Noah Millman has a very thoughtful, long post exploring the reasons for the so-called “closing of the conservative mind.” As I have said before, I am skeptical that the movement conservative mind was ever open in quite the way that Millman or Sanchez means it. The conservative mind of the sort described by Kirk is one that is both grounded in principle and also very capable of critical thinking and self-criticism, but what I think we have seen in recent years is not much the closing of such a mind as its replacement by an ideological mentality that is basically hostile to a conservative mind. To say that the conservative mind has closed leaves open the possibility that it might open someday. Perhaps I am wrong, but once such a mind is obliterated by ideology I’m not sure that it can recover.

Millman’s argument is persuasive that something has changed in degree, but I’m not at all sure that much has changed in kind. What has changed is the relative strengthening and consolidation of movement institutions compared to twenty or thirty years ago, and there has typically been greater access to Republican administrations and majorities and involvement with them during a general period of Republican ascendancy. Where conservative intellectuals once had to prove themselves by the strength of their arguments, they could now increasingly get along by repeating not much more than slogans and audience-pleasing half-truths. By the start of the last decade, there was considerable complacency, which the myth of the “center-right nation” helped to encourage by making intellectual bankruptcy seem to be politically cost-free, and then after 2006 there seems to have been general disbelief and horror that the ascendancy to which the movement had tied itself so closely was now coming to a close.

I agree that the Iraq war and the greater post-9/11 ideological rigidity movement conservatives embraced have worsened matters considerably, but what we have seen over the last eight or nine years is really just an intensification of past habits, which new forms of online media and the growth of distinctively conservative media over the last twenty years have facilitated and brought to a much larger audience. The cocooning instincts were always there (because any group that sees itself as an embattled minority is prone to this), but the means to create a large enough cocoon was not present until the 1990s and afterwards. The creation of the conservative media as an “alternative” to mainstream media gave way to conservative media as a near-complete substitute for their conservative audience. At one point, there was a desire, which I think was partly very genuine, for greater fairness to the conservative perspective, but this soon morphed into the need to construct a parallel universe of news and commentary untainted by outsiders.

Millman contrasts the expulsion of the “unpatriotic conservatives” (i.e., mainly paleoconservatives) with earlier movement expulsions, and sees a difference between expelling “extremists” as opposed to expelling “dissenters.” As far as movement conservatives were concerned then and now, paleoconservatives who opposed the invasion of Iraq (and at least some elements of the “war on terror” more broadly) were like the “extremists” of the past in that we were/are radicals, but we paleoconservatives were considered worse than these others because we were/are also basically reactionaries in many ways when compared to mainstream conservatives. We were and are very sympathetic to the Old Right on both foreign and domestic policy, and we have tended to find fault with movement conservatives on account of their myriad compromises with the welfare and warfare states. Whatever they say now that it is useful, mainstream conservatives tend to abhor the Old Right in both spheres, but they are particularly offended by the desire to return to anything remotely resembling pre-WWII neutralist foreign policy. It may or may not be an important element, but paleoconservatives also tend to be cultural pessimists and many are traditional Christians, and both pessimism and traditional Christianity have helped keep us grounded and wary of any form of triumphalism, be it nationalist or democratist or “conservative.”

Millman mentions that the expelled are expelled from “conservative respectability,” but one reason for engaging in these expulsions is to preserve the respectability of mainstream conservatism in the eyes of the broader public. Another reason for going through the expulsion exercise is to reaffirm one’s own credentials as the True Conservative and Real American, which I suppose must be gratifying in its own right. Opposing the invasion of Iraq was already a minority view during 2002-03, and on the right opposition to the war commanded almost no support, so it was not politically risky to cast out people who were already on the margins of the movement. As far as most non-conservatives were concerned, this was simply a matter of conservatives policing their own extremes, which is what “centrist,” establishment figures are always asking movement leaders to do.

What was noticeable this time was that the supposed radical reactionary extremists were actually the far, far more reasonable ones who were not advocating all of the things that have become so important to movement conservatives: aggressive war, reckless power projection, expansion of state surveillance and detention, exaggeration of the nature and scope of foreign threats, and absolute deference to the executive in “time of war.” In this respect, we have become much more like the anti-anticommunists beginning in the ’50s (e.g., Lukacs, Viereck), who were not really expelled from movement circles so much as they were ignored completely.

