Ross:

A slew of conservative economists and think tankers, led by the University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, have been working on ways to protect free markets from a re-run of last fall’s “too big to fail” fiasco. But most Republican politicians would rather rail against bailouts that have already happened than talk about how to prevent them from happening again.

Ross is right that a lot of anti-bailout rhetoric now coming from the right is focused on the past. He could also add that a lot of it is very new. Many of the new high-profile critics of “bailout nation” were nowhere to be found last fall when it might have mattered. Republican politicians who could have played the role of cautious skeptics and leaders unwilling to be stampeded into emergency measures instead chose to fall in line as they had done time after time under Bush. Most national Republican politicians weren’t railing against bailouts at all. They were desperately embracing them. Ross doesn’t mention here that Luigi Zingales was one of many scholars explaining why TARP was unwise and unnecessary, and he presented various alternatives at the time. It was conventional for many in certain reform-minded, wonkish circles to lump together all opposition to the TARP and other bailouts as nihilistic and purely negative, because they, too, were ignoring or dismissing the arguments of Zingales et al. As it happens, Reihan was not one of them:

To beat back the populist revival, conservatives need to articulate a new approach that is pro-market and anti-insider. Last week, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales offered a brilliant alternative that Republicans, led by John McCain, ought to have embraced.

In a stinging essay, Zingales essentially argued that Paulson was offering welfare to the rich. Rather than pay premium prices for toxic assets, Zingales called for the federal government to craft a restructuring plan that would involve some amount of debt forgiveness or a debt-for-equity swap, saving taxpayers billions and imposing well-deserved financial pain on the reckless creditor who created the mess in the first place.

So why did the GOP go along with such a profoundly flawed approach? If you can think of a better reason than laziness or cowardice, let me know.

What Reihan defines as “beating back the populist revival” is really nothing other than channeling the absolutely legitimate populist outrage generated by the financial crisis into the institutional and regulatory reforms scholars such as Zingales are proposing. One of the reasons why reform-minded wonks are waiting for politicians interested in their proposals is that far too many wonks insist on setting themselves in opposition to populists, who then conclude that they have no need of wonks (at least until they are in office). This perpetuates and deepens the divide between the people who spend most of their time thinking about policy proposals and their natural base of support.

Arguably, what we saw last year was just a Bush-era mirror image of what we have now. Instead of heeding smart arguments, most national Republicans resorted to echoing whatever the party line happened to be. Last year it was imperative to follow blindly whatever the Fed and Treasury said, and so most did, and this year it is now imperative to pretend that last year never happened and most Republicans had nothing to do with it. Perhaps it is just as important that leading national Republicans learn how to break from party leadership when the latter is clearly heading in the wrong direction. That would require a major change in how both the GOP and the conservative movement respond to internal dissent.

Ross:

Before the 2008 election, almost nobody outside Alaska and Arkansas had heard of Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee. But in a long and crowded campaign season, they were the only Republican politicians who inspired any genuine enthusiasm.

This is not entirely true. Obviously, Ron Paul inspired very intense enthusiasm. It is fair to say that this did not translate into much electoral success, but ultimately the same is true of Palin and Huckabee. What seems worth noting is that Rep. Paul inspired this enthusiasm on the strength of his substantive policy positions, which also tapped into some existing currents of public distrust of government. Huckabee and Palin, I’m sorry, thrived almost entirely on their personalities and charisma. That may be a bit unfair to Huckabee, insofar as his social conservative credentials were well-established and actually related to how he had governed in Arkansas, but on the whole it is true.

It is interesting that the one 2008 Republican candidate capable of generating much enthusiasm also happens to be leading the charge for accountability and transparency at the Federal Reserve, and this is producing real legislation that proposes to put greater scrutiny on how the central bank operates, and that will begin to address significant public dissatisfaction with the central bank. This is the sort of republican populist reform that Palin pretends to advocate and to which Huckabee mostly pays lip service. If much of the rest of Rep. Paul’s domestic policy agenda does not necessarily resonate with most Americans, his criticism of the Federal Reserve does. As Greenwald observes, this is because criticism and scrutiny of the Fed answer broad public outrage at how government and major private institutions conduct themselves that transcends party and ideological lines. It is worth noting how readily most observers, including more than a few Paul sympathizers, scoffed at how much attention he paid to the Federal Reserve and the ongoing depreciation of the currency, when these are proving to be two of the most important financial and economic matters of the day. Despite having had minimal electoral success in the Republican primaries, Paul’s candidacy has proved to be the more significant one as far as pushing reform legislation is concerned.

