Reihan:

Democrats focus on the Tea Party movement because it represents a kind of wish fulfillment. Conservatives delighted in the ideological exuberance of Howard Dean’s progressive youth, and they were unprepared for Barack Obama’s slickly post-ideological campaign that drew on the left’s energy while running a disciplined centrist campaign. We’ll see if history repeats itself. Like a lot of people, my gut tells me that Sarah Palin or perhaps Mike Huckabee will be the Howard Dean of 2012. Of course, that would suggest that the Republican nominee in 2012 will be the right’s answer to John Kerry, which is a prospect too disturbing to contemplate for very long.

It might be amusing to speculate on who would be the Republican Kerry of 2012, and I think Romney has to be the leading contender for that special dishonor, but missing here is an acknowledgment of what made Dean into the candidate of progressive activists and the netroots and what made Kerry the drab establishment candidate favored by party insiders. Dean tapped into the strong antiwar sentiment of Democratic rank-and-file, and it was opposition to the war, not his original signature issue of health care reform, that defined Dean’s candidacy in is exciting early phase and its dramatic flame-out phase. After all, Dean may have been coming from Vermont, but he was centrist not only by Vermont standards but also by national Democratic standards. He was an unlikely leader of progressive protest, but he exploited the establishment candidates’ initial support for the war to drive a wedge between them and the party’s activists. When the race began, he would probably have been seen as being slightly to the right of Kerry on domestic issues, but his positioning on the war ended up identifying him with the party’s left.

The split between Obama and Clinton was similar to the split between Dean and Kerry, but a crucial difference was that Obama had built up his own organization alongside of the netroots and activist groups and was able to match and outperform Clinton on the ground, especially in all those caucus states she took for granted. Dean relied so much on the netroots and activists that when it came time to get his voters to turn out that he simply didn’t have the campaign infrastructure to translate tremendous fundraising and media coverage into votes. In this and other respects, Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008 was already the right’s answer to Howard Dean, and McCain was in many respects the Kerry of last year.

What the war was for Democrats in 2004, health care legislation and bailouts will be for the Republicans in 2012. Romney fits the Kerry mold perfectly, and like Kerry he will be forced by the strength of the primary challenge from some Dean-like representative of the “Republican wing of the Republican Party” to run away from his record on health care and bailouts. In fact, Romney has already been trying to make people forget that he favored the bailouts when it mattered, and no doubt he will engage in some of his typical dishonesty when confronted with the question of his record of support for health care mandates. Like Kerry, he will have zero credibility in opposing most of the President’s agenda, which means that Romney’s already fairly strange focus on foreign policy and national security may have to become the centerpiece of his campaign to distract attention from his record of signing off on universal health care in Massachusetts and endorsing deeply unpopular bailouts of Wall Street. For all of the ridicule he received, Kerry nearly won, but I doubt that Romney would be able to do as well as Kerry did unless economic conditions worsen severely.

Alex Massie brings a bizarre Robert Kaplan column to our attention. In this column Kaplan offers his best Otto von Bismarck imitation. Bismarck was once quoted as saying that the world would succumb to materialism without war; Kaplan replaces materialism with decadence, but the idea is much the same. It is also worryingly similar to Teddy Roosevelt’s concept of war as a kind of invigorating sport. As Massie notes, Kaplan is rehashing ideas that were last fashionable approximately a century ago before WWI taught (almost) everyone that they were complete rubbish. In fact, the main movements that came out of the horror of WWI convinced more than ever that constant struggle and endless wars of “liberation” were essential to political health were the communists and fascists.

What really makes no sense is why Kaplan would be so hostile to the EU. I can understand why European (classical) liberals, conservatives and nationalists find the EU offensive in many ways. Were I in their position, I would have many of the same problems with the Union’s institutions and regulations, because I am generally opposed to consolidation and centralization as such. The push for centralization by Europe’s “federalists” naturally generates resistance from these quarters, but why would someone with Kaplan’s views see a more politically consolidated, unified Europe as a problem? Apparently, it is because Europe is not terrified of a series of threats that either do not exist or which have little to do with them.

