Oh, good, Ralph Nader is in the race.  All we need to do now is figure out why.  Until then, here are some thoughts on what the effect might be. 

The impact of other candidates coming from the left will likely be minimal, if recent trends are any indication.  A little more than half a million voters backed Nader’s independent run and the official Green nominee in 2004, and these tended to be concentrated in strongly Democratic states.  As we all know, the fear of Nader playing the spoiler again suppressed support for him and diverted many one-time Nader voters into Kerry’s column.  Greens have flourished best at a statewide level in states where siphoning off votes from Democrats typically does not normally affect the outcome.  However, Greens have sometimes acted as spoilers in several New Mexico elections, the most important of which was the gubernatorial race in ’94 when Roberto Mondragon weakened Bruce King’s bid for re-election and helped ensure the victory of Gary Johnson.  (Johnson probably could have won without the help of the Greens in a very good year for Republicans, but 1994 was one of the first elections when the Greens made a large difference in the final Democratic vote tally.)  The potential exists for Greens to sap Democratic numbers in New Mexico and deliver a swing state to the other party.  Even so, in federal elections many Greens in New Mexico typically fall in line and back the Democrat, and this year the pressure to do that will be greater than usual, especially when the Green nominee is the sad Cynthia McKinney. 

It is undoubtedly true that Nader is wasting his time, but I have to wonder whether the progressives who find Obama’s hope-and-unity act insufficiently radical and bold would be willing to throw in their lot with Nader or with the Greens in some effort to prove a point.  It seems unlikely that any campaign could gain much traction by trying to say that Obama is not progressive enough, but if that perception of Obama takes hold on the far left it could conceivably have an effect.  If people inclined to vote Green as a protest or as an expression of their disagreement with neoliberalism in the Democratic Party are already likely to view the Democratic Party as not significantly different from their opponents, might they be even more strongly inclined to support a third party on the left when they hear Obama’s rhetoric that emphasises all the things the two parties have in common?  The kind of people who have voted for Nader and the Greens in the past are not interested in bipartisan cooperation–they see this as a, possibly the, problem, not something desirable that has been lacking in recent years.  The things that are supposed to make Obama an appealing “post-partisan” figure are exactly the sorts of thing that drives potential Nader and Green voters crazy.  Strongly ideological and protest voters don’t want “post-partisanship.”  Ironically, the more the GOP is able to show that Obama is a left-liberal the more they are likely to help him keep these voters in his column. 

Obviously, in terms of substance Obama and McCain are actually fairly far apart on many major policies and Obama is not politically anything like Al Gore, but if there is a sizeable number of progressives objecting to Obama’s style, particularly his lack of combativeness and his preference for consensus-building, then that could contribute to a largely unforeseen, minor but still potentially meaningful rebellion on the left.  In the event that the election turned on New Mexico, which is not terribly likely but could happen, the Greens and Naderites could tip the balance again.

It’s about time that I brought out one of the great Bollywood songs of all time.  This is Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazmakar from the classic Mughal-e-Azam.  Madhubala is something to behold.

Obama’s cut-and-paste job does respond to the complaint that he is without substance. But it’s hard to mix poetry and prose and come up with an appealing product. Particularly when, as columnist Robert Samuelson points out, there’s not much that’s interesting about the substance. ~Michael Barone

This balancing act of mixing the “uplift” with policy detail was always going to be difficult, as I suggested a while back, but it is made more so by the fact that the candidate of “change” cannot really be confused with the candidate of “new ideas.”  They may or may not be good ideas, but little of what he proposes is bold or original.  This is actually a rather unfair test, and it is mostly professional pundits and the chatterati who want a candidate to offer something “interesting,” but it is a legitimate criticism of Obama to the extent that he claims to represent something different from the “same old politics.”  Attacking the “same old politics” has a nice ring to it, but it helps if the candidate has practiced some demonstrably “new” politics and it is even more important if it is really the “same old politics” that voters find so tiresome.  As I keep insisting, Americans’ complaints against the political system today do not derive from frustration over a lack of bipartisanship and collaboration, but a frustration with the lack of representation they have in both parties on major policies where the political class is deeply at odds with the majority of the public. 

