In other words, a candidate aligned with the Northeastern, moderate wing of the party has not won a nomination since 1960, and there is no reason to expect that to change, barring some kind of once-in-a-century realignment of the two political parties. Northeastern Republicans are now junior partners in the party coalition. They cannot deliver their own states anymore, as the Democrats dominate them all except New Hampshire and Pennsylvania; meanwhile, conservatives in the Midwest, South, and West can deliver their states, and so they now basically run the show. ~Jay Cost

This depends to some extent on how one broadly one wants to define the word aligned. One could seriously argue that the entire Bush dynasty and the presidential nominations in open contests that went with it prove this statement to be not just inaccurate, but quite misleading. Yes, both Bushes ran as Texans and identified themselves with Reagan’s politics, but both certainly started out as moderates by the standards of the party at the time. Bush had the advantage of having served as Vice President under Reagan, but one important reason that he had been selected to the ticket in 1980 was to provide the balance that only a prominent moderate Republican could supply. As a family, the Bushes are undeniably closely connected to the Northeast. Bush had the advantage of having McCain running to his left in 2000, which allowed him to do very little to satisfy conservatives during the primaries and still receive their support.

In 2008, McCain may have had a somewhat more conservative voting record than many of his critics liked to admit, but he was clearly perceived to be the more moderate major candidate in the field. That leaves us with just two unambiguous occasions when the candidate campaigning as the more conservative Republican prevailed in an open nominating contest. The relatively moderate Republicans in the field have had to prove that they are acceptable, but they have usually done this by mouthing the right phrases and selecting VP nominees that enthuse conservatives. After that, they are largely free to campaign and, if they win, to govern as they wish.

Romney’s case is unusual because he actually was a Northeastern moderate Republican in the mold of William Weld until 2005, but he has spent the last six years working to reinvent himself as a Sunbelt conservative. There’s no question that Romney lacks credibility in this role, but skeptics might have said (and did say) the same about Nixon, Dole, McCain, and both Bushes. Despite that, the previous runner-up or anointed front-runner received the nomination every time. Self-identified conservatives make up the vast majority of the GOP, but they do not dominate it quite as much as Cost claims. Romney’s credibility problem is harder to overcome, because the change in just the last few years has been so dramatic and clumsy, and because he adamantly refuses to abandon his signature achievement from his time in Massachusetts.

I am the first to be willing to point out Romney’s myriad flaws, I would be pleased if his second presidential bid failed disastrously. It would be most fitting if the conservatives that he so desperately courted for years decisively rejected him. To be perfectly clear, I shudder at the thought of Romney as the Republican nominee. To believe that he will not be the nominee, I would have to believe that Romney doesn’t have an overwhelming, built-in advantage in New Hampshire and Nevada, and that he won’t scoop up large numbers of former Giuliani and McCain voters in Florida, where he received 31% last time. Virtually every declared or likely 2012 candidate is to the right of Romney and intends to run well to his right, and the more of them that there are the easier it will be for Romney to emerge as the plausible, electable major candidate.

Conservative activists and pundits very much like to believe that they can weed out and reject candidates with glaring ideological flaws, but they overestimate the importance of ideology and policy positions in determining electoral success in a nominating contest. By all rights, McCain’s campaign should have been dead and buried in the summer of 2007, but it wasn’t. Romney’s health care liability is not anywhere as serious or as damaging to him as McCain’s immigration follies were. It is almost certain that conservative activists and pundits are overestimating the importance of Romney’s health care liability, and they are underestimating the extent to which Romney’s attention to economic issues matches up with the concerns of the electorate.

Here is the reality. We either believe the founding principles of this nation or we do not. The founding principles of the United States are simple, and that is that our rights don’t come from our laws or from our government. They come from our creator, and that these rights extend to all men. And any government who denies these rights is an illegitimate government.

Anywhere in the world where that is challenged, the United States has to speak out against it. Otherwise, the very essence of our founding, our purpose for existing as a nation and our founding, is gone [bold mine-DL]. This is an important issue. ~Marco Rubio

Am I the only one to find this completely batty? First, one thing that Rubio is demanding in this interview is that the U.S. “speak out against” the Syrian crackdown. It would change nothing, but I suppose it would at least put the government on record (yet again) that it is opposed to this sort of thing. I don’t really see the point, but it might not do too much harm. The other thing he calls for is the recall of our ambassador and the severing of all diplomatic relations. This would also not do a thing for the protesters, but it would succeed in denying us the one point of direct access in the country that our government has.

