R.L.G. at Democracy in America wrote this a few days ago on the 2012 nomination fight:

Mr Douthat makes clear that he thinks Mitt Romney has the clearest path to the nomination. No wonder he is banking on a changing mood; it will have to change a very great deal before the man who pioneered Obamacare will be the Republican nominee.

As Ross noted in a later post, Romney is already ahead of Palin among some social conservative activists according to the Values Voters Summit straw poll, and right now he has the most support of any likely 2012 contender. It’s true that Romney is in a virtual tie with Huckabee at the top of this latest poll, but the “obvious” front-runner Palin is in fourth place behind the increasingly ridiculous Gingrich. If I had to pick Romney or Huckabee as the current front-runner, I would have to say it is Romney. Despite all of his considerable baggage and my strong dislike for him, Romney is accepted by movement conservative activists, pundits and leaders to a degree that Huckabee is not and probably never will be. More important, he is acceptable to wealthy Republican donors, and Huckabee is not. Romney is certainly running and has been organizing to that end for some time, and Huckabee may not run and has never had much of a campaign organization even when he was an actively campaigning candidate. That puts Romney far out in front of his closest rival, and it puts him miles ahead of the others.

It seems as if it would make sense that health care legislation Romney championed in Massachusetts should be his undoing because it was the model for the federal health care bill. Then again, it should be bad for the GOP as a whole that the health care bill was in many important respects modeled on the Republican compromise position of the mid-90s that Romney adopted. Romney’s health care record should be a liability with primary voters, but that assumes that they will care more about what he did as governor of Massachusetts than they care about what he says he will do as President. The latest version of Romney is the one who fiercely denounces health care legislation and urges its repeal. A substantial percentage of Republican primary voters in 2008 overlooked his complete lack of credibility on a range of issues on which he pretended to be the true conservative candidate, and without McCain in the race sucking up the support of all the moderate primary voters Romney will probably gain their support as well. The voters who regard Romney as too fake and too unprincipled will probably be split several ways by a large field of candidates, and the new Republican rules for awarding delegates will benefit the candidate who is best able to compete in many different kinds of states and who has the resources and organization to have a campaign presence across the country. All of that leaves Romney with a decent chance at the nomination. His nomination will be a debacle for the GOP of a different sort, but it seems the most likely outcome whether or not the public mood changes.

He got a late start in his 2004 race against Daschle, and it worked. And Thune points to Fred Thompson as someone who delayed his entry in 2008 but was nonetheless competitive. “Fred had an opportunity there and he waited until considerably later in the game.” ~Stephen Hayes

It may tell you something about this remarkably long profile of John Thune that there was nothing in it until the eighth page that related anything interesting about Thune’s possible political future. Thune’s name keeps coming up whenever the subject turns to the presidential race in 2012, but it can’t be encouraging to Thune fans that he believes Fred Thompson was a competitive candidate in 2008. It wasn’t just that Thompson entered the race late, which certainly didn’t help, but like Thune he had no particular theme or reason for running. It was as if he felt obliged to provide the Fred Thompson alternative, which turned out to be a dull echo rather than an alternative. From his rambling, 17-minute (as I recall) campaign announcement released online to his fairly early departure from the field after South Carolina, Thompson distinguished himself mainly by his refusal to raise his hand during a debate and an embarrassing habit of falsely claiming that no other nation has lost as many soldiers in the cause of freedom as the U.S. For the most part, he seemed to think his job was to heckle Mike Huckabee during the debates in late 2007. He had virtually no impact on the 2008 field, except to split the conservative vote in South Carolina enough to give McCain an important win, and never received more than 16% of the vote in any state he seriously contested. Third-place also-rans are not normally considered to have been competitive presidential candidates.

