Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation. ~Michelle Obama

Many people have commented on this line already, but let me just add a few remarks.  In one sense, this makes sense, inasmuch as a well-ordered polity will flourish only when the citizens have well-ordered souls (that was and remains one of the original themes of this blog, hence the name), but where this is deeply, terribly misguided is the implication that a politician has something to do with this “soul-fixing.”  To the extent that this statement shows a recognition that the state cannot “solve” problems that derive from people’s ingrained habits, and that lasting political change derives from the reform of habits and that human flourishing in politics broadly defined depends on a sane ethical life, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this statement.  Qualified in the right way, I might say something similar in terms of disordered passions.  However, I have absolutely no confidence that this is what Mrs. Obama meant.  Taken together with her and her husband’s other remarks over the months, it seems clear that this statement implies that Obama’s “new politics” is the cure for what ails your soul, which is as worrisome as it is silly, or rather it is worrisome because it is so silly, yet it is being taken very seriously by millions of people. 

As Christians, we should acknowledge that the souls of all people everywhere are broken, and we should understand that they will not be healed by activism nor by any secular hopes, because just as the earthly powers cannot touch the soul to control it they are equally incapable of providing wholeness and redemption.

Here’s the rub: As anyone who has listened to Sen. Obama knows [bold mine-DL], the substance of policy positions takes a decided back seat to the more ephemeral ideas of hope and inspiration when he addresses voters. The basic Obama argument is that America can solve its problems, that the country can transcend partisan divides, that Washington can overcome gridlock and that he, as a new leader unbound by the debates of the past 20 years, is the one who can make all those things happen. ~Gerald Seib

As one of the commenters has observed, and as I was arguingrecently, this is exactly right.  In her recent remarks, Michelle Obama said that “hope is making a comeback.”  As I was driving to work this morning, I thought about that line and then asked out loud, “What does that even mean?”  Presumably there is alwayshope, or so the elpidolaters would tell you, so how can hope make a comeback if it has always been here?  The Obamas have saying things like this for over a year and they expect people to regard such statements as serious. 

Along the same lines, Brooks beat me to the punch with his column today:

For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we’ve been here all along?

I prefer His Great Expectancy myself, but you get the idea.  Come to think of it, since the motto of the cultglorious people’s revolution campaign is “Yes, We Can,” doesn’t there come a time when someone has to say, “Yes, But Should We?”  We’ve all heard the old saw that having the power to do something does not imply that we should do something.  Indeed, the emphasis on being able to do something is strange.  No one really doubts that “we can” do many of the things that Obama talks about, but what is not at all clear in many cases is whether we ought to do them.  It’s as if this sheer potency is what matters for this campaign, as if to answer the question why by saying, “Because We Can.” 

There is another problem.  Obama risks doing to the word and concept hope what Mr. Bush has done to “freedom,” which is to rip it out of any meaningful context, deprive it of its proper meaning, set it up as an idol and then make terrible sacrifices to it.  Politicians use the idea of the future and hopeful rhetoric to justify all manner of abuses and demand concessions from citizens.  It’s not just that we shouldn’t trust them (though we shouldn’t), but that this kind of rhetoric feeds and builds ever-rising expectations.  These expectations not only will not be met, but cannot be met, because some of the things Obama promises (e.g., transcending partisanship) are structurally impossible and also undesirable in an adversarial, nominally representative system.  It sets up Obama for inevitable failure on his own terms, as his fans will soon turn on him and decry him as a “sell-out” the moment that he does not somehow remake the political fabric of America, and it offers America at least four years of a different kind of “distracting politics,” one that will continually take us down blind alleys of optimistic overkill.  As I have said before, you can advance some kind of “reform” agenda, or you can work fruitlessly to reorganise the political system.  No one can realistically do both, at least not legally, and if Obama chooses to pursue the latter course his administration would accomplish little or nothing.  From my perspective, that might be the best outcome available coming out of this election, but it will yield such intense disappointment that the millions of people who have been riding on their hope high for all this time will crash and become the most embittered ex-optimists you have ever seen.  

This idea of “post-partisanship” is itself so very strange, since this is not really what most Americans want.  The thing that frustrates independents and many partisans alike is not a lack of unity, but the deadening, stifling consensus of the parties in ways are profoundly unrepresentative of most citizens.  On many major policies, we have two factions that seem more interested in collaborating with each other against us than we have representatives serving our interests–that is the frustrating thing that many of us would like to see ended.

