory budget plan, and anyone who speaks too critically of the budget plan will end up on the outside. Last year, Republicans understood that serious entitlement reform was political doom for them, which is why they steered clear of talking about it. Remarkably, they are now opting to embrace that which they knew would destroy them, and they are doing this as they head into an election in which the general electorate will be even less sympathetic to Ryan’s plan.

All of this is rather like the response to the “surge.” Once it had been announced, the “surge” became the defining issue for 2007-08 that determined one’s status as a conservative and Republican in good standing. Support for the “surge” identified the GOP and most conservatives closely with an Iraq war that the public had turned against, and it afforded the other party an easy way to distinguish itself from Bush and the 2008 Republican field. It absolutely became a rigid litmus test, which did have the effect of once again stifling any and all productive debate on Iraq and foreign policy on the right.

In that case, the policy and politics were reversed: sound policy and public opinion happened to be on the same side then, but a majority of the GOP and almost all the ideological enforcers on the right supported the mistaken policy. In both cases, Republicans and conservatives have managed to line up against public opinion. Chuck Hagel had the good policy sense and terrible intra-party political instincts to oppose the “surge,” which briefly made him the focus of media attention and also guaranteed the end of his political career in the GOP. There is evidence that the “surge” did not cause the drop in violence in Iraq, and that just as many critics of the “surge” said then and later other factors accounted for the drop:

Overall violence in Iraq declined steeply in 2008. But Thiel attributes this to other factors besides the arrival of U.S. combat reinforcements. These factors include the Sunni Awakening against al Qaeda in Anbar province, the completion by 2008 of sectarian ethnic cleansing in the Baghdad area, the erection of security barriers between neighborhoods in Baghdad, a unilateral cease-fire by some Shiite militias, the increased dispersion of joint U.S. and Iraqi combat outposts in Iraq’s cities, and perhaps most important, the maturation of Iraq’s security forces. These factors could all have occurred without the arrival of additional U.S. forces.

Even though the “surge” wasn’t one of the main factors responsible for the drop in violence, it became received wisdom that it was, and McCain’s support for the “surge” helped him overcome all other liabilities to revive his political fortunes and win the nomination. The lack of real debate over the “surge” on the right was proof that the intellectual sclerosis Ross warns against now had already taken hold. The content of the prevailing official line may change, but the enforcement of that official line as an ideological commitment that must be accepted remains the same.

A senior U.N. official warns conditions in Libya are continuing to deteriorate and life-saving assistance is urgently needed.

In launching the appeal, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya, Panos Moumtzis, says his main concern is for the western part of Libya where 80 percent of the population lives. “Our concern for the west is that the situation in the west due to the sanctions, with the low availability of medical supplies, of food supplies, the fuel embargo, the cash flow shortages-it is really like a time bomb ticking where the longer the crisis lasts, the more grave the humanitarian situation is,” said Moumtzis. ~Voice of America

As usual, a heavy-handed sanctions regime that was supposed to pressure the regime to capitulate to outside demands is hitting the civilian population first and doing far more damage to the population than to the regime. We now have a spectacle of a policy aimed at averting humanitarian disaster in one part of the country helping contribute to the worsening of a humanitarian crisis for the entire country. As long as hostilities continue, large-scale relief and evacuation efforts are essentially impossible, which means that the continuation of the Libyan war is harming the civilian population of the entire country for the sake of achieving the political success of one faction in a civil war.

Matt Yglesias describes Pawlenty as “a generically orthodox conservative Republican who managed to win several elections in a somewhat left of center state.” That’s true, but slightly misleading. As I was reminded by one of the regular commenters, Pawlenty won both of his elections thanks to the peculiar three-way division that often happens in Minnesota gubernatorial elections. In 2002, he won with a plurality of 44%, and narrowly eked out a re-election win with 46.7% of the vote. So, yes, Pawlenty won in Minnesota, but he never won a majority, and that was despite being a rather conventional Bush Era Republican that Michael Gerson can find satisfactory.

It’s safe to say that any candidate that Gerson thinks is interesting is one that many other conservatives aren’t going to find very desirable, but Gerson overstates his case for Pawlenty the populist. Looking at Pawlenty’s record, I don’t find much that would substantiate Gerson’s claim that Pawlenty can campaign as the candidate of social mobility or economic populism. One can argue that Pawlenty governed in a way that was very satisfactory to fiscal conservatives and libertarians, which should cause Gerson to denounce him for his supposed heartlessness and inhumanity, but Pawlenty’s populism is nothing more than the usual folksiness and identity politics without anything behind it. Pawlenty wants to cultivate the image of the working-class, folksy populist, which makes Republican elites nervous, but he has no intention of following through with policies that might serve the interests of rank-and-file voters. That may explain why there seems to be so little enthusiasm for Pawlenty’s presidential candidacy at both the elite and the grassroots level.

Update: Sean Scallon has more in the comments. Here is Sean’s TAC profile of Bachmann.

