An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin’s favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn’t seriously consider supporting her for the presidency.

Yet Ms. Palin isn’t as unpopular as John Edwards, and she has a higher approval rating than Nancy Pelosi. ~Matthew Continetti

And people tell me that I’m a bad salesman! I can see it now: Vote Palin in ’12, because at least she isn’t Nancy Pelosi. What can it mean to say that someone isn’t as unpopular as a man who cheated on his dying wife? She probably isn’t as unpopular as Mark Sanford, either. That doesn’t make her a viable national candidate. The best part is when Continetti cites her net negative approval ratings among independents and then claims that this is what gives her a chance in national politics.

It’s not really Continetti’s fault that his case for Palin is so terrible. Yes, he has chosen for some bizarre reason to become the leading professional shill for a no-hoper ex-politician whom most Americans don’t like, but he’s doing his best to put a positive spin on simply atrocious polling numbers. If 63% of all voters wouldn’t even seriously consider Palin for President, how much less support would she actually get when it came time to vote?

The problem with Continetti’s “solution” for Palin is that she has no interest in abandoning her pseudo-populist politics of cultural resentment and returning to her less combative reformer persona. The pseudo-populism is what made her a movement conservative folk hero, this is what generated the intense backlash against her, and this is what won her a big book deal. The things that made her appealing to Alaskan voters cut against the grain of the movement and the party. She once prided herself on challenging and going against her party, but this is exactly why activists hated John McCain. Her idea of being anti-establishment in Alaska meant hiking taxes on oil companies, which would be completely unacceptable to movement and party activists if she tried it on a national level.

“Romneyesque,” as an epithet, conveys a willingness to abandon one’s core convictions — in Romney’s case, temperance and modesty on social issues — in order to pander. ~Mark Ambinder

This may be how many people use it, but what it really conveys is not so much a willingness to abandon core convictions as it is the daily reminder in deeds and words that the person has no real, permanent core convictions at all. What separates Romney from most pandering pols is the man’s gall. Specifically, it was the sheer gall of Romney’s sudden and complete transformation from being more pro-choice than Ted Kennedy to claiming that he was a devoted pro-lifer. In a matter of a few years, Romney went from telling us how deeply, personally affected he was by the death of a close relative who died in a botched abortion, which was why he would always and forever support legal abortion, to adopting as close to the opposite position as he possibly could. The only thing that really changed was that he wanted to be elected to the Senate and then as governor in Massachusetts when he told the first story, and then he started setting his sights higher and had to abandon that story.

Romneyites have never tired of arguing that people change their minds, and this is true, but how is it that Romney lived his entire life right up until he began preliminary organizing for the 2008 Republican primaries as a dedicated pro-choice Republican and only then, in 2005, had a revelation that all life is sacred and should be protected by law? I suppose there is a cynical answer that it doesn’t matter if the change was completely opportunistic so long as he sticks to his new position. But there is something that makes Romney less trustworthy than most, and this is the earnestness with which he embraces his new positions, as if he thinks he has outsmarted his audience and made us forget that he believed the opposite just five seconds before. Romney is probably the only politician who could make me have respect for Rudy Giuliani by comparison. Giuliani at least believes what he believes and isn’t interested in changing that for a few votes.

In fact, Ambinder is far too kind to Romney. Perhaps he doesn’t recall all of the shape-shifting changes our protean candidate made, but Romney “reinvented” himself on many more things than just the hot-button social issues, and the changes were substantive and not merely superficial shifts in “tone.” McCain had great fun with this from time to time, calling him the “candidate of change” and joking about Romney shooting at Guatemalans on his lawn. This pointed to the absurdity of Romney’s boast of being a “lifetime member of the NRA” despite having used a gun perhaps twice in his life, once to shoot at “varmints” on his property, and despite being a strong supporter for gun control in the ’90s. It also reminded the audience that Romney, who at that point was posing as a more-restrictionist-than-thou anti-immigration candidate, had previously endorsed amnesty and had employed illegal immigrants on his property.

Romney had begun his career far to the left of McCain, and campaigned against McCain by painting him as the unacceptable squish. Romney had raised fees as governor, but then portrayed himself as the most zealous tax-cutter you had ever met. He had signed universal health care in Massachusetts, but then he turned into an anti-government crusader. In the ’90s he wanted nothing to do with Reagan or his legacy, because these were radioactive in Massachusetts, and then suddenly every third word out of his mouth was Reagan’s name. If he didn’t change some positions, that was because he did not need to. He remained a staunch free trader, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he became a protectionist overnight if he thought it would help him win some elections.