First, we have Russia, of which Kaplan says:

Indeed, once again – thanks to its plans to build natural gas pipelines directly to Western Europe—it holds the ability to split Eastern Europe off from the West and hold the former Warsaw Pact nations captive.

Russia’s ability to do this does not seem to be very effective, since it is not, in fact, holding former Warsaw Pact nations captive and has so far failed in every case to split eastern Europe from the West. Except for the highly contentious cases of Ukraine and Georgia, every central and eastern European nation that has desired and pursued accession to the EU and NATO has been welcomed in as a member or as a member that will be integrated very soon. Russian energy leverage is real, which means that all European nations are less likely to engage in unnecessary provocations of Russia on its own borders, which is partly why the EU refused to whitewash Georgian errors leading to last year’s war with Russia and why leading EU nations are not interested in providing security guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia. However, Russian leverage is not so great that it has been able to prevent its former satellites from doing pretty much whatever they want with respect to integration into Europe.

The “dangerous” possibility of German “neutrality” towards Russia is the re-establishment of the one major policy that Bismarck had absolutely right as far as German interests were concerned, which was the friendly alignment of Germany and Russia. If the largest economy and political power in Europe and the great Eurasian power are on good terms, the peace of Europe is much more likely to be preserved than it would be if the Germans somehow became as anti-Russian in their policies as Washington has wanted them to be. There was a time long ago when I was still in college when I speculated that the EU would need to cultivate an anti-Russian stance to unite all of its member nations more closely together. I argued this on the assumption that the Union would otherwise fail to coalesce and hold together. That now appears to have been mistaken, as European integration and a decline in (western) European hostility towards Russia seem to be going hand in hand. What Kaplan sees as “losing Europe” is actually the way to ensure that Europe is much less likely to become the battleground of a major international war, which other people might describe as saving Europe.

In any case, Kaplan is simply wrong about Germany. It is not “torn between east and west.” The country best described this way might be Turkey, and even that is debatable. It is Turkey’s entry into the EU that France and Germany seem intent on opposing for the foreseeable future. Entry of Turkey into the EU would do more to prevent the establishment of a “hard and fixed border” between Europe and the Near East than just about anything else, so Kaplan ought to be satisfied with the unwillingness of major EU members to let Turkey in.

Kaplan imagines that Iran presents a challenge equal to that of “liberating eastern Europe.” This is not true. The challenge of the latter was larger and of greater strategic significance than anything related to Iran. Losing Iran as an ally in 1979 was a significant blow to the U.S. position in the region; communist collapse was vastly more valuable for advancing U.S. interests in Europe. The two things are not all that comparable in significance. Kaplan writes, “Iran holds the key to changing the Middle East…” Why Iran? Well, he will tell us:

Iran has been a state in one form or another since antiquity, and has a far more urbanized and sophisticated population than most in the Arab world.

Where have we heard this before? It used to be that Iraq held the key, and a lot of people made a great deal of noise about Iraq’s “central” location in the region, and many stressed the importance of its sophisticated, well-educated, urbanized, more secularized population. It used to be the case that agitators for war with Iraq believed that changing Iraq could change the region precisely because it was majority Arab and not Persian as Iran was. Now it is Iran’s Persianness that makes it the more suitable for regional transformation because of the cultural advantages this is supposed to offer. The new story is no more true than the old one.

Kaplan holds up a fantasy as a likely future:

With a reformist regime in power in Teheran, turmoil in Iraq will lessen and Hezbollah may eventually be robbed of a sturdy patron, even as Syria is forced to make its peace with the West, and hopefully with Israel, too.

File these predictions under Things That Are Never Going Happen. Reformists are no less interested in projecting Iranian power in Iraq and Lebanon, and why would they be? Mousavi was partly responsible for the foundation of Hizbullah. Does anyone really believe that he would now turn against them? What will happen in Iran to “force” Syria to do either of these things? If Syria breaks with Iran, it will be in spite of Iranian political change and not because of it.

European politicians are working on the assumption that the EU is being built up for the benefit of Europeans. It is possible that they are wrong and the EU is not the best thing for Europe, but this has nothing to do with Kaplan’s call for endless struggles for liberation to the east. European governments do not seem to consider the ever-eastward march of “liberation” a top priority. Given that this march has mostly involved the smashing of Serbia and the invasion of Iraq, it seems to me to be a very good thing that Europeans seem to have little appetite for more of it.

