Rod says:

But Jeremiah Wright is not just any far-out left-wing minister. He is Obama’s spiritual mentor, and has been for a long time. As we’ve learned from Obama’s biographical details, young Obama was lost and searching for an identity. His father had abandoned him, and he wasn’t sure where and how he fit in to the black community. He found a father figure in Wright and a connection to the black community in Wright’s church. The degree of separation between Obama and Wright, versus McCain and Hagee, is far less.

First, a few things should be stated clearly about Hagee and McCain.  This is supposed to be a free country, and Hagee is free to express his dreadful views, as is Wright, and I am exceedingly tired of the hunt to shut people out of political discourse because they or people they associate with do not toe this or that line.  Watching certain libertarians pathetically pursue mainstream “respectability” in the wake of the newsletters business with the Paul campaign was enough to make me ill.  These are the sorts of people who will abandon their most popular spokesman in over a generation so that they can retain “credibility” in the eyes of people who wish them dead.  Meanwhile, the thing that should really disturb people is the dangerous policies that Hagee, McCain and Obama have endorsed in the past in the Near East.  Bashing Catholics is distasteful and wrong, but Hagee has done far more concrete damage by lending his name and his influence to the excessive bombing of Lebanon. 

Also, there is such a thing as loyalty, and one of the best things that can be said about Obama is that he seems to understand that loyalty entails keeping faith with friends and colleagues after it has become politically dangerous to do so.  A lot of people give his church grief for preaching against an aspirational “middle-classness,” and I understand the objections to this view, but at its core this view entails a call to solidarity with your community and a willingness to remain loyal to that community even though better opportunities may beckon beyond the horizon.   

Obama really shouldn’t have to answer for what Wright says, but I also think that his loyalty to Wright should not be an occasion for bashing the man.  There are plenty of things in his record, or the lack thereof, that provide reasons to find fault with Obama.  Despite the manifest unfairness about the way that the Paul campaign was treated over statements in decades-old newsletters that were objectively far less offensive than things Wright has said in very recent memory, especially when compared to the pass Obama has received and continues to receive from the media, and despite the profoundly dishonest double standard applied to Paul and Obama, I am not interested in criticising Obama along these lines.  Obviously, I don’t share Wright’s views, and Obama claims not to share all of them, but I have to ask seriously what kind of man Obama would be if he disowned his spiritual father for the sake of the approval of others (who may not give their approval even if he did what is being demanded).  No one that I would want to entrust with any office of importance, that’s for sure.

That is the real difference between Obama’s modest distancing of himself from Wright and McCain’s embarrassing embrace of Hagee.  McCain does not belong to Hagee’s congregation, he has no duties or obligations to him, and yet he welcomes Hagee’s support in the most cynical fashion.  We take McCain’s claim that he disagrees with Hagee’s dreadful views at face value, while he receives credit from Hagee’s endorsement as evidence that social conservatives and pro-Israel evangelicals have given him their seal of approval.  Hagee is absurdly accepted as a mainstream figure because he strikes the “right” pose on Israel policy, whatever his own reasons for doing so, while Wright receives opprobrium at least in part because he does not.  At the same time, Obama rejects Wright’s ludicrous and objectionable views, but for some reason he must go beyond that and publicly turn against the man who brought him into the church.  That strikes me as a deeply disturbing demand.  If Obama is to be judged by the far-left company he keeps, one need only peruse his voting record.

No doubt Obama would be better off politicaly, and it would help his career, if he dropped Wright like a stone, but he would be a far more respectable and decent man if he refused to throw his mentor under the bus to appease the media, his critics and even his admirers.  I still wouldn’t vote for him, but I could have some respect for him as someone with a degree of integrity.

Update: Obama has written a response to the controversy.

Second Update: Wright has left the campaign, and Obama appeared on MSNBC on Friday to address the matter.

Steven Stark is a sharp political analyst, and he correctly identifies McCain’s priorities for the general election.  These are:

* He has to win more than his share of the rust-belt swing states — such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Michigan — that are likely to decide the election.

