In recent Senate races, Specter beat back a Club-supported primary challenge from Toomey and won in November despite conservative defections to Constitution Party candidate Jim Clymer. In 2006, Lincoln Chafee similarly repelled Club-endorsed Steve Laffey and lost the general election despite winning 94 percent of self-described Republicans. In New Mexico’s open Senate seat in 2008, the Club favored conservative Congressman Steve Pearce over fellow Rep. Heather Wilson. Pearce got pasted in November but Wilson didn’t poll any better and barely hung on to her own House seat in 2006 by just 861 votes. ~Jim Antle

Jim’s article makes a number of good points, and he is correct that one cannot lay most of the GOP’s woes at the door of interest groups, such as Club for Growth, that promote conservative challengers against Republican incumbents. However, for the Club’s strategy to make sense on their own terms, they need to be able to show not only that they are not consistently doing harm to the electoral fortunes of the GOP, but also that they are helping to get the most conservative candidates elected to office. On those occasions when their challengers have knocked off incumbents, they have not had any general election victories, and in at least one case, the MD-01 race, the primary defeat for Gilchrest all but ensured that the non-incumbent Republican primary victor would lose in the fall during an already difficult year for the party. Perhaps the Club can explain why having one less semi-reliable Republican vote is a better outcome.

For the Club’s approach to make sense, there would need to be some evidence that Steve Laffey, for example, was as or more electable than Chafee, but in a particularly brutal year such as 2006 Chafee’s incumbency was probably the only thing that kept the race competitive, and it still wasn’t enough. For the Laffey challenge to make sense against the backdrop of the 2006 slaughter, one would need to make the argument that Laffey stood a better chance of resisting the wave, when even Chafee, whose positions on many issues were indistinguishable from the Democratic candidate’s, was unable to survive. If one could not make that argument, targeting Chafee doesn’t seem to make much sense at all, regardless of how viscerally satisfying it might be to campaign against a liberal Republican.

In elections for open seats, such as the New Mexico Senate race, it is harder to blame the Club for electoral defeats. Certainly, no Republican was going to win statewide office in a year when Obama won 57% of the vote in New Mexico. (Full disclosure: I voted for Pearce.) However, the fate of Pearce offers a warning to Toomey and his supporters: states that lean heavily Democratic at all levels of voting, as Pennsylvania now does, are unusually poor places to test the electoral viability of a Club for Growth-approved Republican. Unmentioned in Jim’s article is the collateral damage from the race to replace Domenici: both Republican House incumbents vacated their seats to run for the nomination and both House seats were lost in the fall. Arguably, New Mexico was so rapidly turning blue that it wouldn’t have mattered whether Pearce and Wilson stayed in their seats, but at least Pearce was more aligned with his district and stood a decent chance of winning re-election despite the tilt to the Democrats. Perhaps if Pearce had not been encouraged in his Senate aspirations, the Republicans would still have another seat in the House.

The problem with the Club’s approach is not necessarily its goal of targeting moderate incumbents, which can make sense and be perfectly appropriate if these representatives consistently ignore their constituents’ views, but it is instead the Club’s awe-inspiring lack of any sense of timing or awareness of the political mood of the states where they are backing their challengers. For good or ill, the Club specializes in recruiting true-believing free traders and anti-spending enthusiasts, and at the moment I can think of few worse places to run such a candidate than Pennsylvania in a recession. Nominating Toomey in 2004 would have made sense given the generally better position of Republicans nationwide, and had Santorum backed Toomey then he would have received less grief from pro-lifers in 2006 and might have done a little better himself. However, to correct the blunder of ’04 by putting Toomey in a position to lose a seat in 2010 that Specter might not hold anyway will give the Democratic majority another reliable vote, and it will create a convenient narrative that will be exploited to the nth degree by precisely the moderate reformer types Toomey et al. oppose, who will cite Toomey’s defeat as proof that the Club for Growth is a largely destructive force in the GOP coalition. It is precisely those who tend to sympathize more with the Club for Growth and the kinds of candidates it recruits that need to raise the alarm about the political cluelessness of the Club’s approach to elections, but this is not happening.

