After 2006, most observers thought that those results suggested a onetime event, a so-called wave election, and predicted that come 2008, Republicans would reclaim some of those seats, the usual correction after a wave like this passes. But now, seven months before the 2008 election, that does not seem likely. The influential, independent Cook Political Report recently concluded that 12 of the 14 districts most vulnerable to change parties in this election will belong to Republicans, suggesting that Cole’s party is likely to end up in an even deeper hole. ~The New York Times Magazine

Ten months ago, I was talking about Tom Cole and the thankless job he had taken on at NRCC, observing that Cole’s optimism about regaining lost seats was misplaced.  Recruiting candidates was a problem back then, and it is still a problem, and the same goes for fundraising and party ID.  This has not been helped by the complete lack of anything resembling a message, coherent or otherwise.  That is why the Democratic bloodletting in the presidential race is so significant, and why McCain’s current polling is so remarkable.  By all rights, the Democrats should own this year, and in the Congressional races they do seem set to make another big sweep, but it is not coming together as it should be in the presidential polling.  After the last debacle of unified government, I think a lot of McCain voters are not going to be terribly interested in increasing GOP numbers in the House or making Mitch McConnell the new Senate Majority Leader.   

P.S.  At least Cole is smarter than John Boehner, who never stops yammering about the dreaded earmark:

“Earmarks are not the reason that we lost the election,” Cole told me. “I can’t find a single seat we lost because of them.”

This is obvious, but in a party where connections to reality are rare this is a small, hopeful sign for the Republicans.

P.P.S.  Cole also has some common sense when it comes to the fratricidal ways of the Club for Growth:

“The problem I have with the club is I think they’re stupid,” Cole said. “I think they’re politically inept. They spend more money beating Republicans than Democrats.” 

Philip Klein responds to the post below, mostly glossing over the majority of points that I was making.  I want to focus on one part of his reply where he says the following:

Surely, public opinion would influence his actions as president and make it difficult for him [Obama] to adopt an anti-Israel posture, but Obama has given supporters of Israel have every reason to fear he would be the most hostile president toward Israel since Jimmy Carter.

Actually, Obama hasn’t given anyone any reason to think that.  Based on the isolated, frequently de-contextualised comments of certain Obama advisors, Obama’s critics have strained to find reasons to think that Obama would be pushed in an anti-Israel direction if he were elected.  Similarly, those who hope that Obama might alter policy towards Israel have been forced to read some pretty obscure tea leaves.  This has required quite deliberately discounting what he has said and the public positions he has taken in the Senate.  Setting aside what Obama says and paying attention mainly to what his advisors say are essential to demonstrating that Obama is somehow inadequate in his support, because no one can actually point to anything concrete that he has said or done that demonstrates that he agrees with anything that could be construed by the most uncharitable critics as anti-Israel.  Klein was right that Obama’s record is thin and this makes discerning his definite views more difficult, but that’s all the more reason to pay closer attention to what the candidate himself actually claims to believe.        

I would add that the assumption that Jimmy Carter was hostile towards Israel in any meaningful way when he was President (and more “hostile” than, say, George H.W. Bush for that matter) is one that uses a very peculiar definition of what it means to be pro- and anti-Israel.  This is a definition that must say supporting a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel, agreed to by that weak appeaser Menachem Begin, reflects some kind of hostility towards Israel.  Of course, President Carter did once call for a return to 1967 borders, a position that Obama has never endorsed and one that I doubt he ever would support, but if that is what constitutes hostility towards Israel then Israel must necessarily have very few friends.   

As a side note, the discussion between Bob Wright and Gershom Gorenberg on Israeli views of the two Democratic candidates may serve as a useful counterbalance to this growing anxiety about Obama’s attitude towards Israel.

Update: Philip Weiss, an occasional TAC contributor, unsurprisingly takes a dim view of the Goldberg article:

Goldberg is enforcing a code of political correctness, and using the red flag of antisemitism to do so. Sorry– smart Americans have now learned that there’s a difference between criticizing Zionism and being antisemitic.