Most of Ambinder’s post is actually a discussion of Pawlenty and the danger that he is becoming like Romney. The truth is that Pawlenty isn’t slick or charismatic enough to pull off Romney’s multiple metamorphoses.

Lately I have been writing fairly often in defense of Trita Parsi and NIAC, so I was bothered when I saw allegations of legal violations by the organization. Then I read the report and found that there wasn’t much to it. The allegations are a slightly more elaborate version of the attacks various writers have been making against Parsi and NIAC in recent weeks, but there seems to be little to support these charges. Probably the most damning evidence, such as it is, comes in this section of the story:

However, in a July 2008 memo obtained by The Times, Mr. Disney quoted the Lobbying Disclosure Act – a law that says even the preparation of materials aimed at influencing legislation or policy must be disclosed to the public – and said he and a colleague should register as lobbyists.

“Under this expansive view of ‘lobbying,’ I find it hard to believe Emily, and I devote less than 20 percent of our time to lobbying activity. I believe we fall under this definition of ‘lobbyist,’ ” he wrote, referring to NIAC’s legislative director at the time, Emily Blout.

The tax code allows nonprofits to devote less than 20 percent of their activities to lobbying if they declare the activity in a special section on their taxes. NIAC’s latest tax form shows that the group has declared that it spends none of its time lobbying.

When asked about his policy director’s memo, Mr. Parsi said that Mr. Disney is not a lawyer and that when he wrote the memo, he was new to the organization.

When reached Thursday for the story, Mr. Disney said, “You are using an e-mail from very early in my time at NIAC to demonstrate that the organization is not following the rules. When I wrote the e-mail in question, I was a 22 year old with no legal education, but was asked to research and give an opinion about a complex legal matter.

“The opinion I expressed in the email was erroneous, and has since been clarified by legal professionals who have found NIAC is in full compliance with the law[bold mine-DL]. The practice of using out of context and partial e-mails is poor journalism; and it is one of the reasons Americans are losing faith in the media.”

Lake does not produce anything that clearly puts NIAC in violation of any laws. Everyone who seems to be in a position to judge such matters appears to have concluded that there are no violations. Indeed, the documents used as sources for the article come from the defendant in a defamation suit that NIAC initiated against him because he made this same claim of lobbying for Tehran. It would be very strange behavior for an organization engaged in lobbying for Tehran to invite legal scrutiny of whether or not it was lobbying for Tehran. So the story doesn’t really show that NIAC lobbies for the Iranian government, and it doesn’t really show any evidence of lawbreaking, but other than that it’s definitely “groundbreaking.”

Update: NIAC’s official response to the Times’ story is here. I found this part quite illuminating:

Mr. Lake has selectively focused on emails and documents that fit with his pre-determined verdict against NIAC. Though the basis of Lake’s article is misinformation about NIAC provided by Hassan Dai, Lake did not ask a single question about our lawsuit, why it was filed, our understanding of Dai’s political motivations and Dai’s connections to the Iranian terrorist organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq [bold mine-DL]. NIAC encouraged Lake to investigate the evidence of Dai’s role in the Mujahedin-e Khalq [bold mine-DL]. However, Lake declined to investigate his own sources.

Indeed, Lake made a passing reference to some of NIAC’s critics being accused of supporting Mujahideen-e-Khalq, but left out the crucial information that the defendant in the defamation suit may have connections to that group, which is still listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization. So what we seem to have is a possible sympathizer with an anti-Tehran terrorist organization accusing a legitimate advocacy group of working on behalf of Tehran, and The Washington Times is trying to lend credibility to the accuser.

My new column for The Week is now up.

But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America’s allies even if he didn’t always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.

You can’t say any of that about his successor. ~Caroline Glick

Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.

Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.

When we look at policy and the results of policy, however, all of Bush’s love and emotion count for nothing. We also hear all the time how much Bush cared about dissidents overseas, but what we forget to mention is how much stronger authoritarian regimes of various stripes, both allied and non-allied, became on his watch. Bush loyalists very much want to have him and Obama judged on expressions of weepy sentiment and professions of good intentions rather than on concrete results, because they know that their idol has to fare very poorly if he is judged on the merits of what his policies produced. Amusingly, they would like nothing more than to damn Obama for not imitating Bush’s style, which they find reassuring or satisfying for one reason or another.

It may be that Obama will prove to be a poor President, and he could inaugurate policies that will fail as spectacularly as Bush’s did, but we would not be able to conclude from this that he did not love his country or share American values. If we could conclude such things from what politicians do, surely the man who launched aggressive wars, and who sanctioned illegal, arbitrary detention, illegal wiretapping and torture would not come out looking very good at all.