It is beneath my dignity to be critical of those beneath me. ~Rush Limbaugh

That’s strange. That either means that Limbaugh has built most of his career on sinking beneath his dignity, or it means that he believes that Michael Steele is a far greater man than he is. I don’t think he believes the latter.

I’ve written often about the need for renewing the conservative- libertarian fusion, why I think this is a natural alliance, and the terms on which I think it should be forged. The actions of an assertive liberal (in the contemporary American sense) government are starting to illustrate this to the most interesting of those writers often termed crunchy cons, who often think of themselves in direct opposition to a hyper-individualized, commercial political culture on the Right. That is, as among the least natural candidates for fusionism imaginable.

The nature of this alliance is simple: crunchy cons want government to be limited to allow space for idiosyncratic local communities. It is a grudging acceptance of limits, rather than a full-throated embrace of large-scale politics. This strikes me as a healthy view of the role of politics. ~Jim Manzi

Manzi is correct that some of the crunchier dissidents (he has linked to Rod and John in this post) are interested in a sort of fusionism in that they, we, remain convinced that moral restraint and limited government, or virtue and liberty (to use old-fashioned fusionist language) rightly understood, are mutually reinforcing, and indeed that one cannot long have any meaningful kind of liberty without both a human-scale way of life and an ethic of restraint. My guess is that Rod and John would tend to agree that decentralist resistance to any large-scale polity, and thus of large-scale politics, is needed to preserve customary and chartered liberties.

The problem I have always had with fusionism in practice as a matter of political alliances is that typically the far more numerous traditionalist or social conservative part of the alliance is compelled to define and express its views through the distorting language of rights, and as a result the ostensible partisans of liberty end up not only dictating priorities for any such alliance but also end up defining what everyone is supposed to mean when referring to liberty. This is inevitably liberty-as-emancipation and not liberty-through-restraint, and partisans of the former are always going to portray liberty-through-restraint as creeping statism/socialism/authoritarianism, despite the fact that they and their understanding of freedom are paving/have paved the way for the very things they accuse us of wanting to impose.

If most libertarians were like John or Dylan Hales, there would be no problem, but a great many libertarians are a lot more like this, for whom idiosyncratic local communities are “islands of moral chauvinism” and the intellectual riches of Christian civilization are meaningless scribble. This is what makes a fusionist alliance with such fiercely anti-patriotic, anti-religious and globalist types so implausible, fruitless and inherently unattractive.

Patrick Deneen on table manners and restraint.

Mark Shiffman on food, self-sufficiency and freedom.

Sean Trende looks at the possibility of a repeat of 1994 midterm elections in 2010. There are really two separate questions here: will the GOP be able to make a net gain of seats, and will it be able to win back one or both houses? The first is likely, and these first midterm losses pretty much always happen to the party that controls the White House. 2002 is the most notable exception to this pattern, and its position as the first post-9/11 election may make it a poor example for comparison. However, one of the reasons why the GOP benefited in 2002 was the extraordinarily high popularity of the President, which may work in a reduced way to the Democrats’ benefit next year if Obama continues to have approval ratings at or around 60%. In 1978, the GOP picked up three seats in the Senate and 15 in the House, and this seems like the right midterm election to use as a comparative example for the next year. It came in the middle of the term of the last Democratic President to win more than 50% of the vote in the wake of a Republican era riddled by scandal and tied to a President (Nixon) who was deeply unpopular, and followed four years after the 1974 post-Watergrate drubbing of the GOP in Congress. Indeed, anything less than 1978-level gains by the GOP and it will be reasonable to say that Republican leadership failed badly.