Well, perhaps some have.  I think Weiss is being far too optimistic in his expectations of “even-handedness” from Obama, and he is far too optimistic about the “groundswell” of people who are interested in the sort of “even-handedness” he describes.  His post reminds of the kind of the thinking of some antiwar conservatives who support Obama (i.e., he should be supported because he is perceived to be representing a certain policy position), except that in this case Obama has not even given any public indication that he agrees with the people who are rallying to him.  Meanwhile, the fact that such people are rallying to him creates the “zeitgeist” (as one AIPAC official put it) around the campaign that gives the (false) impression that there is something bad for Israel (as defined by AIPAC and the like) in an Obama victory.   

Weiss also cites Richard Silverstein, who makes a point that I would have liked to make in my earlier post:

If McPeak made any sort of mistake here it was trying to use shorthand to encapsulate a very complex issue. 

James Fallows is disgusted and bewildered by the Clinton campaign’s circulation of this attack on Gen. McPeak, the retired Air Force Chief of Staff and an Obama military advisor, and Ambinder essentially ridiculed the attack as silly and has followed up with another post on the basic irrelevance to Obama of what McPeak may or may not have said five years ago.  Since Fallows is in Asia a lot of the time and perhaps hasn’t followed the campaign that closely, it’s understandable that he would be shocked by the Clintons’ use of an AmSpec article, but for more than a year the Clintons have been engaged in a weird kind of rapprochement with all the conservative media institutions that warred against them in the ’90s.  They have either made connections with or started citing favourably Drudge, Newsmax and, just this week, Scaife and AmSpec.  (A cynic might remark that Obama really can bring people together–to stop him from becoming President.)  At AmSpec‘s blog, Philip Klein takes on Ambinder and defends some of the Goldberg article. 

The offending part of the 2003 McPeak interview, which is a long interview filled mostly by McPeak’s military expertise and some excellent comments on the problems he had with the war, centered on this:

McPeak complained of that the “lack of playbook for getting Israelis and Palestinians together at…something other than a peace process….We need to get it fixed and only we have the authority with both sides to move them towards that. Everybody knows that.”

The interviewer asked McPeak: “So where’s the problem? State? White House?”

McPeak replied: “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”  

Of course, there is a large vote in support of Israel, not limited to American Jewish voters (most of whom support much less militaristic, “pro-Israel” policies in the Near East), or else there would scarcely be much controversy or political relevance to what Obama’s views on this subject are.  The full context of the interview shows McPeak going on to discuss other voting blocs, particularly Christian Zionists, that are influential in shaping policy.  I think McPeak’s explanation was insufficient, but it was not therefore wrong, and it was hardly “bigoted.” 

It is amazing that anyone can find McPeak’s comments particularly objectionable.  It is true that resistance to change in U.S. Israel policy is not located only in New York and Miami, but there are certainly enough voters and donors there to make it unwise for any local or national politician who wants their support to make any significant departures from a conventional “pro-Israel” line.  A candidate who deviates from that line risks a lot more than he has to gain, since there aren’t many voting blocs that would reward a candidate for taking a significantly different view, or they are geographically concentrated in just a few places around the country.  Of course, we would not bat an eye if someone said that Cuban-Americans in south Florida make it very difficult to change Cuba policy, but it is somehow beyond the pale to say that there are, in fact, serious political consequences for taking a less “pro-Israel” position, when we all know that there are.  Indeed, McPeak’s one response that has become the focus of criticism understates the political pressure. 

What is so amazing about all of this is that we can all acknowledge that John Hagee’s endorsement of McCain (there it is again!) is politically significant, because Hagee, who is a Christian Zionist of a sort, is quite influential with evangelical voters and also heads the lobby Christians United for Israel.  So there is also a “large vote” in Texas and elsewhere around the country in support of Israel, and a candidate would jeopardise his chances of getting those votes if he took a less “pro-Israel” position.  Hagee is a living example of exactly what McPeak is talking about in the interview, but instead of taking that into account McPeak’s critics seem intent on portraying him as anti-Israel and, in Goldberg’s words, “bigoted.”  