According to Rubio, failure to do these things in Syria, and anywhere else in the world where they are happening, would result in the destruction of our Founding essence and the eradication of “our purpose for existing as a nation.” Yes, unless we speak out anywhere and everywhere against other governments’ abuses, we may as well close up shop. Apparently, a vital part of “our purpose for existing as a nation” is to speak out against foreign governments. No one actually believes this. I don’t accept that Rubio believes this. It is the most egregious sort of meaningless moral posturing with some flourishes of American nationalism.

Rubio says later in the interview:

First of all, it’s hard to imagine anybody being worse than a criminal like Assad.

The second thing, we don’t know anything about anything.

Rubio’s first comment seems to confirm that his second point is true, at least as it applies to him. It is extremely easy to imagine someone worse than Assad. There are quite a few regimes in the world right now that offer examples of what that might look like. To the extent that the U.S. has any role, our government shouldn’t be risking the fates of the population of Syria and neighboring countries on the weak, unfounded notion that we can’t imagine anything worse than the status quo. If Rubio can’t imagine it, that’s another good reason not to listen to his recommendations.

P.S. If Rubio does believe what he’s saying, he has taken what is ultimately a very dangerous teleocratic position regarding the activities of the U.S. government.

While one can debate the degree to which the presidency is imperial, it’s simply untrue that the war in Libya is illegal in any shape, manner, or form. It’s being conducted under the auspices of both the UN Charter and the North Atlantic Treaty, which rather covers it internationally. ~James Joyner

As far as the North Atlantic Treaty goes, this is false. The North Atlantic Treaty has nothing to do with what is taking place in Libya. The war is not being fought to fulfill obligations under that treaty, and NATO is not participating in the Libyan war because of the treaty. Indeed, there is no way that a treaty that created a defensive alliance could be used to authorize an attack on a state that did not attack any member of the alliance. At best, NATO is acting as the institution through which member governments are enforcing a Security Council resolution.

As far as U.S. law is concerned, this is also wrong. The President has no authority under the Constitution to do what Obama has done in Libya. The Libyan war doesn’t even have the ridiculous Clinton administration excuse of “implicit authorization” through a vote for funding the war, and to this day the Libyan war continues to be funded out of the Pentagon’s current budget. The Constitution did not vest the President with the power to start a war against another state (or anyone else) on his authority. This is the very sort of arbitrary war that the Framers sought to avoid. War powers were not ambiguously divided. They were very clearly divided. Since WWII and especially since Korea, the divisions have been blurred by executive usurpation and Congressional surrender, and members of both parties have been happy to collaborate in this blurring when the executive was under their party’s control. The fact that Congress has completely failed to check the executive in this matter doesn’t make Obama’s actions legal. It just means that there will apparently be no attempt to hold him accountable for his illegal war.

Contra Andrew, the war was illegal from the start. There wasn’t a time in March when it was legal, but then became illegal later. Obama has abused the authority given to him as Commander-in-Chief. It doesn’t cease to be an abuse of power because Congress and the public are indifferent. What that means is that Obama will evidently get away with his illegal actions.

Joshua Keating has a brief summary of the foreign policy views of likely and declared 2012 Republican candidates, and it’s mostly fine for what it is, but there were several mistakes and misleading statements that jumped out at me.

He takes what he thinks is an easy swipe at Bachmann for identifying possible elements of Al Qaeda and Hizbullah among Libyan rebels, and says that this echoes Gaddafi’s talking points, but in fact Bachmann took this information from Admiral Stavridis, who testified before Congress that intelligence indicated there were “flickers” of these groups in eastern Libya. Maybe that was wrong, or maybe it wasn’t, but it’s simply inaccurate to say that Bachmann was echoing Gaddafi. She may have been exaggerating the significance of what Adm. Stavridis said, but that’s very different from repeating Gaddafi’s propaganda.

On Palin, Keating says, “She has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Libya.” He fails to mention that her opposition to involvement in Libya was largely incoherent rambling and she didn’t clearly oppose the intervention prior to her speech last week. Indeed, until her split with her neoconservative advisors, which Keating mentions, one would have been hard-pressed to describe Palin as an opponent of the Libyan intervention.

The last error is not terribly important, but it was odd. Keating wrongly identifies Ron Paul as an Arizona Congressman. This is a strange mistake considering how relatively well-known Paul is by now. Ron Paul represents the Fourteenth District of Texas.

As I have been reading the denunciations of Obama’s “weakness” on Syria, I have wondered how many Americans want the U.S. to be more involved in responding to the crackdown there. Just how unrepresentative are the “do something” brigades this time? Apparently, they are extremely unrepresentative. About one in ten wants greater involvement (via Scoblete):

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just nine percent (9%) of Likely U.S. Voters think the United States should get more directly involved in the Syrian crisis. Sixty-five percent (65%) say America should leave the situation alone. But one-in-four voters (25%) aren’t sure.

