In the next issue of TAC (2/25), Brendan O’Neill provides an excellent summary of the case against Obama, focusing on his hyper-ambitious interventionism.  Here’s a short excerpt:

Obama’s stress on how everything is interconnected not only sets up the United States to intervene everywhere, but it makes any coherent strategy impossible.  If every problem is an American problem, how would Obama set priorities or address one crisis instead of another?  It’s a question he hasn’t begun to answer.

Obviously, I agreewiththisanalysisentirely, and I’m pleased to see this view of Obama catching on with others.  As I said in one of my first responses to Obama’s Council on Global Affairs speech:

Obama believes that by stressing interdependence and globalisation that he has seriously addressed complexity in foreign affairs, but he has simply replaced one rigid scheme with another, and in that scheme every problem on earth is potentially our problem.  If every problem is our problem, and everyone’s security is “inextricably linked” to our own, how can any President set priorities or address one crisis rather than another when all are potentially just as relevant and connected to American security?  

If there is any temptation to make comparisons with McGovern ’72, it should be clear after reading this that no one could be more vehemently opposed to the idea that America should come home than Barack Obama.  The two major party candidates offer competing hegemonist visions, and both of them are dreadful, but there are grounds for thinking that an antiwar voter has more to lose overall by backing Obama, which should be a sobering reality for those who understand how dangerous McCain is.  Far from challenging the “mindset” that led to the war in Iraq, Obama possesses the very same mindset that says that we govern the world and must police it.

Granted, in-laws don’t always get along very well, but this is ridiculous (via Shawn Macomber).  There is something disturbingly fitting that the one wielding the knife was the Clinton supporter.  Apparently disagreement about health care mandates is more powerful than I had thought.

Eight months late, Clinton has started hitting Obama hard on foreign policy, making arguments that sound strangely like one of my old columns.  It’s an interesting last-minute gambit, but one that makes little sense at this stage of the contest.  It isn’t as if she’s going to rack up even larger super-majorities in Laredo because Obama is “impulsive” in his Pakistan position, or dent his advantages in Houston because he might meet with Raul Castro.  Obviously, she’s trying to push the same lame “experience” argument she has been pushing for over a year, while also trying to cast doubt on Obama’s judgement, but even though her critique of Obama on foreign policy may make a certain amount of sense it hardly works to her benefit.  If he has an incoherent or mistaken view, she can hardly claim to be much better.  That sums up the entire campaign fairly well.

Meanwhile, one poll shows Obama leading in Texas.  If that holds up, Clinton can look forward to retirement sooner rather than later.  Without a Texas win, she will have a hard time resisting calls for her to drop out.

As one of those “Copperhead isolationists” she presumably loathes, I can’t say that I have a lot of sympathy for Samantha Power’s view of things.  Of course people at Commentary are misrepresenting her position and, by extension, Obama’s–misrepresenting actual views and insinuating hateful views are what they do over there.  But once you get past the silliness of the criticisms of Power, there is a different problem with things that Power says.  For one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisors, she seems surprisingly ill-equipped to engage in foreign policy debate.  Consider this passage from Rosen’s Haaretz article:

With regard to Iran: “Reasonable people can agree or disagree on the issue of meeting with Ahmadinejad,” but here’s what she thinks: The chance of persuading Ahmadinejad may not be great, but it is worth examining, and a meeting “will increase the chance for mobilizing international sanctions, because the world will be reminded that Ahmadinejad is the problem,” not America as many now believe.

That is the logic of Obama’s Iran policy?  This is worrisome to me, since it implies that one of Obama’s top people appears to have no idea how relatively unimportant Ahmadinejad is to the Iranian state’s formulation of foreign and security policies.  Persuading him is not only implausible, but it is irrelevant, because he will be gone in the near future and the real institutional authorities in Iran will still be there.  Reminding the world that “Ahmadinejad is the problem” is also useless, because Ahmadinejad isn’t the problem, even to the extent that you insist thatthere is a problem with Iran.  Not only did Iran’s nuclear program predate Ahmadinejad’s ascendance, but he has no control over the actual rulers of Iran and the state security apparatus, and indeed his election came in the teeth of the clerics’ opposition to him.  It is almost as if someone defined our Japan policy in terms of cultivating a relationship with Emperor Akihito, rather than with the current LDP government.  More troubling is the way that it continues the same failed habit of identifying regimes with this or that person, which lends itself to misrepresenting the structure of the state and the domestic political scene (and which usually leads to referring to the person, sometimes inaccurately, as a “dictator” of the country). 

