Many also scoff at the notion that a responsible Iranian leader would risk using or transferring nuclear weapons or technology. We are told that Ahmadinejad (who most acknowledge is crazy enough to use such a weapon) won’t make the final decision. But the regime is remarkably opaque, and shifting power centers ensure that even capable intelligence agencies have low levels of certainty about decision-making in Iran’s nuclear program. ~Danielle Pletka

As one of the scoffers, I would add something else. That parenthetical statement about Ahmadinejad’s insanity does a lot of the work in a piece aimed at instilling fear in its audience. We heard quite often how “mad” Hussein was in the years prior to the invasion. As we now know for certain, he was so utterly preoccupied with self-preservation and projecting an image of strength that he went out of his way to appear more dangerous than he was to make enemies think twice about attacking him. As the rigged election and crackdown this summer have shown, Ahmadinejad is concerned above all with keeping himself and his allies in power.

Ahmadinejad has shown himself to be the most cynical, self-serving political operator. This is hardly the kind of person who would hand over a nuke to a third party even if he were in a position to do this, much less order a nuclear attack when he and his allies would stand to lose everything in the retaliation that would follow. It is improbable that a constitutionally weak president, who does not have authority over the security apparatus or foreign policy, would be in a position to make a decision as crucial as the sale or use of nuclear weapons, but even if he were making that decision we have little reason to think that he would willingly hand over such a powerful weapon and even less reason to think that he would order an attack with such a weapon. So Iran policy hawks have to trot out the “crazy dictator” line to get around the problem that all of their frightening scenarios are far-fetched and unreasonable.

The Iranian government is relatively opaque, but like any modern regime it is made up of a large number of people and institutions that have their own interests in self-preservation. Even if Iran one day had a nuclear weapon (which it doesn’t have right now!), and even if Ahmadinejad were in a position to give away, sell or use such a weapon, you have to assume that there would be a near-unanimous consensus inside the upper echelons of the Iranian government that this is a desirable thing to do. More to the point, you have to assume that there would be no violent attempt from within the regime to stop such action. As Pletka herself acknowledges, the regime’s structure is opaque, so we cannot assume that there is anything like a consensus inside their government about what Iran should do with any nuclear weapons that it might acquire. This is understandable, since it does not yet possess these weapons and won’t have them for many years. Even if Ahmadinejad were “crazy,” as Pletka assumes without any real evidence*, that doesn’t mean that all of the people in the military, the IRGC and the clerical establishment are suicidal.

Pakistan is a useful counter-example that disproves the hawks’ fantasies. Pakistan is a state that has used terrorist and militia proxies against it enemies for decades. Pakistan is at a significant disadvantage against India in conventional warfare, which is why it has relied on terrorism and proxy warfare since the loss of Bangladesh. It has actually possessed a sizeable nuclear arsenal for over a decade. If ever there were a candidate for a nuclear-armed state giving nukes to terrorists to achieve its political goals, Pakistan is it, and Pakistan has not done this and is not likely to do this. While there was a dangerous moment during the Kargil war when the conflict almost escalated disastrously and there were extremely heightened tensions earlier this decade, the Pakistani military had complete control over its arsenal and it was not about to hand off one of its weapons to Lashkar-e-Taiba or one of its other proxies. Not only would this deprive Pakistan of control over how and when the weapon would be used, but it would still make Pakistan responsible for the weapon’s use, the weapon would be traced back to Pakistan, and this would lead to serious Indian retaliation against Pakistan. When nuclear weapons are involved, deterrence seems to prevail every time.

As Greg Scoblete makes clear, the “the real fear is not that the lives of Americans are in any concrete danger when Iran goes nuclear but that the power balance in the Middle East might tilt in Iran’s favor.” The thing to bear in mind is that the power balance has been tilting in Iran’s favor for the last six years thanks to the rise of pro-Iranian Shi’ite parties as the leading parties in Iraq’s government. Iran is a leading regional power, and it is going to exercise more influence over time. It is going to seek and eventually acquire nuclear weapons to counter-balance the numerous other nuclear powers in its neighborhood, several of which are openly hostile.**

We already have the means to contain Iran. Except when we have toppled their worst rivals and empower their proxies, we were already containing Iran. What so many Westerners seem not to understand is that if Iran pursues a nuclear weapon, it is doing so to acquire a deterrent to limit the aggressiveness of hostile states. In other words, the question the Iranian government is asking is how it can “contain” and deter the U.S. and our allies.

