Let’s be clear about this: Bill Halter and Joe Sestak, in broad terms, represent challenges from the left, and their success is fueled by the energy and intensity of liberal activists. ~Greg Sargent

This strikes me as common sense, but as E.J. Dionne points out common sense apparently has nothing to do with voters’ preferences:

Also, there is this fascinating bit of data reported by Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com. He cites a blog post by Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen reporting that in the last poll taken in PA-12, Sestak led Specter by nine points, 44-35. “Among liberal voters in the district Sestak and Specter are actually tied at 44% each,” writes Jensen. “Sestak’s lead comes largely thanks to a 49-21 advantage among conservatives within the party [bold mine-DL] who make up 26% of the primary vote in this district, almost equal to the 25% who identify as liberals.” This goes to show the kind of branding problems that can occur when one switches parties.

This finding is bizarre, but perhaps there is a way to reconcile the two claims. In fact, Sargent is correct that Sestak and Halter are challenging their respective incumbents from the left and derive important support from progressive activists. They have based their candidacies on being more progressive representatives of their states. That said, it is necessary to distinguish between the ideology of activists and the preferences of the electorate, and it is also necessary to distinguish the ideological leanings of the candidate from that of the people who end up voting for him for whatever reason.

It is important to emphasize how relatively unimportant ideological identifications are in determining intra-party voting. For example, Ron Paul was obviously to the right of all of his competitors in the presidential primaries on almost every issue (and I would argue that his foreign policy views also put him far to the right of the 2008 field), but he received a disproportionately large part of his support from self-described moderates because they tended to be weaker Republicans and therefore more likely to be responsive to a dissident candidate. On paper, it makes no sense that moderate and conservative Democrats would prefer Sestak to Specter while liberals are evenly split between them, but then it doesn’t make rational sense that John McCain won the antiwar and anti-Bush vote in New Hampshire in 2008.

What many of these voters probably have in common is weaker partisan attachment. Specter has the backing of the state party machine, and so there will be liberals who are also strong partisans who rally around the candidate the party machine supports. What those McCain voters apparently perceived in McCain was someone whom they identified as being at odds with Bush, mainly because of their rivalry in 2000, and they bought into his reputation as someone who broke ranks with his party, so they may have assumed that the way to express their opposition to Bush and the party leadership was to support someone who was, in fact, virtually identical to Bush on every major policy question of the day. Perversely, the anti-Bush and antiwar Republicans with weak attachment to the party supported the party establishment’s original preferred candidate because they had the superficial, basically false impression that McCain was not a reliable partisan and Bush ally. It seems likely that Sestak, who is running as the real, progressive Democrat against the phony newcomer, will receive support from weaker partisans while the opportunistic “centrist” with establishment backing will receive a surprisingly large amount of support from the left because those voters are also strong partisans.

My guess is that Sestak’s support among moderate and conservative Democrats in Pennsylvania matches up very closely with the disapproval these voters have for Obama and the Washington Democrats with whom Specter is identified. This just underlines why many strongly ideological voters are often frustrated with the direction of their parties: many strongly ideological voters support candidates endorsed by the party establishment because they are also strong partisans and tend to conflate what is good for their party with what is good for their political views. Bizarrely, the people more likely to oppose the Congressional Democratic leadership’s priorities are going to help put a reliable supporter of those priorities into the Senate and help throw out an opportunist who would probably turn against the Democratic leadership at the drop of a hat if he thought it would serve his self-interest. Realizing this actually makes the result of today’s voting in Pennsylvania even harder to interpret and weave into a larger narrative.

Ross:

Benjamin Netanyahu and Abe Foxman may have accelerated the process, but it’s hard to imagine that the more secular, more assimilated sections of the Jewish-American population wouldn’t have eventually drifted away from an intense connection with Israel anyway, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Italian-Americans are less attached to both Italy and Catholicism than they were in 1940 or so, or that Irish-American are far less interested in the politics of Eire and Northern Ireland than they used to be[bold mine-DL].