This Politico story makes the 2010 House elections seem much more contested than they are likely to be. Earlier this year I looked at CQ’s race ratings for 2010, and I concluded from those early projections that the GOP would have a difficult time picking up many seats in either chamber. Obviously, this was before the August recess, the upsurge in right-populist protests and the main debate over health care legislation. One would assume that the Democrats have lost ground in these race ratings since July, and they have, but the interesting thing is how little ground they have given up. There are now more Democratic seats that are rated as toss-ups, but even if all the toss-ups went to the Republicans and the Democrats lost LA-03 the Republicans would at best net seven House seats. Not seventeen or seventy, but just seven. If that were the outcome, that would be the smallest first-term midterm loss in the House for the party controlling the White House since 1962 and the second-smallest midterm loss for the President’s party since WWII. A loss of just seven seats for the Democrats would be the fourth-best midterm performance for the President’s party in House elections since 1986, including the post-September 11 GOP success of 2002 and impeachment-year gains for the Democrats in 1998. Unlike the other three midterms, the President’s party would not be benefiting from the high approval ratings of the President, but would instead be performing fairly well despite somewhat weak approval ratings for Obama. Were that to happen, we would have to conclude that Republican tactics for the first two years of Obama’s Presidency had failed to move many voters and did nothing to repair the damage to the reputation of the national GOP.

There is another passage in Continetti’s Palin article that tells us a lot about the mentality of Palinites and those who would pander to them:

Dismiss airy prophecies about “peak oil,” “green jobs,” and “limits to growth.” Pledge, instead, that Americans will have access to as much of the cheapest, cleanest energy they need to stimulate the economy. Palin is right. No limits.

In other words, the right-populism of which Palin can supposedly be the great leader is going to a movement of irresponsible consumption, limitless appetite and unfettered desire. This is so obviously at odds with both Christian stewardship and conservative temperament that it scarcely seems necessary to mention it, but here we find the moral vacuum at the heart of Palinism. It happens to be expressed here in connection with the use of natural resources, but it conveys hubris, arrogance and self-indulgence and indifference to the welfare of the commonwealth that will be inherited by those not yet born. “No limits” is the slogan either of the anarchist or the libertine. There is no sane populism that would embrace such an idea, and it certainly has nothing to do with anything recognizable as conservatism.

Matthew Continetti proposes that Palin become a Jacksonian tribune. What he means by being a Jacksonian is this:

Andrew Jackson’s plantation is a lot more than a beautifully restored example of Greek Revival architecture and design. It’s also a monument to the seventh president’s democratic legacy–of rule by the people, of competitive commercial markets, of entrepreneurial individuals lighting out to the territories. It’s a legacy to which Palin is heiress.

In reality, Jackson’s legacy is the antithesis of much of what the Whigs and Republicans have stood for in domestic politics since 1824, and Palin has no claim on such a legacy. The financial sector bailout last year was the sort of close collusion between government and banks that infuriated Jackson and his followers. The so-called heiress of Jackson endorsed the bailout. There is a Jackson-like anti-Fed populism out there, but Continetti and his colleagues have no interest in encouraging Palin to embrace their arguments. So Continetti creates a safe, generic Jacksonian “legacy” that sounds as if it had come from the late Jack Kemp. Everything that made Jackson and Bryan’s populism interesting gives most Republican and movement conservative leaders hives, because these men married cultural and economic populism together. As the GOP’s Palinolatry itself shows, cultural pseudo-populism is at least tolerated as a gimmick or electoral maneuver, but even a whiff of real economic populism has always been toxic for Republican leaders and activists. There is a reason why Palin’s own Alaska record of hiking windfall profit taxes on oil companies has been carefully and consistently eliminated from all conservative discussions of her time as governor. That is her claim to some measure of populist leadership, and it is the one thing about her economic conservatives and national GOP leaders would like to forget. Indeed, as she has become a national figure she has run as far away from the substance of what she did in Alaska as possible, because raising any taxes on major corporations for any reason is exactly the one thing that will never fly with Republicans on a national level.