* Treating Ahmadinejad as a “crazy” person is a mistake, because it means that we believe that only a madman would hold the beliefs that he does. We don’t quite know what to do with an urban engineer apparently in complete control of his faculties who nonetheless holds some of the most obnoxious political views. Indeed, when most people label this or that foreign leader as “crazy,” I’m guessing they don’t mean that he is out of his mind. They mean that they don’t like him. As a descriptor of political leaders, crazy is fast becoming as meaningless as fascist already is.

** The amazing thing about the Iran debate is that many of us in the West talk about the possibility of bombing Iran the way other people talk about the weather. It might rain later today. Israel might launch military strikes on Iran. I recall an article in The Wall Street Journal over two months ago outlining the technical difficulties of an Israeli air strike, the armaments that would be used and the targets that would be attacked. There is a remarkable non-chalance about aggressive war against Iran that would send the very same people into apoplectic fits of rage if state-run media in one of these authoritarian states blithely discussed attacking installations in our country. Hawks would take such talk from the Iranian media as proof of hostile intent and a justification for “pre-emptive” action.

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. ~Ryan Lizza

After reading his ridiculous Rolling Stone article on Obama’s “sell-out” to Wall Street, I am persuaded that Matt Taibbi should be forced to write these two Ryan Lizza sentences a few thousand times by hand until he has absorbed their message. The problem is not Taibbi’s reporting on the administration’s actions and personnel, but with the overall interpretation he gives to the facts. No one believed that Obama was “standing up to Wall Street” when Tim Geithner and Larry Summers were appointed to top economic Cabinet and advisory posts, and everything that has happened since then is consistent with the modern Democratic Party’s accommodation with Wall Street that has been steadily intensifying for the last fifteen years or so. Obama’s support for the financial bailout last fall was just one more instance of this.

As far as Washington pundits and most of the political class are concerned, Obama has taken the “responsible” positions in response to the financial crisis, because he has embraced the solutions offered by the very people from Wall Street, the central bank and the Treasury who contributed greatly to the causes of the crisis. It is very important to understand that Obama campaigned on these “responsible” positions, and he made no promises to challenge the government’s collusion with financial interests. His supporters have exactly what they voted for as far as these things are concerned. He had no mandate “to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy,” because he never really proposed to do either of these things. If he had, he probably would not have voted for the financial sector bailout. It is a bit rich for Taibbi to complain about the Citigroup deal as if it represented something different from the bailout passed earlier in the fall. None of this is to say that Taibbi is wrong in finding the deal outrageous, but it was hardly a sharp break with the things Obama had already supported.

Some progressives are just as invested in the idea that Obama has “sold out” to corporate and financial interests as neoconservatives are committed to the fantasy that Obama’s foreign policy has recently undergone dramatic change. The reality is that Obama never had to “sell out” to these interests, because he never challenged them in any serious way in his national political career before he became President. We are not witnessing “one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.” We are seeing Obama do pretty much exactly what he did during the general election and the months before his Inauguration: he has been careful to position himself squarely as a conventional center-left politician, and he has done this most of all as far as it concerns the financial sector.

As for trade policy, he has not pushed for new trade agreements, but neither has he actively tried to change any existing agreements. The primary candidate who raised the possibility of re-negotiating NAFTA vanished even before the nomination was his. Even Austan Goolsbee, whom Taibbi makes out to be one of the good, banished economic advisors, effectively admitted in the spring of 2008 that, as Taibbi puts it, “Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA.” Taibbi may not want to remember, but at one time it was Goolsbee’s presence on the Obama campaign that served as the kind of reassuring signal to corporate and financial interests that the Furman and Geithner appointments were later on. The idea of re-negotiating NAFTA had been dead for months by the time Furman came on board. Furman’s appointment confirmed a policy view that already existed. It did not represent a change or a departure on trade policy. Taibbi writes as if he didn’t know that Obama was a committed free-trade globalist. Nowhere can Taibbi provide any of Obama’s statements or legislation to support the idea that his embrace of the policies and personnel of Rubinism and globalization as President is any way different from the policies he favored before his election. Instead we are treated to a lot of hand-waving like this:

A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy.

Obama didn’t run on a platform of “fundamental” change of the economy. He was very careful not to scare anyone with anything as dramatic or interesting as that. He didn’t run on a platform of “fundamental” change in foreign policy, either. The man isn’t interested in fundamental change. My guess is that this is not just because this kind of change is far more difficult and risky, but because he really thinks it is undesirable. This is how he has gone from political obscurity to the White House in a decade. That was Lizza’s point all along.

