There are a few other things I would like to say about the Mount Vernon Statement. It doesn’t really deserve as much attention as I and many others have been giving it, but the reactions to it do make clear how irrelevant and flawed it is as an effort to define a conservative consensus. Indeed, the different reactions to it show how such a consensus has long since ceased to exist, and it isn’t going to be cobbled together again by rehashing old slogans. Everyone who calls himself a conservative can use many of the same words and forms, but there is remarkably little agreement about their meaning and their policy implications. While I ridiculed the constitutionalist pretensions of all those signatories who enabled and supported any number of unconstitutional Bush-era measures in the name of national security, Michelle Malkin made clear that she has no time for some of the signatories of the statement because they are too committed to constitutional principles, which is to say that some of them are no longer interested in celebrating every activity of the national security state. The statement seems meaningless to me, and it seems tainted to her, and I have not seen many people on the right respond favorably to it.

Dorothy Rabinowitz’s op-ed on Sarah Palin in today’s print edition of The Wall Street Journal gives us another example of why it is very difficult to sustain a working coalition of actual constitutionalists, such as Rand Paul, and mainstream conservatives. While criticizing Palin’s other flaws, Rabinowitz focuses on her endorsement of Paul in the Kentucky Senate race. Rabinowitz believes that “nothing she has done has been worthier of notice than her endorsement of Rand Paul,” which Rabinowitz naturally regards as a horrible error. This reminds us that mainstream conservatives are willing to use small-government, constitutionalist, anti-tax and Tea Party activists to fuel their return to power, but they are not interested in actually having one of them serving in office and applying his constitutionalist views to all areas of policy. As far as Rabinowitz is concerned, Palin has erred because she forgot that national security is the one area where conservatives cannot meaningfully disagree and still be accepted. Even though Palin is perfectly willing to echo every hawkish and authoritarian view she is fed, she made the mistake of thinking that she was permitted to build alliances with people who actually believe in limited government and upholding the Constitution when they happen to agree with her for the moment on fiscal and economic questions.

The theoretical principles that can supposedly unite conservatives do no such thing, because as far as actual constitutionalists are concerned “limited government” and the “rule of law” are just phrases for national security conservatives and not much more than that. In the eyes of national security conservatives, actual constitutionalists are practically traitors. This is not a gap that can be bridged by shouting, “Constitution!” in a loud voice. Many of us regard them as enemies and subverters of the Constitution, and they usually regard us as unpatriotic fifth columnists. What possibility of a consensus between such groups can there realistically be?

But if the election were held today, the numbers tell me that Democrats would fare worse than they have in any election since 1946. ~Michael Barone

I’m not sure why Barone keeps escalating his unrealistic predictions to ever-more ridiculous levels. The numbers say nothing of the kind. Notice that Barone leans very heavily on the generic ballot poll and ignores entirely the President’s approval rating. The generic ballot poll is certainly relevant, but Barone reads far too much into the modest Republican lead here. A couple weeks ago after Brown’s victory, Barone said we were on the verge of another 1974 (with the parties’ positions reversed), and now he says this year is worse than anything for the Democrats since the ’46 blowout. The ’74 comparison was very wrong, as I have explained before, but Barone has apparently decided that it did not go far enough. A reasonable case can be made for a Republican pick-up of eight seats in the Senate and perhaps at most 28 House seats. I think the House numbers should be closer to half that number and there will probably be no more than seven seats lost in the Senate, but we could possibly see the Congressional results of the 2008 election undone in the fall.

How bad were things for the Democrats in 1946? Democrats were tied to a deeply unpopular President. Truman had an approval rating of 32%. Barring a major disaster, Obama’s approval rating is not going to be anywhere near that low at any point during the year. In 2006, Bush and the GOP lost 30 House seats and six in the Senate, and Bush had an approval rating close to Truman’s rating in 1946. Even if the Democrats saw all their 2006 gains reversed on par with losses in 1950, they would retain comfortable majorities in both houses. That would still be a far better showing for them than they had in 1994, and it would not be anything like a 1974-style collapse of the presidential party. The 1946 election came at the end of 14 years of unified Democratic government. This fall the public will be reacting to a mere two years of the same. The Democrats are nowhere near experiencing a defeat that remotely approaches 1946.

In the 1946 elections, the GOP won 55 House seats and 13 Senate seats. This was one of the five worst midterm losses by a presidential party in the 20th century. Only 1910, 1914, 1920 and 1938 were worse. 1946 remains the worst midterm election for the President’s party since the war. It is far-fetched enough to imagine electoral defeats on the scale of 1974 or 1994, but to propose that this year will be even worse is simply absurd.