It also can hardly be encouraging, when pressed on a statement she had made about Israel and Palestine, that she turns to this excuse: “In any case, she stresses, this is not exactly her field.”  Fair enough, she specialises on genocide, but if one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisors begs off on thorny questions because “this is not exactly her field” then that hardly brings the kind of heft to a foreign policy agenda that is both extremely ambitious and potentially very controversial.

Yglesias notes that objections to McCain and the “Gang of 14” are among the weakest raised by conservatives against the nominee, and this is right.  We have to remember that the “principle” at stake in this particular controversy was the ludicrous idea that filibustering judicial nominees was unconstitutional.  Since the filibuster is a creation of Senate rules, its use has nothing to do with the Constitution, which already gave the Senate power to make its own rules.  So, yes, it was a disagreement over tactics and maneuvering, but the larger problem was that the Republican leadership defended their preferred tactics of demagoguing the Democratic threat of a filibuster by taking an inherently absurd position.  McCain’s great error, such as it was, was to back away from the foolishness of the so-called “nuclear option.”  The creation of the “Gang” effectively avoided the need to make an end-run around the use of cloture.  As an episode of parliamentary maneuvering, McCain comes off looking much less ridiculous than Frist et al. 

But even this does not really explain why this looms so large in the minds of many of McCain’s mainstream critics.  The reason that it keeps being brought up is that the “Gang” episode embodies what it is that most Republican partisans dislike about McCain the most: his willingness to break with leadership or go against the majority of the party.  If this sort of behaviour is seen as intrinsically wrong in most cases, Republican partisans see it as especially awful when it comes to the confirmation of judges.  It doesn’t matter whether McCain’s move may have made more sense under the circumstances of a limited Republican majority–it was the fact that he turned against the leadership and was consorting with them on something as important as judges, even if, in the end, he actually voted to confirm all the judges that conservatives wanted to see confirmed.  Of course, the position the leadership took against filibustering of judicial nominees was also extremely short-sighted, since it now effectively puts the Republican minority at a significant disadvantage in resisting any future Democratic appointments. 

Ultimately, this has become an issue because of McCain’s unwillingness to be a team player.  Objectively, from a conservative perspective Romney was a far, far more compromised candidate when it came to his record, but he was a team player who seemed quite happy to adopt an entirely new set of policies to that end, while McCain is interested in his own advancement and cultivating the favourable media coverage to achieve that.  So he makes these grand gestures to demonstrate that he isn’t a reflexive partisan, and journalists write glowing accounts of his “maverick” style.  Arguaby it is the favourable media reaction to McCain’s rebellions that makes those rebellions seem even worse to Republicans who are already unhappy with them.

Jonathan Martin discusses the difficulty of deploying smear tactics against Obama, but I think he underestimates the degree to which anonymous chain e-mails and third-party (i.e., independent organisations, not political parties) advertising will be able to operate unchecked under the national media’s radar.  To a large degree, the rumours swirling on the Internet are already doing this, and the MSM’s ham-fisted responses to the existence of the chain e-mails have not quashed the rumours, but almost lended them a degree of credibility, as if there is a real “issue” that Obama has to confront.  Politically speaking, however, it seems as if the “issue” has become real despite the completely false nature of the story.  We see also at Martin’s blog Obama’s statemments to Jewish voters in Ohio regarding these e-mails, which shows that his campaign has to waste its time fielding questions about these false claims because there clearly is a concern in the campaign that these charges are sticking a little too well.  In connection with the smear e-mails, you have the circulation of a photo that will probably feed the same paranoia.  When he repudiates these e-mails, he has to state at some point, “I’m not a Muslim…not that there’s anything wrong with that!” 

It seems to me that the public’s awareness that Obama has had some familial connections to Islam is a political liability for him, particularly at the present moment, and this is especially so when he is perceived as advocating a less aggressive foreign policy (even when his foreign policy may in some places be more aggressive).  When he proposes to meet with heads of various “rogue” regimes, the status of “globalised American” that some of his supporters want to give him will be a burden.  Because of his WASP background, Mr. Bush can make some gestures to the Palestinians and Muslims around the world at much less risk of being identified with these groups, while Obama will get less “credit” for his support for the air war against Lebanon and his reckless provocations over Pakistan because of the presumed empathy or affinity that his supporters keep insisting that he has.  Obama is already at risk of such an identification, and his foreign policy is perceived to be more accommodating, which is a political burden regardless of the merits of Obama’s proposals for a summit with Muslim heads of state or meetings with the Syrian or Iranian governments.  It is going to be much harder for someone perceived to be a “dove” to make these moves, and it will even harder for Obama personally. 