* He has to do this by appealing to a large number of working-class, often Catholic swing voters in industrial states — the so-called Reagan Democrats.

* He has to convince enough voters that Obama is too inexperienced to handle the foreign-policy and terrorism threats facing the nation.

* And he has to hold the Republican Party together by discouraging a far-right third-party candidacy while maintaining his appeal to Independents.

As much disaffection with McCain as there is, I think this last concern is the least of McCain’s worries.  Rust Belt electoral success is a must for the GOP nominee, and right now McCain is surprisingly well-positioned to exploit the ongoing implosion of the Democratic contenders.  He has been drawing strong support from Catholic voters throughout the primaries.  So McCain already has several of his objectives in sight and should be able to reach them, barring major blunders or genuine scandal.  A major third party challenge from the right becomes a real threat only to the extent that the Democrats appear to be flailing and collapsing, which creates an opening for more disaffected conservatives to cast protest votes that they assume will not affect the outcome.  There is a base of support nationwide for a third party candidate that could possibly lead to a 7-10% result, but in a close race most of these voters will probably end up siding with the major party candidate they find least distasteful.  The logic that compels restrictionists to continue holding their noses and enabling pro-amnesty national Republicans will apply once again.     

What makes no sense, then, is the argument that choosing Tom Ridge as VP assists McCain in reaching most of his objectives.  If choosing Mike Huckabee is “doubling your trouble” with movement conservatives, as Rove put it, choosing Ridge is like jumping through a plate glass window into a lake of burning fire.  Selecting Ridge will provoke the third party challenge from the right that McCain can’t afford over abortion (remember that McCain has been desperately clinging to his generally pro-life voting record as one of the proofs of his own conservatism), or at the very least it would repel many of the Catholics drawn to the GOP because of life issues, thus actively undermining the ticket in one of the areas where McCain currently has some strength.  While Ridge would probably help the ticket in Pennsylvania because of the home state connection, it’s not clear what he offers that would shore up McCain’s position in neighbouring states.  In general, choosing anyone who has been a Bush Cabinet member reinforces the image of running for a third Bush term, and choosing Ridge, whose tenure at DHS was not all together popular, compounds this mistake. 

If Americans remember Tom Ridge at all, they remember him as the DHS Secretary who was continually harrassing them with announcements about the changes in the alert level (the reasons for which he could not, of course, explain in any detail in public) and holding preposterous press conferences about buying sufficient stores of duct tape.  (And, yes, I understand that this was part of a larger program of encouraging voluntary preparedness for disasters, but it was presented very badly, which hardly recommends Ridge for a leading role in selling the ticket to the public.)  As someone responsible for border security as head of DHS at the time when border security was even weaker than today, Ridge would compound McCain’s problems with restrictionists who already have difficulty trusting McCain on anything related to the border.  He was the face of the hyper-paranoid stage of the “war on terror,” back when people were supposed to believe that Bin Laden was coming to get them in Dubuque and Cedar Rapids.  What better target could you give Obama than that?  I suppose if you wanted the first in the line of succession to be a figure of fun and relentless mockery, you might choose Tom Ridge.   

The problems don’t stop there.  When Ridge’s name was floated as a VP nominee in 2000, John Miller wrote a profile of the then-governor that would not reassure wary conservatives.  Miller wrote back then:

Ridge is not a conservative who happens to be pro-choice; he’s a liberal Republican who happens to have done a handful of conservative things as governor. Putting him on the ticket is a fateful bargain. Perhaps he can overcome pro-life outrage and help Bush get elected this year. But at what cost down the road?

On the whole, everything that conservatives found unacceptable about Mike Huckabee on fiscal, domestic and foreign policy Tom Ridge has in spades and he’s not a social conservative on top of it.  Ridge’s so-called “dove” instincts may or may not still apply today, in which he case he would be even more unacceptable to the majority of the GOP that is reflexively hawkish.  Given the concerns about McCain’s advanced age, Ridge would be judged not just as a ticket-balancing or election-winning choice but as possibly being the next President, and it is fairly inconceivable that most Republicans would ever willingly choose Tom Ridge for President, so they will not abide him as VP.