Recently, I answered a few questions from The Economist on foreign policy. You can read my responses here.

Of all the interventionists out there, Robert Kagan should know better than to claim that the Oslo speech represented some sort of “shift” in Obama’s foreign policy. As Tomasky made clear in his article, Obama was saying things that he had been saying for years. There was nothing new. There was no “shift.” Kagan should know better because he was one of the few neoconservatives who recognized early on that Obama was an ambitious interventionist. Kagan liked Obama’s early foreign policy speeches, as well he should have. Most of his complaints since then have been baseless (he once claimed Obama was cutting the Pentagon’s budget) or focused on a disagreement over process and means, which are the only significant disagreements that separate most neoconservatives from liberal internationalists. Obama made no “course adjustment.” His Nobel speech, like his war plan speech, was defined by a particular occasion, but he could have given most of the speech two or even seven years ago.

None of this stops Kagan from making a fool of himself:

He would not be the first president to make the transformation from skeptic to champion of a war.

Obama has never been a skeptic of the Afghan war! There has been exactly one war where Obama’s skepticism outweighed his normal hawkishness, and this was Iraq. As it happens, he was absolutely right to be skeptical about that. It could turn out that he ought to have been more skeptical of what the U.S. can accomplish in Afghanistan, but all of this commentary I see claiming that Obama has somehow been “half-hearted” or not a fully convinced supporter of the war in Afghanistan is completely wrong.

The comparison with Wilson is silly. Wilson was lying when he claimed that he was trying to keep the United States out of war, and once he was secure in office after the 1916 election and had a good enough pretext he could not enter the war fast enough. His second inauguration was in late March, and the war declaration was passed in early April. Wilson’s voters would have had a right to feel betrayed by Wilson’s sudden volte-face; Obama’s backers are getting exactly what Obama promised them. Obama has never claimed as a candidate or as President that he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan under present circumstances; he did not campaign on suddenly ending the war in Afghanistan. Unlike Wilson, Obama did not blatantly lie about his intentions regarding Afghanistan. What seems to amaze so many people is that Obama evidently meant what he said when he argued for providing the Afghan war with more resources and soldiers. All of the campaign rhetoric that Obama wanted to “retreat” or “surrender” to or “appease” America’s enemies has been exposed as the lies that they obviously were at the time, and so now there is something of a desperate race to claim that Obama’s foreign policy has changed from what it was and, if possible, to take credit for the change.

The Oslo speech also does not represent a “turning point in Iran policy.” Obama’s idea of engagement with Iran has always included the possibility of punitive measures, and of course Obama has never absolutely ruled out the use of force against Iran. Engagement was one tool among many to achieve a certain end. Obama’s goal has always been the dismantling or strict limitation of Iran’s nuclear program. Obama’s Iran policy is continuing on the same trajectory it has been on since the beginning, and so long as the severe limitation or elimination of Iran’s nuclear program is the official goal the administration will employ increasingly harsh measures to try to extract concessions. This will fail, and Iran will never make those concessions. Obama’s approach is not what I have in mind when I think of engagement with Iran, but Obama’s Iran policy has not turned anywhere, nor has it changed. It continues on its straight line to confrontation and conflict. At least this last part obviously pleases Kagan and Kristol, which is the lesson to take away from neoconservative praise of Obama’s speech: they will embrace anything, even a Democrat delivering his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, if it makes aggressive war more likely.

At the risk of piling on, I wanted to follow up on Erik Kain’s response to Abe Greenwald. Erik writes:

Even more absurd is the idea that because these people support Obama’s Afghanistan strategy that now a slim majority don’t share the conception of morality advocated by liberals. What does that even mean? Neocons like Greenwald assume that the only people who could possibly oppose war are liberals. Such is the state of affairs on the right, I suppose. But even worse, to weigh someone’s morals on their support for war (and to call the lack of support immoral) strikes me as fairly awful. The old trick is to question someone’s patriotism, and that’s cynical and arrogant enough, but to define an entire group’s morality based on their belief that interventionist wars are wrong is absurd.

It is absurd, but what makes Greenwald’s article deserving of even more ridicule is the content of this “morality” that Obama and others are supposed to have embraced in the past. According to Greenwald, Obama “has held fast to a comprehensive model of right and wrong.” What model is this? He goes on:

It is the present-day liberal model, wherein right comprises those things accomplished or pursued without approval from the West and wrong covers most anything America and Europe hope to effectuate outside their own borders; right is that which strives for peace, even at the cost of long-term suffering, and wrong is any American act of war.