Something that people expelled from the movement have tended to have in common is a profound distrust of the federal government and wariness of the expansion of its powers. At least as far as the national security and warfare state is concerned, that is simply not acceptable, because growing and using that state apparatus is the one thing that seems to unite most movement conservatives during and since the Cold War. The expelled have also been just as likely to criticize and oppose Republican politicians and policies as they have those on the Democratic side, and sometimes in even stronger terms because Republicans rely on conservative support. The expelled are very bad partisans and are not “team players.” Another reason for bothering with these expulsions is to show those who remain “inside” how far they are allowed to go until they will no longer be tolerated. At one level, this is standard boundary maintenance that any group practices, but it is also a means of imposing a degree of uniformity and discipline on those who remain.

On the whole, the practice works to keep those “inside” in line, but what it also does is signal to anyone with much intellectual curiosity to stay far away or to leave now. If the quality of conservative thought is worse today than it was ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and I agree that it certainly seems that way, I would attribute this to the triumph of the ideological spirit that has afflicted movement conservatism from very early on and to the strong disincentives ideological rigidity creates for anyone who might be interested in conservative ideas.

I despair of this latest episode of gestural theater designed to make the U.S. look exquisitely reasonable (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?), but which in truth results in the U.S. looking flaccid, or worse, complacent. After all, who gains from a presidential posture that has, in effect, stigmatized our most potent deterrent?

In terms of foreign policy—or, better put, foreign clout—the U.S. is going through a startling period of auto-emasculation. Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick—the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor—and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant competitors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India…~Tunku Varadarajan

Shorter Varadarajan: The substance of Obama’s positions is unchanged from the previous administration, but it is imperative that I make him appear as a weak buffoon, so I will simply invent a complaint about entirely superficial appearances that mean nothing.

Varadarajan is just one among many conservatives thrown into apoplexy by basically nothing. He is different from most in that he acknowledges up front that he has no substantive disagreement with what Obama has done with respect to the Nuclear Posture Review, but proceeds to complain about “auto-emasculation” nonetheless. Obviously, some of this is just partisan and ideological opportunism. Republicans and mainstream conservatives destroyed their credibility on foreign policy and national security, they have done nothing to improve on the bad ideas and policies that helped destroy that credibility, and so they have to try to position themselves as opponents of a new Carter. They do this even though they have few grounds for any serious objections to what the administration has done, because it is crucial for them to re-establish the link in the minds of the public between Democratic Presidents and perceived or real weakness abroad. This will allow them to posture as the nationalist defenders of the country, which might be enough to make people forget their remarkable failures in the past.

These critics are laboring under the false impression that by constantly emphasizing their hawkishness and imputing to Obama a dovishness he does not possess that they will turn the public against him. Because Obama continues to be consistently “centrist” and relatively hawkish in his foreign policy, which is mostly a bad thing, he does not provide any real openings for legitimate hawkish criticism. So they are reduced to inventing the “apology tour,” simply lying about the “appeasement of Russia,” hallucinating a “soft” approach towards Iran, constructing a ludicrous narrative of hostility to allies and accommodation with enemies, and topping it off with the silly claim that Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism. Given enough time, I’m sure they will declare that Obama was somehow responsible for Bakiyev’s downfall in Kyrgyzstan and will accuse him of “undermining a critical ally in the war on Afghanistan.” Like all of these other things, this will be rubbish, but it is rubbish they can use.

Criticism of the administration’s clumsy, needless provocation of Britain over the Falklands would carry far more weight if the same people had not already concluded that Obama had been “snubbing” the British by returning Churchill’s bust. Perfectly reasonable criticism of the mishandling of the Honduras crisis is lost in all the caterwauling about the “betrayal” of Poland and Czech Republic on the missile defense decision. Real administration mistakes are drowned out and pushed to the background by the endless yelping about policy decisions that are correct, or boringly conventional or in line with what the critics themselves claim to want. If these people had had any credibility left after the Bush years, they would have already squandered it all in the last 14 months of frivolous, hyperbolic, contradictory complaints about every single thing Obama has done.