Looking through the crosstabs, I see that there is no demographic group in which support for more direct involvement exceeds 15%. Ideological identification and party affiliation make no difference. Conservatives and Republicans are just as uninterested in greater U.S. involvement as all other political groups. Hardly anyone in America believes that the U.S. should be more directly involved. Perhaps some of them understand that there isn’t very much that the U.S. can profitably or constructively do in Syria. Whatever the reason, there is essentially no meaningful public support for doing more than what the administration is currently doing, which can accurately be described as not much beyond targeted sanctions.

Contrary to a lot of nonsense that people were saying two months ago on Libya, this is not a betrayal of “who we are.” The Syrian regime’s brutality is deplorable and awful, but Michael Young is completely wrong to say that the U.S. will bear “partial responsibility” for that brutality. Young wrote, “The White House’s uncertainty can be measured in human lives.” This is absurd, because it is quite clear that there is nothing that the U.S. or any other Western government could have said and followed through on that would have deterred Assad from what he is doing now.

The U.S. bears responsibility for many things, but this isn’t one of them. Arguably, the conduct of allied governments subsidized or defended by the U.S. reflects on America, and the U.S. bears some partial responsibility for enabling or tolerating the behavior of allied regimes. When rival or pariah states react to perceived U.S. provocations, the U.S. has some responsibility for contributing to the escalation of tensions. The U.S. cannot reasonably be held responsible when repressive governments engage in repression.

In reality, his ostensible liberal allies like the late Ted Kennedy saw an opening to advance their own priorities, and in Mr. Romney they took advantage of a politician who still doesn’t seem to understand how government works. It’s no accident that RomneyCare’s most vociferous defenders now are in the White House and left-wing media and think tanks. They know what happened, even if he doesn’t. ~The Wall Street Journal

Jacob Heilbrunn cites this WSJ editorial as evidence that the “war against Romney has begun,” but this overlooks how unsympathetic the WSJ editors were to Romney in the last cycle as well. Romney’s support among conservative elites and activists was often shallower than it was for many of the other candidates. Support for Romney seemed to be based in little more than the idea that “at least he’s not Huckabee or McCain!” This was a strange reaction, since Romney had been well to the left of Huckabee and McCain for most of his adult life and political career, but Romney promised to give movement conservatives exactly what they wanted (whatever that might be at the time). As a result, movement conservatives could be reasonably confident that Romney had no enduring principles that would get in the way of that. Since then, Romney has been paying his dues, supporting Republicans around the country with his PAC, and building up another formidable campaign organization.

The good news for Romney is that the 2008 cycle showed just how limited the influence of the movement and party’s ideological gatekeepers really is when it comes to determining the outcome of primaries. Conservative media of all kinds declared that Huckabee and McCain were completely unacceptable for different reasons, and most primary electorates ignored these official condemnations. Most Southern primaries went to Huckabee, and most of the rest went to McCain. Romney dominated in almost all of the caucus states by virtue of his superior resources and organization, but he always kept coming up short against McCain when he had to compete in states with larger electorates.

Huckabee’s successes in 2008 and his continued popularity have demonstrated the extent to which social and religious conservatives make up much of the conservative coalition. Huckabee benefited greatly from this because he was the one 2008 candidate who made social issues a major theme of his campaign, and as a former pastor and an outspoken evangelical he appealed to many of these voters by being “one of them.” If Huckabee does not join the fray this cycle, those voters are even more likely to be split among four or five candidates instead of rallying behind him.

Gingrich, Bachmann, Pawlenty, Santorum, and Cain could divide this part of the conservative vote. At least three of them can credibly speak the language of religious conservatives to one degree or another, and Bachmann and Pawlenty can appeal to evangelical identity politics, but with all of them in the mix it is less likely that any one of them will prevail. For his part, Romney could pick up some of this support, as there are some social conservatives and evangelicals who have supported him in the past. As of right now, Romney appears to be the only viable candidate to win moderate Republican votes in large numbers, but Huntsman could complicate that.

It isn’t a given that any candidate that conservative elites reject is one that will have more popular support, but the 2008 experience suggests that the movement elite’s understanding of what rank-and-file voters want and like is badly skewed by elite preferences. Romney transformed himself into a standard-issue Republican for 2007-08, and for the last three years he has been struggling to keep up with political changes inside the GOP. That said, for the most part he has latched onto almost any line of attack against Obama that Republicans want to make. As far as I’m concerned, Romney has little or no credibility as a conservative, but if Republicans want a well-funded candidate eager to bash Obama on the economy and make frequent references to American greatness Romney is the candidate they’re going to get behind.