When Ross and I were at Princeton last month, I spoke of the need for a credible reform conservatism to challenge the interests of concentrated wealth and push for the reduction of the warfare state. There were not many takers. Regarding the latter, Ron Paul is virtually the only Republican office-holder who has any interest in such reform, and the audit of the Fed could be the beginning of a more serious effort in pressing for the former. There are many reasons why the idea of reducing the warfare state has so few Republican politicians behind it, and it would take a longer post to work through all of them, but what struck me about Ross’ post and his column today was that policy wonks are “waiting for the reformers” to some extent because they have already ruled out listening to the reformer(s) that do exist. There is at least one elected reformer that we have on the right, but as far as most wonks are concerned he wants to fix the wrong things (or they regard his solutions as disasters). Some of Paul’s proposals already command significant public support, and that would seem to point the way Republican reformers should start moving. Otherwise, the reform-minded wonks are going to continue to wait, because their domestic policy agenda leaves their natural constituents cold and their foreign policy horrifies two-thirds of the country.

But for Larison to sugeest that for Palin to keep in the good graces of her base, she has to back the more conservative candidate in every single race, no matter what other circumstances are in play, is totally ludicrous. ~Philip Klein

Had I said that, Klein might have a point, but I clearly didn’t. I’m not talking about Palin siding with the conservative in “every single race, no matter what other circumstances are in play,” but I am definitely talking about this Arizona Senate primary and the Palinite loathing of McCain. Rank-and-file conservatives dislike McCain as much for how he disrespects them as for his actual policy record, and it is especially the Palin loyalists who believe that it was McCain’s people who sabotaged Palin and sought to blame her for the failings of the campaign. In the Palinite story of her “persecution,” McCain and his staffers are seen as treacherous and untrustworthy.

It is easy to underestimate the significance of McCain’s record on immigration when considering how much rank-and-file conservatives in Arizona loathe him. Remember that his advocacy for immigration legislation nearly destroyed his candidacy on a national level. It was only after he gave up on talking about immigration during the campaign that he was able to revive his political hopes. There is a large bloc of Republican primary voters in Arizona who regard immigration as one of the most important issues, and they rightly regard McCain as one of the leading Republicans on the wrong side of the issue. That is why endorsing McCain would be very different from endorsing, say, Mark Kirk in Illinois, who has already been actively seeking her endorsement. Kirk may be a moderate, but for most people his name doesn’t mean anything and he hasn’t gone out of his way to aggravate and insult conservatives. Palin could endorse moderate candidates in blue states such as Kirk to her heart’s content, and her supporters probably wouldn’t think twice about it, but to support McCain for re-election to what has been a safe Republican seat would be more of a pragmatic compromise than a lot of them would be willing to tolerate. That doesn’t mean that she has to back Hayworth.

Klein may be right that Palinites are such cultists devoted to the person of Sarah Palin rather than to any discernible set of beliefs, in which case the Palin phenomenon is even more devoid of substance than anyone thought. On the assumption that her supporters actually object to “moderate” Republicanism for some coherent and intelligible reason, Palin will do herself great harm if she backs McCain.

Still, who could help McCain beat back a populist conservative challenger? Sarah Palin. I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth. ~Bill Kristol

One of the amusing things about Palin supporters is that very few of them are prepared to accept that Palin and McCain represent the same part of the Republican Party. For the most part, the people who love Palin loathe McCain as all the things they oppose in the GOP. It as if they think her appearance on the national stage would have happened apart from him. It is as if they black out all of the occasions when she endorsed positions McCain held (as she had to do as his running mate) that they otherwise find unacceptable. If she is supposed to represent some great right-populist hope, he is the deal-brokering, bipartisan “moderate” Beltway denizen who assiduously cultivates the media, but the reality is that he chose her partly because she reminded him of his own combative, arrogant, egocentric style and his habit of breaking party ranks to aggrandize himself.

Were she to side openly with McCain in a primary against Hayworth, whose views match up a lot more closely with her supporters’ views, she would be seen as imitating McCain’s worst habits. She would be considered a worse sell-out than McCain. She would be doing exactly the opposite of what she did in NY-23. Her intervention may have failed to elect Hoffman, but rank-and-file conservatives generally loved her for it anyway. She would fritter all that away if she backed McCain. In exchange for the contempt and disaffection of the people who currently adore her, she would win the enduring affection of editors at The Weekly Standard. McCain seems to be satisfied with this, but I doubt it would be enough for Palin.

Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale that siding with the establishment-friendly incumbent would be the crazy “maverick” thing to do, much as she claimed that staying in office would be the easy way out and quitting would be the courageous, bold move, but she would destroy the foundation of rank-and-file conservatives’ love for her. Palin generated such excitement because she was perceived by conservatives to be very different from McCain. This was wrong in many ways, but this was the source of all those enthusiastic calls for Palin to head the ticket and it is the reason why most conservatives instinctively sided with her during the campaign and all the internal squabbles with McCain’s staff. If she intervenes on McCain’s behalf, especially if it seems likely that Hayworth would otherwise win the nomination, she will destroy the political persona she has been crafting for the last year and cut herself off from the base she has thus far managed to captivate.

I would note that, as Hounshell himself admits, not a single U.S. president has actually done more than mouth empty threats or apply mild, temporary, pressure on Israel over its settlements. All serious people may believe settlements are corrosive to peace, but those people do not include the current Prime Minister of Israel and the current U.S. administration (again, judge what they do, not what they say).

What Sarah Palin is saying has been U.S. policy in deed, if not in word, for decades. I see no reason to beat up on Palin over stating the obvious, not least because she will (thankfully) never be president. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete makes a fair point, which is why it is somewhat misleading to refer to Palin as being on the “lunatic fringe.” Lunatic? Maybe. But whatever else her views are, they are definitely not on the fringe. In practice, as Scoblete notes, it is the advocates of a settlement freeze who are on the margins and the supporters of continued settlement in the territories who actually make policy. This is the way it has been for decades. Of course Palin’s statements on the subject are formulaic and betray her ignorance of the “basic nuances of the conflict.” First of all, she is repeating what her advisors and allies have told her to say about these things, and she is keeping her lines as simple as possible. What matters to her hawkish allies and her loyal followers is not whether she understands the issue. For these people, understanding and nuance are obstacles to be overcome. What matters is whether she adopts the correct pose. In this case, she has to strike the pose of being unflinchingly, reflexively supportive of Israel, and so she takes a maximalist position that secures her reputation as reliably “pro-Israel.” It makes no difference if the maximalist position she takes is actually worse for Israel in the long term. She has established the appearance of respecting Israel’s “rights” to do whatever it wants in contrast to an administration that her backers believe has been “bullying” Israel.

As a matter of internal Republican Party and movement politics, what Hounshell describes as lunacy is the consensus view on the right. This is why Huckabee’s earlier dabbling with neo-transferism isn’t the least bit surprising. We should also be a bit wary of invoking the authority of “serious people.” I think it is true that informed people understand why continued expansion of settlements is detrimental to the long-term interests of all parties, but after the last decade of terrible foreign policy guidance by self-proclaimed “serious people” there is hardly anything more damning one can say about something than to say that “serious people” embrace it.

There is a problem in hiding behind policy consensus and dismissing those outside it as an irrelevant fringe, and this is that the consensus gets important things wrong with remarkable frequency. Hawkish interventionists were able to create the (false) impression that 9/11 happened because America was too wedded to geopolitical stability and was too willing to tolerate authoritarian governments in the Near East, and then the lazy establishment consensus allowed itself to be dragged along with them to support an unnecessary and disastrous war. Establishment consensus views on Iraq and its weapon programs were wrong; consensus support for the bombardment of Lebanon and the Gaza operation was also wrong; the “serious” bipartisan consensus in favor of NATO expansion has been disastrously wrong. The trouble with Palin’s views on settlements and Israel-Palestine is not that they are on the fringe, but that they are as deeply misinformed about political realities in the region as so many of the consensus views mentioned above. As with all of those, it is the ill-informed and ideologically-driven position that prevails when it comes to policy decisions.

After reading some of the thingsPalinites have been writing this week, I am tempted to say that they are “objectively” pro-Obama inasmuch as they are doing their very best to make Obama’s re-election secure. It’s tempting, but it wouldn’t be entirely fair. What is a bit sad is simply how out of it Palinites are. R.S. McCain imagines that Palin is extremely popular. This is true only among a shrinking number of Republicans. Douglas thinks that Palin is powerful because she has become a favorite pinata of the left. In fact, she has very little power outside the conservative cocoon where she receives so much praise and deference. As her favorability ratings show, the intense and concentrated opposition to her has helped turn most of the public against her; Palin has managed to do the rest all by herself. That is evidence of her political weakness. She certainly generates a remarkable degree of irrational loathing, but then she also generates irrational and excessive admiration that makes her supporters believe absurd things about her and her political potential.