A prominent conservative senator said that Washington political leaders should “be replaced” if they do not back a document of conservative principles signed Wednesday.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) deemed it necessary that politicians endorse the Mount Vernon Statement, a document outlining a vision of “constitutional conservatism” backed by a number of right-wing activists.

“If our leaders cannot agree to the Mount Vernon Statement, they are part of the problem and should be replaced,” DeMint tweeted. ~The Hill’s Briefing Room

This is not much of a threat, and it isn’t much of a litmus test. The statement itself is so anodyne, unobjectionable and filled with stock phrases that no one to the right of Olympia Snowe could have that much to say against it. The statement was written specifically to be as inclusive, vague and undemanding as possible. It was done this way so that every movement faction could accept it without complaint. It reads like remedial instruction on civics from the Claremont Institute, and the actual politics of most of the signatories have about as much to do with “the Founding” as does Claremont’s distorted understanding of the same. If I thought it worth the time, I might pick apart some confused ideas about “the conservatism of the Declaration,” but as far as conventional movement conservative rhetoric goes this is unremarkable stuff.

There is no danger here of an unreasonable “purity test.” The standard being set by this statement is so low that anyone in the conservative movement could claim to agree with everything in the document and still merrily go about his way violating both the letter and the spirit of the principles to which he supposedly just subscribed. The statement is so generic and so divorced from any contemporary policy debate that everyone from Marc Thiessen to Ron Paul could endorse it without the endorsement having any effect on their current policy views. Any consensus this broad and unrelated to actual policy is pretty meaningless.

Now that Labour is returning to its class-warfare roots under Gordon Brown, it once again faces electoral defeat. ~John Fund

This is possibly the silliest thing I have seen all month. Why does Labour face electoral defeat? For one, it has presided over a financial meltdown every bit as bad as ours that its own policies helped make possible, and it is still the governing party during a severe recession. Labour has been in government for almost thirteen years, which would inspire anti-incumbency sentiments in any electorate no matter what the ruling party did in office. Easy monetary policy inflating their own real estate bubble and collusion with the financial interests of the City, which were once considered some of the strengths of New Labour’s shift to the center, have come back to haunt Brown and have laid waste to his premiership. It is New Labour that has been in power for the last decade, and it is New Labour that has lost the British public’s trust.

Brown had once been viewed as the economic wizard of the Blair Government during the boom years, but like his counterparts on our side of the Atlantic his competence was rapidly exposed as a fraud. Add to this his own personal limitations as a politician and his poor skills as a political manager, neither of which hampered Blair, and throw in a revitalized, modestly well-organized Conservative Party and you may have a recipe for a general election defeat. Even now it is not a guarantee that the Tories will win the general election. Nonetheless, Fund is very confused if he thinks that Labour’s current woes come from an overindulgence of its left wing. That doesn’t mean that indulging the left wing of Labour would have avoided these problems, but it is simply an acknowledgment that the left wing of Labour has not been the driving force in Brown’s government.

Now it is possible to say that this has nothing to do with American politics. Britain and America have different electorates, so what may succeed there will not necessarily succeed here. Even so, it is becoming tiresome to keep seeing the constant repetition of what at this point can only be called a lie, namely that the current administration is some intensely left-liberal operation that has strayed from the true path of “centrism.” Evan Bayh would very much like people to believe that “centrism” is the cure for what ails Democrats, just as Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman before him wanted to insist that support for authoritarian security measures and aggressive foreign wars was at the core of what it meant to be a Democrat. They say this not because they have a better feel for the pulse of America, but because it matches up with their preferences. In fact, as Miller, Lieberman and Bayh have all come to feel increasingly alienated from their party, the country has been slowly but steadily moving towards their party. This is true whether we are talking about voting patterns or demographics. Fifteen or sixteen years ago, their arguments might have had some political relevance. Today they are the complaints of people who no longer have any significant constituency in their own party.

What is there to say about this statement, which is being called a new conservative “manifesto”? Someone might object that Russell Kirk said that conservatives do not have manifestoes, but that would be entirely too quaint and old-fashioned. What is one to make of the organizers’ selection of the site of George Washington’s home for a statement that refers to a foreign policy of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world”? I would say that it is in extremely poor taste, but then this statement is not directed at people like me.

My admiration for Washington comes partly from his rejection of the sort of militaristic Caesarism that fuels the modern cult of the Presidency in which so many conservatives indulge. I agree with his advice that we should “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” and that we should “cultivate peace and harmony with all.” Most modern conservatives today embrace antagonistic, confrontational policies either informed by a hubristic nationalism or inspired by a misguided fear of vastly exaggerated threats. I also agree with Washington that “[t]he great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” It would amaze me if most of the signatories of the Mount Vernon Statement would endorse this view. After all, how can we exhaust our resources “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” if we do not enmesh ourselves deeply in the politics of every other continent?