Now Philip Klein has just posted something about Obama’s past views on the subject, including his dinner with Edward Said and reported statements that Obama had kept his concerns about Palestine under wraps because he was in a difficult primary election fight in 2004.  (Scott saw some potential for even-handedness in these same episodes.)  In other words, Klein is suggesting that Obama is actually more pro-Palestinian than he lets on, but has downplayed this ever since because of political pressure.  So it seems that McPeak is basically right that “no politician wants to run against it,” including Obama, in which case McPeak is neither “bigoted” nor necessarily wrong in what he said.  Perhaps Obama has come to hold the staunch “pro-Israel” views he has had since taking office in 2005, but regardless of whether he really believes them he will not depart from them in the future for the same reason that he adopted them in the first place (if you assume that his calls for a more “even-handed” approach were sincere).  It may be relevant that Nader made a point of raising Obama’s changed position on Palestine as one of the reasons why he was running, which certainly suggests that the perception on the left and among at least some Arab-Americans is that Obama has abandoned his former views. 

But let’s go a bit further.  Goldberg aligns McPeak, essentially baselessly, with what he calls “the Mearsheimer-Walt view that American Middle East policy is being controlled by Jews at the expense of America’s interests in the region.”  This is probably the most dishonest statement in the entire article, since that isn’t the Mearsheimer-Walt view, whether as expressed in their original essay or in their book, and there is little evidence in the interview that Gen. McPeak necessarily agrees with the entire thesis put forward by the two authors.  First, the Mearsheimer-Walt view is that there are a number of “pro-Israel” organisations and groups that exert political pressure and influence to advance what they regard as good policies for Israel and the United States.  The point that Mearsheimer and Walt make, as those who have bothered to read the book know, is that these policies are, in their realist estimation, very bad for both states, but especially for the United States.  That is their view.  They do not claim and in fact they reject outright the idea that “American Middle East policy is being controlled by Jews.”  In fact, anyone who would characterise their view in the way that Goldberg did has revealed that he doesn’t know what their view is, but has relied on second- or third-hand hostile accounts and should not be trusted when flinging similarly baseless allegations against someone else. 

The outrage about such statements tends to come from the same people who will turn around and talk about how broad and popular “pro-Israel” sentiment is in America.  Of course, when the entire political and media class makes clear that no other view is really all that respectable or worth hearing, whichever view they endorse is going to become much more widespread than it would otherwise be.  When the public is reminded daily that Israel is our “reliable ally,” what little they know of anyone else in the region is usually associated with media reports of acts of violence, and anyone who questions the merits of current policy is targeted for smears, it is little wonder that people will naturally gravitate to the view that incurs no risk of ostracism or stigma. 

Gen. McPeak erred slightly in that one answer, because that one response could be taken out of context (as it now has been) and used to sum up his entire view.  Goldberg erred significantly in his assessment of the “Mearsheimer-Walt view” and his uncharitable characterisation of McPeak’s views as “bigoted,” for which there is no evidence in that interview or, so far as I know, anywhere else.  Even if McPeak does agree with Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis, as some seem to think Brzezinski did when he wrote a letter in defense of the two authors, Obama has already made his position clear in that episode, when he firmly rejected the thesis and distanced himself from Brzezinski’s statements.  Of course, the fact that we are even discussing Obama’s potential problems with Jewish voters on account of allegedly “anti-Israel” things that his associates have said tends to support McPeak’s response in general terms.  In closing, I agree with one of Fallows’ concluding lines: “I don’t like attempts to stifle argument when they occur in China, and I don’t like this in the United States.”

P.S.  Fallows has encountered this kind of baseless attack before. 

Update:  I was wrong.  The most dishonest part of Goldberg’s article is this section:

McPeak also noted: “The secret of the neoconservative movement is that it’s not conservative, it’s radical. Guys like me, who are conservatives, are upset about these neocons calling themselves conservative when they’re so radical.”

Guys like McPeak are upset because they think Jews have too much influence.