Continetti notes the angry, distrustful public mood, and mentions this:

In September, the Democratic pollster Peter Hart asked registered voters who they thought had benefited most from the Obama administration’s economic policies. Sixty-two percent said the main beneficiary had been the “large banks.” In contrast, 65 percent said the “average working person” and “small businesses” hadn’t been helped. Seventy-three percent said “my family/myself” hadn’t been helped.

Now obviously one way to tap into that reservoir of dissatisfaction would be for Continetti’s would-be Jacksonian heiress to rail against the influence and power of banks and the government’s unduly close relationship with them. This is the one thing Continetti has no wish for her to do, so what is the point of writing the article?

Of course, we understand that the purpose of the article is to give favorable press coverage to Palin and to continue The Weekly Standard‘s embarrassing cheerleading for her. There is also a clear desire to burnish Palin’s credentials as the “rogue” anti-elitist and to make her part of the most absurdly artificial tradition of “Jackson-Bryan-Reagan.” After all, no Palin love letter would ever be complete without some reference to how she resembles Reagan in some intangible, mystical way that only devotees can understand. I simply don’t know how one draws a line between William Jennings Bryan, an intense evangelical Christian who fiercely opposed concentrated wealth and power, and Ronald Reagan, a mild Unitarian Presbyterian and former FDR Democrat whose practical domestic legacy was the advancement of corporate and large business interests. Of course, Bryan never won a presidential race, so it’s hard to know whether he would or could have translated his rhetoric into policy, but I doubt very much that he would have recognized any of his legacy in Reagan. How much less is Palin in the same tradition?

So we come to the core of Palin’s pseudo-populism, which is her cultivation of the cultural grievances of her audience and the manipulation of their feelings of relative powerlessness to promote her own ambitions. She feeds off of the elite anxiety that her performance generates, and elites are happy to fuel her rise, because she makes populism appear ridiculous and makes their positions even more secure than they were before. After all, when given the choice between the incompetent and ridiculous populist and even a moderately informed establishment figure, the public will tend to favor the latter despite their dissatisfaction with the status quo. They may also suspect that she has no intention of giving any substance to her complaints against elites. This makes her useful as a means of diverting populist anger away from them and their preferred policies and channeling it into useless identitarian protest movements that congratulate themselves on how deeply American they are before fading into obscurity. This is why many movement and party elites tolerate and even encourage Palin, but regard Huckabee as a serious threat who must be thwarted, because he occasionally gives them reason to worry that he is hostile to their interests. In reality, even Huckabee’s gestures towards economic populism are empty, but they have seemed real enough to terrify some of the very same people who now happily boost Palin as the great populist hope.

Dan McCarthy had severalgood posts on last week’s elections and the internal problems of both parties. These are worth revisiting in light of the news that the Club for Growth endorsed Marco Rubio in his Senate primary challenge against Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.

I still don’t quite understand the idea, which some conservative bloggers have floated in the last week, that NY-23 has some bearing on the Florida Senate primary. Yes, I see the dynamic of a “moderate” being challenged from the right, but everything else is different. For one thing, most Floridians and even most Republicans in Florida like Crist. On the political spectrum, he is far to the right of someone like Scozzafava, so there are far fewer substantive reasons why conservatives would want to defeat Crist. If it was absurd to describe a liberal Republican such as Scozzafava as a “moderate,” Crist also doesn’t really deserve that label if “moderate” Republicanism refers to the politics of Sens. Collins and Snowe.

Actually, Crist’s “moderation” is to some extent a fiction that he has perpetuated to maintain his electoral viability in a state that has seen several House seats switch to the Democrats and which voted for Obama. Crist is pro-life; he’s just not very vocal or demonstrative about it. As a governor, there aren’t many things he could do on this question anyway. Crist supported the state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage last year, but did not actively campaign for it. This was actually very much like President Bush’s hands-off approach to the issue in the ’04 cycle: he formally opposed gay marriage, but wasn’t going to spend much time on it. Partly because of George Bush’s reputation for personal religiosity, the voters who might have held this against him never cared that his support was minimal. Crist’s calculation seems to have been that there are not many voters who would punish him for being lukewarm on the issue, but he could lose many more by appearing “strident” or “intolerant,” and the measure was going to prevail regardless of how actively he campaigned for it. Simply by supporting the measure, which ended up winning 61% support in a year when Obama received a little over 50% of the vote, Crist aligned himself with a significant majority of the voters, but he did so in a way that did not identify him with one faction in his party.