On TARP, Thune is disingenuous when he objects to the TARP being misused when the legislation he voted for provided no oversight or accountability for how the money would be used. His vote and the votes of his colleagues all but guaranteed that the money would be used for whatever purpose the executive wanted, and that’s exactly what happened. He is probably right that it won’t be held against him, because it would end up disqualifying almost every leading national Republican.

On the more grave matter of starting a war with Iran, Thune takes the predictable, reckless hawkish line:

“A nuclear Iran is a very, very serious threat to America’s interests and to America,” Thune said. “And I think the president assumed that when he came into office that all that stuff would just go away because all’s he’s got to do is he could be the great negotiator and people would just sit down and reason, and I think he’s found out otherwise.” Thune says the United States should exhaust all options before turning to a military action. But given a choice between a risky military strike and an Iran with nuclear capability, it’s not a close call.

“There are no good options, but I think the United States has to have on the table the military option. And I think if there is a possibility that we could destroy or take out that nuclear capability by acting sooner rather than later I think it’d be better to act sooner.”

Thune may run a pointless Thompsonesque campaign, or he may run a good one, but as far as I’m concerned this position on Iran proves that he should never be allowed near the Presidency.

Responding to my assertion that there’s no correlation between U.S. defense spending and global freedom James Joyner (and Dave) called me out – arguing that the demise of the Soviet Union proves that indeed there is.

That’s true, and I concede the point – up to a point. First, the U.S. defense build-up had an impact on the Soviet Union’s ability to compete with the U.S. and helped hasten their end – but a host of other factors contributed to that end as well, as Joyner admits. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg shouldn’t concede so quickly. Not only did a host of other factors contribute to the end of the USSR, but in most important respects it was overwhelmingly the political action of the peoples of eastern Europe and the USSR that resulted in the collapse of the Soviet system. This isn’t meant to diminish the real successes of containment policy in western Europe and Asia, but we do need to acknowledge that policies that provided effective defense for our allies also effectively did very little to advance the freedom the hundreds of millions of people under Soviet control. That wasn’t the purpose of containment, and neither was it the main purpose of the military build-up in the ’80s.

Besides, to the extent that our military build-up showed leaders in the USSR that their economic and political model could not compete and thus contributed to the collapse, it is not something that can be readily repeated today and it is not something that needs to be repeated. Even if one wants to maintain that the build-up in the ’80s was imperative to “winning” the Cold War, there is no comparable competing state today, nor is there likely to be one for a long time. What Pletka and Donnelly are calling for is the ability to project power around the world in ways that have no connection with the advance of political freedom abroad. They are arguing for a “robust” American role in a post-Cold War world where it is not needed. Indeed, it is less necessary today than it was ten or twenty years ago, and it will become increasingly outdated and unnecessary as more regional powers begin assuming responsibility for their parts of the world.

George Kennan famously rejected the core assumption of the argument that U.S. policy in the ’80s was decisive in bringing down the USSR:

The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.

Kennan went on to argue:

Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980’s.

What did the greatest damage was not our military preparations themselves, some of which (not all) were prudent and justifiable. It was rather the unnecessarily belligerent and threatening tone in which many of them were publicly carried forward. For this, both Democrats and Republicans have a share of the blame.

What Pletka and Donnelly were arguing in their op-ed was obviously not just for continued high or increased levels of military spending, but for a “robust” American role in the world. “Robust” is the word hawkish interventionists use to refer to policies of aggressive confrontation and interference in the affairs of other nations. To use Kennan’s words, this is the unnecessarily belligerent and threatening way to manage relations with rival and hostile states. As Kennan argued concerning the USSR, this approach tends to strengthen hard-liners in the other government, retards political change in the other country and generally delays regime collapse by providing a rallying point in the form of a foreign adversary.