The second possibility of a full GOP comeback in one or both houses is much, much less likely. The sheer number of seats needed in both House and Senate suggests that winning back the majority in either would be extremely difficult. The make-up of the 2010 Senate elections once again works against Republicans. At least four incumbent Republicans are retiring, Judd Gregg’s term is up in New Hampshire (where Sununu lost last year), Specter is vulnerable and will face a strong primary challenge and a credible Democratic opponent should he still be re-nominated, and there are only three new Democratic Senators (Bennet, Burris and Gillibrand, all in office by appointment) where the GOP might manage to pick up seats. Almost every other Democratic incumbent, with the possible exception of Reid, is in a safe seat. The added trouble is that two of these most vulnerable Democrats are in safe Democratic seats (NY, IL), and were it not for Burris’ connections to Blagojevich it is unlikely that the seat would be within the Republicans’ reach at all. Meanwhile, Colorado has not voted for a Republican Senate candidate since 2002, and has since elected two Democrats. Dodd’s ethical woes may make his seat more vulnerable, but a Republican pick-up in Connecticut seems like a long-shot. Meanwhile, Ohio, Florida and Missouri all have open seats in states that have been trending Democratic. On the flip side, as Trende notes, because they are in the majority in both houses the Democrats have not had a wave of retirements opening up marginal districts to truly competitive races. The Republicans in Congress also continue to suffer from a destroyed reputation that will take longer than two years to repair. At the moment, another 1978 election would be a huge success for this rudderless party.

At some point, reproaching the mainstream conservative movement, criticizing its most popular writers and commentators, and expressing befuddlement at the political habits of millions of ordinary voters who sympathize with the movement all end up becoming stronger identifying characteristics than the alternate vision of conservatism the non-movement cons seek to promote. ~Jim Antle

Jim is right that these things tend to reinforce the isolation of the critics and ensure that mainstream conservatives become even more resistant to alternative visions, but at some point this becomes more of a problem for mainstream conservatives than it is for the critics. Paleo critics have no influence to speak of, and so they have nothing to lose by continuing to say what they think, and gradually many of the reformists are going to find themselves in a comparable position, but the message this will send is that mainstream conservatism cannot tolerate or handle serious dissent from either the right or from its left. The calcification of thought in the mainstream movement, the forming of cocoons within cocoons that we are seeing now, may mean that all kinds of critics fail to make any inroads. However, what this ultimately means is the ever-diminishing influence of the mainstream movement as it ceases to have any capacity for internal renewal or an ability to adapt. In the end, this works to the advantage of various alternative rights that currently do not receive much of a hearing, and in the interim it means that the mainstream movement will stumble along in confusion, bereft of ideas, as most reform proposals are met with scorn and ridicule.

Yes, there is a certain justice that Frum is now being cast out by many of the people in whose name he denounced paleos, but mainstream conservatism’s habit of casting people out can work, to the extent that it works at all, only when its support in the country is growing and the political fortunes of the right are in the ascendant. At the present moment, it is a luxury they cannot afford, but the habits remain unchanged. Amid an already-shrinking coalition, of which the Obamacons were one notable symptom, persuasion and speaking to those outside the movement have become subjects for mockery, while repeating worn-out slogans and pointing to “the blueprint” of past victories have become all the rage. In the short and perhaps medium term, the critics may lose these debates as a practical matter, but it is mainstream conservatives who are depriving themselves of ideas that could revive their movement.

Best of all from the paleo/”post-paleo”/alternative right perspective, there is no danger that anyone in the mainstream movement will heed this warning because it comes from me, one of those “radicals,” so there is little chance that mainstream conservatives will learn any lessons from the last two or three decades that would enable them to adapt to the present. That may hasten the day when the people the mainstream movement has ill-served for so many decades will begin seeking out alternatives once they finally tire of following the enablers of the party of immigration, imperialism and insolvency.

Jim Antle says that there is no point in pondering what might have happened under a McCain administration, and he may be right. I think it does provide some perspective and offers a useful check on the impulse to shout “socialism!” at every turn, but it is not all that important. On a related McCain matter, what might be worth discussing a bit more is why the Republican leadership continues to believe that it has found a winning strategy by embracing some of the wackier McCain ideas from the election campaign.

For instance, why aren’t more conservatives challenging the increasingly ludicrous direction the House leadership is taking by imitating the McCain campaign’s pitiful grasp on economic policy? Confronted with financial crisis and recession, McCain wanted to impose a spending freeze, and Boehner and Cantor are urging the same thing. Republicans would have been even more likely to support a spending freeze had McCain been elected, but they are actually framing their opposition to the administration’s domestic agenda around such a non-starter of an idea that they cribbed from McCain’s campaign. Of all the times to urge a spending freeze, the GOP has chosen to call for it now?