To be clear, it is Goldberg who equated neoconservatives with Jews, and he then took McPeak’s political disagreement with neoconservatives, whom he deems radical (I can’t really disagree with his assessment), and his frustration at their use of the name of conservative and twisted it into an anti-Semitic sentiment.  This is really trashy, as is much of the article.

Second Update: Michael Goldfarb is on the case with what may be the most absurd statement on an Obama-related controversy this year:

Obama has a Jewish problem, whether or not it’s merely guilt by association is irrelevant. Politics is about perception, and the perception is that Obama’s one step removed from the Nation of Islam [bold mine-DL]. If he wants to get the anti-Semitic stench of Trinity United off his campaign, it’s going to take more than the all-clear from Marc Ambinder and Marty Peretz.

In other words, the smear campaign is working, and there isn’t much Obama can do to stop it, because the people who keep pushing this line of criticism against Obama have no respect for truth, as the statement in bold shows.

As much I have had to say about his likely opponent in recent weeks, I don’t want to give the impression that I disagree with any of the criticism that Anatol Lieven, who is also an occasional contributor to TAC, has offered about John McCain in his FT article.  For at least nine years I have been keenly aware of just how belligerent and reckless John McCain was, ever since he advocated introducing ground forces into Yugoslavia in 1999 (the bombing of which began nine years ago yesterday), and I have been writing against him in one venue or another since that time.  His meddling in the Caucasus, his embarrassing and dangerous shilling for Shevardnadze and now Saakashvili and his generally throwback ideas about U.S.-Russia relations are all truly horrifying.  Since the start of this blog, I havewarnedagainstMcCain’sRussophobiaandhismilitarism, to say nothing of the historical ignorance that he uses to defend his positions.  Obviously, his belligerence towards Iran is extremely troubling, and his insistence on remaining in Iraq indefinitely as well-known as it is awful.  A McCain Presidency would likely be a disaster for our country that is at least on par with what the current administration has done.

James makes an important point:

So I suppose I’m less concerned about Obama’s support for that mess of a war than the dignity-promotion principle — which, in a judgment I share with Daniel, remains a cipher at best.

Certainly, the idea that it is the U.S. government’s job to promote “dignity,” which is potentially even more nebulous and manipulable a concept than democracy, can lead to an endless number of pledges of support and funding.  It represents not so much a recognition that democracy promotion is inherently flawed, destabilising and counterproductive as it does a belief that Mr. Bush and company have been too limited in their willingness to intervene in other countries at every level.  Team Obama’s problem with the “freedom agenda” is that it has been too superficial, and they intend to go much deeper, which in turn implies that they apparently intend to get us stuck much deeper in the conflicts and problems of all those countries to which we are supposedly “inextricably” tied.  Forget nation-building or building institutions, which are hard enough in the best of times–Team Obama calls for dignity-building, which is almost infinitely more open-ended and aimless.  To repudiate the policies of hubris, they offer hubris cubed.   

I would add that in the specific case of Lebanon the “human shields” aspect of the conflict has been disputed by Amnesty and others, but even if it were true that would not explain why so much of Beirut was reduced to rubble or why Lebanon’s infrastructure was systematically destroyed (or why civilians fleeing the south were repeatedly targeted by the IAF).  It is not simply that the war killed many civilians and displaced a vast number, but that the campaign was conducted almost from the first day with a reckless disregard for the civilian population of Lebanon.

Spencer Ackerman has written a very positive review of Obama’s foreign policy team in The American Prospect.  In the first section, he describes how the team sees the campaign as breaking out of the “defensive crouch,” as some call it, that defines how Democrats address foreign policy in national debates.  What it doesn’t do is consider or “think through” the policy recommendations Obama made last summer, all of which were at the very least questionable and some of which were simply bad ideas.  The fact that the Bush administration has actually been putting one of these recommendations into action does not necessarily prove it to be a bad idea, but it certainly doesn’t help in persuading skeptics that it represents some remarkable break with the status quo.  Usually, at least outside the Bush administration and its supporters, policies that involve violating allied states’ sovereignty and risking their internal destabilisation are considered unwise–not so with Team Obama.