Does that sound like the preferred foreign policy of any contemporary hawks? Of course it does. It is the same kind of foreign policy that hawks want us to pursue against Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Burma and Syria, among others, and it has been shown to be completely counterproductive, harmful to the welfare of the people living under these regimes, and an aid to the continued survival of repressive governments. If we misunderstand the principal causes for the USSR’s failure and collapse and identify massive American military spending as the key to “winning” the Cold War, we will probably end up concluding that “extreme militarization of American discussion and policy” is the appropriate solution to contemporary international problems as well. Indeed, that is what Pletka and Donnelly hope Americans will conclude. The “robust” role they support is that of a military hegemon dictating terms to uncooperative states. As I said before, this has nothing to do with defending American freedoms, and it also delays the day when many of these repressive regimes will be held accountable by their nations.

Since World War II, a touchstone of American conservatism has been the defense of freedom. The freedoms of others were regarded as essential to secure and enjoy our own. ~Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly

Via Scoblete

The first sentence is debatable, but there is something to it in general terms. If the “defense of freedom” means what they say it does in the next sentence, this has not been a “touchstone” of American conservatism since WWII. At best, it has been a faddish idea indulged by some conservatives during the last ten to twenty years, and before that it was not an idea held by many conservatives in the United States. It reached its peak in popularity on the right around the time of Bush’s Second Inaugural, and has steadily lost support since then. Of course, the authors aren’t really talking about the freedoms of others or American freedoms. What they want to keep in place is an America that has a “robust” role in the world, and they don’t really care what it costs in dollars or American liberties.

One of the problems with the idea that the “freedoms of others” are “essential to secure and enjoy our own” is that there’s simply no reason to believe that it is true. If people in China or Iran or Burma were to become significantly more free politically than they are today, American freedoms would be no more and no less secure. On the whole, American freedoms are not under threat from foreign governments and non-state actors, and foreign governments and non-state actors cannot significantly affect our freedoms. What can threaten those freedoms is the belief that we must give them up for the sake of an elusive security against over-hyped, exaggerated or non-existent threats.

What is essential to securing and enjoying our own freedoms is a healthy wariness of and opposition to concentrated and unchecked power at home. There are few better examples of concentrated and unchecked power than the warfare and security states constructed for the sake of “defending freedom.” Many actual American constitutional liberties have been compromised, undermined or gutted by this supposed freedom-defending apparatus, which makes the claim that our large military and security establishments are primarily dedicated to defending freedom a bit hard to take. Pletka and Donnelly have resorted to this misleading freedom language because they want to make sure that the funding for the warfare and security state is not jeopardized in all of the budget-cutting excitement that they think might ensue next year. The main thing to understand is that their argument has nothing to do with fidelity to conservative principles or the protection of American freedom. It is focused solely on perpetuating an unnecessary, unaffordable American hegemony in international affairs that forces us to sacrifice liberty and security and the fiscal health of the nation while nonetheless failing to put American interests overseas first.

Dana Rohrabacher was one of the Republicans in the House who had supposedly learned some lessons from invading Iraq. He claimed that most of the House Republican conference now thought that invading Iraq had been a mistake. My reaction to that has been to note that criminals often think their crimes were mistakes when they go awry, but it was possible that Rohrabacher meant something more than that. He has become one of the more outspoken Republican critics of the mission in Afghanistan now that he has rediscovered hostility to nation-building. One might have assumed that this meant that he would not be party to the next round of paranoid threat-hyping and reckless fearmongering about a despotic regime overseas. If so, that would have been a mistake. Here‘s Rohrabacher doing his best Rick Santorum impression by warning of the impending threat from…Burma! Whenever we see a mainstream Republican starting to espouse something that sounds like common-sense, America-first foreign policy, I am always skeptical and assume that we merely have to wait long enough to find out that the apparent change of heart was an illusion or a bizarre fluke. Unfortunately, Rohrabacher shows that my skepticism about the “new antiwar right” was entirely warranted.

