“The Republicans are gonna win the House,” he [Brian Hagerty] said. “It’s a done deal. We just need to do what we said we were gonna do.” ~Dave Weigel

As sure-thing Senate seats drift out of sight tonight for the GOP, it’s rather funny to read a report quoting Dick Morris talking about picking up a seat in Oregon, but then Morris would say something that preposterous just to get quoted. More to the point, I was thinking about that activist’s statement about taking over the House, “It’s a done deal.” Certainly, this is what many conservative pundits have been telling activists for months, and activists want to believe it is true. It’s possible that they’re all seeing something that I’m not. Still, whenever I read someone saying something like this I have a simple question: How?

Based on CQPolitics’ rankings, available funding and recent polling, I count 25 Democratic House seats that will most likely change hands, 4 Republican House seats (including HI-01) that will become Democratic seats in November, and 16 genuine toss-ups. This doesn’t include FL-25, which is an intriguing and weird race that bears watching and might be an unexpected Democratic pick-up. Even if the Republicans win all of those toss-ups (which is not likely), they will not have enough net seats to take the majority. They would be painfully, intolerably close, but they would fall just short. Revisiting South Dakota’s House race that I discussed earlier this month, I now find that Herseth Sandlin is slightly leading her challenger in a Rasmussen poll.

One of the more amazing discoveries I made while browsing Politico’s House tracker in the last week was that Harry Teague in NM-02 was ahead of Steve Pearce by a few points in a late August Albuquerque Journal poll. I have been taking for granted that Teague was politically doomed in that district ever since his cap-and-trade vote. For those who don’t know, NM-02 is a district in the southern part of the state with major oil interests in it, and it has simply been assumed that Teague destroyed himself with that yes vote. If that isn’t true, and if Teague can win re-election, the Republicans will not only fall short of winning the House, but they will end up being embarrassed by how average their performance will be. Put another way, if someone with Teague’s voting record can win re-election in a district designed for Republicans in this environment, this election will not be a great pushback at all. In fact, it will barely be a half-hearted shove.

Dan McCarthy’s post on the Delaware Senate primary at the main blog made me realize that this will be a bad night for Republican militarists no matter the outcome. If the folks at The Weekly Standard have their way and Castle wins, they will have gone out of their way to advance the political ambitions of one of the relative few Republican House members to vote and speak against the hallowed “surge.” Honestly, I had forgotten that Castle was among the mere seventeen House Republicans who opposed the plan in early 2007, but I can just imagine how annoying it will be for all the hawkish Castle supporters to listen to Castle’s speech against the “surge.” There he was, citing the Iraq Study Group report war hawks hated so much, and then he continued on with his endorsement of a regional diplomatic solution! In taking this position, Castle wasn’t much different from many other mid-Atlantic moderates, including Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland. Gilchrest lost his primary in 2008 to a challenger who then went on to lose the general election to the current Rep. Frank Kratovil. By the way, that was another great “victory” provided by the Club for Growth. His opposition to the “surge” notwithstanding, I am not going to fall prey to the reverse of a pro-war Lieberman enthusiasm. If Castle loses tonight, it will be primarily because of fiscal and social issues, and perhaps because of the resentment many Delaware Republican voters probably felt at being lectured about their election by major outlets in the national conservative media. There will be no plausible way to spin this as a rejection of Castle’s record on foreign policy.

If Castle wins, the militarists will have defeated a candidate whose only statement on national security is that she “[b]elieves terrorism is an act of war requiring the full force of our intelligence and military resources rather than granting terrorists precious Constitutional rights and outsourcing our foreign policy to the U.N.” That’s the sort of rhetoric that would normally earn a Republican candidate the hawkish seal of approval: a nod to unilateralism and belligerence, the hint that indefinite detention and maybe even torture are perfectly fine for suspected terrorists, and a completely open-ended, perpetual war view of how to respond to terrorism. On the other hand, if O’Donnell ekes out a victory tonight, the militarists won’t be able to spin her very likely defeat in the fall as a rejection of non-interventionist or realist foreign policy views, because it appears that her foreign policy views, to the extent that she has any, are in line with theirs. If O’Donnell wins tonight, as she very well may (she is up by 8 points with 81% reporting), the militarists will have managed to show that they could not get their heavily-favored, preferred candidate across the line, and in terms of policy views they will be linked to a weak candidate headed for a landslide loss.