I don’t begrudge Crist’s conservative opponents their desire to compel him to take positions that are even more in agreement with their views. That is their prerogative, and it may even do some good on one or two issues, but it is curious how Crist’s successful political tactics are being held against him at a time when Republicans are no longer governing very many large states and when the party has declined nationally as well. This is the same governor who campaigned actively for an amendment that reduced property taxes, so why would he be a top target of the Club for Growth? On policy, Crist is hard to distinguish from the tradition of former Gov. Jeb Bush, who angered a lot of conservatives with his liberalizing views on immigration but who has otherwise been widely respected and admired by many rank-and-file conservatives. Obviously, I am far removed from both Bush and Crist, so this does not recommend Crist to me, but what makes Crist the unacceptable “moderate” in the minds of movement activists that does not similarly tar Jeb Bush?

A large state primary for governor is significantly unlike a special House election. If nationalizing the House race was the wrong way to go, as I thought it was, how much more disconnected from Floridian political realities would a Senate campaign that has served as a protest against “moderate” collaboration with a national Democratic agenda be? As they are elections for the lower, popular chamber, House races are better-suited to enforcing a party line. There are fewer voters in these elections, which increases the impact of highly motivated and ideological voters, and this is especially true in lower-turnout special elections. A statewide race, even if it is a primary, weakens the influence of activists and ideological enforcers.

Now maybe Rubio won’t run a Hoffmanesque campaign that privileges ideology over local issues, but to a large degree Hoffman’s campaign became a cipher for national Republican and conservative objectives because his campaign was being built up by an influx of national money and the interventions of movement interest groups. If Crist can use his considerable statewide popularity (something that is all the more remarkable during a recession) to make the primary into a contest between candidates who are interested respectively in Floridian concerns and national GOP hobbyhorses, Rubio has little chance.

No one will deny that Crist has lately made something of a sport of making political moves that seem calculated to infuriate movement conservatives, so it still makes some sense that movement conservatives would have him in their sights. He gave McCain a crucial endorsement on the eve of the Florida primary that ensured that he would have a huge advantage going into Feb. 5 voting. Never mind that Crist’s abandonment of neutrality was triggered by Romney’s endless begging for an endorsement. The effect was that a critical, large primary went to McCain with barely a third of the vote, and movement conservatives were soon stuck with a nominee they didn’t trust and a man whom many of them viscerally disliked. Florida set the stage for the rout of Romney in every large state primary, and his withdrawal from the race came just a little over a week later. Crist also backed the stimulus, which is not very surprising for the governor of a state that voted for Obama, but it has been held against him and was one of the things that propelled Rubio into the race.

Dan made an important point when he was assessing the GOP’s internal problems, and it is one that I haven’t seen made elsewhere:

The Republicans, by contrast, have a one-boot-fits-all mentality, both in the primaries and in the legislatures.

Dan and I may differ on the efficacy of Club for Growth tactics, but I think his observation gets to the heart of what bothers me when I think of the Club for Growth and similar organizations that are responsible for trying to enforce conformity on GOP representatives and governors. Either they launch primary challenges against representatives who are better-suited to their districts, and end up losing the district all together, or they force candidates to hew to such a strict line that they reduce them to carbon copies of one another and deprive them of the flexibility and adaptability they need to advance local interests. The more uniform the movement and party become, the less resistance there will be to uniform and centralist national policies aimed at imposing a top-down “conservatism” that exists to secure conservative control over the Court and pays less and less attention to the Country. That doesn’t make Crist preferable or desirable as a candidate for Senate, but defeating Crist will be a hollow victory so long as the movement conservative alternative to the Crists of the party seems increasingly pre-packaged and crafted by national activists who are oblivious to and uninterested in local conditions around the country.