What McCain misses in his article is that liberal journalists actually take great delight in the Palin phenomenon. Yes, of course, they don’t want to see her in power, but I think they do want to see her prosper and thrive as the face of the Republican Party. An American right led by or identified with Palin is one that they can very easily ridicule and discredit, and at the same time they can be confident that a Palinized GOP poses no threat to anything they value. Palin is not going to bring the party out of the minority, and were she to lead the party it would more or less guarantee continued Democratic ascendancy for many years to come. Her content-free pseudo-populism ensures that the legitimate political concerns of her constituency remain irrelevant to real policy debates. Media outlets also thrive on controversy and conflict, both real and manufactured, and Palin continues to give them plenty of opportunities for both.

One of the lessons we were supposed to have learned from the off-year elections, and one that I think is correct, is that the public craves competent leadership and that it penalizes any party that fails to deliver it. 2006 and 2008 were repudiations of the GOP because of the war in Iraq and the financial crisis, but more broadly these elections were the public’s demands that the government be ably and competently administered. If McCain ever had a chance of winning, his erratic and confused response to the financial crisis destroyed it, and between his selection of Palin and his insane response to the war in Georgia he drove away many others who simply could not trust someone with such poor judgment with such great power. The elections earlier this month were much the same in that they were protests against Democratic failure to govern well. The Palinites propose to rally behind someone who has no particularly impressive record of accomplishments, who abandoned the highest executive office she has held before completing one term, and who seems to have no great expertise behind her. In other words, Palinites are telling the public that they have no interest in providing competent leadership, and they expect the public to respond favorably to this. Following one of the worst Presidencies in postwar history, one that was marked by incompetence and ideological demagoguery, the Palinites believe that the country is desperately seeking to relive that experience under an even less-experienced, less well-informed, more malleable Western governor.

Update: Rod has written a review of Palin’s book. As he says in a post at his blog, “There is nothing to her.”

Reihan:

Yet the fact that Matt [Continetti] isn’t unremittingly hostile to Palin is reason enough for many readers to reflexively dismiss his arguments.

I find this pretty depressing, albeit pretty predictable. What’s worse is that this contributes to a tit-for-tat culture that is the enemy of thoughtful, reasoned discussion.

One thing that moves me to dismiss his arguments for Palin is his insistence that she in some way represents a tradition of Democratic populism exemplified by Jackson and Bryan when she has no claim to such a tradition, especially when she seems to have no sympathy for such a tradition once she is in the national spotlight. Another is the idea that she can appeal to independent voters to revitalize her political career when, as Brendan Nyhan noted, the vast majority of independents believes she is unfit for presidential responsibilities and just 28% believe her to be qualified.

Everything she has done since arriving on the national stage has involved steadily distancing herself from her short record as governor. Reihan has already given up on her as a viable political leader, and I’m not surprised. Reihan is a smart writer interested in policy ideas and their application in reforming government, and there would not be much call for that in Palin’s GOP. Continetti has embarked on a project of rehabilitating the national political fortunes of someone who dropped out of elective office in her own state mostly because she could not put up with the tactics of her opposition and the scrutiny of the media. Why should we take such a project seriously? If arguments in support of Palin’s political future don’t deserve to be dismissed pretty quickly, no argument ever should be.

I would have thought that anyone interested in promoting reasoned, thoughtful discussion would shudder at the thought of a Republican Party led and defined by Sarah Palin, whose national political career has been one episode of inflammatory, uninformed agitation after another. That is the kind of party and the kind of conservatism Continetti is working to create. Fortunately, his preferred candidate is so politically radioactive to most of the country that it will never take hold.

Walter Shapiro makes a good observation that the GOP’s winner-take-all primary system improves the chances for a Palin nomination bid. There could be just enough true believers to push her over the edge in the early contests, at which point it would become increasingly difficult for rivals to catch up. After all, McCain benefited from a divided field and gained a prohibitive lead in the delegate count without ever winning more than 45% of the vote in any contested state. At first glance, this seems possible, but it isn’t going to work out this way.