Obama at his most “post-partisan” suggests that he will combine members of both parties in the service of what Samuelson dubbed the “sanctification of the status quo.”  In other words, the themes of Obama’s campaign point towards reinforcing the establishment and all the worst instincts of the political class, and so deepening popular frustration.  Rather than sharper, clearer distinctions between parties and alternative policy agendas, Obama seems to promise that the differences will be muted even more.  This may be one more reason why the journalists and pundits who idolise “centrism” find Obama so intriguing, and why they continue not very subtly to cheer for him: he is diverting a flood of public discontent into easily managed channels of the status quo. 

Meanwhile, the progressive activist criticism of Obama that I have seen most often is that he isn’t the most progressive, or at least that he isn’t running as the most progressive candidate of the major Democratic candidates (and you heard this even more often when Edwards was still in the race), and even to the extent that they are willing to grant that most of his policies are just as progressive as Clinton’s they are offended by his style.  At the same time, he does, in fact, have a very progressive record, which ought to unnerve conservatives and at least some independents, but doesn’t seem to very much.  Obama is suffering from the reverse of the problem Huckabee has had.  Scorned by the party for being a liberal squish, Huckabee is feared by everyone outside “very conservative” voters as a would-be theocrat (and is supported by “very conservative” voters who may think that he is one), which is almost exactly the opposite of what should have happened.  For his part, Obama should have easily won over progressive activists without any effort, while encountering significant problems in appealing to independents and Republicans, yet something more like the opposite has occurred. 

This suggests that appearances and perceptions are vastly more significant than “substance,” and this is true even for the hardened activists who think that they are making intellectual judgements about the merits of the various candidates.  This still puts Obama in an odd bind: if he plays the hopemonger, pundits scoff at the message’s emptiness, and if he talks about unity, progressives grow wary of his lack of combativeness, but it isn’t clear what he could be doing differently that would not have brought him to the same fate as Edwards.  Obama and McCain to some degree find themselves in the same situation: having run relatively more towards the center than their opponents during the primaries, they must now satisfy activists who doubt their commitment, their willingness to “fight” for the cause.  The complaints about Obama on this score are more muted, because they are for the most part criticisms of his style (though his health care plan does generate some dissatisfaction on the left), but they are there. 

Coming back to an old topic, it is not now, and hasn’t been for months, a question of whether Obama has something substantive to say, but whether most of his supporters know anything about this and also whether what he has to say seems compelling to a large enough number of voters.  His “boilerplate liberalism,” as it has been called, may sell better this time than at any time in my life, but it makes the opposing boilerplate conservatism that McCain will rehash, however unpersuasively, much more competitive than it would otherwise be.  Bizarrely, given Obama’s stated concern not to re-fight old battles, this election promises to be yet another re-fighting of the same rather tired arguments.  The arguments are tired, because they have been rehearsed so many times, but they have been rehearsed so many times because they continue to mobilise voters and because they continue to represent some differences between the party’s constituencies.  

Obama does seem to be blessed by an opponent who has literally nothing new or interesting to say, but the entire conversation about Obama’s substance and a lack of “interesting” policy ideas has probably missed something crucial.  Pundits, journalists and bloggers, hyper-attentive and obsessed political junkies that we are, repeatedly mistake the appearance of vacuity for a political weakness, which is remarkable given the amount of time we all spend, myself included, discussing the “atmospherics” and symbolism of campaigning and the “horse race” rather than specific policy questions.  Within reason, the less defined a candidate is the better his chances of tapping into the public’s discontent, as they can see in him whatever they want to see.  However, the line between a popular empty vessel and a ridiculed empty suit is a thin one.       

As I must keep reminding myself, democratic elections do not actually turn on policy (except in a negative, reactive way of people rebelling against an incumbent who has presided over a period of economic or political failure), and the policy agenda effectively matters only to the extent that it persuades activists and journalists alike to approve of a candidate as suitably in alignment with the activists and suitably “serious” and not “too far” to one side of the spectrum or the other.  If most voters are non-ideological, and the more ideological constituencies of both parties are locked in to supporting their respective nominees as a matter of interest or party loyalty or both, what matters is not so much what positions on policy a candidate takes as it is the impression of competence and understanding that these positions convey.  The reason why the relatively more wonkish, detail-oriented candidates repeatedly come up short is that they confuse a display of competence and understanding with demonstrating intense expertise with the specifics of their policies, which matter primarily to interest groups, bloggers and box-checking ideological gnomes.  Romney could run rings around McCain and Huckabee with his expertise, but that didn’t matter.  The same has been true with Clinton in her struggle with Obama. 