How is this anything other than disastrous for the party’s ability to resist the administration’s plans for health care or cap-and-trade? If the important thing now is to oppose Obama’s bad policies, the GOP might be well-served by breaking out of their weird post-election habit of closely imitating their losing presidential candidate and endorsing some of his worst ideas. If railing against wasteful spending and calling for spending freezes made any sense and appealed to voters as a remedy for economic problems, McCain might not have lost. Does it make any sense, then, to frame the core of the opposition to the President around such a politically and economically bad idea? What the counterfactual President McCain might have done may not be important, but what the McCainified GOP is doing certainly is, and unless they want to endure a four-year replay of last year’s presidential debates the party leaders need to stop doing what they’re doing.

Update: As Antle reports, the “spending freeze” being proposed isn’t a complete spending freeze at all. It is a relatively minor reduction of the omnibus bill’s cost by holding discretionary spending at last year’s levels. So from the perspective of fiscal responsibility, it barely makes a dent, while also managing to convey the symbolism that the GOP is clueless on economic policy. It’s very much like when several governors refused to take 1% of the allotted stimulus money, and so managed to get themselves dubbed anti-stimulus governors. I’m glad to acknowledge that I overreacted to the proposal, but I had assumed that it was what they were calling it. Even so, you can bet that the details are going to be lost on the average voter.

It seems to me that implicit in a lot of conservative criticism of the stimulus bill, the mortgage plan, and Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme, among other things, must be the odd notion that things would have been very different had McCain won the election. While we can be sure that McCain the crazed earmark-hunter would still be with us (no doubt keeping us safe from volcano monitoring and gang tatoo removal), let us recall that McCain supported cap-and-trade (even if he didn’t necessarily understand what he was talking about when he said so), proposed an insane mortgage bailout plan that pretty much everyone hated, backed TARP and differed from Obama on taxes largely in that he refused to raise any rates. In the end, the main difference turns out to be a disagreement about whether to return the top rate to its Clinton-era level or not. I guess that is a bit more than a dime’s worth of difference, but it isn’t much. Of course, this is why so many Republicans were relieved that McCain lost, because had he won they would have ended up backing a whole host of policies that they are currently denouncing as disastrous. At the same time, we would have had an old, irritable President prone to fits of bellicosity in international affairs and moral grandstanding about any issue he doesn’t understand, and behind him would have been an unqualified VP. However bad things are, remember that they could have been far, far worse.

Andrew makes a number of good points in this post, but I think it misses the point of the argument in favor of Freeman’s appointment to say this:

Obama was not elected to continue the policies toward Israel of George W. Bush.

This is a tricky statement. Regardless of what some of Obama’s voters believe he may or may not do with respect to Israel and Palestine, Obama very clearly campaigned on positions that were essentially indistinguishable from second-term Bush administration policy, and as far as setting policy goes continuity is going to be far greater than change. It has been one of the great misreadings of Obama to expect (or fear) something else from him on this subject. One of the reasons why the reaction to Freeman’s appointment is increasingly unserious on the merits is that Freeman is not going to be in a position to set policy or alter policy, so his views of Israel one way or the other are of secondary importance. However, proponents of changing U.S. policy towards greater “even-handedness” or making any significant changes at all should expect to be disappointed even more than before, as the appointment of Freeman will have political consequences for the administration that will limits its ability to maneuver on the things that matter to these people.

Perversely, those most likely to benefit from all of this are the defenders of the status quo, which is why most of his critics come from this camp and it is naturally why they are stirring up controversy about the appointment. The controversy itself, largely baseless as it is, imposes costs on the administration that help keep the status quo intact. Even if Freeman remains in the appointment, the administration will be forced to yield elsewhere to avoid creating a “pattern” of allegedly “anti-Israel” moves. Of course, this has been the purpose of trying to paint Obama as “weak” on Israel all along–to box him in and hamper him from making even those modest diplomatic moves that he has said he supports making.