Finally, assuming that an O’Donnell win tonight means a Republican loss in November, that makes the chances of a Republican takeover of the Senate much worse, which will make it that much harder for the GOP to undermine the administration’s foreign policy.

Update: O’Donnell has won by six points (a margin of approx. 3,500 votes) with 99% reporting.

The fact is, the American story is not just the story of limited governments; it is the story of limited but energetic governments that used aggressive federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System. ~David Brooks

Of course, at the time that Whigs were promoting “internal improvements” they encountered constant resistance from many Democratic Republicans/Democrats who believed that the federal government had no authority to use federal revenues that way. Once the war was over and Republicans dominated national politics, the schemes for “internal improvements” became larger and more ambitious, but they always had many opponents. What Whigs would have considered “limited but energetic” government would strike Brooks as far worse than anything Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks are proposing, and Brooks’ idea of “limited but energetic” government would have horrified most Americans before 1900 and probably all Americans before 1850, not least because there are never actually any limits to what Brooks thinks the government can or should do.

Invoking the Whigs to score a point against two other Republicans who are almost as centralist as Brooks is unintentionally gives some support to the people he is trying to dismiss. After all, the Whigs believed the federal government had very limited powers and was quite constrained by the Constitution. What would have probably been more effective in challenging easy sloganeering about government-cutting is to take his opponents at their word. If they say that they want to reduce the federal government’s size and scope to the level it was at some point in the past, Brooks should have made them defend that position.

Had he done that, Brooks would have probably discovered that most people on the right today say “limited government” rather than “small government” or “constitutional government” because most of them also favor a fairly “energetic” government, but they object to some of the current activities of the federal government. They therefore choose to draw a line that they think the federal government is crossing, but one that it “shouldn’t” be crossing, and they want to make that line the outer limit of what they are willing to tolerate. The phrase “limited government” conceals a multitude of government programs, which is how so many Republicans who have no intention of scaling back the federal government to anything remotely like its enumerated powers can use the phrase without being too misleading.

My point isn’t that there haven’t always been American impulses towards a more activist, consolidated and centralized government, which in practice is what Brooks means by “energetic,” but that that there have been equally significant impulses opposing all of that. The former have won most of the contests over the last two centuries, which Brooks takes as proof that advocates of ever-more “energetic” government should keep prevailing over those who favor rather less activity. Brooks wants to claim that he can draw inspiration from the winners of those contests, while his opponents should be dismissed if they seek inspiration in the example of the losers.

One of the main problems with Brooks’ “energetic” government position is that he has repeatedly favored government activity when either none was necessary or when the specific measure he was supporting was badly misguided. For example, Brooks was a vocal supporter of the TARP. Matt Welch reminds us that Brooks dismissed opponents of the TARP bill as “nihilists,” mainly on the grounds that in a crisis government must “do something” and be seen doing something. There was never an argument for the TARP on its merits, because the merits of the legislation on offer were sorely lacking, but there was simply a call for government to take charge.

It’s worth noting that the TARP has become one of those things credited with success that is mostly the result of other policy decisions. For instance, the easing of the mark-to-market rule that was imposed in 2007 did not resolve the toxic asset problem, but it significantly aided in limiting firms’ losses. As I keep saying, the money Congress appropriated for the original purpose and sole justification for the TARP, which was to purchase toxic assets and clear the balance sheets of financial institutions to prevent a cessation of lending, was never once used for that purpose. As officials in the Obama administration admitted almost as soon as they came in, and just as many critics of the measure said before it passed, there was never going to be a way to price those assets, and there was no notion of how the program was ever going to work in practice. As it turned out, the TARP funds were never put to use for their original purpose, and yet somehow the world did not end. The TARP is a good example of what happens when the impulse towards government action overwhelms thought and deliberation. But don’t listen to me–I’m just some nihilist.