Comparisons between NY-23 and NY-20 can be overdone, but what I found interesting in Hoffman’s loss last night in northern New York was the similarity of his campaign to that of Jim Tedisco in the special election earlier this year. Both were put in the national spotlight by GOP leaders who wanted to use the candidates as examples of Republican revival; both districts were flooded with national money and advertisements that ignored all those “parochial” issues and made the contests into referenda on the national Democratic agenda. Perhaps not coincidentally, both failed in historically very Republican districts. To the extent that the national Democratic agenda had anything to do with these elections, the national GOP’s gambit backfired when the Democratic candidates who had aligned themselves with important parts of the administration’s agenda prevailed in traditionally hostile territory.

We should not invest any one or two House races with that much significance, but it seems somewhat telling that given the chance to put another effectively Republican representative in Washington there were not enough voters in deepest upstate New York willing to do it. At the level of state government, however, large, albeit skewed, electorates opted for anti-incumbency. That suggests that the taint of the national GOP does not extend to state parties and their candidates, but candidates for federal office who are embraced by national Republican leaders continue to face significant resistance even in places that ought to be their strongholds.

Tedisco had some additional advantages that he managed to squander. He was the Republican nominee, and he was a much better-known local politician than the rookie candidate Hoffman, all of which gave him a large early lead over Scott Murphy. Tedisco blew his lead, and Hoffman scarcely had time to establish one, but the flaws that marred both campaigns were very similar. Even though Hoffman was not as much of an outsider as his opponents made him out to be, he did everything he could to make himself out to be a carbon-copy national Republican with no feel for local concerns and no obvious interest in the place he was supposed to be represented. Murphy was a recent transplant to the area with connections to the district thanks to his wife, but despite Tedisco’s efforts to paint Murphy as a newcomer who knew little about the district it was the tone-deaf national Republican push on behalf of Tedisco that made him, the known quantity and well-liked local, seem as if he did not understand the voters and their interests. Nationalizing both races not only imported all of the toxic baggage the national party had acquired during the Bush years, but it also made candidates who could genuinely claim to be full members of their communities and turned them into something more like movement activist zombies.

The reassuring story that movement conservatives have been telling themselves last night and this morning is that the local GOP establishment in the district was to blame for creating the conditions for defeat. It is true that the irregular nomination of Scozzafava created an absurd situation for the district’s Republican voters, but it seems to be a bad sign for Hoffmanites that a district that routinely gives 60-70% of its general election votes to the Republican candidate could not muster a simple majority of special election voters for Hoffman. As we kept hearing, and as the Virginia and New Jersey votes do show, the off-year voting was skewed towards angry, mobilized conservatives and right-leaning independents. A special House election in an off-year ought to have magnified the impact of such voters. In other words, the conditions were quite good for Hoffman. Movement conservatives might like to say now that Hoffman has failed that the odds were always very long and victory improbable, but this special election was almost tailor-made for an activist-backed, slogan-repeating, box-checking, party-line mimic of every national Republican and movement conservative obsession. (Incidentally, the importance of Hoffman’s opposition to card-check in the usual GOP talking points on NY-23 is a rather odd and possibly significant indication of how far removed from their voters national Republicans have become.) It didn’t work. Hoffmania did not catch on among the GOP’s natural constituents in what is normally a safe district, so how likely is it that this brand of conservative politics will catch on elsewhere?

One thing that seems crucial to emphasize is how much this was not a “revolt” or an explosion of anti-GOP establishment fervor. I want to be very precise here. Many voters in NY-23 revolted against their local party leadership by backing Hoffman, but the outpouring of support for Hoffman came from the very center of what remains of the national Republican establishment. Viewed locally, Hoffman was not the establishment candidate. However, he was the national GOP establishment’s candidate, which is why I do not regard his defeat as such a great loss. During the last election we saw how movement and party leaders respond to real, threatening insurgencies from the right, and it was opposite of the warm embrace given to Hoffman.