The one small snag for Romney may be the Huntsman candidacy. If Huckabee helped doom Romney by winning a large part of the conservative vote Romney was seeking, Huntsman could undermine Romney by taking just enough of the moderate vote that Romney may need. That doesn’t mean that Huntsman will become a competitive candidate, much less that he will win anywhere, but that he will bleed away just enough support from Romney that others could take advantage.

If it threatens to steal away moderate voters, Huntsman’s campaign could help Romney with conservatives in the way that McCain’s 2000 campaign unintentionally helped Bush. Bush was the de facto frontrunner coming into the race, but he had started campaigning as the moderate “reformer with results” and conservatives were appropriately wary of him. Bush expected that he would have to head off challenges from the right, but none of candidates to his right posed that much of a threat. McCain became the insurgent candidate attacking Bush from the Republican left, and his fan base in the media encouraged him. This had the effect of letting Bush present himself as the conservative alternative to McCain’s media-backed candidacy. There’s no question that mainstream media outlets are pushing Huntsman as openly and desperately as they once promoted McCain in 1999-2000. When I was reading the latest glowing Huntsman profile in Time, it occurred to me that Huntsman is the politician mainstream journalists hoped and wanted Romney to be, and some of them are doing their best to present Huntsman that way.

Instead, the coalition, through aggressive attacks on Tripoli and a naval blockade, has adopted a campaign of coercion. There are three problems with this. First, punishing adversaries rarely works. Nato has inflated the costs of capitulation and made a settlement less likely. Second, the regime has levelled the playing field by switching to hit-and-run tactics in the south, plain-clothes soldiers in the east and rocket attacks in Misrata. Third, coercion may flounder as the regime waits out the coalition. But to ensure this longevity, Muammar Gaddafi has had to switch his focus to securing the war’s lifelines.

This is why the battles in the west and the interior of Libya are crucial. It is why Colonel Gaddafi’s forces have redeployed forces from Misrata to the west. ~Shashank Joshi

Joshi has been providing some of the better analysis over the last several weeks, and his new column is worth reading. Related to what Joshi describes here, The Independent has a report on Libyan regime efforts in the interior of the country to cut off the rebels on the coast from some of the main water and oil reserves:

The oasis of Jalo, 250km south of the front line between Ajdabiya and Brega, has witnessed repeated raids by a fast-moving enemy that attacks and then disappears back into the desert.

The assaults by regime forces come amid reports last night that rebels were poised to take the airport in the western coastal city of Misrata, which has been under siege for nearly two months. But despite rebels claiming a major breakthrough against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi, the battle for control of the sparsely populated Jalo area could have greater long-term consequences.

When the town of Jalo rose up against the Gaddafi regime the day after the revolution began in Benghazi, regime loyalists fled – but they have since returned in force. The area is now ringed by pro-Gaddafi forces, who have occupied nearby oilfields and are using them to shelter from Nato air strikes and launch sabotage and kidnap missions.

As the article also explains, the resistance to Gaddafi’s rule in the western mountains threatens fuel supplies for the capital and the regime’s forces, so both sides in the conflict are at risk of losing their lifelines. The point here is to emphasize Joshi’s argument, which is that the parts of the conflict that are receiving relatively little attention may prove to be more important to the overall outcome. They also happen to be the parts of the conflict where NATO’s role appears to be less significant so far.

Instead, the administration needs quickly to move off the sidelines, declare its full-fledged support for the aspirations of the Syrian people, and develop a serious strategy to expedite the collapse of Assad’s rule and a peaceful transition to a new, more democratic order. ~John Hannah

After that, Obama can win the war in Libya using the same magic wand that he just used on Syria. In fairness, Hannah does a better job than many administration critics in outlining some specific things that he wants the administration to do:

The key to a soft landing will be fracturing the regime’s elite, particularly by convincing prominent figures in the Alawite community, especially within the security services, that their interests lie not in continuing to support Assad and his family in the commission of their crimes against the Syrian people, but in abandoning them and throwing their weight behind the popular movement for peaceful change. Such an effort would require assembling a diplomatic coalition of states most capable of influencing Syrian events, including the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and perhaps Egypt. The office of the United Nations’ Secretary General might come in handy as well, particularly in the form of its shrewd and energetic envoy, Terje Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat who proved such a useful ally in helping coerce Syrian troops out of Lebanon in 2005.