The U.S. and EU are expressing gratification at Turkey’s democratizing measures, but their effect will be to eliminate key checks on what Erdogan and AKP can do with a legislative majority. ~J.E. Dyer

Via Scoblete

There is something a little odd in referring to the ability to stage a military coup without legal consequences as a “check” on someone else’s potential abuse of power. I am one of the last to idolize the form of democratic or constitutional government as if that were enough (I wrote some positive posts about the overthrow of Thaksin when it happened and afterwards), but on the whole it is good to not have the military be effectively outside the rule of law and have that exemption written into the constitution. One of the important reforms approved by the Turkish referendum was the elimination of military immunity from prosecution in civilian courts. For any other country with a history of military interventions in politics, we would be applauding this move to bring the military under the rule of law, but because it is Turkey and some of us trust Turkish authoritarians more than they trust Turkish democrats this is a cause for worry. Democratists are a funny bunch: they are eager to install democracy where it has never existed, pretend allied states are successful democracies when they aren’t, and get worried when democratic government actually appears and grows somewhere without their help.

The tradition of Turkish secularism has always been one imposed from above and in its most extreme form it is one that has been maintained by elite institutions against the will of the majority. We don’t usually regard the President’s ability to appoint federal judges as a particularly great danger, but somehow allowing the elected government to select most of the Turkish constitutional court is a threat.

It seems as if it was just yesterday when everyone was absolutely sure that Turkey had rejected the West and abandoned their ideas about joining the EU. Of course, that was because the Turkish government was acting as it if were the government of a sovereign and independent country, and a lot of people here were under the impression that Turkey was an American dependency. On the one hand, this referendum formally brings Turkey a lot more in line with European legal norms. Europe may not want Turkey, but the Turkish majority is still trying to meet Europe’s requirements. If this is what neo-Ottomanism in action looks like, it seems that the alarmists were wrong again.

The strange thing about Turkish politics is that the Kemalists that some Westerners keep idealizing and rooting for made up most of the opposition to the referendum (in part because their opponents support it), which means that many Westerners are actively cheering for the forces that have been less interested in integrating with Europe and the rest of the world in practice. For the last decade, the AKP has been the party of trade, business and investment, and the CHP remains obsessed to a surprising degree with old socialist models. Naturally, then, the AKP is the one that many Americans find troubling.

The referendum succeeded partly for domestic political reasons unrelated to constitutional reform or Europe, and some of it was simply an expression of support for the AKP. Then again, support for the AKP continues to be as high as it is because the AKP has largely delivered on its promises of economic reform and political modernization. The referendum is part of that modernization process, and it is something that Americans, to the extent that we have any business commenting on it at all, should be pleased to see.

The Logevall/Osgood article in World Affairs Journal is worth reading:

As the current debate over U.S. foreign policy again turns on the lessons of the past, Americans would do well to take a closer look at the country’s long wrestling match with Munich’s ghost. Such an examination would show, first, that “Munich” has retained its power in American political discourse for more than seventy years largely because of electoral calculations. Second, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the success or failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s has to a great extent hinged on the willingness of presidents to withstand the inevitable charges of appeasement that accompany any decision to negotiate with hostile powers, and to pursue the nation’s interests through diplomacy. Sometimes these negotiating efforts failed; sometimes the successes proved marginal. But those presidents who challenged the tyranny of “Munich” produced some of the most important breakthroughs in American diplomacy; those who didn’t begat some of the nation’s most enduring tragedies.

A third finding would be that the people yelping, “Munich!” the loudest, such as Pawlenty, typically have the weakest, most superficial grasp on foreign policy and international affairs. Regarding the politics of Pawlenty’s appeasement remarks, it is clear that Pawlenty has embraced this rhetoric to mask his complete lack of experience in and lack of knowledge about foreign policy. Invoking Munich has retained power because of electoral calculations, yes, but the people who invoke it are usually sincere believers in the rudimentary, comic-book history of the 20th century they have learned. Take Rick Santorum, for example. No one could say that Santorum has been playing a super-hawk for the last few years because of the electoral advantages it brings. Heavy reliance on Munich/appeasement rhetoric is not simply a cynical move, but one derived from a hyper-simplistic, moralizing understanding of modern history.

Foreign Policy is to be congratulated on this very fair and intelligent article on the South Caucasus by Thomas de Waal. Mr. de Waal is an expert on the Caucasus and author of a forthcoming book on the region. He makes some excellent observations on how outsiders make problems in the Caucasus worse, and he identifies three errors that those outside the region make in thinking about the region. In short, the errors include treating the region as if it were a chessboard and the locals as if they were pawns, viewing the region as a helpless target of unending Russian aggression and great power, and seeing the Caucasus as a strategically vital region.