All the things that horrify a republican about mass democracy–the identitarianism, the “gut-level connection,” the vacuous rhetoric and the cheap, manipulative symbolism–help to explain why we end up with the candidates we do, and they will explain why the aloof, relatively more expert candidate in the general election, Obama, will end up losing.

There is no reason to trust any pre-October 2008 polls showing Obama beating McCain, including those now showing him beating McCain by a larger margin than Clinton would. Obama would be the second consecutive Democratic standard-bearer ranked the Senate’s most liberal member by nonpartisan outlets like National Journal. ~John DiIulio

Much of DiIulio’s argument doesn’t persuade, especially the part where he tries to say that Clinton still has a chance, but this part is an important reminder of just how unreliable general election polling is this far away from November.  It’s worth remembering that at roughly this time in the ’04 cycle both Edwards and Kerry polled at least 10 points ahead of Bush with Kerry leading 55-43 and Edwards leading 54-44.  As you may recall, the outcome was rather different.  So polls that show Obama leading nationally by this margin or less are not necessarily reassuring for Obama at all.  I think some of this polling strength reflects the Democratic advantage on the generic ballot, which Obama weakens less because he is less of a known quantity than Clinton right now, and as he becomes better known the effect of that generic advantage will fade.   

If this argument is right, Obama needs to be leading by a much wider margin now to endure the next eight months and the Rezko-Ayers-Khalidi attacks that will be coming his way.  As Mike Pridmore noted at MyDD the other day, Obama’s polling lead over McCain also bears some eerie resemblances to Dukakis leading Bush the Elder in mid-May 1988 (Dukakis was ahead 49-39), including evidence of Republican cross-over support for Dukakis.  The final 1988 result, of course, was Bush 53-45 in what was otherwise a reasonably good Democratic year.  So I’m sticking with my earlier claims.

I saw Peter Suderman’s post on global warming alarmism as anti-politics, but didn’t have a chance to remark on it earlier.  It seems to me that the Gourevitch argument he presents makes a good deal of sense, and the comparison with the “war on terror” echoes what I was saying along much the same lines earlier this year.  The reason that both are anti-political is that both presuppose that current conditions are so dire or the threat is so grave that special emergency measures are permitted.

Where I would disagree with Peter is over his claim that meaning itself is a luxury good.  Uncertainty may be a peculiarly modern luxury good, since part of the of the “brutal business of trying to keep on living” entailed having very clear and reliable certainties that provided meaning.  (Likewise, perhaps the hyper-certainty of ideologies that are profoundly destructive is only possible on a large scale in an era when people have had the luxury to grow dissatisfied with abundance.)  It may always be the fool who says in his heart that there is no God, but even the fool would not place such a dangerous wager, so to speak, in an era of scarcity in which dependence on the next harvest was all but absolute.  Likewise, it is probably only in a modern technological age when man begins to indulge in truly world-wrecking hubris that he can find his own salvation. 

What Peter is describing later in his post is are the people who have been raised in a culture that prizes the negation of any meaning provided by traditional authorities and who are now trying to build up some sense of meaning with the materials they have at hand.  The pursuit of transformation of the world without religious truth is what Voegelin called modern gnosticism.  Actually, that simplifies Voegelin a bit: his objection was to any doctrine, religious or secular, that preached the radical transformation of this world, which was to try the impossible of  bringing the parousia down to earth.  In the end, that is what these world-saving causes provide: a soteriology without a Saviour.  “We” become our own saviours, and this necessarily casts those who oppose us into the role of Ahriman trying to thwart the salvation of the world.  This gnosticism is founded on the hope that “we” can change the world radically.  Ultimately, the trajectory of progressive ideas (among which I would number Mr. Bush’s ludicrous promise to “end tyranny”), as Delsol explained in Icarus Fallen, is inherently anti-political in another sense: it aims to overcome the structural disparities of power that are unavoidable in this world.  As with every such fantasy, the end result will be like that described by one of the radicals in The Possessed, in which 10% of men are absolutely free, and 90% are absolute slaves.  That will also be the eventual result of any agenda, whether defined in terms of national security or planetary deliverance, that declares perpetual emergency and justifies an ever-increasing concentration of power in the name of preparedness and emergency response.