My impression is that ethnic groups in diasporan communities retain strong connections with their respective nation-states overseas in direct proportion to the intensity of political upheaval and controversy in those states and in inverse proportion to the relative power of the nation-state in question. The Armenian diaspora has been very involved in funneling funds to the Republic and to Karabakh ever since independence and the war, and it is partly because of the relative political and economic isolation Armenia experienced during the last twenty years because of the Karabakh war that Diasporan support has been forthcoming and also very important. This has happened at the same time as successful Armenian assimilation in the U.S. and in other countries around the world, and indeed it is thanks to that successful assimilation that Diasporan Armenians can provide as much aid as they do. In the event that Karabakh’s status could be normalized or some negotiated settlement with Azerbaijan and Turkey could be reached, we would probably see a gradual weakening of attachments as Armenia comes under less pressure economically and politically.

The Irish case seems similar. It was not all that long ago that a U.S. administration strongly influenced by Irish-Americans in the Democratic Party was very actively pushing the British to reach a settlement with the IRA and Sinn Fein. After the Good Friday agreement, the armed conflict that was a significant driver of Irish-American sympathy for the republican cause more or less came to a close. Sinn Fein won some political concessions in the process, and all of the rhetoric of struggle and violent resistance faded into the background. Disarmament and the power-sharing agreement in Belfast made previous American sympathy for Irish republicans in Ulster increasingly redundant, and whatever pro-republican sentiments still exist are not being exploited for any particular political issue. Most Irish-Americans in the 1990s were at least third-, fourth- or fifth-generation Americans, but what kept sympathy for the republican cause strong and politically significant was the continuation of the conflict in Ulster.

What seems different in the case of American Jewish attachment to Israel is that the relevant conflicts and controversies have only intensified and deepened during the same period, but the American Jewish attachment has weakened, or at least the nature of the attachment has changed significantly. What may explain this may not be secularization and assimilation so much as it is the very different position of Israel vis-a-vis its neighbors and subjects compared to the positions of Armenia and Irish republicans. By all accounts, Israel has a relatively flourishing economy. Following the financial crisis, its market was one of the best-performing in the world, and its tech sector has been very successful. Militarily, it enjoys superiority over all of its enemies and potential rivals, and enjoys the patronage and support of a superpower. Even though Israel is probably more diplomatically isolated in the world than it has been in decades, Israel is secure and more than capable of defending itself. At least partly for that reason, rhetoric that emphasizes that Israel faces an “existential threat” or “second Holocaust” seems absurdly alarmist, and the urgency and uncritical solidarity that once characterized the attachment to Israel make sense to fewer and fewer people. So the attachment to Israel grows weaker as Israel becomes stronger and wealthier and ceases to resemble the much more vulnerable state of earlier decades.

Reihan:

And Republican strategists are confident that the president’s approval rating will continue to erode, which is why they’re banking on even bigger gains.

Were any of these the same strategists who speculated that the GOP would gain seats in 2008? It’s easy to forget that there were more than a few pundits and analysts on the right who believed this, which was based on the same assumption that the Democrats held too many “naturally Republican” seats, but there were. Obviously, the unusually high Democratic and unusually low Republican turnout in 2008 will not be repeated this year, but it is worth remembering that we have heard this story about a sizeable comeback in Congress once already in the last few years and it proved to be false.

What is the basis for this confidence in the future erosion of Obama’s approval rating? Since Obama’s post-Massachusetts nadir and some weakness during the final stages of the health care debate, Obama’s approval rating has improved slightly and held steady in the high 40s ever since. His approval has never dropped anywhere as low as Clinton’s did, and his average rating is higher than Clinton’s Gallup rating was at any point in 1994. It is likely that Obama’s approval rating has dropped about as far as it is going to drop.

There are two other problems with the assumption. For one thing, the economy has been growing steadily for the last three quarters, and there are some signs of steady job creation, which probably means that Obama’s approval will at the very least stay where it is. Considering how high the unemployment rate is, it is more than a little amazing that Obama’s approval rating has consistently remained above 45%. The other problem is that Obama’s approval rating has dropped below his 2008 share of the vote as much as it has largely because of disaffection among his core constituencies, and it seems that he has now stopped losing those supporters and could be slowly winning them back. Disaffection on the left may depress Democratic turnout, but over the last few months we have actually seen the “enthusiasm gap” narrowing. Republicans remain more highly motivated to vote, but they are typically more highly motivated to vote in midterm elections.