Bearing that in mind, it is telling that Freeman’s views on Israel were the views that the critics initially focused on, only then moving on to question his other views and connections, because it is primarily these views that make Freeman objectionable to most of his critics. That means that it is because of these views, which are going to be basically irrelevant to the appointed position, that he is being hounded, while anything else about him and his career is being used in an effort to stop his appointment. Whether or not Obama continues Bush-era policies, that is something that he, Gen. Jones and Secretary Clinton will be determining. Freeman will not be in a position to do anything about that. Whether that comes as a relief or as a disappointment, that is the reality.

If Freeman is right for the job as an intelligence analyst, as the DNI believes him to be, and the IG investigation finds no conflicts of interest, his particular views on this subject should not be a bar to serving in the appointed position.

P.S. Jeffrey Goldberg allows that Freeman “is not making policy,” but concludes:

I get the sense that some of Freeman’s defenders want to see him in government not because he’s a professional contrarian but precisely because he’s viscerally anti-Israel.

After putting in the usual caveats that charges of Freeman’s “visceral anti-Israel” views are excessive in themselves, it may be that some of his defenders are defending him for this reason, and it is possible that some are defending him more or less automatically just because of who his crtics are, but speaking for myself I regard it as something close to madness to rule out qualified professionals because they fail to meet a political litmus test that does not have any real bearing on the positions they are going to fill. (Imagine for a moment the absurdity of denying someone this position for holding radically libertarian views on the drug war, or for holding distasteful-but-conventional pro-Turkish views on the Armenian genocide–these things are related to U.S. policy overseas and are controversial, but have no connection to intelligence analysis.) On the flip side, it seems clear that almost everyone who has a problem with his appointment is uninterested in his professional qualifications and wants his appointment stopped almost entirely because of his views on this subject. If these views are irrelevant in determining whether he is qualified for the post (and he has no conflicts of interest), that should put an end to the controversy.

Update: Apparently missing the irony of his own words, here is a priceless quote from Chait:

The problem with making arguments primarily about motives is that it creates a stupid and poisonous public dialogue.

Yes, a stupid and poisonous public dialogue that has been fashioned and maintained by many of the people who have been preoccupied with criticizing Freeman’s appointment. For many years realists and non-interventionists have railed against the tactics used by so-called “idealists” during debates in the past, making exactly the same argument about how impugning the motives of antiwar critics, or critics of Israel or critics of U.S. foreign policy generally distorted and ruined the quality of debate. In return, we were treated to various insults, of which anti-Semite and apologist for depotism were some of the more pleasant ones. Now that some realists are making the basically accurate assessment that Freeman’s views on Israel are the main reason for the outrage over his appointment, we are supposed to believe that these realists are engaging in the same sort of tactics. This is false. For one thing, it is not as if it has somehow become a liability or an insult in American politics to observe that someone is strongly “pro-Israel.” What is so amusing about this complaint is that the entire campaign against Freeman is based on the assumption that he cannot be trusted as an intelligence analyst because of his political views and his connections to an allied state, which is not the sort of precedent these critics should want to set.

Second Update: It should go without saying that Michael Moynihan should not be attacking anyone for making poor assessments about Iraq, or perhaps he thinks that Iraq has not suffered from a humanitarian disaster in the last six years? It is also worth noting that the quote from Freeman he is criticizing expresses the view (i.e., “Iraqis Shias are not Iranian surrogates”) that the former administration and most pro-war supporters held from 2002 until mid-2006 when the reality of sectarian warfare and expanding Iranian influence became impossible to deny. This was a view they emphasized constantly to justify our ongoing support for a sectarian Shi’ite government. For any war supporter to hold this quote against Freeman is simply an amazing display of hypocrisy. Moynihan also misses that this quote directly undermines the argument that Freeman is essentially a paid-for Saudi stooge. If he were, he would take every opportunity to exaggerate Iranian power to bolster the importance of supporting the Saudis, and he would not dismiss fears of Iranian influence in a Shi’ite-dominated Iraq.

Third Update: As usual, Max Socol has an interesting, judicious take on the controversy.

Fourth Update: James Fallows has two posts on Freeman and China. Here is Fallows in the second post:

To put a brake on the momentum, and to give a chance for deliberation about a man’s reputation and a president’s ability to get the range of advice he wants, I think it is worth reinforcing the idea that the people who know Freeman and China policy best think the complaints about him on this front are a crock.