It is true that the Burmese junta has shown some interest in trying to acquire nuclear technology. While the information revealed earlier this year came from a defector and was promoted by a Burmese exile group, there appears to be some documentation to support the claim. What does this amount to? Not much at all:

The report said the defector had been involved in the nuclear program and smuggled out extensive files and photographs describing experiments with uranium and specialized equipment needed to build a nuclear reactor and develop enrichment capabilities.

But the report concluded that Myanmar is still far from producing a nuclear weapon.

“From what I’ve seen, the quality of workmanship is extremely poor, that the level of professionalism in the things they are building, the drawings they are making is extremely poor, said Kelley.

“I am not saying that this is a nuclear weapons program that is about to scare us tomorrow,” he said. “What I am saying is the intent to build nuclear weapons is much more clear now.”

Not surprisingly, a poor, ramshackle military government doesn’t have the resources or the know-how to go about building a functioning nuclear weapon. That isn’t about to stop Rohrabacher from making this non-existent threat into a global one:

Such awesome new power in the hands of psychotic bullies who have no regard for human life would be a nightmare — not just for the suffering Burmese, but for all of humanity [bold mine-DL]. Like North Korea’s nuclear program, Burma’s does not suggest that it’s time to cut a deal. It’s time for regime change. Such a goal does not require us to send troops, but it does require a commitment to an alternative, and it requires our attention.

Unfortunately for the Burmese people, a military junta with such weapons would mainly just be a nightmare for the Burmese. Having developed them, it isn’t going to give them away, and there’s no reason to think that they would ever use them. Pretty much everything Rohrabacher says about the junta’s crimes and abuses is true, which is why it has never made much sense why the international response to the junta has been to punish the people of Burma with economic and political isolation. Burmese sanctions have had the same effect that sanctions always have on countries with such despotic regimes: the middle class is destroyed, the political opposition is badly weakened, the country is impoverished, and the regime grows stronger vis-a-vis the people. Our colleague Dr. Leon Hadar wrote a paper on the total failure of sanctions on Burma 12 years ago, which has not stopped Rohrabacher from being a supporter of this failed policy. Three years ago Rohrabacher once again supported trade restrictions on Burma for the ostensible purpose of promoting democracy, when cutting off Burma even more from international markets will do nothing of the kind. As Naser Mousavizadeh said in a Newsweek article at the start of this year on the outdated “rogue state” concept:

But Burma presents perhaps the starkest and most advanced case of the failure of Western strategies aimed solely at cutting off repressive regimes. The two-decade-old policy of isolating Burma now looks like a carefully constructed attempt to weaken Western influence and open the door to China, while devastating Burma’s legitimate economy and doing nothing to improve its people’s human rights.

Mousavizadeh went on:

This is not to say that the sanctions haven’t had an impact—only that they have been entirely counterproductive. In a series of recent conversations with civil-society leaders, businessmen, and foreign diplomats in Rangoon, a grim picture emerged: a middle class decimated and forced into exile; an educational system entirely unable to develop the country’s human capital; a private sector hollowed out, with only the junta’s cronies able to profit from trade in the country’s natural resources.

And he also had this to say:

In Burma and Iran—no less than among the other rogues states—decades of Western sanctions have achieved a perfect storm of deprivation for the people, wealth and job security for their rulers, and strategic influence for those countries unmoved by complaints about human-rights abuses.

The depressing thing is that all of this could have been seen back in the ’90s, and scholars such as Dr. Hadar did see it, and yet Burma policy has gone from bad to worse. It is a bad joke that Rohrabacher, a member of the Human Rights Caucus no less, proposes boosting the broken, weakened opposition that his preferred policies have been starving for decades as the means to overthrow the junta. Rohrabacher’s solution rests on this not-very-credible claim:

Aung San Suu Kyi and her ethnic allies are democratic and give the West a viable and powerful option.