It hasn’t been remarked on much yet, and it may change in the coming weeks and months, but the generic ballot average on which so many ludicrous Republican predictions depend has been slowly shifting back to the Democrats in the last few months. As of today, the Democrats have a minuscule lead in the RCP generic ballot average. If the parties remain tied on the generic ballot, everyone acknowledges that Republicans will benefit because of their higher turnout, but it is still difficult to see how this translates into gains of more than 30 seats. It may now be a “commonplace observation” that the GOP can retake the House, but it remains a far-fetched prediction that the GOP definitely will do this, but that has not stopped pundits and House Republican leaders alike from issuing increasingly crazy forecasts of landslide triumphs with gains far in excess of the necessary 40 seats.

The more one looks at the individual seats that the Republicans have to win, the harder it is to see how they get there. I have mentioned Travis Childers’ local political appeal in MS-01 as an example of a House Democrat who may be able to survive in what has been heavily Republican territory for over a decade, and there are other races where local quirks and candidates may allow some vulnerable Democrats to hang on. Reihan mentions the Tea Party several times in his column, so it is worth adding here that Tea Party Express endorsed Walt Minnick, the Democratic incumbent in ID-01. That endorsement may or may not help Minnick in the fall, but it reminds us that Minnick is not a typical Democratic incumbent and may not be as vulnerable as he may appear. The quality of candidates matters and can turn a race one way or another. Minnick also has a substantial fundraising advantage. Most commentary on the midterms has consistently ignored the advantages that incumbents continue to have even in a cycle dominated by anti-incumbency sentiment, and chief among these is the ability to raise more money than their challengers.

Pennsylvania’s 12th District is one district that Republicans had no realistic chance of winning when Murtha was alive, and it is not certain that they will win it today, but I mention it here because PA-12 is one of the districts that Republicans must have and must hold to get anywhere close to gaining 40 seats this year. Pennsylvania’s 7th District, left open by Sestak when he left to run for the Senate, is another must-have seat that might see the conservative vote split between the Republican Joe Meehan and the independent Jim Schneller, and whose Democratic nominee will be decided today. Sestak won that district with 56% and 59% of the vote, and it is a district that was carried by Gore, Kerry and Obama. The district has a Cook PVI of D+3. Many analysts list the seat as a toss-up, but there is reason to think that this may be exaggerating the Republicans’ chances here. The primary upset of Mollohan in WV-01 has removed an incumbent tainted by hints of corruption and replaced him with a new Democratic nominee, which may make it more likely to be held by the Democrats. All of these examples suggest that local political conditions will define many competitive House races this year, and many of the districts that Republicans have to have to realize their “dramatic comeback” may not cooperate with the party’s self-congratulatory narrative.

“Thirty-five percent of Iranians like this government and Ahmadinejad,” a college student told me outside a Sufi shrine in the southeastern town of Mahan. “Twenty-five percent are against. The rest don’t care.” ~Stephen Kinzer

There’s no good way to verify that estimate, but it sounds plausible and it makes sense that there is a large number of disaffected Iranians that have no strong desire to side with regime or opposition. For the opposition to have even partly succeeded in having its grievances addressed, it needed to find some way to mobilize this apathetic and/or thoroughly disillusioned bloc, and this didn’t happen. It’s not clear how the tactics of the movement were going to make that happen, and it is possible that the more radical and secular elements of the movement alienated potential supporters in this otherwise indifferent middle. It is possible that other Iranians would have told Kinzer something very different about the status of the Green movement. Because he could not meet with opposition leaders and activists, Kinzer was bound to encounter more Iranians who were less directly engaged in or more disillusioned about politics. It still seems telling that he could not find anyone who believed that the movement has not stalled or failed entirely.

In the wake of the new nuclear deal brokered by the Turkish and Brazilian governments, another part of Kinzer’s account is worth noting:

Iranians seem puzzled by the Obama administration’s intense focus on their country’s nuclear program, which officials in Washington describe as a grave threat to global security.