In the second section comes the discussion of “dignity promotion”:

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. “I don’t think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. “Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.”

Well, it’s pretty “graceless” to full-throatedly support the bombardment of a country, Lebanon, when the campaign kills 1,000 civilians and displaces a million more, putting hundreds of thousands into refugee camps for months and years afterwards, but that is what Obama did during the summer of 2006.  His appreciation for human dignity is truly overwhelming. 

Then there is this gem:

“Look at why the baddies win these elections,” Power says. “It’s because [populations are] living in climates of fear.”

Viewed another way, they win because significant numbers of people in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine don’t think of these groups as “the baddies,” and not least because these groups have come to represent them and their aspirations to some degree (which is a troubling development all its own), because they offer them a means to vent their resentments against someone else (in the cases of Hizbullah and Hamas, Israel) and because the groups may also provide some meaningful social services (Hizbullah) or local policing (see Sadr’s militias in Iraq), and serve a function beyond demagoguery and thuggery.  One might note again that the empowerment of Hizbullah in the aftermath of the “Cedar Revolution” was then redoubled by the solidarity against Israel on account of the wide-ranging, disproportionate and indiscriminate war against Lebanon, and then one could observe that Obama was right there along with most of the Senate cravenly endorsing the campaign to the hilt.  In other words, Obama has proudly backed policies that have struck at the dignity of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, and he has proudly backed policies that contribute to the “climate of fear” that helps empower what his then-advisor described as “the baddies.”  (Seriously, “the baddies”?  Who talks like this?)  This is the candidate who offers a change of direction in foreign policy?  Really? 

Those who continually come back to his position on Iraq seem satisfied that Obama reached the right conclusion without concerning themselves very much with how he reaches conclusions and makes decisions.  Taking the longer view, his assumptions about America’s role in the world are more significant than his view on any particular policy.  Basic assumptions are more valuable for understanding what a politician is likely to do in a crisis than how he has responded to any one particular policy or event.

Ackerman adds towards the end:

Conservatives are using Obama’s argument about the inextricability of international prosperity and U.S. national security to portray him as a “post-American globalist.”

For my part, I have never used the phrase “post-American,” but it seems undeniable to me that Obama is in some real sense a globalist (as is most, if not all, of the foreign policy establishment).  And Obama does not argue for “the inextricability of international prosperity and U.S. national security” as such, but argues explicitly that the security of every other country is inextricably bound to American national security: every security crisis, in theory no matter how local or contained, is fundamentally our business because it (supposedly) affects us.  It seems to me that people who agree with this are globalists and would probably not mind being called by this name.  I would conclude by noting that it requires someone with the strange assumptions of a globalist about the vast scope and extent of American security interests to have ever believed that a third-rate dictatorship on the other side of the world posed a meaningful threat to the United States or American interests worthy of preventive war.  The “mindset” behind the Iraq war is the mindset that says the following: state sovereignty is irrelevant when Washington says it is, international law exists to be used as a justification for our policies and a bludgeon against other countries, and civilian populations of states that supposedly or actually harbour or support terrorists are essentially expendable.  In his comments on Pakistan and his vote on the war in Lebanon, Obama has not only failed to repudiate this mindset, but has demonstrated his fidelity to it on occasion. 

I wonder if progressive realists interested in a sane and responsible foreign policy will see these flaws, or if they are so intent on getting out of the “defensive crouch” that they will endorse a bad foreign policy paradigm simply because it is being presented as a break with the past.  Thus far, my impression is that the latter is more the case than the former.

Doug Kmiec has endorsed Obama (via Sullivan).  My previous critiques of Kmiec’s pro-Obama arguments are here and here.  While I cannot get myself to the same point as others on the right have done, there was one section from Kmiec’s statement that seems entirely right to me:

Our president has involved our nation in a military engagement without sufficient justification or a clear objective. In so doing, he has incurred both tragic loss of life and extraordinary debt jeopardizing the economy and the well-being of the average American citizen. In pursuit of these fatally flawed purposes, the office of the presidency, which it was once my privilege to defend in public office formally, has been distorted beyond its constitutional assignment.