But having her [Bachmann] in the race might well be helpful to Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels, and other comparatively mainstream Republicans. If they can resist the lure of moving right to compete for her base, which would backfire, she’ll serve as a lightning rod and make them more appealing to general election voters. ~James Joyner

I agree that Bachmann’s candidacy will be helpful to Romney, but for the other two there is a danger that she will generate more enthusiasm among actual caucus-goers and voters than either of them. They may not have to worry about general election voters. She often polls just ahead of both of them, she is more widely known because of her frequent appearances on cable news shows, she has been speaking to Tea Party and other activist groups for the better part of two years, and she has one of the greatest Gallup “positive intensity” ratings of any candidate in the field. If many Republican elites are eager for a Daniels run, and if some conservative pundits regularly tout Daniels and Pawlenty as the best candidates, relatively few Republicans nationwide know who Daniels and Pawlenty are, and they don’t inspire enormous enthusiasm. Bachmann will also have the luxury of being a candidate on the right with no realistic chance at the nomination, which allows her to make more direct appeals to conservative voters that the “serious” candidates won’t be able to match. The problem this creates for Pawlenty and Daniels is that the natural anti-Romney constituencies are the conservative voters interested in uncompromising, fiery rhetoric, and these are not voters that Pawlenty and Daniels obviously attract.

What is the central argument for Pawlenty’s campaign? Essentially, it is an appeal to electability without too much baggage from major policy compromises. He is a somewhat less heterodox Republican than Romney, but like Romney he has proven that he can win elections in a traditionally Democratic state. The central argument for a Daniels candidacy is that he is outspoken on debt and entitlements, and he has developed a reputation as a fiscal conservative while in Indiana that lends him some authority as the candidate to address fiscal issues. These are plausible and reasonable, and my guess is that they also strike most casual observers of politics as very boring. The added problem is that both Pawlenty and Daniels hardly have reputations for generating excitement or interest. Both of them are obliged to run insurgent campaigns against the de facto front-runner in Romney, but neither of them seems very credible as an insurgent candidate.

Bachmann can outflank them both on fiscal and social issues (unlike Pawlenty, she was against the TARP), and she has greater credibility with pro-life and Tea Party activists than either one. She happens to be the only candidate apart from Ron Paul and Gary Johnson clearly opposed to the Libyan folly. Bachmann can appeal to evangelicals as “one of them” at least as well as any of the other candidates, and she can use the fact that mainstream journalists and pundits dismiss or mock her as part of her “populist” appeal. Other than Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, Bachmann becomes an obvious non-Romney figure on the right to support, and that likely comes at the expense of Pawlenty and Daniels*.

* All of this takes for granted that Gingrich has already destroyed whatever chance he may have had to make a competitive showing in the race.

From what I can gather from Glenn Beck’s announcement of his August rally in Jerusalem (via Andrew), he is implying that a two-state solution is the work of “the force of darkness” (because such a solution “cuts off Jerusalem, the Old City, to the rest of the world”), he thinks “most people” don’t know who Dietrich Bonhoeffer is, and he seems to believe that his August rally has something in common with Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the Nazi regime. To take the last two points first, Beck has outdone himself here in his declarations of self-importance. Bonhoeffer is probably one of the best-known German theologians of the last century, and his anti-Nazi opposition activities are among the few things that most Americans do know about Christianity in modern Europe. People don’t need Glenn Beck to tell them about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For his part, Beck is not a Bonhoeffer, and his attempted appropriation of Bonhoeffer is one of the more ludicrous things he has tried to do. What is Beck standing for here? He appears to be standing for the continued mistreatment of an entire nation and the occupation of their land. Somehow I doubt that Bonhoeffer would recognize this as something worth defending.

Joanna Brooks comments on Beck’s end-times fanaticism:

Actually, Mormons may diverge from Hagee on some details of the last days (Mormon theology is usually characterized as premillenialist) but we do read the Book of Revelation. And in Mormon end-times scenarios, we don’t call them “witnesses”: they are described as apostles, or even prophets. Invading armies of Gentiles bent on the destruction of Israel will kill the two apostles, and their murdered bodies will lie dead in the streets of Jerusalem for three days without a decent burial. And then the Mount of Olives will split open. And then Jesus will return. That’s how Beck’s guru, the LDS ultra-conservative Cleon Skousen described it in 1972.

Is Beck making himself out to be a prophet? It wouldn’t be the first time that he danced with prophetic rhetoric. By now, though, we should all know that Beck is less interested in plying his own virtues than in plugging into the fears of his followers. After burning through conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory over the last few years, Beck is looking to wreak havoc in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by exploiting the most powerful fear-generating narrative of them all: the apocalypse.

Joshua Keating wrote elsewhere:

Having support for Israel, as a U.S. political issue, associated with Beck’s brand, can only be a bad thing for the future of the relationship.

It is certainly not good for a healthy U.S.-Israel relationship. Beck’s CUFI allies have been closely identified with Republican “pro-Israel” figures, and John McCain and Joe Lieberman have frequently associated themselves with John Hagee. In other words, support for Israel has been closely connected with people very much like Beck for many years. Hagee has remained relatively unknown, so the embarrassment has been limited. Perhaps Beck’s fame will force some “pro-Israel” Americans to reckon with the tactical alliance they have made with the likes of CUFI.