The Iranians aren’t the only ones puzzled by this. Even if you accept that Iran’s government is intent on building nuclear weapons, the obsession with Iran’s nuclear program is hard to explain rationally. The trouble is that it is not a rational policy: it has an impossible objective and it is based in an unreasonable fear of a potential future arsenal for which there is little or no evidence. This arsenal would most likely be built, if it ever were built, as a deterrent against the attacks that Western governments continually say they will never rule out launching.

The Turco-Brazilian diplomatic effort is a product of growing international consternation with Washington’s fixation on this issue. It is a reflection of just how few non-Western governments take the Iranian “threat” at all seriously. An increasing number of governments does not really believe that the threat exists and they are more willing to say so after the Iraq debacle. Now there are more non-Western governments, including both large democracies and allies, that are in a position to wield influence internationally and many of them have been building constructive trading relationships with Iran at a time when the U.S. and major European governments have gone down the dead-end route of isolation and sanctions. Turkey and Brazil have demonstrated what real diplomatic and commercial engagement can achieve. If Iran hawks regard the nuclear deal these states have brokered as insufficient and unsatisfying, that is more a measure of their unreasonable demands and expectations than it is a measure of the deal’s flaws.

The new nuclear deal will not satisfy the U.S. and our European and Israeli allies, because nothing short of the severe limitation or abolition of Iran’s nuclear program will satisfy most of these governments. The administration insisted on pursuing a diplomatic track to try to craft an international consensus against Iran, and it always acknowledged that it was doing this as a necessary prelude to punitive measures later. All along the flaw in the administration’s policy was not that it was pursuing a diplomatic solution, but that it was pursuing an objective that it could never realistically achieve by any means. We now see what kind of fuel swap deal Iran will accept, and it is clearly unacceptable to Washington.

Instead of rallying the world around a new round of sanctions against Iran, the pursuit of those sanctions has reminded us that even many important democratic and allied powers around the world are effectively more sympathetic to Iran’s position than they are to ours. By pursuing the same irrational policy goal in a relatively consultative, multilateral way, the administration made clear to rising powers that there was nothing that Iran would realistically do that could have prevented punitive measures. Instead of exposing Iran as the uncooperative “rogue” state thwarting the “will of the world,” the administration has unintentionally done all parties a favor by pushing a new round of sanctions hard enough that the U.S. and our allies were exposed as the unreasonable, uncompromising creators of a “crisis” that need not have happened.

This is not the result the administration or Western hawks wanted, but as far as regional peace and stability are concerned it is a fairly good result. The deal probably will not prevent unilateral U.S. sanctions, but the new deal shows us just how few allies we will have in trying to penalize Iran and it will make it increasingly difficult to pretend that our Iran policy serves the interests of international security and stability.

On the eve of Rand Paul’s likely primary victory over Trey Grayson, I want to make a few observations about the importance of Paul’s candidacy and the apparent failure of party and movement establishment figures to defeat him. First of all, Paul is one of a very few Republican candidates in the country who is truly serious in his desire for fiscal responsibility. In his hostility to expansive government and reckless spending, he does not make exceptions for military spending, and he is appropriately skeptical of government power whether it comes in the form of military adventurism and empire-building or sweeping social legislation and bailouts. Paul is the candidate of both austerity and peace, which is why he is particularly terrifying to David Frum, who has spent many years arguing for an agenda that values neither.

It is possible that Paul’s positions will be too fiscally conservative and too sensible on national security for his state’s electorate, but it is also quite possible that Paul could be representing Kentucky in the Senate next year. Oddly, Frum consistently makes the same mistake that many Republican officeholders and activists make in their total opposition to any and all of the administration’s agenda: all of them believe that the policies that they believe are correct are also going to yield electoral success. Right now, winning by default during poor economic times and total rejectionism seem to be working for the GOP, though perhaps not as well as many Republicans think they are, but this is the opposite of what Frum said would happen if the GOP did not become more accommodating. The Kentucky Senate seat is not going to be in jeopardy if Paul wins tomorrow, nor are we on the verge of a massive Republican blowout in the midterms driven by a public backlash against government spending. Virtually everyone on the right is investing election outcomes these days with far more ideological meaning than they actually possess, and to the extent that there is an ideological message in the backlash going on right now almost everyone is misinterpreting it.