Among likely Pennsylvania Democratic primary voters, Obama trails by 13 and has slightly higher unfav ratings (27 to Clinton’s 22).  To address Noam Scheiber’s point about a different Pennsylvania poll, it seems that there is a sizeable number (30%) of white Democrats who are unlikely or very unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain in the general.  According to Rasmussen, even 8% of black Democrats are unlikely or very unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain.  17% of white Democrats and 23% of black Democrats are unlikely or very unlikely to vote for Clinton against McCain.  Obama’s unfavs among white Democrats are 33%, which is comparable to Clinton’s unfavs among black Democrats (30%).  Overall, 78% of respondents say they are somewhat or very likely to vote for Clinton against McCain, and just 71% say the same about Obama.  18% are unlikely/very unlikely to vote for Clinton, while 26% say the same about Obama.   

As the general election polling from Pennsylvania makes clear, Obama does as well as he does in the match-up with McCain because he draws enough Republican and independent support to offset the Democratic defections that he would likely suffer.  Clinton draws fewer non-Democrats, but retains enough Democrats to do slightly better against McCain than Obama according to current preferences.

There are many Democrats who think Clinton should have dropped out by now to save their party from a destructive bout of fratricide, but I think there is a far more powerful argument to be made that she should drop out so that her supporters will stop assaulting the world with things like this. 

Via Yglesias

With all caveats about eight months being left in the campaign and all the rest, here is some new polling on general election match-ups in Pennsylvania.  Strategic Vision shows Obama slightly more competitive than Clinton, but still trailing by three in Pennsylvania (47-44).  Rasmussen has the McCain v. Obama contest as a dead heat right now at 44-43, and it shows some noticeably greater erosion of Democratic support for Obama compared to Clinton.  McCain wins 21% of Democrats away from Obama, compared with just 14% from Clinton, but, as you might expect, he still wins independents (but gets just 49%) and she loses them (receiving 45%).  This much confirms the impression that Clinton is polarising and drives independents to McCain who might otherwise remain undecided.  Obama has support from just 66% of Democrats, as 9% prefer some third party candidate and 3% remain unsure.  Obama’s Republican voters (17%) and McCain’s inability to consolidate the Republican vote (he gets just 74%) are the things keeping the race as close as it is.  Overall, McCain leads Clinton 46-44, so once again the size of the coalitions of both candidates is roughly the same but they have different compositions.

Obama keeps losing the 18-29 year olds by incredibly large margins.  They prefer McCain over Obama 55-35.  30-39 year olds help keep it close, giving Obama an even more lopsided lead in their group, 55-33.  Obama loses 40-49 year olds and 65+ by large margins of 16 and 15 respectively, and just nudges ahead 47-45 among the 50-64 crowd.  The unfav ratings for Obama among the 18-29 group are amazing: 51% have a “very unfavorable” view and 15% have a “somewhat unfavorable view.”  His fav/unfav ratings among the youngest voters seem to be sharply divided between those view him very positively (28%) and very negatively.  In some amusing and puzzling irony, the candidate who wants to “turn the page” and who claims to represent the choice of the future is deeply polarising among the youngest voters who would, one might think, be most susceptible to such talk.  The candidate who talks endlessly about unity divides voters my age and younger more sharply than Hillary Clinton.  (She also loses 18-29 year olds by a huge margin against McCain, but her fav/unfav ratings are not quite so starkly opposed.)  Perhaps resistance to Obama among the youngest voters is greatest because they potentially have the most to lose and will take on the largest share of future burdens, and so are least inclined to take a chance on Obama.  Perhaps this generation is, as conventional wisdom would have it, not as preoccupied with racial categories, and so they are much less preoccupied with the symbolism of racial reconciliation.  While Obama wins overwhelmingly among young Democrats and Dem-leaning independents, most of my generation isn’t buying into the cult, and I think this is a very healthy sign.  