Such is the continuity with the administration that McCain represents that many Republicans and conservatives have concluded that it is better to make a tremendous leap of faith in backing Obama rather than perpetuate what we have had for the last seven years.  Powerline attacks Kmiec for incoherence, but someone sympathetic to Kmiec might argue that if “coherence” requires supporting the current administration in its open-ended conflict in Iraq and its record of usurpation it is better to be incoherent and in opposition.  Kmiec’s endorsement is evidence, very much like Prof. Bacevich’s article on Obama, of how awful the GOP has become.  It is so deeply distrusted, so loathed, by a significant number of conservatives that even a Democrat whom they know to be on the far left and in disagreement with them on almost everything has a better chance of winning their vote than the Republican standard-bearer. 

However, the Democratic primary voters seem to have given the GOP a reprieve from disaster.  Rasmussen’s polling in Nevada and Arkansas shows that Obama loses even more Democrats and liberals than McCain loses Republicans and conservatives.  In Arkansas, Obama currently receives the support of just 48% of the Democrats, and in Nevada just 65% of Democrats back him.  In Nevada, where Obama enjoyed an 11 point lead a month ago, he leads by just four now, while in Arkansas he trails by 29 (his Arkansas unfavs of 62 are almost unheard of).  While it may not be a very large sample for comparison, both Democratic winners in the presidential election in the last four decades carried Arkansas (and, yes, it obviously helped that the last two winning nominees were both Southerners and one was an Arkansan).  Being outpolled almost two-to-one there is a serious problem for the probable Democratic nominee in a state that just elected a Democratic governor in 2006 and is set to have an unopposed re-election campaign for Mark Pryor.  Even if we assume that Arkansas is now reliably a “red” state, the gap between McCain and Obama here is indicative of broader dissatisfaction among Democratic voters when 37% of Arkansas Democrats say they will back McCain.  But, by all means, let’s talk about how all of this doesn’t matter, even though it is the Democratic candidate who has typically polled better early in the year and seen his support evaporate in the fall. 

Update: John Tabin views Kmiec’s endorsement as driven mainly by anti-McCain animus, which is consistent with his previous pro-Romney sentiments.  An alternative way of looking at it is that Kmiec has shown a pattern of supporting the candidate who attempts to appear superficially and unconvincingly to be more conservative than he actually is.  

Philip Klein notes acerbically:

Kmiec argues that when it comes to radical Islam, “Senator Obama needs to address this extremist movement with the same clarity and honesty with which he has addressed the topic of race in America.” Of course, Obama’s failure to do so after more than a year of campaigning, has no bearing on Kmiec’s decision to endorse him.

Of course, it might be that Obama has no interest in approaching jihadism with the lenses of a Paul Berman (mentioned by name in the article) and may actually regard the entire framework in which we debate anti-jihadist policies to be fundamentally flawed.  Indeed, if anti-jihadism requires the sort of lame sloganeering that Romney used during the primaries, or compels us to embrace talk of “existential threats” and resurgent caliphates, it seems to me that anyone who wants to deal in reality would be inclined to take a different approach.  Kmiec’s quote is remarkable from another angle, since many conservatives (and not a few Democrats, if polls can be believed) seemed to regard the speech on race to have been anything but honest and clear.

John McWhorter hits on the core of the difference between the two kinds of reactions to Obama’s speech: the audience’s educational background.  That does not mean, as I see it, that the people who reacted very badly to the speech are wrong or benighted, as I’m sure some Obama fans would have it (I hasten to note that McWhorter doesn’t say this), but points to two things that explain why elite commentary has generally been so much more favourable to Obama’s speech than general public reaction: people who spend a lot of (or too much) time in academia or elite institutions of any kind are exposed on a regular basis to the demands of political correctness and will start to internalise them if they are not very careful, and they are conditioned to appreciate subtlety, nuance and context to what can be an almost maddening degree for many people.  These people generally, but not necessarily, responded favourably to the speech because it was pitched to them and written by someone who comes from the same kind of background and speaks their language.  Those who have a background in “higher education” but who turned against the speech did so for at least one of two reasons.  The first is, as I have suggested earlier, that elite conservatives have defensively internalised the requirements of political correctness as a way of retaining mainstream respectability and gaining access to the conversation, and so insist on enforcing them against deviants on the left, oblivious that reinforcing these rules works ultimately to squeeze them ever more tightly until they are compelled to abandon entire subjects for fear of violating the ridiculous speech rules that they once used to reject out of hand.  The other reason centers around the difference over policy and philosophical disagreement, and these negative critiques tended to focus on the standard liberal policy fare Obama offered.      