In another state at another time, Paul’s Senate run might have ended up as nothing more than a protest candidacy, but things seem to be coming together to make victory possible. Fiscal austerity is generally a very unpopular message: it demands that voters either pay for the services they want or it says that they have to do without those services. It is not normally a vote-winner, because it goes against the basic assumption of most democratic voting for at least the last eighty years that we should regularly look to government for assistance. Even if Paul wins, it will not necessarily prove that unflinching fiscal conservatism is always the key to electoral success, even in Kentucky, and Paul’s example may not be easily repeated elsewhere. In many ways, Kentucky is a very unrepresentative state. While Democrats have a significant registration advantage there, the state still went heavily for McCain (57-41%) during a second consecutive Democratic wave election and it has voted heavily for Republican candidates for President in the last three cycles. What succeeds in Kentucky will not necessarily translate to larger, more urbanized, more diverse states. That is an argument for giving local candidates more flexibility in how they appeal to their voters and recognizing that a party trying to push a uniform agenda nationwide is going to make itself uncompetitive in many parts of the country.

What Paul’s likely win tomorrow suggests is that the close identification of national security conservatives with the party leadership significantly blunted the impact of Grayson’s attacks on Paul on these issues. If the Kentucky primary electorate is in a fiercely anti-establishment, anti-Washington mood, what could be better for Rand Paul than to be denounced on a fairly regular basis by establishment Republican politicians and pundits? For his part, Paul has been careful to emphasize the issues where most Republican voters seem to agree with him rather than stressing points of dispute. The efforts to misrepresent many of Paul’s views on social issues also seem to have backfired and weakened the effectiveness of the overall negative campaign against Paul. The push to derail Paul’s candidacy because of his insufficiently hawkish views should also remind rank-and-file Republican voters that national security hawkishness trumps all other issues.

Dan McCarthy points us to Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s criticism of Cameron. Wheatcroft recalls a particularly troubling episode:

And Cameron’s sheer lack of judgement has been alarming. Only the week before last he flew to Belfast to strike a deal with the Ulster Unionists, a crazy mission. Worse still – the worst single moment in his party leadership – was the summer before last, when Cameron flew to Tiflis during the conflict between Georgia and Russia, and said that Georgia should be admitted to Nato immediately. Apart from the fact that, as plenty of us guessed at the time and has since been confirmed by independent observers, Georgia was not in the right, Cameron’s words meant, if he was serious, that he was ready to send the Coldstream Guards to fight and die for South Ossetia. Did he mean it?

The easy answer is that he didn’t mean it and was simply trying to get to “the right” of Brown during an international crisis. This was a case of the cheap, irresponsible hawkishness in which all opposition parties can and most center-right opposition parties do engage in, and calling for Georgian admission to NATO at a time when Georgia membership had obviously become politically impossible and insane was both foolish and also safely irrelevant. Georgia’s chances of joining NATO died in August 2008, never to be revived, which made what Cameron said little more than a piece of absurd but ultimately empty posturing. This was how many anti-Russian hawks in the West responded to the war in Georgia. Having failed to trap NATO into going to war wih Russia over disputed territories in the Caucasus with Georgian admission, the hawks lamented that not admitting Georgia immediately had “emboldened” Russia, when in fact the promise made in Bucharest earlier that year to include Georgia in the alliance was what emboldened Saakashvili to escalate the conflict and provoke the Russian response.

This is an important reminder that the foreign policy views of the Conservative front bench (and most of the backbenchers) during the last decade have generally been awful when it comes to foreign wars and NATO expansion. One of the great failings of the Conservative opposition to Blair and Brown was their unwillingness and inability to align themselves with public opinion against the reckless military adventurism of the New Labour years. They were only too happy to provide a British echo of foolish Republican arguments, and that helped to keep them out of power for several more years. Much of the discussion of the future of British foreign policy under a Cameron ministry thus far has revolved around the nature and degree of his Atlanticism and what Cameron might mean for the relationship with the U.S. and Europe, and as far as these relationships go Cameron has been taking roughly the best positions one could reasonably expect given the pressures within his party. That certainly doesn’t give him or his colleagues a pass on their terribly poor decisions in the past.