To the extent that last night signaled the amount of right-populist discontent in the country, the establishment support for Hoffman represented yet another episode of the national party attempting to feed off of populist enthusiasm to sustain its own decaying body and to co-opt (and then ignore) populist themes while having no intention of ever governing in the interests of their constituents should they regain power. The prominence of the pseudo-populist Palin in all of this was significant. Her presence served as a reminder of how often conservative voters are pandered to rhetorically and symbolically and how uninterested Republican leaders are in serving the interests of their constituents once elections are concluded. Hoffman’s failure may mean that rank-and-file Republican voters in once-safe districts are no longer going to be taken for granted, and it could mean that their votes will have to be earned with policy proposals that address their concrete interests. The national and Congressional party has no clue how to do this, and so they keep failing. Candidates at the state level seem to grasp this basic idea and have started having some success.

P.S. Perhaps it isn’t nice to kick them while they’re down, but it’s worth noting that Owens’ victory is another in the growing list of Democratic pick-ups at least partially engineered by the Club for Growth.

Reihan advances an unfortunate argument:

[W]hile Parsi is undoubtedly a believer in democratic liberalism who wants to see Iran radically reform its institutions, he objectively serves Iranian interests insofar as he discourages Western efforts to exert pressure on the regime [bold mine-DL].

The charge being made against Parsi is that he serves Iranian government interests, and the point in making this charge is almost certainly to claim that Parsi is in some way a bad, unwise or dangerous actor in public policy debates. People involved in these debates regard the Iranian government as corrupt, oppressive and brutal, as they should, which loads a claim that someone “objectively serves” its interests or lobbies on behalf of those interests with a sinister significance that claims of lobbying for an allied state do not possess. At best, this is a claim that the person is a “useful idiot” of the regime, and at worst it is classifying the taking of a set of policy positions as collusion with a despicable government. As Reihan says, this isn’t that complicated.

One thing that is bothersome about this is that it tries to erase the important distinction between Iranians and the Iranian regime. Parsi opposes “exerting pressure on the regime” because the proposed mechanisms for doing so would harm the Iranian people and do little or nothing to coerce the regime anyway. I repeat myself, but additional sanctions would cripple domestic opposition and consolidate and expand the regime’s control over the economy. In Goldberg’s earlier formulation, opposing this course of action somehow means that Parsi is working in the interests of the regime! Obviously, that’s ridiculous.

Parsi opposes exerting this pressure because he assumes that such pressure will fail to achieve Washington’s objectives and could make them harder to reach, which means that he takes his position in no small part based on what he thinks serves American interests in its relations with Iran. The result of tarring–and it is tarring–Parsi with the label of lobbyist for Tehran and calling his organization Iran’s AIPAC would be to make it that much more politically difficult for anyone, and especially for Iranian-Americans, to “oppose a forward-leaning U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf” with respect to Iran, and of course that’s the point of doing it. Jeffrey Goldberg may think that in doing so he is defending a sanctions policy option that he believes is the only available means of avoiding a war with Iran, but the method he is employing to do that really is reprehensible.

Clearly, I overestimated Democratic power in New Jersey, which I assumed was more or less unbeatable despite Corzine’s low approval ratings and weak polling. The pick-ups in both gubernatorial races were impressive, and it seems to me that the scale of the win in Virginia was significant and not easily dismissed in a state that had been trending Democratic for the last several cycles. Even taking into account that Corzine had once trailed Christie by double digits, a statewide Republican win in New Jersey certainly signals dissatisfaction with the status quo at the state level. Certainly lower turnout favors the more mobilized party, and Republicans made the most of this today. Exit polling indicates that protest votes against Obama were more or less offset by support for him, but there appears to be much less enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Oddly enough, the one race in which there seems to have been overperformance in the Democratic effort was in the House special election that doesn’t have much significance.

What is more encouraging to me is that the wins by Christie and McDonnell show that competent center-right candidates interested in governance and all those “parochial” local issues can tap into voter discontent and win electoral victories. Hoffman’s possible defeat suggests that campaigns dominated by the presence of national activists, empty sloganeering and indifference to local interests may not gain traction even in those districts that are traditionally inclined to favor the politics of someone like Hoffman. Those of us who would like to see Democratic domestic agendas thwarted without empowering the Palins of the world may have managed to get exactly the results we would wish to have.