Rod has an interesting post on allegiance to God and country connected to the Fort Hood massacre, but I think he misses something when he writes this:

If any Jew or Christian would put his national identity over his religious identity, he is an idolater and should repent. I pray that I will in all times and at every opportunity choose fidelity to God over fidelity to nation. The thing is, as a Christian, one has pretty much never had to make that choice. I do not worry, and indeed honor, the Muslim soldier who places God above country — but only as long as there is no serious conflict between serving both.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and it occurred to me that there have probably been cases in the past in which American Orthodox Christians serving in the military were either training for a possible conventional and nuclear war that would annihilate the better part of the world’s Orthodox population or were deployed as part of a mission to bomb an Orthodox country (i.e., Serbia). Would these Christians have been in the right to turn on their comrades? Absolutely not. Even though the attack on Serbia was completely unjustifiable and morally wrong, Orthodox Christians pledged to U.S. and NATO military service would have been obliged at the very least to remain loyal to their governments. If there were a severe conflict between their obligations to their fellow Christians and their duty, they would either have to resign or at least refuse to engage in hostilities. In practice, as regrettable as the conflicts themselves were, Orthodox Christians have warred against each other for centuries dating back to the middle Byzantine period. That in itself is not a good thing, but no one on either side in these conflicts believed his religious obligations compelled him to betray his natural and political loyalties. There were Orthodox soldiers on both sides in the Russo-Japanese war, and the bishops in both countries prayed on behalf of the armed forces of their respective nations.

Treason and mutiny, which are the actual crimes that Hasan committed in addition to murder, are not justified by one’s political views of what is being done to one’s co-religionists by the government. As I understand it, only if the government demanded apostasy and the abandonment of the faith would Christians be required to resist or disobey a legitimate government. Hasan seems to have believed that he had a religious duty to make a violent political and policy protest on behalf of other Muslims. To the extent that Islamism blurs or even erases the lines between religious and political obligations, or makes loyalty to the ‘umma greater than loyalty to one’s own government, the distinctions I mention above would be extremely difficult to maintain. There are going to be times when there will be serious conflicts between duties to God and country, but for the most part that is not what compels treason of this kind. Men commit treason to achieve a political objective or to make a political statement. Their politics may be infused with or closely identified with religious ideas, but it cannot be pinned squarely on their religious convictions when most of their co-religionists do not reach the same conclusions and do not share those politics.

I would add one more thing. Americanists who want to continue bludgeoning and bombing other countries cannot expect the immigrant populations they so happily welcome to remain indifferent to what is being done to their home countries or co-religionists. To the extent that the Americanism to which they expect immigrants to assimilate involves unnecessary and aggressive wars against other nations, it is the hawkish Americanists who are contributing to the erosion of national unity even as they squawk about the need for assimilation and it is they who are putting the loyalties of new Americans to the test.

Alex Massie enters the debateover Parsi and NIAC from a different angle in response to some of Melanie Phillips’ crazy talk. Massie writes:

So, to reiterate: pretending that the only sensible way forward vis a vis Iran is to continue the failed policies that have done nothing to avert or alleviate the current problem is as sensible as suggesting that US policy towards Cuba has been such a triumpant success that it must never, ever be altered in any way whatsoever. This is a very strange way of thinking indeed.

Of course, according to the standards of Goldberg, Phillips et al., Massie’s post proves that he is also working on behalf of Tehran. For that matter, the Iran expertise and personal experience of the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran, Jim Limbert, will probably be counted against him by the anti-NIAC crowd. How this usually works is that the people most familiar with a country or region are deemed “unreliable” because, well, they actually know something and understand that the proposed heavy-handed policies of hawks, who typically know little or nothing about the place in question, will backfire badly. The most well-informed wind up being considered virtual agents of the other government or, in Phillips’ despicable formulation, “in hock” to the regime. Obviously, this sort of criticism is intended to have a chilling effect on policy debate and to automatically rule out certain policy positions as treacherous support for the interests of a hostile government.

Reading another Politico article on the 2010 midterms, I found the treatment of the ’94 elections tremendously unsatisfying. Cook writes:

It is the 1994 election that actually draws the greatest comparison with 2010. As was the case 15 years ago, there is a charismatic young Democratic president engaged in a long, messy battle for health care reform. And the Democratic numbers in Congress are eerily similar now to what they were then. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 with 258 Democrats in the House and 57 in the Senate. Obama was elected last fall with 257 House Democrats and 57 Democratic senators.