The good news is that being in government will probably make Cameron less reckless in the future. Like Cameron, Biden went to Tbilisi during the war, and he was going there in a more important capacity as the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and after a short-lived brush with sanity Obama began mouthing all the predictable phrases about Russian aggression, but in practice the Obama administration has been fairly cool towards Saakashvili and mostly constructive in its relationship with Russia. The alternative to Obama/Biden was the truly crazy John “We Are All Georgians Now” McCain, and the Labour alternative to Cameron offered nothing better. Whenever I find myself getting discouraged by the shortcomings of the administration or the Conservatives in Britain, I have to remind myself how much worse it could be.

There is reason to think that Cameron will have enough on his plate at home and overseas in Afghanistan that he will have neither the time nor inclination for picking fights with Russia over NATO expansion, which has become much less practical in the last two years. There is not much to say in defense of Cameron’s overall foreign policy record, except that it is approximately no worse than the records of Obama and Biden on Georgia and other matters, and that it is probably as much as one could reasonably hope for from a Conservative Party whose leadership has been in the thrall of American and “pro-American” hegemonist and neoconservative ideas for over a decade. Cameron undeniably showed appalling judgment on Georgia, but in this he was unfortunately entirely representative of most Conservative and Republican reactions to the war. The consensus in the major parties in Britain and America in favor of NATO expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine, to which Obama also belonged, has been made outdated and irrelevant by events. There is some reason to think that Cameron’s pragmatism will allow him to recognize this and adjust accordingly.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives. ~Peter Beinart

Once again, the old proverb seems quite appropriate: “the yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” It is one thing to defend a government against unreasonable and unfair criticism, and quite another to try to discourage, discredit or ignore any and all criticism and to treat all criticism as if it were always inherently biased and driven by vile motives. Beinart explains very clearly how leading American Jewish organizations have played the role of yes-men to Israel’s government, effectively enabling it to pursue its ultimately ruinous policies in the territories, while the younger generation sees no value in remaining uncritically supportive of Israeli policies. Indeed, much of the younger generation presumably sees this uncritical backing as directly harmful to the long-term well-being of Israel. This has been happening while the politics and culture of Israel and the American Jewish community have changed in ways that make such backing unsustainable in the next generation.

Naturally, Philip Klein has a ready-made and remarkably unpersuasive response:

The problem, however, isn’t with leading Jewish organizations that defend Israel, but with liberalism. As sickening as it sounds, Jewish liberals see their fellow Jews as noble when they are victims being led helplessly into the gas chambers, but recoil at the thought of Jews who refuse to be victims, and actually take actions to defend themselves.

Whether Klein finds it sickening or not, the more important point here is that this doesn’t seem to be true. I can’t speak for liberal Jews, but my guess is that what causes them to recoil is the thought of fellow Jews imposing inhumane, unjust policies on people under their power. If it were simply a matter of self-defense, rather than one of sustained occupation and the attendant humiliations and degradations visited on a subject people, there would be far less criticism because the government’s policies would be much easier to justify. Nationalists here in the U.S. insist on uncritical support for our policies abroad because they see this as an expression of loyalty to their country “right or wrong,” and “pro-Israel” hawks insist on offering the same kind of uncritical support for Israeli policies regardless of their merits or their consequences.

Of course, nationalists typically have a defective understanding of loyalty and a distorted understanding of patriotism, and hawks have a similarly defective understanding of what constitutes real, effective support for an ally. Encouraging a government in its worst habits and instincts, remaining silent in the face of its abuses and focusing all of their energies on attacking dissidents and critics are not the acts of friends or supporters. They are instead the acts of the blindly loyal who ultimately contibute to the ruin of the state they claim to defend.