This is laughable. I can’t speak for liberals, but as I recall it is liberal internationalists who have been busily trying to do all kinds of things beyond our borders for as long as they have been around. On the whole, they believe in global interdependence and global governance more than even neoconservative globalists, and they have done a great deal of the disapproving of other regimes’ actions inside and outside their own borders. To this day, the illegal bombing of Serbia ten yeas ago remains sacrosanct for most liberals, and Obama endorsed it again in his Oslo speech. There were some honorable progressives who spoke out and opposed the bombing of Serbia as well, so I don’t want to overstate this, but by and large Kosovo was and remains a war that commands majority approval on the left just as Iraq has commanded it on the right. That was a case of the “responsibility to protect” and a defense of “human rights,” even though every premise for the military action was false, our government had no legal or moral authority to intervene in Serbia’s internal affairs, and the war greatly worsened conditions in Kosovo and throughout the region. The “morality” Greenwald attributes to liberals is not only one they would not recognize, but also one that has no basis in reality.

Historically, liberals have hardly been pacifists, and most of them today would have nothing to do with the “morality” Greenwald describes as theirs. Obama is even more hawkish than most liberals, as there is only one military campaign that he has opposed in his entire political career, and almost every foreign policy address he has given has been filled to overflowing with all the areas in which he thinks America must provide “leadership.” I think this is horrible, but there is no question that this has been the content of Obama’s foreign policy thinking for many years. There was nothing new in the Oslo speech to anyone who has been paying attention. Neoconservatives such as Greenwald are forced to caricature liberal internationalist positions because the latter are not all that different from their own as far as policy objectives are concerned, so they are forced to exaggerate or invent differences to make neoconservatism seem to be the only ideology around acceptable to the political class. Every liberal has to be portrayed as a McGovernite (and a caricature of a McGovernite at that!) to cover up the reality that liberal internationalists have largely occupied the policy and political ground on which Nixon and Republican realists once stood. In the meantime, neoconservatives have been dragging the GOP down a dead-end alley of increasingly aggressive confrontational policies. This has made the misrepresentation of rather boring, conventional center-left establishmentarians such as Obama crucial to maintaining the fiction that the GOP and the neoconservatives in it are the “serious” party on foreign policy.

P.S. I had not seen Michael Tomasky’s article making much the same point until after I finished this post. Tomasky observes the same thing I did:

The surprise — the happy surprise among conservatives, and the anger among some on the left — says less about Obama than it does about the presumptions of listeners in both camps.

Before Culture11 vanished into the ether, I had an article on Obama the day after the election that addressed the persistent habit people across the spectrum had in refusing to believe that Obama actually meant what he said on foreign policy:

Obama’s position on Israel and Palestine is a particularly apt example of how perceptions of the candidate’s policies diverge diverge wildly from his stated views. Some of his more progressive—and conservative—supporters want to emphasize the same ‘weakness’ on Israel that his critics want to prove. Trivial episodes—toasting Khalidi at a farewell party, having dinner with Edward Said, generic remarks about Palestinian suffering—are transformed into clues to understanding the hoped-for “real” Obama who will chart a different (i.e., a more “even-handed” or even pro-Palestinian) course in American policy. The same episodes are also cited as indictments alongside such equally meaningless things as Hamas’ so-called ‘endorsement’.

Both interpretations conveniently ignore Obama’s actual Israel policy positions, which mirror the Bush Administration in almost every detail, and Obama’s record, including his unequivocal support for Israeli military action in Lebanon in 2006. His antiwar supporters, who frequently tout his 2002 statement of opposition to “rash and dumb wars,” are unfazed by or unaware of his support for an equally counterproductive, rash and dumb war in Lebanon, just as his hawkish critics cannot or do not attempt to make sense of the fact that Obama is far more in agreement with them about Israel than he is with significant numbers of his own voters.

This process has been repeating for the last year. Whenever Obama reminds us that he is a hawkish liberal internationalist, neoconservatives and hawks gasp in amazement (and try to take credit) and many of his supporters express dismay at the “betrayal” they have experienced. It is understandable why some neoconservatives would want to treat Obama’s liberal internationalism as a result of “going neocon,” because as long as Democratic leaders adhere to something close to a pre-1968/post-1992 liberal internationalist foreign policy neoconservatism has no reason to exist, except perhaps as the distorted echo of liberal internationalism that it has always been.