Of course, it is revealing that the reaction to the controversy over the newsletters using Rep. Paul’s name is exactly the inverse: the precious, goo-goo cosmotarians were the first to jump ship, and the Middle American conservative response was generally sympathetic with or protective of Paul.  In the end, the people who responded most favourably to each candidate when he was confronted with controversy were the sorts of people who were already supporting the candidate disproportionately before the controversy.  In Obama’s case, this usually included educated professionals and members of the mainstream media.  Surprise, surprise, these are the people who have fallen all over themselves praising Obama as a conquering hero.  Everyone else, for the most part, took the controversy as an occasion to take Obama down a few notches or to justify not supporting him, which they may have wanted to do all along but may have been reluctant to do openly earlier.  That elite conservatives could turn on Obama with guns blazing in their phony p.c.-drivenrage was the perfect arrangement for them: they could express disapproval of the media darling because he had made a very un-p.c. blunder, making it possible for them to pose as the champions of the kind of “liberal intolerance” they might have decried a decade or two earlier. 

Meanwhile, middle- and working-class white (and probably other) audiences heard this, remembered the anti-racist catechisms they had been taught for as long as they could remember and understood that the proper, approved reaction was to shake their heads and boo.  McWhorter makes a similar observation.  Now that anti-racism has captured the minds of so many of these people, now that the conditioning has had its intended effect, observers sympathetic to Obama are dismayed that Obama’s nuanced effort to explain (or, as the critics have it, explain away) racially-charged and potentially racialist rhetoric fell on deaf ears.  Yet this shouldn’t surprise anyone–if the speech fell on deaf ears, it was the elites who deafened them years before with a single, simple imperative: “Don’t pay attention to race, except when we tell you to!”  I agree with McWhorter that the conditioned reaction on display is “sad,” but its causes are to be found in the kind of thought policing and “sensitivity training” that conditioned them that way in the first place.

Update: Rasmussen has a poll on the ongoing reaction to the controversy and the speech.  John McWhorter will be encouraged to know that most people regarded the speech as excellent/good, and just 21% thought it “poor” (probably overlapping with the 21% who thought it was divisive).  However, 42% say that they are “very concerned” about Obama’s relationship with Wright (30% of Democrats and 25% of liberals say the same) and 14% are somewhat concerned–they are responding just as they have been taught to respond.  This tends to be concentrated most among Republicans, whites and men, but it is at similar levels across all age groups.  All together, 61% of whites are “concerned,” 48% of them very much so, compared to 36% (19/17) of black voters and 39% (21/18) of “other.”  So it seems as if reactions to the speech are separate from the ongoing controversy over the relationship with Wright, as at least some of the people who say they are concerned about the latter reacted positively to the speech. 

Second Update: It may also be relevant to this post that one of the most positive reactions to the speech on the conservative side came from Charles Murray (not exactly someone who could be accused of yielding to the dictates of political correctness), who elaborated on why he found the speech so impressive:

Text that deals with a difficult racial issue is like a Rorschach ink blot. People project onto that text—project their own experiences, anxieties, angers; all the emotions that go into thinking about race, which means all the emotions that exist. You can weigh every word of your text. You can rewrite it until you think there is absolutely no way that a fair-minded person can fail to understand what you said. And they will not only fail to understand it, they will accuse you of saying exactly the opposite of what you said. 