These days such critics don’t even attempt to explain how Obama has “snubbed” India, whose prime minister was the guest of honor at the first Obama state dinner. Instead, they just rattle off a list of allied states and simply declare that they are offended. Apparently, India does feel somewhat neglected by the administration. Granting that India feels neglected, does the Indian government have good reason to complain? We should remember that this is also the administration that confirmed the nuclear deal negotiated under the previous one, and it effectively gave up on any idea of mediating in Kashmir after New Delhi protested. Aside from some early, unnecessary public quarreling over climate change regulation and the odd blunder by Holbrooke, there isn’t much that should displease India. As for Ganguly’s claim that Obama is “backpedaling” on the nuclear deal, that isn’t what Bhadrakumar was saying just last week:

The relationship between the United States and India, which lately showed signs of stress, was revamped on Monday with the announcement that the two countries have completed the “arrangements and procedures” for US-origin spent nuclear fuel to be reprocessed in India.

Bhadrakumar went on to say that there might be an agreement ready for signing as early as this week when PM Singh is in Washington for the non-proliferation summit. He added, “Without doubt, Obama is putting his personal stamp on the US-India strategic partnership.”

No contribution to the “Obama is dragging America down” genre would be complete without the completely loopy claim that Obama intends to slash military spending. Varadarajan even drags out Charles Hill, who happens to be a former Giuliani campaign advisor, and quotes him at length as he embarrasses himself by describing Obama’s “solution”:

Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex [bold mine-DL] by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power. This will gain the confidence of those regimes adversarial to us as they recognize we will no longer be a threat to them and that we will acquiesce in their maintenance of power over their people.

This is so far removed from reality that I don’t really know what to say. Once upon a time, even Robert Kagan affirmed that Obama embraced the “arrogant interventionism” Varadarajan claims that Obama opposes. Apparently, that is just one more thing that movement conservatism requires be sent down the memory hole.

The news out of Kyrgyzstan is awful, and the latest events there should serve as yet another reminder that the Bakiyev regime has been significantly worse for Kyrgyzstan than the government Western governments and media outlets were so happy to see overthrown in yet another “color” revolution. Of all the governments challenged by “people power” protests in the last decade, Akayev’s was probably the most inoffensive and Akayev himself was a fair sight better than some of the other Central Asian rulers Washington continues to embrace to this day. Akayev’s overthrow never had much to do with “people power” or “democracy vs. dictatorship,” but was simply a contest between the ruler and the country’s elites and the replacement of one family’s control of the government with that of another. As Leon Hadar wrote after Akayev’s fall:

In fact, there are actually a few American experts on Kyrgyzstan and several Western journalists even traveled to Bishkek, and after a day or two they succeeded in getting their message across, and we discovered that, as the New York Times concluded, the uprising looks now less like a democratic revolution and more “like a garden-variety coup, with a handful of seasoned politicians vying for the spoils of the ousted government,” that is, “a plain old coup.”

The ousted Mr. Akayev is now being described as one of the more progressive political figures in Central Asia, while its opponents are depicted as members of the political and economic elite, mostly politicians from the country’s southern and northern provinces, trying to overturn the results of the last parliamentary elections and inciting mobs to commit acts of vandalism.

Bakiyev has since imitated Akayev’s authoritarian habits and became even worse than Akayev ever was. The dead protesters in Bishkek are proof of that. The good news in all of this is that Bakiyev seems to have fled, but not before his forces have killed at least 17 and perhaps as many as 100 people according to AP reporting of the opposition’s death toll claims. These are the fruits of yet another “color revolution” that far too many Westerners enthused about out of misguided idealism, weird anti-Russian hang-ups or ideological fantasies of a global democratic revolution. Perhaps the most absurd expression of the enthusiasm for the so-called “Tulip Revolution” was a Chicago Tribune op-edcelebrating Akayev’s downfall and lauding John Paul II (no, really) as being somehow ultimately responsible, but there was virtual unanimity in the Western press that one more bad authoritarian was succumbing to the inevitable, glorious triumph of democracy. As it turned out, Akayev may have been the best Kyrgyzstan was going to be able to get, and ever since he was deposed Kyrgyzstan has been less stable, governed less well, and now joins Georgia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a new scene of violent repression of civilian protesters by a U.S.-allied government. Might we begin to learn from this that foreign political clashes are not usually clearly-defined ideological contests between democrats and authoritarians, and that there is not much reason to celebrate the destabilization, political upheaval and disorder that such things usually involve?