Countless articles have been written that in some way touch on the elections in 1994, but one thing almost all of them have in common is their consistent omission of any mention of the impact of NAFTA on Democratic turnout and voting that year. In the wake of losing the NAFTA battle, unions and their members were disaffected going in to the midterms, and this compounded the problems that national Democrats were already having thanks to numerous retirements and their own complacency in the face of a serious Republican electoral threat. If one goes looking, it is nonetheless possible to find reports that detail the effect this had on Democratic electoral fortunes:

In the 1994 midterm election, a year after the NAFTA vote, union activists, stung by losing that fight to Clinton and by the president’s failure to get a Democratic Congress even to vote on his promised health care reform, deserted their posts. Phone banks went unmanned; the turnout of union families plummeted; 40 percent of those who bothered to vote backed GOP candidates, and the Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 years.

One of the things that distinguishes 2010 from 1994 is that the White House and Democratic leaders are not pushing through any new free trade agreements. The major legislative item that concerns major unions is EFCA, which the current majority has not been able to pass, but this is still not a case of an administration trying to force an undesirable bill on its own recalcitrant partisans in Congress. That suggests that unions will be much more likely to play their role in turning out Democratic voters next year, and union voters may be more energized if the GOP makes its opposition to EFCA a major theme of the election. Emphasizing that certainly did nothing to help Hoffman*. The union factor has been important for turnout in both of the special elections in New York this year, and the unions have delivered for the Democrats and put two new Democrats into the House. That is not going to be the case in every district, but it is a reminder that Democratic House and Senate candidates will have solid support from unions that their counterparts lacked in 1994.

* Another example of national GOP messaging at odds with local interests was Hoffman’s anti-earmark pledge, which was crazy in a district that relies on Fort Drum for a significant part of its economy and a perfect expression of the Washington-oriented blindness that has afflicted the national party leadership for years. It is another expression of the absolutely unfounded notion that the public turned against the GOP because of spending and especially because of earmarks. The (mostly rhetorical) hostility to earmarks is a more general form of national GOP contempt for local district interests, whose representation in Congress Boehner et al. have decided to equate with corruption and wastefulness.

Zakaria’s column on U.S. domestic politics and international trends seems weakest in this section:

Imagine you had been told five years ago that a huge economic crisis would erupt, prominently featuring irresponsible financiers, and that governments would come to the rescue of firms and families. You would probably have predicted that, politically, the right (the party of bankers) would do badly and the left (the party of bureaucrats) would do well. You would have been wrong. It’s not just the Republicans who came out ahead. Last month a conservative coalition swept into power in Germany. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy’s party has considerable public support. In Britain, conservatives are poised to win their first national election in 17 years. Even in Denmark and Sweden, where social democrats usually win, the right is in power. In fact, across continental Europe, only one major country, Spain, has a left-wing ruling party.

Just as we need to look at local conditions to understand last week’s off-year elections, we should be careful not to make claims about international trends without heavily qualifying them with the specific reasons for electoral outcomes in all of these countries. The European elections earlier this year were supposed to be “surprising” for the same reason, when these results were heavily driven by anti-incumbency feeling regardless of the leanings of the national government. The fact is that center-left coalitions in Germany and France have been remarkably weak for much of the last decade (remember the ’02 French presidential election in which the Socialist failed to make the run-off?), and the SPD in Germany has been a shambles since Schroeder left office. Had it not been for Merkel’s uninspired campaigning last time around, the election of a Union-Free Democrat coalition would scarcely be news.

On the other hand, fatigue with Labour’s long tenure in power and disgust with Tony Blair’s foreign policy have only very recently translated into serious electoral problems for the ruling party in Britain. It took the devastation of the financial crisis, and the indictment of Brownian economic mismanagement that came with it, to make it possible to imagine an end to Labour dominance. That period of dominance had not been defined by its old-time socialist roots, but was instead defined as a very cozy pro-business regime. Were we to look at Indian and Japanese elections, we would find counter-examples in which the center-left coalitions either expanded their hold on power or dramatically ousted the long-serving center-right ruling party. Of course, we could explain the Japanese result as being driven by recession-caused anti-incumbency and see the Indian result simply as the rallying of the public around the governing party in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, but these elections in rising Asian democratic powers seem to tell us a different story than what has been happening in Europe.

Zakaria is right to stress competence as the deciding factor in much of this, but this is hardly encouraging for the GOP, which has yet to recognize, much less correct, the errors of its previous turn in national government. In this way, despite state-level successes, the national party continues to resemble the confused post-1997 Tories.