I cannot object to the statement that the “federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.” This is true. However, I have no idea why the organizers of this gathering think that anyone will believe their professions of constitutionalism after enabling or acquiescing in some of the most grotesque violations of constitutional republican government in the last forty years. If constitutional conservatism means anything, it has to mean that the executive branch does not have wide, sweeping, inherent powers derived from the President’s (temporary) military role. It has to mean that all these conservatives will start arguing that the President cannot wage wars on his own authority, and they will have to argue this no matter who occupies the Oval Office. It has to mean unwavering conservative hostility to the mistreatment of detainees, and it has to mean that conservatives cannot accept the detention of suspects without charge, access to counsel or recourse to some form of judicial oversight. Obviously, constitutional conservatives could in no way tolerate or overlook policies of indefinite detention or the abuse of detainees. They would have to drive out the authoritarians among them, and rediscover a long-lost, healthy suspicion of concentrated power, especially power concentrated in the hands of the executive.

Until we see these basic demonstrations of fidelity to constitutional principle from the would-be constitutional conservatives of this Mount Vernon meeting, we should assume that this is little more than a new ruse designed to rile up activists and donors during a Democratic administration in order to breathe new life into a moribund and bankrupt movement.

Update: As Dave Weigel reports, Richard Viguerie declared the statement to be “pablum” just days before signing it.

After some consideration, I am persuaded by the commenters who objected to my claim that Bayh’s retirement was hard to imagine without Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. Brown’s election may have been a factor in Bayh’s decision, but I definitely overstated its importance. So that isn’t why I’m pairing the two of them in this post. It occurred to me while reading Ross’ recent post on “the emptiness of Evan Bayh” that Bayh today is likely to be what Scott Brown will become in the future, which is to say that he will become a dull, predictable “centrist” mostly interested in splitting the difference between the two parties on domestic policy while adhering to a conventional hawkish line on foreign policy.

One of the frequent themes of Brown’s campaign and his post-election rhetoric has been the complaint that there is not enough cooperation in Washington. This was also Bayh’s stated reason for retiring. It is remarkable how the same vague, maddening fluff can be used by the supposed outsider who is bringing “change” to Washington and by the bored insider who claims to have lost interest in working in Washington. It is a little amusing that the net effect of both Brown’s win and Bayh’s retirement has been to make the cooperation both claim to want even less likely.

We have heard this complaint from “moderates” and “centrists” for years, even though in practice it is the “moderates” and “centrists” who frequently act as the gatekeepers of what can and cannot be done in Congress. They stall, delay, extract concessions, and otherwise do their best to make the ugly sausage-making of legislating even less attractive, and then when legislation stalls they throw up their hands and blame the ideological poles for legislative failure. They hold a disproportionate share of the real power in Congress, but accept none of the responsibility for the results they create. Perversely, they feed on the public’s dissatisfaction with ineffective government and then do all they can to contribute to making government more dysfunctional.

Because they are relatively marginal within their own parties (a position they draw attention to whenever they can as a point of pride), they can play the part of persecuted dissident opposing the majority of their fellow partisans. This helps to obscure that they are even more in hock to the Washington establishment and more aligned with the prevailing consensus views than anyone else. They do this because they have a very tenuous relationship with their own party bases and must seek the favor and approval of national media to build themselves up. As “independent-minded centrists,” they are even less representative of their constituents than the regular partisans they deride. The centrists’ alleged pragmatism and general lack of strong convictions (at least on domestic policy) continually put them in a position to exercise maximal leverage even when one party commands super-majorities in both houses, and it is their reputation for unscrupulous dealmaking that somehow affords them the media’s attention and respect as “independent” or, God help us, “maverick” members.

“Centrists” typically thrive by being non-threatening to powerful interests at home. This translates into a ready defense of the status quo in most cases, occasionally punctuated by bouts of “reform” efforts that often work to the advantage of large corporate interests. These “reform” efforts sometimes involve breaking with rank-and-file partisans, which reinforces the false notion that these “centrists” are independent and unusually concerned about the public interest. We saw this with McCain on immigration and Lieberman on health care. As I was arguing last month, a status quo conservatism is precisely the kind of politics Scott Brown practices. Where they are also quite beholden to powerful interests is their complete and abject loyalty to the national security state, which finds expression in their support for confrontational foreign policy, aggressive military actions, expansive surveillance and detention policies and acquiescence to executive power grabs.