I feel like I’m back in the mid-90s reading about the “viable” option of supporting an Iraqi exile-led rebellion against Hussein. Like the Iraqi opposition forces back then, the Burmese opposition forces are in no shape to do much of anything. The junta’s brutality has a lot to do with that, but our sanctions policy has done a fair amount of damage, too. If the Burmese people are “twice sanctioned,” according to a Burmese businessman quoted by Mousavizadeh, the best way to alleviate the Burmese people’s suffering at the hands of the regime is to stop helping the regime in keeping the people poor, poorly-educated and weak.

What won’t help people in Burma is the sort of fantasies being offered by Rohrabacher, who also wrote:

They [the opposition] would already have succeeded in toppling their oppressors, except that China has supplied the junta with an arsenal of modern arms and other instruments of repression.

Rohrabacher has no way of knowing this. What we do know is that the old SLORC held on for many years without substantial Chinese aid. Admittedly, China is now heavily involved in Burma, which makes things even harder for the opposition, but that’s another argument against a regime change policy. Not only would we expect the Burmese opposition to do all the work and take all the risks, but we would be putting them up against adversaries that they could not realistically overcome. If it were just the junta, that might be one thing, but Burma is the client state and trading partner of major regional powers. China and India have an interest in preserving the status quo, and even if India would welcome a change in government China is not going to give up control in one of its new satellites. From the American perspective, a Burma policy focused on regime change would introduce new tensions into the relationship with China that the U.S. doesn’t need. The Bush administration drove U.S.-Russian relations into the ground partly because it seemed to be obsessed with promoting anti-Russian governments in ex-Soviet republics, and Rohrabacher would have us do the same thing with China by trying to topple one of its client governments.

Chinese hostility is even more likely if the new Burmese government is supposed to be an overtly anti-Chinese one. I take it from Rohrabacher’s long-standing hostility to China and his remarks near the end of his article that making Burma a front-line state in an anti-Chinese containment policy is what he has in mind:

I recently returned from the Thai-Burmese border, where I consulted with members of the Burmese democracy movement. I was deeply impressed with not only their courage, but also their commitment to a decentralized, denuclearized, democratic Burma. The freedom-loving people of the region want to be our allies against an evil enemy [bold mine-DL], as they were in the fight against the Japanese in World War II.

Rohrabacher deserves some credit. Not just anyone could propose a policy idea that combines the worst features of the “freedom agenda” in the former USSR with the strategic blindness and moral bankruptcy of our Iran policy together with the reckless encouragement of political dissidents that gave us 1956 in Hungary and the massacre of Shi’ites in 1991. Following these recommendations, we can badly damage relations with a major power, strengthen a dictatorship and set up Burma’s political dissidents for a big fall. It takes a certain kind of dangerous imagination to bring all of these things together to shape policy towards a country that also happens to be of minimal strategic importance to the United States. This is a perfect example of needlessly trying to make another country’s problems into a problem for the U.S.. It is also a good example of wanting to sabotage concrete American interests elsewhere for the sake of making futile gestures of solidarity with dissidents that our policies have been undermining for decades in a country where no American interests are involved.

Most of Krauthammer’s column today is tiresome, but he does ask one good question:

Fourth, what sane Democrat wants to nationalize an election at a time of 9.6 percent unemployment and such disappointment with Obama that just this week several of his own dreamy 2008 supporters turned on him at a cozy town hall? The Democrats’ only hope is to run local campaigns on local issues.

That’s true. When I saw Obama attacking Boehner in Ohio, I didn’t think that much of it, since Boehner is from Ohio, but I have been amazed by the stupidity of Democratic attemps to make the election into a contest focused on Tea Partiers. Democratic leaders have become preoccupied with the latest fad in political reporting and they have allowed themselves to confuse a media-inflated phenomenon inside the other party that is of interest mostly to pundits and conservative Republican activists with something that will matter to swing voters. Just as national Republicans have been flailing around hopelessly in special election after special election because they want to make every contest a referendum on Nancy Pelosi, national Democrats are going to sabotage themselves if they try to turn local races into a vote on John Boehner. As with Pelosi since 2007, most people have no idea who Boehner is and he doesn’t matter to them even if they do know. Republicans have routinely failed in House special elections because they wanted the voters in these districts to approve of a national platform for the most loathed of the two major parties.