Theories as to why most of my generation seems to dislike Obama so deeply are welcome in the comments.

Update: Then again, 18-29 year olds in Pennsylvania shockingly give Bush some of his best job performance ratings (48% with 30% giving him an “excellent” rating), so the picture is decidedly mixed.  True, 45% rate his performance as “poor,” and a slim majority gives him negative marks, but disapproval of Bush is much higher in every other age group.  Unfortunately, strong dislike for Obama seems to be related to the unusually strong support for Bush among the youngest voters.  Bizarrely, these are the voters who have spent a large part of their politically conscious lives under the Bush administration and even now this many of them give him good ratings.  Perhaps it is because they have so little against which to compare the failure of the administration that so many still approve of Mr. Bush.  They are also far and away the most optimistic age group when it comes to Iraq–48% think conditions will be better in Iraq in six months.  Young voters’ support for McCain is beginning to make more sense all the time, even if their perceptions of reality are strangely warped.

Second Update: After looking at the results for voters aged 18-29 in Michigan (56-33 for McCain), New Jersey (61-29 for McCain) and Washington (52-39 for McCain) that show young voters turning against Obama, I went back to check the other states to see if the pattern holds true elsewhere.  In Minnesota, 18-29 year olds are very pro-Obama (62-28 over McCain).  In New Hampshire, they narrowly support him 48-44, and 18-29 year olds in Wisconsin back him 49-39.  Iowa is a “lean Democratic” state, and the 18-29 year olds back McCain 53-34.  However, in New Mexico Obama leads in this age group 53-33.  Young Nevadans split three ways 36-34-30, giving Obama a small lead in a state where he did have a large lead last month.  In Florida, where he trailed McCain badly last month, he wins 18-29 year olds 65-31.  In most states the youth vote is not disproportionately supportive of Obama, and in many cases is strongly opposed.  That is something that deserves further investigation and explanation.

No one will confuse me for an Obama fan or someone who puts much stock in Obama’s “hope and unity” routine, but I have to second Sullivan’s amazement at this remark:

I don’t see any problem with Barack Obama admitting that part of his appeal is the hope that he might help mend the racial divide and turn a new page. But he could also say that he’s not running for the President of Black America but of all America and that his qualifications involve more than his skin color. He’s more than eloquent enough to make that case.

It does defy belief that anyone even remotely familiar with Obama doesn’t know that he says this sort of thing all the time (indeed, he says it almost ad nauseam as far as I’m concerned).  This was only the central theme of the DNC speech in 2004 that raised him to national prominence, and it has been repeated time and again in his victory speeches over the past two months from Iowa until Wisconsin.  For instance, he said in South Carolina:

The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor; young versus old; and it is not about black versus white.

It’s about the past versus the future.

His oft-repeated lines, of course, derive from the original speech:

Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

And again:

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

It’s not as if the campaign started just a few months ago.  This is the elementary, superficial stuff that I assumed everyone knew about Obama–I thought this sort of rhetoric was the reason why more than a few conservative pundits have been so impressed with Obama.  For some of them, though, it’s as if he just appeared on the scene.

Update: Goldberg has clarified his remark to some extent.

Dennis Byrne has a different explanation for the loss in IL-14:

It is a measure of the moribundity of the Illinoisʼ Republican Party, whose national consequences seem not to be fully appreciated by the GOPʼs national proprietors. The once proud and powerful party of the late senators Everett McKinley Dirksen and Charles Percy, and more recently former Gov. Big Jim Thompson, has sunken to such depths it didnʼt even bother to field token candidates in the populous Cook County.