There are a few reasons why this scenario for a Palin nomination is still extremely unlikely. The first is funding. If Palin is in so many ways a less serious candidate than Dan Quayle, it is worth remembering that Dan Quayle’s extremely brief flirtation with presidential politics in 1999 ended because he could not find enough people interested in backing him financially. When there was already more or less an establishment candidate in Bush, no national political figure other than McCain attempted to oppose him, and McCain’s insurgency that year collapsed quickly enough. It seems to me that Romney is shaping up to be the prohibitive favorite and heir-apparent, just as McCain effectively was going in to the primary contests. Aside from his own money, Romney is an effective fundraiser, and he has the experience and the connections from the last presidential run to make it more difficult for any other contenders to gets funds and endorsements. Republican primary voting does not reward insurgent candidates. Barring some unforeseen implosion, Romney will begin as the frontrunner and likely remain in that position. Any contest between Romney, the competent, wonkish technocrat, and Palin, who is the opposite of all these things, would result in a win for Romney.

Huckabee showed last year how far a charismatic politician benefiting from favorable media coverage could take a campaign that had little money and a small staff, but these were important factors in falling short almost everywhere outside the South. No doubt Palin could inspire a lot of people to volunteer on her behalf, much as Huckabee did, but that will not be sufficient. Palin is not going to have the favorable media coverage that Huckabee did, in part because she is not as good at handling the media. Where Huckabee used charm, she takes an entirely adversarial approach. Another problem for Palin is that Romney stands to consolidate movement conservative and moderate Republican support, as he will become the natural candidate for secular and non-evangelical voters, and she will be left fighting with Huckabee, Pawlenty and others over the voters who remain. A split field and winner-take-all system may work to Romney’s benefit just as they propelled McCain to the nomination last year. If she were to run, she would most likely become one of the also-ran, second-tier candidates.

Finally, losing VP candidates very rarely win the presidential nomination later on, and only once before has a losing VP candidate made it to the White House, so there is no reason why anyone would want to rally behind the losing VP candidate from a previous cycle. Even if Obama ends up having a lousy first term and has poor approval ratings, ousting an incumbent President is very difficult. When it is finally faced with the choice, the GOP is not going to make Palin its standard-bearer in the campaign to defeat Obama’s re-election bid.

Pawlenty may not be the next Romney, but John Thune might be. David Brooks was waxing panegyrical in his column on Thune today, and one thing he focused on was Thune’s alleged love of all things small and local:

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations [bold mine-DL]. His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban[bold mine-DL].

Of course, that celebration was nowhere to be found when it came time to vote on the financial sector bailout last year. Like three-quarters of the Senate and, eventually, a majority of the House, he went for “the big and urban.” Thune voted for the bill, and even had the nerve to pat himself on the back for doing the politically dangerous thing. In fact, TARP was unnecessary, it was a dangerous grant of power to the executive branch, and it represented a gigantic swindle of the public for the benefit of financial institutions. Thune went along with most of the Senate in backing it. It’s true that Thune’s populism isn’t angry–it’s phony and opportunistic. He should do very well for himself in a party that rewards and admires politicians for just this sort of occasional, unreliable pseudo-populism.

Thune now hides behind the claim that he was misled when he cast his vote to grant the executive unaccountable power to use TARP funds however it saw fit. This is what every member of Congress who took the wrong position on a major vote tends to say nowadays when he had to answer for it later: the White House tricked me! Nothing inspires confidence in someone’s leadership abilities like the admission that he was easily fooled into making terrible mistakes. It’s a great campaign slogan: I’m so gullible, I even followed the Bush administration’s lead. I seem to remember that line of argument not working out very well for leading Democrats who voted for the war authorization in 2002.

Of course, the point opponents kept making was that there was no guarantee that the executive would use the money for the stated reason for the TARP. In fact, it has never been used for its original toxic-asset-buying purpose, because the government has never developed and likely never could have developed a mechanism for determing the price of these opaque assets. That doesn’t mean that the stated reason was a good one, and it does not mean that the program would have worked had they attempted to use it for its intended purpose, but the grant of power to the Treasury that Thune supported could have been used in any number of ways, which was why the sheer unaccountability and lack of oversight for the program were reasons enough to oppose it. Now that the public is sick of the bailouts, Thune has discovered that he, too, dislikes collusion between government and financial institutions, and in this he is just like Romney.