Obviously, vulnerable Democrats in swing districts are doing everything they can to demonstrate their independence from the national party agenda, and they may be succeeding, but it hardly helps them to have their national leaders giving the election a unifying theme. Focusing on Tea Partiers is based in a misreading of the political scene as bad as the one many Republicans are making. If many Republicans mistakenly believe that the midterms represent a general revolt against a “big government agenda,” it seems that many national Democrats assume that the public shares their visceral dislike of Tea Partiers, but for the most part Americans either don’t know or don’t care about Tea Partiers.

There is the possibility that national Democrats think that their core constituencies will be so horrified by Tea Partiers that this will motivate them to vote when they otherwise wouldn’t, but they are essentially relying on mobilizing their low-information voters with a message that only their high-information voters would find meaningful. Go to a dinner party here in Hyde Park, and people will casually make jokes about Christine O’Donnell and everyone will understand the reference and have more or less the same reaction, but despite the media frenzy around O’Donnell it is doubtful that large numbers of voters who belonged to the Obama coalition have more than a vague idea of who she is and what she represents. The same goes for the Tea Party in general. National Democrats must be so completely trapped inside the bubble of political commentary and national news reporting to think that railing against the Tea Party is going to mean anything to most of the voters they’re trying to mobilize or to win over to their side.

The New York Post has a story on a possible “NY earthquake” in November, and one of the things it cites is an August poll for NY-24:

Central New York, including the Finger Lakes, Utica and Rome, where incumbent Mike Arcuri trails challenger Richard Hanna by 50-37 in a poll by the Democratic Benenson Strategy Group on Aug. 31.

There is one small problem here. Arcuri led Hanna in that poll 50-37. According to Kyle Trygstad, this was part of a DCCC poll dump to show that some of their targeted incumbents were doing reasonably well:

The DCCC polls, which were taken of 400 likely voters in late August and carried a 4.9-point margin of error, include some of the party’s most vulnerable candidates. For example, a Benenson Strategy Group poll found Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.) ahead of Republican Richard Hanna, 50 percent to 37 percent.

It makes the “earthquake” story a lot easier when you just switch the numbers to give the challenger the lead, doesn’t it? Arcuri is also up by eight according to Siena’s most recent poll. This isn’t really surprising. The GOP has lost many upstate New York districts in the last four years, and they lost two of them since the start of 2009. Right now, the Democratic incumbents in both NY-20 and NY-23 are in a decent position to win re-election. Since Scott Murphy defeated the well-liked state politician Jim Tedisco in NY-20, he has apparently won over voters in his district. Remember that these are historically Republican districts that have no modern tradition of electing Democrats to Congress. The most recent poll had Murphy up by 17 against his challenger.

Looking at some of the other races the story mentions among the “possible pick-ups,” I saw that they included NY-20, NY-23 and NY-25. The Post article overlooked the huge Murphy lead reported a few days ago and relied on an older poll with a smaller Murphy lead. As you may remember, Bill Owens was the one who defeated Hoffman in the three-way race for the 23rd District, and according to Politico he was ahead in the last poll taken and has a two-to-one advantage in money. Once again, Hoffman is not the Republican nominee, but he will still contest the race as the Conservative nominee, which makes Owens’ re-election a little more likely. Cook, Sabato, Rothenberg and RCP all consider NY-23 to be at least a “lean Democratic” seat. Dan Maffei’s district in NY-25 is listed anywhere from “lean Democratic” (RCP) to “Democrat favored” (Rothenberg), but it is not on anyone’s list of seats that anyone believes the GOP is likely to win. The article says that the challenger in NY-01 has a “good chance” to defeat the incumbent Bishop, but every ranking system except for RCP puts this seat in the Democratic column. That makes sense, since Bishop was first elected in 2002, an unusually bad year for Democrats, and the district voted for both Gore and Obama. Bear in mind that the non-partisan analysts are far more bullish on Republican gains this year than I am, and even they don’t think many districts in New York are going to change parties. That means that seven of the nine “possible pick-ups” listed in the article are not very likely wins, and the only one that is a likely win is Massa’s open seat, which everyone already knew. For that matter, Gillibrand isn’t going to lose to a friend of KLA terrorists. The quality of reporting in the conservative media about New York politics seems to be unusually bad these days.