It’s true that the Illinois GOP, the people who have recently given you such outstanding standard-bearers as George Ryan, Jack Ryan and Alan Keyes (or “Allen,” as Byrnes would have it), is in miserable shape since the corruption of the Ryan administration turned the state party into a shambles, and it has been in decline longer than that.  Nominating Oberweis didn’t help matters.  Even so, the deplorable state of the Illinois GOP didn’t start recently, and cannot fully account for the failure in this special election.  Suburban and ex-urban districts have started trending towards the Democrats, especially in Illinois, and that has as much to do with the national party’s failures as it does with the state party’s implosion.  The problem for the Congressional GOP is that the same moribund Illinois party that just failed in IL-14 has to defend at least three other vulnerable seats in the fall.  Even if the IL-14 loss has no greater significance for how the GOP fares in the Midwest or nationwide, it does have significance for how Republicans will fare in closely contested suburban districts across Illinois.  In the same way that Byrne explains away IL-14 by focusing on state party collapse Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania Republicans could explain away the decimation of their House incumbents by talking about the loss of confidence in state party leadership.  The consequences remain the same: more Democrats winning House seats.

Ross says:

Americans want border security and they want a lower immigration rate; what they don’t want is to feel like they’re being asked to vote for “Operation Wetback, Part II.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there are any Republican politicians who actually believe in the moderate-restrictionist position.  Instead, there are politicians who make restrictionist promises they don’t intend to keep in the hopes of keeping the yahoo vote appeased, and politicians who sound like, well, yahoos themselves.

One of the reasons why there are no (or virtually no) Republican politicians who believe in a “moderate restrictionist” position is that such a position presupposes that a stronger restrictionist position is essentially a “yahoo” view that must receive some lip service, but never under any circumstances should it dictate policy.  In other words, to hold the “moderate” position is to take for granted that the people most energised by the issue, the voters who are most likely to make your immigration position an important basis for their vote, are cretins who must be kept under control, which means that there is no political advantage in holding the “moderate” position when you can adopt a more “hard-line” view that you have no intention of supporting in meaningful legislation.  The average GOP House member knows that he will get no credit for taking a more “moderate” position and will suffer a backlash if he appears to “soften” on immigration.  Also, there are few people the politician could turn to in the conservative movement who would want to help his “moderate” position, since the debate long ago broke down into globalist/capitalist defenders of mass immigration in all its forms (for whom existing restrictions are the problem), opponents of illegal immigration and a relatively smaller, but vocal, bloc of opponents of most or all forms of immigration.  In theory the “enforcement-first” bloc, the second on this list, is the “moderate restrictionist” position, but as matter of intra-party politics the pro-amnesty forces have pushed together enforcement-first and all other restrictionists and deliberately try to obscure the differences between all positions to their right.     

Symbolic border fence bills (such as the one the President signed in ’06) are perfect for such politicians, since it sends the message back home that you are appearing to take a strong restrictionist position, all the while knowing that the bill is pure symbolism and even if constructed will be insufficient in the absence of greater internal enforcement.  It’s rather like Republican politicians who intervened in the Schiavo case to get credit for their allegedly staunch pro-life convictions, but who otherwise do little or nothing substantive on matters of life.  There are no political advantages from what might be called a “moderate pro-life” position, and obviously there are no penalties for making pledges on an issue that are never kept.  The old logic of “where are they going to go?” applies to pro-life voters just as it does to restrictionists.  Knowing that these voters will always come back to the party in the end, Republican pols have every incentive to use absolutist rhetoric and essentially do nothing after the election, except for the occasional symbolic gesture (“pardon Compean and Ramos!” they cry).

However, it all depends on how you define the “moderate restrictionist” position.  Was the Pence compromise bill an example of a “moderate restrictionist” view?  In the view of most restrictionist activists and voters, the Pence plan was an unacceptable compromise and was seen as little more than delayed amnesty.  All of this relates to a basic lack of trust in the political class.  Supposing that there is a “moderate” position that could satisfy most restrictionist voters’ concerns, anything that seems to water down or weaken a “hard-line” position at this point appears to these voters to be a kind of trick.  Washington’s general neglect of immigration policy for the last two decades has created intense distrust, and the insistence by supporters of amnesty that they do not support amnesty (as Bush and McCain keep insisting to this day) reinforces that distrust and strips all compromise plans, including Mike Pence’s, of all credibility.  Pence also insists that his plan has nothing to do with amnesty, but having been lied to for years these voters are in no mood for the subtleties of guest-worker schemes (which they would regard as basically unworkable and unenforceable anyway). 