If you really move the goal posts, defining up “success” as the Surge having not only reduced levels of violence and addressed immediate drivers of conflict but having also managed to fix all the problems in Iraq’s political process, then yeah, it failed. But I don’t recall that ever being the aim of the operation in 2007, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the U.S. military and its friends in the diplomatic corps to be able to settle the political affairs of a host nation. ~Abu Muqawama

That’s a bit of hyperbole on his part, which is necessary for his objection to hold up. No one claims that the “surge” was ever supposed to “fix all the problems in Iraq’s political process.” However, it was supposed to facilitate political reconciliation, and by Bush’s own standards a plan that did not include political reconciliation on major points of contention would not be a successful one. It was not the critics of the plan who put these measures of success in place–it was the authors of the plan.

Fortunately, we don’t need to rely on anyone’s memory for this. We can refer to Bush’s January 10, 2007 address to the nation, and we can review the White House’s “fact sheet” that summarizes the “key elements of the new approach.” In his address, Bush said:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

What were these? Bush continued:

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend 10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.

One or two of these have occurred, but the rest remain elusive. As I wrote in my TAC column in December of 2007:

The Washington Post declared in an editorial, “By every metric used to measure the war, there has been an enormous improvement since January.” Every metric, that is, unless you include measures of rebuilt and functioning infrastructure, political progress, or public opinion—all of which are as vital to success
as physical security.

Some of the political elements that the previous administration considered “key” to their “new approach” were these:

Strengthen the rule of law and combat corruption.

Build on security gains to foster local and national political accommodations.

Make Iraqi institutions even-handed, serving all of Iraq’s communities on an impartial basis.

Is anyone going to argue seriously that there has been significant progress on any of these “key elements”? These are political elements of the plan that the administration itself emphasized as essential, and I don’t think anyone can say that the goals have been reached. There are other political elements listed on the “fact sheet” that are still neglected over three years later. If anyone wants to separate the security gains that have occurred in part because of the additional brigades present in Iraq during 2007-08 from all of the other stated goals of the plan, he is free to do so, but it is absurd to say that it is not credible to judge the success of the plan according to the standards set up by the administration that proposed it.

Will over at the League has picked up on two completely contradictory NRO responses to Obama’s nuclear posture review announcement. The first response from Giuliani is suitably hysterical and preposterous, which is what we would expect from him, and the second from Henry Sokolski is appropriately sober and credible. Giuliani proclaims the announcement a disaster, and Sokolski acknowledges that there has been no real change in policy. Only one of the two can be right, and it isn’t hard to determine which one that is. One need only read the relevant passage carefully to see that Obama has not so much removed ambiguity as he has stated the obvious:

For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty [bold mine-DL], even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

In other words, Obama has committed to not escalate any future conflict to nuclear war in the improbable event that Brazil or South Africa or Japan decides to attack us with other unconventional weapons or cyber-warfare. Oh, the wretched appeaser! How will we ever survive the long night of Brazilian domination? Ahem.

Will’s contrast of the two also helps to set the stage for discussing Roger Kimball’s rather silly post on the same subject. Naturally, Kimball falls into the Giuliani camp of hysterical over-reaction:

The posture in question, though, is self-abasement. Nuclear weapons are fearsome things. We wish they didn’t exist. Therefore we will take steps to reduce our threatening posture in order to appear more emollient. Has no one in Obama’s inner clique heard of the Roman military historian Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum“: “if you want peace, prepare for war.” The possession of weapons facilitates war: no doubt. But history demonstrates that pacifism and signs of weakness precipitate war. The choice, in other words, is between rhetoric that celebrates peace and comity, and policies that actually achieve it. Obama has once again plumped for the former.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that there is a reasonable conservative reaction to this announcement, which is basically to shrug one’s shoulders, but it is inevitably drowned out and overwhelmed by the cacophony of foolishness that passes for foreign policy commentary on much of the right. I could even understand the criticism that there is no need to make an announcement when nothing has actually changed, but that isn’t flashy and provocative enough when responding to a dull, reasonable Obama decision.

Coming back to Kimball, it isn’t at all clear how more or less preserving the status quo in this case sends a sign of weakness to anyone. Unless the North Koreans are under the mistaken impression that they are in compliance with a treaty they withdrew from years ago, this announcement will make absolutely no difference to North Korea. The administration is still promising overwhelming retaliation against any state that would attempt this, which will certainly keep the Ukrainians on their toes, and the threat of a massive conventional response should manage to keep the Kazakhs and Belarussians in check. In fact, pretty much every state to which this statement applies is either a client, a purchaser of U.S. arms, or a member of some treaty or partnership organization to which the United States belongs, so it seems unlikely that there would ever be a conflict with any of them that would require a future administration to have to follow through on this commitment.