The dangerous and foolish gasoline sanctions bill now before the Senate was co-sponsored by Bayh, and we can expect that Brown will follow the lead of his mentors, McCain and Lieberman, in backing this and other destructive, counterproductive measures. Brown made a major issue over the handling of Abdulmutallab, insisting on a military tribunal to try him. Taken together with his other statements and the allies he has chosen in Washington, we can see that Brown is on his way to filling the void that Bayh will be leaving behind.

My new column for The Week on Iran is now online.

There is a mostly excellent National Journal panel on Iran policy (via Scoblete). Prof. Michael Brenner, Prof. Paul Pillar and Steven Metz make what I find to be the most compelling arguments, and naturally I agree with their rejection of aggressive war against Iran, but I was also briefly intrigued by Robert Baer’s call for doing nothing.

It is intriguing because he takes for granted the collapse of the Iranian government, and argues strenuously against any direct overt or covert action that might strengthen the hand of the IRGC. Baer is saying that the U.S. should get out of the Iranian regime’s self-destruction, and he says this at a time when the collapse of the regime seems more remote than it has in months. Actually, Baer is not really calling for complete inaction, but wants a combination of current sanctions and indirect pressure brought on Iran by somehow persuading Russia and China to stop helping the current leadership:

Keep the sanctions, talk the Russians and Chinese out of helping Ahmadinejad, even if it means conceding disputes in places like Georgia and Taiwan. At the end of the day, the regime in Tehran, properly ignored, will fall under its own weight.

On the face of it, this sounds very much like the hoped-for quid pro quo that the administration seemed to think it would get if it gave up on the missile defense plan in central Europe. The standard administration justification for the decision was that it would make Russia more amenable to pressuring Iran on its nuclear program. As I said repeatedly last year, that was never going to happen. Even though I always said the decision on missile defense was the correct one, and I was surprised when Obama made it, I kept insisting that there should be no illusions that it would yield any real results on Russian cooperation. Here Baer is proposing what could be even larger concessions, but it is important to understand that Russian and Chinese cooperation of this kind is unlikely to be forthcoming. As a matter of domestic politics, the administration was able to scrap the missile defense plan without too much backlash, but if it were perceived as ceding ground over Georgia and/or Taiwan there would be much more resistance within both parties and a barrage of negative press coverage.

If the GOP was so obsessed with such a trivial program as the missile defense system in central Europe, just imagine how energized hawks in both parties would become if Georgian and Taiwanese interests were sacrificed as part of an attempted bargain to undermine Ahmadinejad. As we have already seen some version of them before, you can see the headlines already: “Obama sells out allies for nothing.” What I did find intriguing about Baer’s idea was that he seemed to be stating that our disputes with Russia and China over Georgia and Taiwan were relatively unimportant enough to U.S. interests that Washington could give ground on these disputes and it wouldn’t be any great loss. Especially as it concerns Georgia, I agree that there are no real U.S. interests at stake, but I am not the one who needs to be persuaded on this point. I have no idea what Baer means by “conceding disputes,” but I guarantee that anything significant enough to interest the Russians and Chinese would be politically radioactive in both parties.

Even if the concessions were significant, Moscow and Beijing would have little reason to withdraw aid and support from Iran’s regime. From the Russian and Chinese perspectives, U.S. involvements in Georgia and Taiwan are provocations and examples of ongoing interference in their affairs. If Washington made concessions tomorrow, Moscow and Beijing would regard this simply as a return to the way things should be and a recognition of prior Russian and Chinese claims.

I said the panel was mostly excellent, which brings me to the contribution that was jarringly bad. This came from the Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the other contributors, they made arguments for their proposals. Carafano spends the first half of his entry lamenting Neda. This is fine as far as it goes, but it is not a policy argument. It is an attempt to exploit a woman’s tragic death to gin up sympathy for a series of bad policy options whose merits and consequences Carafano never bothers to outline. Carafano’s entry amounts to a fair amount of weepy sentimentality combined with unfounded assertions (“this is a government that cannot stand”) and topped off with counterproductive recommendations. Carafano’s proposal for what Washington should do comes at the end:

Obama can help speed the process. First, the United States needs to adopt tough unilateral sanctions that hit the regime in the gut. Second, Obama needs to spare no effort to shame Iran for its horrific human rights record. Third, put the “third site”—the deployment of missile defense to Poland and the Czech Republic–back on the table. Take out every avenue Tehran has to threaten the West.