Why does any of this matter? For most of the last year and a half, conservative pundits and newspapers have been promoting a story that seems to be untethered to reality. It has a reached a point lately that news “reports” on the midterms have devolved into exercises in wild, unfounded, pro-Republican speculation that have nothing to do with the political conditions in the country. Obviously, some conservative journalists are going to propagandize for the GOP in an election season, but floating the idea that New York Republicans are going to have massive electoral success against all evidence is a good example of the desperate self-deception that many people on the right are practicing this year. It encourages conservatives to think that they are on the verge of a landslide when they aren’t, and in the meantime it destroys the credibility of the people making these claims. Having convinced themselves that the midterms are going to be an unprecedented win for the GOP, conservatives and Republicans have been building up completely unrealistic expectations, and they are going to be bitterly disappointed when reality intrudes. More practically, if the NRCC is wasting its time and money targeting seven districts in New York, it is frittering away resources it doesn’t have to contest races it isn’t likely to win, and meanwhile other pick-up opportunities in more receptive parts of the country (e.g., Ohio or Michigan) will probably be missed as a result. On a more serious note, any national Republican money wasted on DioGuardi’s campaign is just a disgrace and an insult to Orthodox Christians across the nation.

If anything is conspicuously absent from the document, it is the word “earmarks.” There is no doubt that the conservative crusade against earmarks is often more symbolic than substantive—earmarks are hardly at the core of our budget woes. But symbols matter, and for many voters, earmarks are a symbol of the corruption of our system of government. Republicans already took a no earmark pledge this past year. Some Republican members, particularly those on the appropriations committee, would rather not take another one, and the party’s leaders have been wobbly on the subject in recent weeks. They should straighten up, and make it very clear to voters that if Republicans win the majority, there will be no earmarks. That’s almost certain to be the case whatever the leadership wants—a massive new class of members elected for the first time this year is very likely to make sure of it. Why not make it clear in advance that this is where Republicans stand? ~Yuval Levin

Levin is proposing that the GOP take an uninspired“let’s go back to 2007” message and augment it with the Republican obsessionwith earmarks from 2008. What makes this worse than the usual anti-earmark rallying cry is that Levin understands perfectly well that earmarks are irrelevant to the government’s fiscal problems. He knows that a ban on earmarks would address none of the long-term liabilities that the “Pledge” document also avoids discussing. It is one step removed from promising spending reductions by targeting “fraud, waste and abuse.”

He says that earmarks are a “symbol of the corruption of our system of government,” but this isn’t true. Arguably, earmarks are one of the few things done by members of Congress that have something to do with serving members’ constituencies. Symbols of the corruption of our system of government abound from the TARP to Medicare Part D to the Iraq war, all of which most of the current Republican leadership in Congress supported. If they want to make symbolic gestures, it might be more useful if they acknowledged and repudiated those colossal errors.

Levin has managed to take a document roundly mocked as milquetoastfrom the right and fiscally disastrousfromeverywhere else and found a way to make it that much more easily ridiculed.