De Waal is right about all of these, but it’s the third error, or “mirage” as he calls it, that probably matters most in practice. We in the U.S. regularly attach more strategic importance to other parts of the world than these places merit. Many advocates for these places rely on our exaggerated estimates of strategic importance to make their basically sentimental or ideological attachment to the places appear to have value to the nation as a whole. This is how advocates get away with dressing up their private enthusiasms as national security imperatives.

Before you know it, we have “vital” interests in every corner of the globe, when most of these places are tangential or irrelevant to American interests. This not only confuses us about where we have vital interests, which may cause us to neglect our genuine interests in pursuit of these phantoms, but it is usually serving the nations in the region poorly as well. That has clearly been the lesson of the experiment in treating Georgia as a U.S. satellite: Georgian and American interests were harmed and nothing was gained.

I very much agree with De Waal’s recommendation that policymakers should begin moving towards policies on the South Caucasus that stop empowering and reinforcing the worst habits of local politics. Taking a less intrusive approach and accepting the region as a “zone of neutrality” make for a very sensible course of action. It probably goes without saying that no regional policy for the South Caucasus will be very successful without involving Turkey, Iran and Russia along with the Caucasian republics, and that would involve repairing relations with Turkey and restoring relations with Iran. Over the course of the last decade, Washington has managed to alienate or aggravate almost every government in the region, and there is a lot of fence-mending that needs to take place before the U.S. can be effective in opening up those borders to trade and exchange.

Get into your church and demand, demand that your minister, your priest, your rabbi, your pastor talk about individual rights. ~Glenn Beck

Via Andrew

If Beck’s understanding of social justice is as flawed as I think it is, the alternative that he is proposing is no better and it may be even worse than the idea he is attacking. The point here is not simply to beat up on Beck, but to make an important correction to Beck’s idea that there is something evil or Satanic in understanding the salvation Christ accomplished as something collective. As he did with social justice, he makes such a sweeping rejection of what he calls “collective salvation” that he promotes something he calls “individual salvation,” which is a doctrine that none of the Fathers would recognize or accept. Because he is reading political categories back into theological questions, which is the very thing he finds so offensive about liberation theology, he gives the impression that he is repudiating what most Christians would consider to be a core teaching of their faith.

Traditional soteriology in the patristic era taught that Christ assumed human nature like ours in every respect except for sin, which meant that He assumed a sinless humanity that was substantiated in His Person, the Person of the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. Many of the early doctrinal controversies centered around the assumption that Christ must have assumed the whole of human nature in order to heal it. Through the Incarnation and Resurrection, Christ united our nature with God and redeemed our nature from death and sin. Christ’s saving act was already accomplished then. Of course, it is our responsibility to respond to God’s condescension by willingly entering into and remaining in communion with Him in His Church, but properly speaking the New Adam lifted up all of humanity through His saving Passion and Resurrection. God accomplished our salvation collectively in our nature before salvation could be realized personally* through free will. Indeed, the one had to come before the other was even possible.

Maybe Beck doesn’t really mean what he seems to be saying, and my guess is that he is so busy confusing political and theological categories that he doesn’t see what he’s doing. That would explain how he jumps from discussing salvation to discussing rights. I have no idea what it is that he thinks the minister, priest or rabbi is going to say about “individual rights” that would be relevant to their teaching.

* Maybe I’ve read too much Zizioulas or relied on too many Neo-Thomists over the years, but I automatically react badly whenever people use the word individual when they should use the words person and personal.

In their own more subtle ways, the WTC mosque organizers end up serving the same aims of the separatist and supremacist wings of political Islam. In this epic struggle of the 21st century, we cannot afford to ignore the continuum between nonviolent political Islam and the militancy it ultimately fuels among the jihadists. ~M. Zuhdi Jasser

When I first read Jasser’s piece, I wanted to laugh at it, but the trouble with this sort of thing is that it is so easy to underestimate how seriously many people will take it. When many people read Jasser’s argument, they don’t find a lot of tendentiousness and hyperbole. Instead, they conclude that this is a very reasonable interpretation of the situation, and Jasser’s religious affiliation makes it even easier to credit what he is saying. It’s worth noting that Jasser is one of the “authorities” cited in Newt Gingrich’s new bit of fearmongering, America at Risk. The argument Jasser is making in this op-ed is very much along the same lines as the one Gingrich made against Park51 last month. Jasser has been arguing against the project at least since May, but he has significantly escalated his rhetoric against the project’s backers since then.