But the populist candidate who claims to speak for the “people” — against some political straw man such as big business or big government — has a long history. ~Michael Cohen

Perhaps I have missed something, but since when have real things that real voters have complaints against count as examples of “some political straw man”?  There is such a thing as big business, and there is such a thing as big government, and citizens have legitimate complaints with both.  That the populist might conceivably exaggerate the errors of either does not make his targets “straw men.”  An easy target for criticism is not a “political straw man.”  The populist may attribute ill intentions to agents of business and government that they do not have, but even if the story the populist tells is a fable it does not change the reality of the results of decisions taken by business and government.  The populist may simplify a complex phenomenon to an easily digestible narrative of some powerful few who have ushered in ruinous policies, but that doesn’t mean that some relatively powerful few haven’t actually ushered in ruinous policies resulting in some of the things the populist is describing.  Fundamentally, populism at its best attacks concentrations of wealth and power that are inimical to free government.  Populism becomes incoherent when it attacks one manifestation of concentrated wealth and power (multinationals) while pretending that consolidated, centralised government “works for the people,” just as attacks on centralised government ultimately get nowhere if they cannot be expanded to include a critique of corporate power.  That would be a broad and unifying message, and it is something that Obama (who is the actual subject of the article) is not using.

The real “political straw men” deployed most often in American politics are such demonised things as “isolationism” and “xenophobia.”  These are “straw men” because no one actually advocates either (non-interventionists aren’t really isolationists at all, and virtually no one in American history has been an actual isolationist, even if we sometimes allow the label to be used) and the labels work to make a policy position politically radioactive.  These are the pejorative descriptions by people who are caricaturing and demonising their opponents in foreign policy, trade and immigration debates.  Messrs. Bush and McCain have deployed them often over the last few years, defining everyone outside of their circle of political allies with one of these pejorative terms, and then proceeding to knock down the straw men they have set up with arguments that are very nearly as bad as this: “Some isolationists think that we should cede half our country to Bin Laden, but I think that is wrong,” or “Some xenophobes may want to drown all immigrants in the sea, but I think we’re a better country than that.”  Of course, it is the side of the debate that has the fewest good arguments that most often resorts to using these straw men, which is why the people allied with forces of concentrated power and wealth use them so very often.

For all the misty eyes, it is becoming commonplace to allege that he is somehow ‘lacking in substance’, too heavily dependent upon such vague notions as ‘hope’ and ‘unity’. ~Venetia Thompson

Thishas become commonplace because in his major addresses and his stump speeches, at least until very recently, he has been heavily dependent upon such vague notions of hope and unity and has not provided much in the way of content.  He also leaned heavily on his biography for a long time.  Yes, he gives policy speeches, and the people who know about those speeches’ content at all well can be numbered in the tens of thousands, not the millions.  Obama admirers complain that the media have done a poor job reporting on Obama’s policy views, not realising that this probably does him a huge favour.  

Close observers have been remarking for months that Obama is most inspiring and most effective as a candidate when he steers clear of details and specifics and fares less well in debate formats where these are necessary, which is probably why his campaign has smartly steered clear of details and specifics as much as possible.  He is, after all, currently defeating Ms. Wonk, so whatever he has been doing before now has worked, at least with the Democratic electorate.  Besides, the reality or even just the perception of a “lack of substance” and a well-regarded personality will take you far in American electoral politics (see McCain, John).  Incidentally, this is probably what bothers many conservatives the most about McCain–his detailed policy knowledge is quite poor, but he likes to strike media-friendly poses and so becomes a prominent co-sponsor of high-profile legislation of which most journalists approve. 