What Murray and Obama seem to have in common is that they express some interest in understanding this difficult subject, rather than in striking the appropriate, expected poses.  As Peggy Noonan suggests, this is all the more remarkable in Obama, because he is a politician and therefore should normally be allergic to thinking through a problem.  As Ross noted the other day, some part of the reaction to the speech was, as I suggested above, disagreement about the policy implications (or the lack of policy imagination) in it, which means that conservative audiences did not arrive at the same conclusions as Obama. 

Also, I don’t mean to imply that people with other educational backgrounds can’t understand nuance and complexity, which they often can, but that they respond to it by viewing it as an attempt to skirt the issue or react to the controversy in much more stark terms, which is where the anti-racism conditioning comes in.  For years they have been told that context doesn’t matter when it comes to statements that are deemed racist, and now they are expected to accept Obama’s attempted contextualisation of a controversy.  But they’ve seen these controversies before, and they know how it’s supposed to work according to the rules that they have been told to obey: the perpetrator expresses groveling contrition for his offense, he probably still loses his job or is shunned by polite society, and then we move to the next item of business.  As Rod correctly notes, there is enormous frustration with the double standard applied to the right, but the only chance of getting rid of the double standard is to break the habit of ritually condemning and ostracising offenders.  The left may never give up trying to use such accusations as bludgeons, but at the very least conservatives could begin once again to view them as what they are: the tools for increasing the left’s political and cultural power.  That’s the thing–even if conservatives could use Wright to break Obama’s candidacy, they would be empowering their opponents and reinforcing their worldview.

Reflecting the remarkable divergence between the fortunes of the Congressional GOP and their presidential nominee, another Republican House member, Tom Reynolds of New York’s 26th District, has announced his retirement, leaving yet another open seat for the cash-strapped, overwhelmed NRCC to defend.  As you will remember, Reynolds wasensnaredintheFoley scandal (he was the one who urged him to run for re-election in spite of his undue interest in young pages), which nearly cost him his seat last time, and he was also the head of the NRCC during the debacle in 2006.  With Reynolds gone there will be virtually no one left from the old, pre-2006 leadership crew, which is something of an improvement, but that will be cold comfort when the GOP loses an upstate New York district that it probably should have held. 

Cue James‘ skeleton crew references.

Philip Klein can rest easy–anything that he finds troubling or worse about Wright’s foreign policy views is simply not to be found in Obama’s views.  Obama’s remark about Palestinian suffering was a one-time thing during campaigning in Iowa, which I suppose you can read as either a slip-up “revealing” his true beliefs or an isolated incident that has no deeper meaning.  His abasement before AIPAC, his vote backing the campaign in Lebanon and his campaign literature all paint a clear picture of someone who not only wants to demonstrate his “pro-Israel” position, but who has not shown any evidence, except for one remark about distinguishing between “pro-Israel” and “pro-Likud” positions, that he would change anything about current policy towards Israel.  Yes, the line about cynicism was silly, but when it comes to policy questions he takes all the conventional views.  In the issue currently online, Scott makes the argument that Obama may potentially represent a shift towards a more even-handed approach to Israel and Palestine, and I think that would be a very good development, but even if Scott is right in reading the “hints” that he sees, I’m not sure that I see where Obama gains the political capital to make moves towards that even-handedness.  In short, even if Obama did hold some of the views that worry Klein, he would be so busy trying to prove that he was a supporter of Israel that he couldn’t afford to make meaningful moves away from a reflexively “pro-Israel” position as we have come to know it during the past seven years. 

Indeed, in Obama’s speech at AIPAC he said, “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad’s regime is a threat to all of us.”  He spoke out against the Mecca agreement, which should lay to rest any concerns that he is secretly keen on Hamas.  Obama said furthermore, in a line that echoes then-Gov. Bush’s critique of Clinton’s last minute negotiations: “No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.”  For exactly the same reasons that Klein was right to challenge Prof. Bacevich’s support for Obama partly on foreign policy grounds (which does not necessarily mean that Bacevich disagrees with Obama on all of these things), he should have no worries about what an Obama administration would do with respect to Israel.  If the last seven years have proved satisfactory, Obama offers more of the same in this particular area.