P.S. As Beinart’s essay makes clear, it is the hard-line Israeli politicians who constantly invoke the history of Jewish victimhood to justify what they want to do. On the whole, it is “pro-Israel” hawks in the U.S. who grossly exaggerate the vulnerability and weakness of Israel’s position in the region to justify aggressive policies vis-a-vis Israel’s neighbors and other Near Eastern states. The trouble isn’t that Jewish liberals are uncomfortable with the power of Israel, but that “pro-Israel” hawks refuse to acknowledge the disparity between the power of the Israeli government and its enemies and the disparity in power between Israelis and Palestinians. On the whole, Jewish liberals seem to be willing to accept responsibility that wielding such power requires. In the meantime, “pro-Israel” hawks prefer an Israel that wields power under the constant protection of invoking victim status whenever someone criticizes the Israeli government’s abuses of power.

The more Palin can convince independent voters to align themselves with the frontier ethos, as opposed to the technocratic model associated with Obama that promises competence but may not always deliver on it, the more powerful this message will get.

But the frontier may represent a more powerful meme in the coming decade for yesterday’s frontier is today’s and tomorrow’s exurbs, a place where middle class Americans escape crowded cities and suburbs to better their lots in life. These voters don’t want government to get in the way of their economic aspirations but also want government to ensure that they wont’ be, for lack of a better term, “screwed” by corporations that can sometimes be just as stifling as an oppressive government. Call them Tea Partiers. Or cloth-coat conservatives. Or Reagan Democrats. Or voters who call themselves conservative and not Republican. These voters and those who identify with this spirit have swung every election since 1980. ~Tony Lee

Via Andrew

Lee’s case for Palin is typical of the genre in that it never explains why the actual Sarah Palin will prove to be such a formidable political force. Instead, he weaves a story about an imaginary Palin who will somehow rally disaffected independent voters and become a transformative political figure. The actual Palin is aggressively ideological and obnoxiously partisan, which is very satisfying to most ideologues and partisans, but this is exactly what people outside the Palinite bubble dislike about her. Palin is far too irrelevant to the 2012 race to pay so much attention to her, but it might be worth revisiting once more why it is that she is so irrelevant.

Lee argues for this despite all the evidence that very few people outside the GOP and conservative movement regard her favorably, and he enthuses over Palin’s “genius” without demonstrating how this supposed genius translates into political success. For every endorsement of a Rand Paul that puts her on the side of a likely winning candidate, she has a few dubious endorsements of candidates who may not even win in their primary races (e.g., Fiorina in California and Martinez in New Mexico). Lee seems to know throughout that the transformative Palin he praises does not exist right now, but nonetheless rehearses all the arguments we have heard for almost two years for why she represents a future political juggernaut. She is feisty and unapologetic. She is optimistic and she is “one of us,” and she enjoys mocking the other side! It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of charisma and identity in democratic politics, but it is equally misguided to make charisma and identity into the only things that matter. However, this is what Palin admirers and supporters are reduced to doing, because there is nothing else to say in her favor. What is so striking about this piece is that it says nothing that Palin fans have not said a dozen times before.

It’s important to identify correctly who Lee’s independent voters are. On the whole, they are not Tea Partiers. There are independents who identify with the Tea Party movement, but they do not represent most independents. These are for the most part independents who are not “true” independents but are reliably right-leaning, Republican-voting independents. This is that part of the electorate that refuses to call itself Republican but almost always votes for Republican candidates at most or all levels. Most who identify with the Tea Party movement also identify as Republicans. Most of them are reliable partisans. They are significantly different from Reagan Democrat voters in their ethnic, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, and politically they are to the right of swing voters. These are the people who overwhelmingly view Palin favorably, and in this as in other things they are very unrepresentative of the rest of the country.

Palin admirers have the strangest habit of finding new and demeaning ways to insult the object of their admiration. Here is Lee again:

In attacking Obama, conservatives get the sense that Palin is punching fearlessly up in her weight class and they find her more endearing because of it [bold mine-DL].

In other words, everyone including her admirers acknowledges that Palin is outclassed by Obama in every area of actual policy knowledge and understanding, but her admirers like that she doesn’t let this get in the way of launching her attacks. She may be a lightweight, but at least she punches above her weight! She is completely out of her depth, but she’s scrappy! This is supposed to be a compliment? Palin’s fans almost universally view Obama as an inexperienced incompetent, yet they routinely compare her to him when confronting the problem that she is less experienced and less knowledgeable than he was three years ago. It can’t be a good sign when even her fans basically hold her in such contempt.