To overcome this credibility gap, Republican pols have to stake out very strong restrictionist views to reassure voters who will cease to trust them if they are seen to move very much at all towards a “moderate” position.  This dynamic is reinforced by the tendency of genuinely open borders and pro-immigration advocates within the GOP of denouncing any restrictionist position that goes beyond “securing the border” as bigoted.  Even if a “moderate” position existed that could conceivably address the concerns of restrictionists, no one would want to risk going out into the middle of the no man’s land between the WSJ and the establishment and the rank-and-file restrictionists, because they know they would take heavy fire from both, have very few allies and endanger their re-election over what a “moderate restrictionist” is likely to regard as a second-tier issue anyway.  In other words, if you are inclined to take a “moderate” position on restricting immigration, you probably aren’t concerned about it enough to risk the political suicide that adopting a “moderate” position would entail.

With all the appropriate caveats in mind (i.e., this poll does not predict what will happen, the election is far away, many things can change, and so on), here is some information from the latest Rasmussen Michigan poll.  McCain leads both Clinton and Obama by three points.  Only 65% of liberals express support for Obama with 19% going for McCain and 11% for “some other candidate.”  McCain has a weak hold on conservative voters (74%), but holds on to more of them than Obama does with liberals.  Obama trails narrowly among independents and gets just 67% of Democrats.  7% of Republicans support him, while 17% of Democrats back McCain.  There are slightly fewer “Obamacans” than Republicans who would opt for Clinton over McCain (13%).  That is not what is supposed to be happening.   

My generation must be pretty cynical, because they seem to react very negatively to Obama all over the country.  His unfav rating among voters 18-29 is 56%, which is by far the highest unfav of any age group.  He trails McCain among the 18-29 group by 23 points (33-56), but he managed to remain competitive or tie in every other age group.  This age group rallies to Clinton more than any other even though she has an unfav rating over 50% with this group: she still gets 54% of the 18-29 group to McCain’s 41%.  The story we keep hearing about the enthusiasm for Obama among the young does not reflect the attitudes of a majority of young voters.  The generational trend towards the Democrats that we have been hearing about is apparently real enough, but it seems to collapse when Obama is the candidate.

Dave Weigel offers an interesting article on the Ron Paul campaign, but unfortunately we are going to clash again over his claims about the alleged inefficacy of anti-immigration politics.  When longshot candidates who have little realistic chance of gaining traction take up immigration as an issue and then fail to gain traction, it seems as if this is frequently attributed to the adoption of the immigration issue rather than a function of the longshot, marginal candidacy itself or the result of a more general failure of political strategy that Weigel has described elsewhere. 

It is fair to say that there were more competitors for the anti-amnesty, anti-immigration vote in the GOP primaries, which made any attempt to poach voters from the crowded field unlikely to result in smashing success, but there is a flaw in the following conclusion:

This lunge for the Minuteman vote didn’t work. According to exit polls, Paul won only 8 percent of Republican voters who want to deport all illegal immigrants. That was 16 points less than immigration compromiser John McCain, six less than amnesty waffler Mike Huckabee, and even one point less than “sanctuary city” mayor Rudy Giuliani. Paul finished a poor fifth among voters who cared about immigration but came in a strong second place among voters angry at the Bush administration. In other words, he came in second among his natural constituency and fared poorly on an issue every candidate was already scrapping over.