The word “Iraq” does not appear in the address, yet again and again the president flails out against that war. That is his opinion and his policy. Fine. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes. But Oslo is a horribly inappropriate venue for such criticisms. If he wants to argue with other Americans, let him do it in America, not in the course of accepting an award from some non-Americans for joining with them in their criticism of other Americans.

It’s human nature to prefer compliments to criticism, flattery to dissent. In that respect, Barack Obama is a very human man. But here he has gone too far: He has allowed an international organization to exploit his weakness to drive a wedge between this president and half his country – the half, ironically, whose support he most needs to sustain his ongoing foreign policy. ~David Frum

Via Conor

Conor has some fun comparing Bush’s attacks on past U.S. Near East policy to Obama’s allegedly “graceless” remarks criticizing the invasion of Iraq, but that doesn’t address some of the larger problems with Frum’s response. It has been many years since half of Americans supported the war in Iraq, but even if we take Frum to mean the roughly half of the country that voted for McCain this complaint doesn’t make any sense. Obama hasn’t allowed a wedge to be driven between himself and these people. If criticizing the Iraq war is so unacceptable to the latter, the wedge between them and Obama has existed for years. Then again, Bush hardly endeared himself to most of his countrymen when he whined about so-called appeasement in his Knesset speech in the closing year of his second term. Everyone at the time could see that he was making a not-so-veiled attack on Obama’s proposed diplomatic engagement with “rogue” authoritarian regimes, and he was free to do so, but I’m pretty sure that Frum et al. would not have taken seriously arguments that Bush had allowed a foreign parliament to drive a wedge between himself and half his country.

The thing I find far harder to understand is why Frum objects to that particular statement from the Oslo speech. Obama said:

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait – a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression. Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention – no matter how justified.

Leave aside how Obama reconciles this statement in his own mind with his endorsement of the bombing of Serbia, which was as arbitrary, illegal and wrong as an intervention could be (and which certainly did not have any global consensus behind it), and look at his final sentence. According to what he’s saying in the Oslo speech, the main problem with invading Iraq wasn’t necessarily that it wasn’t justified, but that the invasion lacked global consensus support and went outside the “rules of the road.” If you didn’t know Obama’s position on Iraq from before this speech, you would conclude that he would have had no objection to the invasion if it had commanded broader international support. This is a revised version of the old chestnut that the Iraq war was bad because it was “unilateralist,” and not because it was aggressive or unjust.

All that Obama is saying here is that operating within the framework of international institutions and their rules makes it possible to continue to engage in military interventions in the future and that the invasion of Iraq jeopardized the future of interventionism when the last administration failed to abide by those rules. Supporters of military intervention should be quite happy with this statement. Obama here not only reserves the right to order new interventions, but he has effectively recast his opposition to the war in Iraq in terms that do not attack the merits or wisdom of the invasion. Instead, he states merely that the war was launched in the wrong way, and that this will make it harder to start future wars humanitarian works of mercy. Once again, Obama commits himself to the same ambitious and interventionist foreign policy that he has advocated for years, and this is received as either some striking change from his previous statements, as Peter Feaver would have it, or it is ignored entirely as it is in Frum’s response. One wonders if Frum has any idea what Obama’s “ongoing foreign policy” actually is if he cannot see that this statement is as strongly interventionist as anything Obama has said since his election.

My new column for The Week on Afghanistan is up.

Abe Greenwald reminds us that neoconservatives have the historical understanding of five year-olds:

Among other things, the War of 1812 was an attempt to eradicate the evil of monarchic rule [bold mine-DL]; the Civil War, a push to eliminate the evil of slavery; World Wars I [bold mine-DL] and II, fights to destroy the evil of totalitarian ideologies; and the Cold War, a triumph over the “Evil Empire.”