This distancing from the US introduced an element of incoherence into Conservative foreign policy. A Thatcherite hand-bagging of Europe only really makes sense emotionally and strategically if it is balanced by a warm embrace of the US [bold mine-DL]. But Mr Cameron knows that many British voters now associate the special relationship with involvement in unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bureaucrats of Brussels may not be particularly popular in Britain: but at least the price for Britain’s membership of the EU is not paid in blood.

The Tories have a particular problem with the US because their sister-party is the Republicans. Like many youngish politicians, Mr Cameron would dearly love to embrace President Barack Obama and to drink deeply from his aura – if such a thing is possible. But the Tory leader has to pretend that the US politicians he is closest too are the likes of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

This is a pretence that is increasingly painful. The special relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was based on a genuine meeting of minds. The two leaders shared core beliefs in anti-communism and small government. But, since then, the Republicans have moved right and the Tories have moved left. The Republican party has just made it clear that it regards state-run healthcare as on a par with Satanism. But Mr Cameron tells British voters that he treasures the National Health Service. Only last week, the Tory leader gave a speech on community organisation in which he explicitly praised the late Saul Alinsky – a Chicago-based social organiser who is a bogeyman for many Republicans, who regard him as Mr Obama’s socialist Godfather. ~Gideon Rachman

Rachman does a fairly good job describing the divergence between Tories and Republicans, and he makes several good points as he defines the Tory predicament, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Tories have become incoherent. On foreign policy at least, my impression is that Cameron is attempting to achieve a difficult balance between an Atlanticism that is not mindless and reflexive (as Blair’s was) and a Euroskepticism that is likewise not unreasonably hostile to Europe. Blair was really the worst of both worlds: inflexibly Europhile (and therefore badly out of step with his country) and insanely supportive of every American initiative (and therefore badly out of step with his country). Cameron is unlikely to please the extremes of his party on these questions, but it seems to me that his views on relations with the U.S. and the EU are no more incoherent than what the British public prefers.

I am not British, so perhaps the idea that Britain must choose between subservience to Washington or subjugation to Brussels makes more sense to those who are, but it doesn’t seem as if Britain should have to confuse a “warm embrace of the U.S.” with total support for whatever Washington wants to do no matter the cost to Britain. As I mentioned in my last column, Cameron has shown an interesting willingness to criticize U.S. policy when he thinks it necessary, and he has repeatedly stated that a good alliance between two states depends on frankness and criticism from time to time.

What we see is that the party of British Unionists and nationalists has become alienated from its former federalist partners in Europe. Short of completely gutting their party’s identity, I’m not sure how the Tories were supposed to maintain the pretense that they embrace Euro-federalism. If pretending to be of like mind with Sarah Palin is painful, pretending to favor more concentration of power in Brussels when one does not would be excruciating. We are also seeing a party that prides itself on its support for the alliance with the U.S. becoming appropriately skeptical about how readily Britain should lend its support to U.S. efforts. An ally is not an automatic yes-man; a real friend does not indulge his friends in stupid, self-destructive behavior.

Perhaps the more interesting break Rachman describes is the much greater Tory interest in communitarianism and more self-sufficient communities. The influence of Philip Blond’s very interesting ideas on Cameron’s thinking is probably quite overstated, but an important difference between Britain and America is that Blond’s “Red Toryism” would cause most American conservatives to run screaming from the room even though there is not that much that is really “red” in Red Toryism. Even if one holds that “Red Toryism” is itsef incoherent and leads to adopting a grab-bag of policies, the genuine Red Tory concern for the adverse effects of state capitalism on society is important and absolutely necessary right now. Such a view is rarely tolerated in Republican circles, unless it is harnessed to another centralist initiative, and it is never seriously adopted by party leadership. What is most striking is the degree to which so-called “Red” Tories are far more supportive of the decentralization of power and wealth than their ostensibly more right-wing Republican counterparts. This disagreement may not have an impact on U.S.-U.K. relations, but it wouldn’t be surprising if Republicans started mocking a Cameron-led, Tory-governed Britain with the same insults they normally reserve for France.