In one respect, this is very good news for Obama.  The knock that he “lacks substance” can easily be overcome, because it is both false and easily disproven.  The criticism that most of his supporters fans know next to nothing about his policy agenda is more effective, because it is both true and easily demonstrated by talking to Obama fans at random.  The larger problem comes when allegedly sympathetic pundits persuade voters to look past their first favourable impressions of Obama and see what policies he proposes, which is when the substance that these supposed friends of Obama want to emphasise becomes the weight that sinks his campaign.  My guess is that he isn’t going to lose because he, Othello-like, inspires resentment or jealousy among white men (Thompson’s article is just bizarre in its treatment of the entire question), but that he will lose, as I expect he will, when it becomes clear that his domestic proposals are very expensive, his foreign policy is risky and once his voting record becomes the subject of some real scrutiny for a change.  Having just spent the last seven years rolling snake eyes at the craps table of government with the Bush administration, the public is ultimately not going to “roll the dice,” as a certain former President put it, on someone who is even less experienced in an executive role and management than Bush was in 2000. 

When I have declared that Obama will probably lose to McCain, in contradiction of all available polling, I have received responses asking for some justification for this wacky view.  Below is my speculaton on what will happen. 

Obama is as intellectual as Bush is not, and this will be, to the endless frustration of academics and journalists everywhere, a liability with the general public.  It is ridiculous, really, but voters repeatedly opt for bonhomie over intelligence.  (McCain should be glad about this, since he has never been accused of an excess of the latter.)  Plus, perception of aloofness, an aloofness that Obama seems to have and seems to cultivate, is the ruin of presidential candidates.  Where Clinton played the wonk against Obama, he will be necessarily thrust into the role of wonk when faced with McCain, whose obliviousness to the details of policy, including the bills he sponsors, is legendary.  Unwittingly, Republicans have managed to select the one candidate as nominee who can compete with Obama in uttering vacuous platitudes and in winning the adoration of the media, while cunningly forcing Obama to adopt the role of relative policy expert against McCain’s impressive ignorance.  The turnaround will be sudden: Obama will overcome the “lack of substance” critique right around the time that McCain will win over all those undecided voters by dint of his personal history; Obama will then find himself running the more substantive of the two campaigns and it will undermine his candidacy.

Finally, when they find out what Obama has accomplished, voters may or may not find the legislation that he co-sponsored to be sensible, but even to speak of his “accomplishments” is to draw attention to the limited amount of time Obama has spent in the Senate.  If someone objects that he hasn’t accomplished that much in Washington–the place where he proposes to bring the parties together to promote major policy changes–his defenders will note that he hasn’t been in Washington very long, which must eventually make people question whether he could possibly do any of the things he proposes to do.

Rod points to a story about Michelle Obama’s Princeton senior thesis, which ties into something that Mickey Kaus was talking about in a recent bloggingheads, in which he applies to Mrs. Obama some speculation about the anger and insecurity created by affirmative action.  If I am reading the story right, the frustration expressed doesn’t come entirely from anxiety about preserving community solidarity, but might also stem from dissatisfaction that she was never really accepted on the basis of merit and felt the anxiety that comes from what Kaus called “affirmative action insecurity.”  Of course, more damaging to the Obama campaign than anything she says in the thesis or in most of her speeches is the growing perception that she feels resentful of or alienated from the majority of the country.  Once that perception sinks in, her unfav ratings will shoot up and will have a negative effect on Obama’s ratings as well.  Obviously, anything that puts a dent in the public’s favourable attitudes towards Obama and his “likeability” is particularly harmful to a candidate who has thrived to some significant degree because of his personality and “likeability.”

By way of the Obama campaign, Politicohas acquired access to the thesis and has uploaded the entire thing, so that you, too, can delve into the mind of a Princeton undergrad from the ’80s.  From what I have seen of it so far, there isn’t much outside of her opening remarks and conclusion that will cause anyone much alarm, and even these statements strike me as being rather unremarkable.  Then again, I don’t assume that my responses to this are at all representative. 

All of this thesis talk makes me wonder: what my senior thesis on Iconoclasm would tell people about me in another 15 years?  Probably not that much.