But consider that he also finished behind McCain among anti-Bush voters.  In state after state, he routinely fell behind both McCain and Romney among antiwar voters, when both stated clearly their intentions to prolong the war.  This means that there was something very strange about Paul’s natural constituencies–they may have been against Bush and the war, but they did not place a terribly high prioritiy on opposition to either one.  It also means that a restrictionist electorate that could bring itself to back McCain, Huckabee and Romney in large numbers is either generally poorly informed or fairly irrational in its candidate preferences, and the same could be said for antiwar voters.  When restrictionists refuse to vote for one of only two candidates (the other being Hunter) who had any real credibility as a restrictionist by the time of New Hampshire, there is not much that a campaign can do. 

Unlike the restrictionist voting pool, which could sometimes swell to 50% or more of the primary electorate, anti-Bush and antiwar voters consistently made up roughly a 30% minority of GOP voters, which meant that Paul was always fishing in a relatively small pool.  His “natural constituencies” were very unnaturally backing candidates who espoused the opposite of everything Paul was offering, meaning that Paul was usually getting perhaps a fifth or less of this third of Republicans that he theoretically should have dominated.  Arguably, restrictionism was one area after Tancredo’s withdrawal where Paul could have conceivably gained some purchase, since he had some real credibility in opposing mass immigration in a field crowded with latecomers and opportunists.  It was an attempt that did not pay dividends, but it was a reasonably smart move considering that it was the perception of Huckabee and Romney as hard-liners on immigration that continued to keep them viable with conservative voters who should have regarded both with suspicion on this and other issues.  Huckabee won Iowa in part because he presented himself simply as an anti-amnesty candidate.  The figure of 8% in New Hampshire is no better, but also no worse than his statewide performance, and the percentage is consistent with the fraction of GOP voters who have been called “Fortress America” Republicans.  These are the voters most receptive to a combined anti-Bush, antiwar and anti-immigration message.  Outside this group, however, anti-immigration sentiment tends to be strongest among nationalists, who tend to be “Jacksonian” in their foreign policy views and so are least inclined to endorse foreign policy arguments that stress “blowback,” criticise American deployments as outposts of empire and demand immediate withdrawal from a war zone.  It’s true that Paul could only draw a small sliver of restrictionist voters, because only a small sliver of these voters also share Paul’s foreign policy perspective.  In an ideal world, pro-sovereignty and anti-imperial messages ought to complement each other electorally, but in reality they seem to cut against each other. 

Yet it is very questionable whether a “more foreign policy–based libertarian message” would have been the better course.  I assume Weigel and others have seen the high unfav ratings Rep. Paul had in every early state; these high unfav ratings were the result in large part of Paul’s principled and correct foreign policy position, so it seems likely that an even more intensely foreign policy-based campaign would have been the cause of higher unfavs and would have been even less successful electorally.  As frustrating as it is to admit, thoroughgoing non-interventionism or a general “mind our own business” attitude in foreign affairs is not terribly popular among Republicans, and perhaps has not been for at least ten years.  Focusing even more intently on this part of the campaign was not going to boost Paul’s share of the vote.  Deploying populist appeals on immigration was an attempt to broaden Paul’s message that did not really yield the desired results, but it seems certain that a more strictly anti-imperialist campaign would have had even more limited appeal.  Some voters choose candidates purely or primarily on foreign policy, but most do not.  A campaign that was already heavily defined by its foreign policy dissent could scarcely have increased its numbers among antiwar voters who were already willing to vote for McCain and Romney, since their opposition to the war could hardly have been very deep.  One of the biggest problems with Paul’s restrictionist appeals is that they came relatively late in the process, which probably gave the average voter the impression that Paul was engaged in imitating Huckabee and Romney in their race to capture the restrictionist vote.  A deeper problem, and one Paul’s campaign could have done little to change, was that the GOP is filled with voters who rallied behind such “conservatives” as Huckabee and Romney and has very few that prize radical devotion to the Constitution or economic liberty.  Under the circumstances, and bearing in mind the mistakes in organisation the campaign did make, Paul may have done about as well as he could have.