Lee also makes the mistake of confusing profound contempt for Palin for fear of her. Palin is extremely useful to many media outlets regardless of their ideological leanings, because she generates controversy and strong feelings and therefore drives ratings. The left doesn’t view her as much of a threat, but rather they see her rise to prominence on the right as an unparalleled opportunity to discredit their opponents in the eyes of the public. So she is treated as an invaluable instrument in painting the GOP as a party defined and led by someone like her.

Obama and his advisors have not treated potential future 2012 rivals with scorn and dismissive contempt. On the contrary, they have gone out of their way to bind potential rivals to Obama to make it impossible for them to make credible challenges to him in the next election. One need only look at how respectfully they handled Huntsman last year to see how the administration responds to potential political threats for 2012. Obama and his supporters would probably like nothing better than to have Palin as a general election opponent.

Re-election is not guaranteed for sitting Presidents, but a Palin nomination would give Obama an enormous advantage for the entire election. However, everything we have seen so far tells us that most Republican primary voters, activists and party insiders are not going to cooperate, and Palin seems to be doing none of the organizational and fundraising things future presidential candidates. When even the people who like her do not take her seriously, we can safely say that she has no future as a successful national political candidate. Can we please stop talking about her now?

In any case, no-one votes for a government of any stripe. All anyone gets to do is endorse a given candidate in their local constituency. After that it’s a case of letting the national chips fall where they may. Hari, however, complains that it’s all most unfair that the people – for whom he presumes to speak and whose opinions he appears to know – have been robbed. ~Alex Massie

What is interesting about Hari’s lament is that it is very nearly a perfect British copy of the frequent Republican complaints that Obama has been governing in such a way that he is at odds with our “center-right nation” and that he has also been going against his own campaign promises. During the last sixteen months we have heard endlessly about Obama’s alleged “betrayals” of his “moderate, pragmatic” campaign and his pursuit of a “radical left-wing agenda” in defiance of the preferences of the majority. Republicans have been making these charges quite often despite the obvious “centrist” governance the administration has offered so far. The purpose of these charges is not to describe political realities. The goal is to re-define the political landscape and set down markers for future elections, so that there are ready-made ideological explanations for what happens later. It is no accident that these complaints have usually been coming from supporters of defeated, deeply discredited parties that are opposed by more than half of their countrymen.

Hari would essentially like to ignore that 70% of the British electorate voted for parties other than the one in power, and he would prefer instead to have a “democratic voting system” in which that overwhelming rejection of the ruling party is somehow thwarted or undone by the maneuvering of coalition negotiators. In the final weeks of the British election, I saw many arguments coming from the British left, almost all of them being made by Labour supporters, that the division of the British left between Liberals and Labour could and should be repaired, but this was little more than wishing away an unpleasant, inconvenient reality. Quite apart from the self-interested motives both parties have in perpetuating the divide, this division endures at least partly because there was and continues to be deeper reasons for it. It is legitimate to point out that the center-left won over half the vote in Britain, but that does not automatically translate into a mandate for a coalition arrangement that would have effectively re-elected the party most voters wanted thrown out.

It is a curious thing to watch supporters of parties recently routed in elections turn into ardent advocates of plebiscitary democracy, as if their cause would be aided by the sort of direct popular voting they now claim to want. Give them a few poll results and enough time, and they will invent fascinating stories in which their opponents, who actually received the majority of the votes, are constantly and outrageously flouting the will of the people. Of course, show Hari a different poll result on the majority’s views on immigration, for example, and see how long he cares about “what the British people want.” Republicans have convinced themselves, or at least pretend to be convinced, that the American public has recoiled from massive government spending and Obama’s domestic agenda, but aside from ambiguous and potentially misleading poll numbers on the majority’s view of the health care bill there is no evidence for this. They keep claiming this in the hope that the midterm elections will appear to vindicate this ideological claim, regardless of the real reasons for the election result. So far, as Massie notes, Clegg has made the terrible mistake of actually following through on his pledge to support the party with the most seats and votes, which is to say that he is being accused of treachery for having kept his word. This is basically how Republicans have responded to Obama when the President has pursued the policy initiatives he spent the better part of two years saying he would pursue.