It probably doesn’t help, either, when Ralph Nader begins complaining publicly that Obama “used to support” the Palestinians and now doesn’t.  I wouldn’t hold this against him, but I am not at all representative of American opinion on Israel and Palestine.  Neither will it help him much for columnists to draw attention to his Kenyan relatives, as Kristof does this week.  Drawing attention to John Kerry’s French relatives did not make him seem more American in the end, but reinforced the hostile narrative being crafted about him that he was an out-of-touch elitist who didn’t understand America.  As we all remember, there was an absurd amount of Francophobia in 2003-04, so any association with France was politically disadvantageous.  To the extent that voters are aware of Kenya lately, they know that it is convulsed by chaos and ethnic strife.  Does it really help Obama with voters in much of the country to broadcast that he is part Luo and has Luo relatives still living in Kenya?  I suspect that, for all of the “nation of immigrants” rhetoric and the official enthusiasm for diversity, Obama’s biography will seem to most voters to be an overdose of diversity in a country that has elected just two white ethnic candidates as President in the last century (if you count Eisenhower).  When Obama frames his biography in terms that make his success into an example of the opportunities available in America, he appeals to a much broader audience and to some extent neutralises the political danger that comes from emphasising his background.  When he or his supporters attempt to make him into a Healer of International Rifts or a Builder of Bridges, he is on much shakier ground.

Huckabee has a revelation.

Another eight months of soaring but empty rhetoric about bringing people together and bringing about change will leave most of America brain-dead. ~Stuart Rothenburg

The cynical and hostile observer might note that the success of such a campaign thus far indicates some significant and widespread neurological damage in the voting population, but when all is said and done it is hard to fault a mass democratic election campaign for being largely vapid and bereft of substance.  This is one of the reasons I tend to think so poorly of mass democracy, but since it is what we have at the moment there is a certain absurdity to the charge of insubstantiality, as if Mitt Romney rattling off 20 year-old talking points about the welfare state and family values represented some kind of substantive engagement with contemporary problems or John McCain repeating “we are winning” at every debate showed something other than the unimaginative status quo campaign that he is running. 

It isn’t that Obama’s campaign has built itself up on the strength of his policy agenda, since no successful campaigns ever do that, but that no one else really has, either.  Every mistake of analysis I have made over the past year has come from believing that policy mattered to voters and that the candidates with the policies most in line with their constituents’ priorities would prevail.  That was a pretty stupid assumption. Worse than a pundit’s fallacy, this is the error of the high-information voter, who thinks that because he wastes his time learning about the policy positions of two dozen politicians that everyone else is as, well, brain-damaged and conditioned as he is.  Even though the high-information voter is presumably reasonably well-informed, he repeatedly, insistently refuses to acknowledge that the entire exercise is absurd and fairly futile, since he knows better than most that the actual policies enacted by the candidate once he is in power may bear no relationship whatever to his campaign pledges.  Yet these are the people who will complain loudest about a “lack of substance,” whether real or imagined, despite their awareness that the content of any substance that may be offered to them may be reversed or repudiated within months of a candidate taking office.  When that happens, the same people will speak knowingly about the candidate’s “newfound pragmatism” and the “importance of compromise,” and so on and so forth.  

The heavily policy-oriented campaigns are always the third-party protest candidacies that fizzle and die.  Some candidates have been more wonkish than others, and these candidates have failed, but all of them have been operating within an extremely narrow range.  The candidates of bold ideas and major changes were, of course, the ones who were consistently marginalised and ridiculed as “kooks,” and in a narrow sense this label is correct in that you do have to be a bit eccentric to care deeply about foreign policy paradigms, much less monetary policy.  The one candidate who routinely spoke about the declining value of the dollar, one of the more important questions of the moment, was Ron Paul.  The best McCain has ever been able to do when confronted with a question about monetary policy is to recycle his lame joke about propping up Alan Greenspan’s corpse in a chair, and he stands a frighteningly good chance of becoming the next President.  Paul’s rivals typically battled with each other over things that were relatively trivial by comparison–“sanctuary mansions” comes to mind–and they have been rewarded for their triviality.  They are the serious ones, because while they may mouth platitudes, these are the approved platitudes.  Paul’s candidacy was focused heavily on his dissenting policy views, and it was, whether or not you endorse his proposals, the most substantive campaign of them all. 

All of which is a long way to make the point that voters aren’t terribly interested in substance.  The attack that someone “lacks substance” is a criticism leveled by journalists and pundits (and bloggers!) at a candidate to reinforce their self-styled reputations as allegedly sober observers of the political scene.  It is a gesture towards their sense of themselves as the knowledgeable and informed elite and the would-be guardians of public discourse, which the very phenomenon of blogging reveals to be nothing more than pretense.  It is ultimately an expression of the petty tyranny of the miserable functionary who fancies that he is the king of his own small hill, and he is going to demand that the great and the good pay their respects and jump through a few hoops to acquire real power that the functionary can only ever just watch and never possess himself.  It is finally a pose designed to bolster the incredibly untenable claim that our political discourse is serious and intelligent, and that the media, ever so wise and prudent, put the candidates through their paces in a way befitting that seriousness and intelligence.  That this is transparent nonsense does not bother the people who do it.