Conservatives are generally underwhelmed by the domestic policy sections of the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” and they have every reason to be, but like Kevin Sullivan I was actually a little bit glad to see that the treatment of foreign policy was minimal and superficial. Jonathan Bernstein is right that the foreign policy section was “amateurish and pathetic,” but it could have been so much worse than that. I don’t disagree with Bernstein when he says that “it’s a sad piece of work that really does not reflect well on the party,” but compared to what some of the would-be 2012 Republican presidential contenders have been saying in recent years on the subject it is refreshingly dull.

From the Republicans’ perspective, it’s better that they produced something amateurish and pathetic rather than something demagogic and absurd, especially since that is what most criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy from the right have tended to be for the last two years. As Kevin says, 2010 is an election focused entirely on domestic issues, and this document is the first hint I have had that Republican leaders realize that attacking Obama on foreign policy right now is pointless. First of all, most voters don’t care about it under present circumstances. Second, Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy is better than most of his other ratings, so there simply aren’t as many votes to be had by attacking the administration on it.

The House GOP probably also realized that they will have no power to change anything in foreign policy even if they win a majority. Even if they manage to win the House, they will have a razor-thin majority and little power to influence foreign policy. They have no power over treaties, so there was no need for them to wade into the debate over START. It’s not as if Republican gains are going to represent broad public disgust with administration failures overseas. I would argue that 2006 definitely represented that, but there’s simply no serious way to claim that the GOP is making gains because of, say, the “reset” with Russia or the troop escalation in Afghanistan. Everyone understands that Republican gains this year will be a product of high unemployment, slow recovery and discontent with things at home. It would have been genuinely foolish for the House GOP to stake out a full foreign policy platform when it would mostly provide fodder for their critics and potentially alienate voters they might have otherwise won over. Nothing would more quickly remind many Americans of why they drove the GOP out four years ago better than a lot of confrontational, jingoistic rhetoric and promises to plunge the country into new wars. The bad news is that I suspect this is exactly what would have been in the document if it weren’t a pre-election campaign document.

This is where I think Kevin gets it wrong:

Ideological rigidity, or, in the specific case of Iran, radical statements about preparing for a regime change, make for good soundbites and exchanges on the Sunday morning shows, but they don’t resemble, as far as I can tell, the actual Republican plan for governance regarding the Islamic Republic – and that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, the Pledge doesn’t appear to be a plan for governance. It is a means of getting Republicans elected, and as such ideological rigidity and radical statements that alienate most Americans wouldn’t be included. That might seem reassuring, because it suggests that Republicans have some awareness that their foreign policy ideas are political liabilities in much of the country, but that just means that they are going to be more circumspect about what they believe during election season. There’s still no evidence that the GOP leadership understands that it has been wrong about many foreign policy questions in recent years. So far, it has only managed to discern that most Americans think they have been wrong, which is a small improvement over being completely oblivious.

Like much of the rest of the document, the foreign policy section was aimed at taking positions that a majority of Americans would find uncontroversial. Militarists and hawks are likely going to be disappointed, because many of them very much wanted to make 2010 into some sort of referendum on Obama’s foreign policy, but this was never going to be a document that satisfied hard-liners and activists, and it also wasn’t going to please political observers and pundits. It’s true that their unwillingness to touch any military or security-related spending or anything related to entitlements is proof of their fiscal unseriousness, but that’s hardly news. What is interesting is that some Republican leaders seem to have recognized that re-litigating the “surge” or the entire Iraq war is a loser for them, so they go largely unmentioned. The House GOP probably could not come up with anything substantive to say about Afghanistan because it would put most of them in the awkward bind of basically agreeing with the administration’s policy.

The main things they say that they will do in the document presumably all poll fairly well. There is something comical about a Republican foreign policy statement reduced to the bare essentials of keeping detainees at Guantanamo, missile defense and sanctioning Iran, but it is amusing because that is almost the whole of affirmative Republican foreign policy in the Obama era. After that, there is automatic rejection of anything Obama does or doesn’t do, and much of that has taken the form of demagoguery and distortion. Most of it has been intended for consumption by other conservatives who believe in the main myths about Obama.