The network of contacts, political, military, and intelligence, that these states possess across the Syrian elite would need to be discretely [sic] tapped. Inducements — financial, political, and otherwise — would need to be offered. Assurances — both in terms of a future role in the post-Assad order and security protections for the broader Alawite community as well as other minorities — would need to be provided. Punishments in the form of economic sanctions, travel bans, and international prosecutions would need to be threatened and, as necessary, imposed.

This is a bit more developed than the usual hawkish plan for responding to foreign political unrest, which goes something like this: 1) Take A Stand; 2) ???; 3) Success! That said, Hannah’s proposal relies entirely on convincing core elements of the current regime that their interests do not lie with the current regime. That doesn’t just strike me as “enormously challenging,” but nearly impossible. Who will be providing the bribes, er, inducements? How much are “we” willing to pay, and once the bribes have been paid what will stop a post-Assad regime from reorganizing as an authoritarian state under a different leadership? What would give Syrian minority groups any confidence that outside security guarantees will mean anything? Perhaps they will be inspired by the shining example of protections afforded to religious minorities in Iraq? Speaking of Iraqis, what is going to happen during all this regime-collapsing to the roughly one million Iraqis who have taken up residence in Syria after they were driven from their homes in the last decade?

Assuming that the administration is interested in doing this, what incentive does Turkey have to support this regime change effort? Regardless of the party in the power, the Turkish government has traditionally been opposed to moves that would destabilize countries that border Turkey, and it has been extremely wary of anything that could affect stability in Kurdish areas of the country. What assurances can the U.S. credibly give Turkey on this, and why would Turkey believe those assurances after the experience of the Iraq debacle? Turkey is one of the states with the most to lose if Syria suffers from prolonged instability, but it is also one of the states that has gone out of its way to cultivate good relations with the current regime. Why is Erdogan going to break with Syria and make controversial moves to facilitate regime change in a Muslim country? In any case, Erdogan will be reluctant to do much of anything until after next month’s election.

The brutal crackdown in Syria is an event to which there are no ready-made answers. If Hannah is serious about desiring the collapse of the Assad regime, he can’t expect that there will be a peaceful transition to follow. If the administration’s response has largely been cautious and limited, that is because there is not much that the U.S. can do without jeopardizing many of the other states in the region and jeopardizing the population of Syria as well.

Republicans have high hopes for Rubio as a future leader. In part, that expectation is based on the realization that no conservative since Ronald Reagan has better articulated the connection between American values and a forward-leaning foreign policy. ~Jennifer Rubin

That’s almost certainly not true, but if it were it wouldn’t say much for conservatives since Reagan. I take it for granted that Rubin is going to build up Rubio. His foreign policy views align with hers. Couldn’t she manage this without quite so much embarrassing hyperbole? He is a freshman Senator who has taken a number of standard hawkish positions in the last four and a half months that make him virtually indistinguishable from his other hawkish colleagues. No “conservative” in the last twenty-two years has articulated these ideas better than Rubio?

Reviewing Rubio’s remarks makes this very hard to believe. The second part of Rubin’s interview with Rubio is just an underwhelming as the first part, and like the first part it contains many of the same stock phrases that he used in his interview with National Review‘s Robert Costa.

What do we learn from all of this? We find out that he is against a Palestinian declaration of statehood, he favors tighter Cuba sanctions than the administration wants, and he doesn’t like “isolationism” or “neo-isolationism.” This is all perfectly consistent with the hawkish interventionism Rubio has embraced, and there is nothing about it that is especially insightful or unique. That isn’t entirely Rubio’s fault. Normally, no one expects freshmen Senators to have much insightful or unique to offer once they have adopted the conventional party line, but Rubio’s admirers are busily promoting him as the next great militarist hope. It isn’t enough to applaud him for taking the positions they like. He has to be made into a heroic figure when he has done and said nothing requiring the least bit of imagination or courage. Rubin concludes with this bit of egregious flattery:

Republicans, as Rubio points out, run the risk of becoming narrow-minded and inward-looking. If Rubio, through his actions and words, can stymie that impulse he will be well on his way to ascending to the leadership of his party — and perhaps of the country.

Here is another Rubio insight:

In the last century the U.S. has been a force for good. If you talk to people around the world, they’ll tell you the same thing [bold mine-DL].

In some cases, it is true that the U.S. has been a force for good, and in others it doesn’t apply at all. One of the chief failings of Rubio’s foreign policy view and his triumphalist form of American exceptionalism is that as far as he is concerned these other, unfortunate episodes have apparently never occurred. When asking “people around the world” about this, it rather depends on the people being asked and what we’re asking them. The annoying thing about Rubio is that I doubt that he would know what to ask.

Update: Josh Rogin has the details about the Syria resolution Rubio has co-sponsored.