No one will claim that I am a fan of Marco Rubio. His CPAC speech was awful, and it was all the more awful because it is the sort of low quality speech that activists at CPAC seem to crave. That this was the speech that seems to have cemented his place as a modern conservative folk hero only makes things worse. It will come as no surprise that I regard any speculation about a Rubio presidential bid in the next two or even six years as frivolous and absurd. However, much like baseless Petraeus speculation, the equally baseless Rubio speculation is useful for what it tells us about the movement conservatives and Republican activists who engage in it. Matt Lewis writes (via Antle):

I know that at first blush, this sounds quixotic. But in my mind there is a better rationale for Rubio running for president than there is for almost any other candidate on the Republican side.

That is quite a remarkable admission. Surveying the field of possible Republican presidential candidates, Lewis cannot find one candidate more suited to being a presidential candidate than Rubio? Whether or not this makes any sense, it is telling that Lewis thinks it does. As weak as the Republican field really is, is it so weak that it makes more sense for Rubio to jump in than any of the others?

Some observers, including both liberals and conservatives, have sometimes referred to Rubio as the “Republican Obama,” but Lewis goes beyond this and essentially argues that Rubio should run for President fresh off of a Senate election victory he has not yet won because this is what Obama did after he was elected to the Senate. By promoting Rubio as a desirable presidential candidate this early, Lewis would evidently like to see an even less experienced state legislator seek his party’s presidential nomination. Obama causes a very strange reaction in Republicans. On the one hand, they want to regard him as a joke and an incompetent, but they also desperately want to find someone who can imitate his appeal and success, and so it is almost as if they go out of their way to anoint whatever young politician they come across as their new hero and then disregard all of the person’s liabilities by saying, “Well, he’s no more inexperienced than Obama was” or “She’s still better than Obama!” It is an odd mix of contempt for Obama mixed with admiration for Obama’s success and an even stranger need to outdo him in the categories that originally caused them to view Obama so poorly. So Rubio is touted because he is even more inexperienced, Palin is held up because she knows even less about policy, and so on.

What Lewis does not take into account are the key reasons why Obama’s relative inexperience was not much of a disadvantage and why the fresh face/blank slate appeal worked so well. First, the sitting administration was staffed by some of the most experienced Washington hands and was widely and correctly viewed as extremely incompetent. On the most important issue of the day, the war in Iraq, most of the experienced politicians (and all of Obama’s main rivals for the nomination) backed the invasion, while Obama had initially opposed it. Of course, Obama was never quite the foreign policy novice that his opponents wanted to make him out to be, but his better judgment regarding Iraq showed how little long years of experience in government counted when it came to making good decisions. In Rubio’s case, there is no obvious way that he turns the experience argument around on those who would use it against him.

Rubio’s signature issue is his opposition to the stimulus bill of last year, and it is on account of this that he has now taken a large lead over Crist, but this would not distinguish him from other potential Republican candidates and as an issue it is not nearly as significant. Even granting that the stimulus was poorly conceived and designed, supporting it was not the kind of mistake that is going to cause a massive electoral backlash from the general electorate. Meanwhile, opposing it and making that opposition the centerpiece of one’s candidacy are not going to guarantee electoral success in the fall. Perhaps Rubio’s biggest problem is that he simply does not interest or excite many people outside his own party. Right now he is tapping into the discontent of the Republican rank-and-file in a primary, and he is having great success so far because of this, but the things that excite and motivate the partisan rank-and-file tend not to excite and motivate people outside the party. Meanwhile, all of the other potential presidential candidates are tapping into the same discontent. The reason for Rubio’s success makes him virtually indistinguishable from almost every other national Republican figure.

Whatever else one wants to say about Obama since his inauguration, during the campaign he did present himself as a post-partisan pragmatist. Rubio seems to want to have nothing to do with such a label, and indeed the rationale for his primary candidacy is that he is both strongly partisan and ideological. Rubio has succeeded so far because he has cast himself as the true-believing ideologue and strong partisan, but it remains to be seen if that translates into victory in a presidential swing state.

Recent polls tell me that the Democratic Party is in the worst shape I have seen during my 50 years of following politics closely. ~Michael Barone

Yes, but what does common sense tell you? It should be telling all of us that the Democratic Party is in much better shape than it has been since before 1980, and it would also tell us that the Democrats have been in far worse shape in many other election years (e.g., 1950, 1952, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1994). What we see is a majority party that has won at least 52% of the vote in the last two elections, and the party has a President who was elected with almost 53% of the vote. Such a party is not likely to suffer a massive wipeout and lose its majority status in the very next election. By just about any important measure (i.e., presidential approval, unemployment rate, economic growth), the Democratic Party today is in better shape than the Republicans were in 1982, and even in 1982 with a less popular President (who had been elected with a smaller share of the popular vote) and higher unemployment the presidential party only lost 27 seats in the House. Yet Barone would have us believe solely on the basis of the generic ballot poll and some negative views of unions that things are worse for them now than they have been at any time since 1960. This still seems strained and not very credible.