I appreciate Justin Raimondo’s smart comments in his latest column on my earlier Obama post, and I take his point that antiwar conservatives and libertarians shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Despite his cautious positioning over the last few years, Obama does oppose the war in Iraq and seems entirely serious when he says that he will bring it to an end.  That is a very desirable outcome, and indeed what I had been hoping, obviously unrealistically, that the new Democratic majority would begin doing successfully last year. 

My reservations about Obama come precisely from the focus on foreign policy and issues of war and peace that Mr. Raimondo quite rightly emphasises as central in this election and in our political system as a whole.  Obama’s domestic agenda does nothing for me, though I do find his use of economic nationalist rhetoric on trade intriguing, but if there is one thing that the last seven years has shown me it is that neither major party candidate is going to be offering a domestic policy agenda that I would find worthy of actually supporting, and so it is again.  There is certainly no “sentimental attachment to the GOP” in my case, unless disgust can be counted as a kind of sentimental attachment.  So what worries me about Obama? 

I remain wary of his broader foreign policy vision not simply because it theoretically may commit the United States to interventions throughout the world, which it will, but because Obama’s vaunted foreign policy judgement has clearly been lacking in almost every other case except for Iraq.  I did find it slightly gratifying that his remarks on Kosovo were not entirely the sort of shameless pro-Albanianism that I expect from Democratic candidates (Hacim Thaci was  a guest of honour at the 2004 convention, for goodness’ sake), but even so he remains fundamentally on the wrong side of that question.  To my mind, getting Lebanon wrong in the summer of 2006 is almost as bad as being wrong about Iraq, because Obama’s support for the Lebanon war as it was actually fought makes me doubt his ability to discern which wars are “dumb” and “rash,” to borrow the words from his famous 2002 address.  His remarks about sending forces into Pakistan, regardless of the Pakistani government’s consent, have had the bizarre effect of making McCain seem relatively more reasonable and restrained in the use of military force in that country.  His position on Iran is nearly as confrontational and dangerous as any, and he has made explicit calls to intervene in Darfur, which would presumably entail a deployment of American soldiers to the Sudan.  It isn’t just that he isn’t as anti-interventionist as I might like, but that he seems markedly more interventionist than the current administration and not much less so than McCain.  He has not elaborated on any ideas on Russia policy beyond the no-brainer of securing loose Soviet-era nukes, which strikes me as a glaring oversight, but possibly one that could be remedied.  His relative openness to employing diplomacy and a willingness to ease restrictions on travel to Cuba are two bright spots in what is otherwise a very grim picture. 

If it simply came down to Iraq, where McCain has always been wrong and Obama has, more or less, always been right, I could probably see my way to cheer some modest cheers for Obama, but it isn’t and can’t be just about Iraq, even as important as the war is.  Indeed, one thing Obama has right about Afghanistan and Pakistan is that that is the theater that is far more crucial for our strategic interests, but I have no confidence that Obama has any better grasp on what do with Pakistan than his future general election opponent.  He has been right that Washington has only had a “Musharraf policy” and not a Pakistan policy, but nothing he has said about Pakistan leads me to think that he has one, either.  Granted, on everything I have mentioned above, McCain is just as bad or worse, so I suppose I would prefer that Obama win given a choice between two frankly unpalatable and terrible options, but I cannot bring myself to cheer for him, much less to vote for him.  More worrying to me now is the possibility that Obama’s candidacy, which has been so often compared to a souffle, will collapse for one reason or another and drag down the public’s opposition to the war with it.  The Democrats ought to win this election in a walk, and the fact that the GOP is going to campaign explicitly on the war with a McCain nomination should make it even easier, but I simply don’t think Obama will win, which tends to dampen whatever cheering I might be willing to do.

Thanks again to Reihan for this very generous post.  A couple clarifications: my decentralist idea would entail at least having Kennan’s dozen independent countries, and preferably many, many more depending on their realistic viability, and they wouldn’t be doctrinaire “pacifist,” but might collaborate with their neighbours in a loose confederation much more like the original Confederation was before the usurpation constitutional convention in Philadelphia.  I wouldn’t insist that all these states all be agrarian, since half the genius of such decentralism is that they would not all pursue uniform economic and political goals, but I would see that as an optimal outcome.  Besides, identical regime types might not suit each state, so that would depend on the natural constitution of the inhabitants and their habits.