Of course, the Obama campaign exaggerates all the features of modern democratic campaigns that represent the generally visceral and reactive nature of our political life, but everything that so many of us have been reacting against is just a heightened or intensified form of something that has existed in modern democratic politics for decades.  Thus the people who have fashioned the posthumous (and increasingly embarrassing and incoherent) quasi-cult of personality around Reagan now berate the people who are creating a quasi-cult of personality around the candidate who consciously models himself on the last Democratic Senator elected to the Presidency, the one whom the Democrats have shrouded in myth and gauzy legend.  The party whose nomination has been fought over by candidates disputing over which one of them Reagan would endorse now clucks its tongue at an excess of defining politics in terms of a charismatic politician.  Of course, it’s true that Reagan had intellectual heft and headed a movement with intellectual and academic roots, but was routinely ridiculed for being a lightweight famous for appearing on film with apes, just as Obama, obviously intelligent and educated, is now mocked for his “lack of substance.”  Yet this is what the circus of democracy makes candidates become, and the more successful they are the worse it gets, since to some extent success feeds the very things (i.e., popularity, need for mass communication, simplicity of message) that make insubstantiality necessary.

It is true enough what Rothenburg says elsewhere in his article that the “change” of a concerted progressive policy agenda and the “change” of drippy bipartisan cooperation really are mutually exclusive.  He can either pursue his agenda or he can introduce his “new politics,” but cannot do both at the same time.

He [Obama] is one of those rare talents that taps into a real call to bring us together [bold mine-DL]. ~Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius

Hey, I thought Obama was against wiretapping!

P.S.  Of course, Obama makes the call, he doesn’t tap into it.

Rasmussen’s results for a general election match-up between McCain and Obama in New Mexico is telling, especially in light of the potential for a third party spoiler on the left in my home state: the poll shows McCain and Obama tied 44-44.  Some significant details: McCain picks up 25% of Democrats, Obama gets only 15% of Republicans; McCain wins married voters by 10 points, and loses among the unmarried by over 30; Obama has an unfav rating of 41%,which is roughly twice that of his national average which is conistent with his national Rasmussen unfav rating (44%) and three points higher than McCain’s.  McCain is a comparatively well-known political figure, but apparently slightly more voters already view Obama negatively in an important swing state. 

Married voters tend to vote at significantly higher rates than divorced, widowed or never married voters.  In 2004, married voters voted at a rate of 71% compared to 62% widowed, 58% divorced and 52% never-married.  Now it may be that Obama is generating enough enthusiasm, especially among the young and never-married, that his candidacy reduces the difference between these rates, but I wouldn’t want to have to bet on that.  McCain also wins among the two oldest age groups, taking the 65+ group by 25 points.  Voters aged 55+ likewise vote at much higher rates than voters aged 18-34, where much of Obama’s strength comes from. 

Not to be too superstitious about this, but New Mexico has a good record of voting for the winner (every time since statehood except 1976 and 2000) and Obama is struggling to lead there right now.  It is not hard to imagine his unfav ratings going up over the next eight months of campaigning.  New Mexico is plurality Hispanic, which may have a distorting effect on these numbers, but whatever the reason for it Obama is not currently leading in a state that has a built-in Democratic party ID advantage of over fifteen points and which has been trending more strongly Democratic on a state and local level.  According to Rasmussen, New Mexico technically leans Democratic at the moment, but this suggests that this does not translate into a polling advantage for Obama.  The sobering reality for Democrats is that Clinton does even more poorly in this poll in a state that her husband carried twice.  The flip side of the “Obama will probably lose” argument is not, it seems, that Clinton can probably win.

P.S. It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to describe N.M. as a toss-up and Nevada as a Democratic-leaning state in an Obama-McCain match-up, if Rasmussen’s Nevada polling is accurate.  This doesn’t change the Electoral College numbers, since the two states have the same number of electoral votes, but it would seem to be more accurate.  Likewise, Colorado seems to be leaning more Democratic, while Iowa, like Wisconsin, appears to be more of a toss-up.  Normally, I would agree that the fundamentals make Ohio a Democratic-leaning state, but for all that Obama manages only 42% at present to McCain’s 41%.  So, to sum up, four of the five states Rasmussen has determined to be Democratic-leaning seem to be much more competitive, while two of the “toss-up” states appear to be Democratic-leaning.  That provisionally puts 14 electoral votes in the Dem column, but removes 42.