One important factor in the 1946 elections that Barone keeps citing as his comparison was the long period of unified Democratic rule that preceded it. Democrats had controlled the House since 1931, and Democrats won every national election that followed until ’46. Wartime ruling parties in Britain and the U.S. that had been in power for over a decade were voted out once the war was over, and part of this was simply anti-incumbency sentiment and a backlash against a long period of unified government. The similarities between the 1910 and 1946 midterms make clear how different this election is from both of them. These were midterms when the non-presidential party won majorities in one or both houses after defeats in at least the last two cycles. What sets them apart and makes them very different from this midterm election is the extremely long period of unified government by the other party. We already had this sort of midterm election in the recent past, and this was in 2006.

The 1910 example is interesting for another reason. It marked the beginning of eight years of a House Democratic majority and inaugurated a period that saw a number of significant, enduring progressive measures enacted. These measures did not result in the loss of their majority. Looking at the elections that followed it, we see that the Republicans did not regain control of the House until the 1918 elections. Like the 1950 backlash against Truman, 1918 was partly a product of dissatisfaction with a foreign war that the public had not wanted and which was not yet over on Election Day. It was also the sixth-year election during Wilson’s Presidency. Based on this comparison, and barring unforeseen catastrophes, it seems plausible that the GOP might not regain the majority until 2014 at the earliest.

Of course, we are almost a hundred years removed from the political landscape that led to those results, and these comparisons are necessarily always very rough, but this should help give us some idea of how long it takes for a party to recover from losing majority status and successfuly regain that status. It takes time for the electorate to forget why they repudiated the old majority party, and it also takes time for voters to grow frustrated and disgusted with the new majority party. Even after we take into account the rise of many new forms of media and the constant stream of news and information that might speed up this process, it seems hard to believe that the electorate will shrink enough and tilt enough to put Republicans in power just four years after they were thrown out. Barone proposes that there has been a second sea-change in public sentiment very shortly after the first, and there doesn’t seem to be a compelling example from past U.S. House elections to support this claim.

After Gen. Petraeus as made it abundantly clear that he will never run for political office, why does anyone keep pushing the idea of a Petraeus presidential bid? It could just be a lack of imagination, but there may be a few more significant reasons why Petraeus speculation continues long after it should have vanished.

Most of the speculation comes from the right, and my guess is that it is fueled primarily by an awareness of the tremendous weakness of the prospective Republican 2012 field. Once the conversation turns to national security matters, none of the likely 2012 Republican candidates can be taken at all seriously. When Mitt “No Apology” Romney is the relatively well-informed, careful thinker on the subject, the party has a problem. Belittling Obama’s minimal foreign policy experience was a favorite pastime during the election campaign, but even Obama’s experience c. 2007-08 was greater than anything now on offer from the likely GOP field. It is all the more remarkable that Republicans believe foreign policy to be one of Obama’s vulnerabilities, when it has proved to be one of the areas where he wins the most public support. At least at first glance, a Petraeus candidacy would lend the party some credibility in this area.

Another source of admiration expressed in speculation about 2012 is the remnant of the Petraeus cult that formed on the right before, during and after the “surge” in Iraq. Despite the lack of Iraqi political reconciliation, which was the essential measure of the plan’s success, the “surge” has been widely praised as a great success and Petraeus is identified with that. Inside the GOP, the man responsible for “turning around” the Iraq war and thereby somehow redeeming it enjoys enormous popularity. Unlike most other Republican favorites, Petraeus is also widely respected outside the party, which would make him a rather unique political figure. Of couse, all of this is irrelevant for the reasons Alex Massie hasgiven, but I wouldn’t underestimate how important it is for most Republicans to put up a candidate whose election could be spun as an ultimate vindication of the Iraq war. Even though Petraeus will never run, it is what Petraeus represents that many on the right would like to see in the next Republican nominee: someone identified with, but not politically tainted by, the war in Iraq, and someone whom Beltway pundits and national media have already sanctified as more or less beyond reproach.