Each of these claims could be ridiculed as the simplistic, ideological and largely anachronistic nonsense that it is, but I will limit myself to the most obvious errors. These are not only the most easily refuted, but they are also telling in that they show the extent to which neocons such as Greenwald will distort and do violence to the historical record to shore up their shoddy ideology. He could not be content with repeating boilerplate claims about the “Good Wars” of 1861 and 1941, which few would bother to contest because the mythology surrounding them is so well-established, but he felt compelled to extend his absurd reading of American history even to the War of 1812, which is remarkable in American history as a war that we formally started and lost completely without any real ill effects on our nation. After two years of failure, we negotiated a settlement at Ghent, peace returned and the world did not end. The conclusion of the War of 1812 is a good example of how negotiated peace and compromise concluded a foolish policy favored by War Hawks and this settlement allowed us to resume commerce and exchange with Britain. It is especially strange for a neoconservative to invoke the War of 1812, since the aftermath of that war showed that we could be completely defeated by a foreign military on our own soil, and this didn’t really have any long-term significance for the prosperity or security of the United States.

Put in the most favorable light that its own propagandists would have used, the War of 1812 was at most a belated, failed effort to halt British impressment and the violation of the neutral rights of American ships, and this was wrapped up in overblown rhetoric about a “second war of independence.” There was no notion of “eradicating” monarchic rule. More bluntly, the war was an attempt to exploit British involvement in the Napoleonic Wars to make a land grab in the Northwest. The War Hawks of that time were interested in expansion, and it is worth remembering that it was our government that formally declared war first. No doubt the War Hawks loathed monarchy as everyone in the early republican period did, but in the early nineteenth century there was no chance of “eradicating” monarchic rule anywhere.

The claim that WWI had anything to do with fighting “totalitarian ideologies” is comical. Anything recognizable as a modern totalitarian movement did not exist until after WWI. It is fair to say that the effects of WWI created or empowered totalitarian ideologies, but the war itself was the struggle of the established major empires to retain supremacy in Europe against the rising power of Germany and its allies. Allied propagandists portrayed the war as a fight variously for the rights of small nations, democracy or resistance to absolutism, but none of this had anything to do with totalitarianism or anti-totalitarianism. Neither did it particularly have much to do with combating evil. No doubt every nation involved convinced itself that its cause was righteous and the cause of the enemy was utterly depraved, which just serves as a reminder of how disastrous valorizing warfare can be. WWI was a catastrophic waste that destroyed much of the stable order of European civilization and ushered in at least seventy years of horror, oppression and actual totalitarianism across much of the Continent. During WWI, every belligerent on both sides claimed sweeping powers to police internal dissent and to some extent every government took on the character of police states. That was a product of waging mass warfare, and the wartime expansion of government powers applied to both Allied and Central powers.

Ben Smith notes that 44% now say they would prefer to have Bush as President according to a recent PPP poll. At first, that seems startling because of the tremendous improvement in Bush’s approval numbers that this represents, but it is more interesing as evidence of how quickly people forget their complaints against an earlier government and how ready they are to edit their memories of that time selectively to make them seem much better than the present. It is also a product of a partisan reflex for people to insist that the President from their party was better.

After all, McCain won 47% of the vote, and as far as policy was concerned he was as close to a Bush clone as could be expected under the circumstances. Clearly, when most voters expressed dissatisfaction with Bush during his second term most of the Republicans and right-leaning independents among them did not really disagree with the substance of what Bush had tried to do, but rather they were dissatisfied because of the administration’s repeated failures and blunders. In the end, by supporting McCain these Republicans and independents voted to continue virtually everything Bush had done, even though the failures of the same policies were what had soured them on his tenure.

Speaking of short memories, for some reason Rick Santorum is apparently being taken seriously as a national Republican figure again. It is unlikely that Santorum could have prevailed in 2006 even if he had not run the most tone-deaf campaign in recent history. The anti-incumbent and anti-GOP sentiments around the country and especially in Pennsylvania were probably too strong for him to have survived, but he made sure that his defeat was overwhelming by obsessing about the dangers from the Venezuelan air force and Iran, the leader of the so-called “Islamic fascist movement.” At that point, all Bob Casey had to do was show up, demonstrate an ability to speak English, and he was in.

The frustrating thing about Santorum is that he is at his worst when he talks about national security issues and he has nonetheless chosen to make national security alarmism his central and overriding message for the last three years, and he shows no signs of stopping. The conventional view is that Santorum’s strong social conservatism is his greatest liability with the public if he were to pursue a presidential bid or another attempt at statewide office, but this is exaggerated. What was disastrous for Santorum in 2006 and ever since is his obsession with foreign threats that do not exist or which he grossly exaggerates. Not only did this make him seem hard to take seriously three years ago, but it meant that he spent most of his time fixated on problems about which most voters knew little and cared even less. For the last three years, he has made his role as alarmist his full-time job, so we have to assume that this would figure prominently in any future political campaign.