Jasser’s op-ed serves as a good example of where the emotional demagoguing of the Park51 project was always leading: conflating and confusing non-Islamist Muslims with Islamists, and then treating all Islamists as little more than jihadists-in-waiting or as the inspiration for jihadists. In this way, a proposed building that will apparently include areas for Christian and Jewish worship can be described as an “Islamic edifice” and its proponents can be treated as aggressive provocateurs rather than over-eager ecumenists. Everything that distinguishes Rauf from advocates of political Islam is simply wiped away, and anything that might be viewed as benign or innocuous is treated as an insidious, more “subtle” form of threat. Perhaps Jasser is so preoccupied with his own cause of combating political Islam that he sees its manifestations even where they do not exist, but his arguments against Rauf will probably come back to haunt him.

It will just be a matter of time before someone else comes along to declare that Jasser and his “reformist” efforts are insufficient or are really just a “more subtle” way to advance an agenda of supremacism and domination. Once it is taken for granted that it is acceptable to impute bad faith, deception and ill will to someone from the start because he holds different or controversial views, there will be no end to the use of such people as punching bags for political gain. Today it is Rauf’s turn, but tomorrow it could be Jasser’s. Of course, that might require wildly distorting and misrepresenting his record, but that is exactly what he is participating in right now.

Whoever wins the GOP nomination will be at a clear disadvantage in financing and campaign infrastructure against Senator Gillibrand. But she’s on the wrong side of key issues for many voters, just last week claiming she has no regrets about her support for the TARP bailout of financial institutions in 2008. ~John Fund

It would be very strange that she says that, since the House roll call does not list her as a supporter of the TARP bailout in 2008. As the roll call shows, then-Rep. Gillibrand voted against the TARP, which would seem to put her on the right side of one key issue for many voters. It’s not as if her opposition was a secret. The New York Times’ profile of Gillibrand following her appointment noted her opposition to the TARP:

Ms. Gillibrand is also a fiscal conservative who vehemently opposed the financial bailout bill — not once, but twice.

Unlike some members of the House, Gillibrand did not waver and change her vote to yea after the bill’s initial defeat in late September was followed by a sharp downturn in the stock market, so it’s not as if she tried to have it both ways on that vote. In fact, it seems like only yesterday that Harold Ford Jr. (D-Overclass) was floating the idea of a primary challenge to Gillibrand because she was seen as insufficiently slavish to Wall Street. The most recent news report I could find about Gillibrand and TARP came from earlier this month from The Ithaca Journal, which includes this passage:

But Gillibrand said she doesn’t regret her vote against the Trouble Asset Relief Program [bold mine-DL] proposed by President George W. Bush.

So Fund believes that Gillibrand recently said that she doesn’t regret her supposed support for the TARP in 2008, when she actually just said that she doesn’t regret her opposition to it. That’s a bit of a problem for an article that is already long on speculation and extremely short on any supporting evidence that there might be an upset in the making in the New York Senate race.

Why does this matter? Getting facts right should be reason enough, but there is something else. Fund’s article on Gillibrand’s potential weakness is based on an entirely false and easily checked claim, and on the basis of this rather glaring error Fund fashions the idea that anti-TARP populist anger may dislodge Gillibrand from a Senate seat that is safely Democratic in reality. That completely misleading reporting then creates the impression that New York Republicans have a far better chance of defeating Gillibrand than they actually have, and that feeds into the general hype about Republican election chances. It is also a bit rich that Fund is invoking anti-TARP anger as a threat to Gillibrand, when Fund’s own editors endorsed the TARP and did their best to encourage the flop that was Harold Ford’s insurgent campaign from Wall Street. Even though it is the WSJ and the candidates it supports that are on the wrong side of the public mood regarding the bailout, Gillibrand is painted as the villain. That reinforces my assumption that a lot of claims about Republican political strength in this cycle have very shaky foundations, and it should make us all very skeptical whenever we see stories hyping improbable Republican successes.