This seems like a parody of a lot of movement conservative foreign policy commentary, but this is actually what passes for such commentary at one of the flagship think tanks of the conservative movement these days. It has much of what is wrong with movement conservative thinking on these issues. If there is an authoritarian government engaging in repression of its people, slap sanctions on it and engage in a lot of useless moral preening. And missile defense! Pay no attention to the small problem that the longest-range Iranian missile can barely reach Romania–there simply must be a missile defense installation in central Europe!

At first there would seem to be no logical connection between Carafano’s manipulative sentimentality and his boilerplate recommendations, but something I read near the end of Christina Larson’s article on Tibet made me think otherwise. She wrote, “In general, sentiment veils critical thinking.” Larson’s piece is worth reading for no other reason than to be reminded of this lesson. Carafano’s enthusiasm for the Green movement and his sympathy for the regime’s victims seem to be so great that they prevent him from seeing how useless and counterproductive his recommendations are.

The last time we saw a double-digit shift in Senate seats in a single election was when a former movie actor by the name of Ronald Reagan was elected president (Republicans won a dozen seats back in 1980). A shift of those dimensions in a non-presidential election year would be basically unheard of. ~Peter Wehner

There is a reason this is unheard of. A ten-seat gain by the non-presidential party has happened just twice before in the first midterm election of a new President’s term, and these were 1910 and 1946 under very different circumstances after fairly long periods of one-party government. Even with Bayh’s retirement and a Republican pick-up there, it would be necessary for Republicans to pick up Pennsylvania and Illinois in addition to the five much more vulnerable seats (NV, DE, ND, CO, AR), and then they would also have to win in California and Connecticut. If even one of their own open seats changed hands, this would still not be enough to regain a majority. The open seat in Indiana brings the Republicans closer to this goal, but the goal remains extremely unrealistic. To continue to talk about it as if it were a probable outcome will make anything less than this seem rather underwhelming.

It is also important to note that most Democratic wounds over at least the last six weeks have been self-inflicted. The Republicans are in the position they are in today on account of nothing they have done. Byron Dorgan panicked at the prospect of a real contest, Massachusetts Democrats nominated the worst possible candidate from their primary field, and Evan Bayh decided to give up rather than go through an election campaign that he could conceivably lose. Delusional Republicans claiming that the Democrats are in worse shape now than they were in 1994 are in no position to take full advantage of these mistakes. Wehner is reinforcing these delusions when he writes:

The Democratic party is in worse shape now than it was at a comparable period then [1994]. The mistrust of government runs deeper. The anti-incumbent tide is stronger. And the public uprising is greater.

There were far more House Democratic retirements in 1994, and Democrats were generally far more complacent and oblivious to the danger they were facing. Today there are more Republican Senate and House retirements than there are comparable Democratic retirements. In 1994, the Democratic presidential candidate had won a mere 43% of the popular vote two years earlier. In 2008, Obama won 52% of the popular vote. In 1994 it had been forty years since the Republicans had been in charge of Congress. Voting for the GOP seemed as if it might offer some change from the perpetual Democratic majority. Today memories of a Republican majority are fresh and generally negative.

As Chait points out, a recent Pew survey confirms what the NBC/WSJ poll showed a couple weeks ago and what post-Massachusetts polling showed last month:

Currently, slightly more voters say they think of their vote as a vote for Obama (24%) than as a vote against him (20%). Throughout most of 2006, roughly twice as many said they were voting “against” Bush as “for” him. And in three surveys during the fall of 1994, slightly higher percentages said they thought of their vote as against Clinton rather than for him.

As I wrote about the NBC/WSJ poll after it came out:

That doesn’t mean that Democrats aren’t going to lose many seats this fall. They will. However, it does suggest that most voters’ frustrations right now are not a product of their dissatisfaction with Obama. It is possible that these numbers could change and the anti-presidential vote could increase, but if we look at the ‘06 numbers we see that the levels of support and opposition were locked in over a year earlier and barely changed at all between the end of ‘05 and the election. After everything we have been hearing about Republican successes and the administration’s approaching doom, what is interesting here is that there are relatively so few respondents in this poll that want to express opposition to Obama in the midterms.

It is not clear that Congressional Democrats are going to have a worse-than-average election. However, if Congressional Democrats are poised to have a worse-than-average election year, it does not follow that the results represent deep public hostility to Obama. The RCP average of Obama’s approval rating continues to show that he has more support than Clinton did at a comparable point. If post-election polling in Massachusetts shows that Obama was not a factor for most Brown voters and two national surveys show that more midterm voters intend to vote to express support for him rather than opposition to him, it makes no sense to conclude that Obama is dragging his party down. For that matter, it is not yet clear that his party will experience a worse-than-average midterm election, so it is even more unreasonable to blame Obama for being the cause of this.