But they found that as the weeks went on, they needed more and purer hope-injections just to preserve the rush. ~David Brooks

This makes sense to me: the optimist as the psychological equivalent of a heroin addict.

Sophisticated commentary now notes the growing creepiness of the Obama campaign: Its aversion to substantive policy discussions. ~Froma Harrop

Naturally, Obama fans (and I do mean fans, not supporters) will dispute the label “sophisticated,” since the truly sophisticated understand Obama’s ability to move outside of linear time and reverse entropy.  They will say, “Haven’t you read his policy booklet?  It’s amazing!  Even his policy booklet will reunite America!”  They will also insist that the people saying this about Obama’s campaign just haven’t looked closely enough, but how is it that so many observers, regardless of their politics or stake in the Democratic race, keep coming up with the same conclusion? 

P.S.  I would note that this Harrop column supports my guess that Clinton might perform reasonably well against McCain, but Obama would fail.  I admit that it hadn’t occurred to me that his happy hopemonger routine would be one of the causes, but the result will be the same.

Update: David Brooks makes use of the same word Harrop used to describe Obama: “vaporous.”

Not to beat this into the ground, but on a second reading Ross’ concluding remarks in his post on McCain caught my attention:

But, um, Senator McCain, you did notice that Ron Paul topped out at about 5-10 percent of the vote, didn’t you?  And that every other candidate in the race (allowing for certain variations) took roughly the same foreign-policy line as you? Doesn’t that at the very least suggest that there might be more pressing battles awaiting a politician looking to reinvent the Republican Party than a crusade against the isolationist menace? Please? 

Here’s some speculation for you: maybe McCain’s concern isn’t so much about the people who voted for Paul as it is about the unbelievably large numbers of antiwar voters who voted for McCain in the primaries.  Perhaps McCain noticed this, even if his pro-war admirers ignored it, and became anxious about all these antiwar McCainiacs, making him think that beating back the brushfires of “isolationism” was one of his major tasks.  Okay, probably not.  More likely it derived from McCain’s annoyance at being asked how long American forces would be in Iraq (the origin of his “100 years” remark).  Perhaps McCain has become so geared towards intervention and U.S. power projection that even mere questions about bringing our forces back at some point in the future strike him as evidence of the rise of “Fortress America” politics.  If that is the line he wants to take, he may find that when he begins rattling off the list of all the places where we have soldiers and bases he will eventually encounter the rejoinder, “Why do we still have soldiers in all these other countries, too?”  This has struck me as one of the main weaknesses of the argument for permanent bases in Iraq: likening a continued presence in Iraq to  bases in Germany, South Korea and Kuwait draws attention to just how unnecessary those deployments are as well. 

Another possibility is that McCain found the presence of even one antiwar candidate in the GOP field deeply troubling.  In a party in which even Sam Brownback was found to be lacking in sufficient zeal for the war in Iraq, because he dared question certain aspects of the “surge,” the idea that there was any antiwar constituency was probably very shocking to McCain.  Perhaps his thinking is this: even one extreme long-shot House member garnering 10% of the vote is one antiwar candidate too many, and so perhaps he views Paul’s candidacy as evidence of “isolationism” that has to be squashed before it can grow.  Who knows?  The good news is that this revelation tells us that McCain’s political judgement is terrible, which means that he will probably make a terrible VP selection and lose the general election by a large margin.

Another point: according to that 2007 Fabrizio survey I like to come back to every so often, approximately 8% of Republicans are the so-called “Fortress America” sort and 8% are the so-called “Free Marketeers,” but the latter have vastly outsized influence within the party despite their relatively small numbers and the “Fortress America” voters have even less influence than their nominal one-tenth of the party would suggest.  If these different parts of the coalition were representing proportionately in Congress, you might have 15 antiwar Republican members of the House rather than a handful.  It is likely that these two groups made up the core of Ron Paul’s support among Republicans (his support among independent voters was typically as great if not greater), which means a couple of things: there was always something of a built-in ceiling within the GOP for a campaign focused heavily on the war and foreign policy plus a strong small-government, spending-cutting message, which Paul reached or nearly reached in many primaries, and the power of “isolationism” within the party that McCain thinks he has found was never very great.  What should worry McCain is that three or four times as many Republicans oppose the war as belong to this so-called “Fortress America” type of Republicanism, which means that many of his strongest supporters are at odds with him over the main issue of his campaign.

Regarding McCain’s focus on the “real threat” of “isolationists,” I wanted to add a few more observations.  First, as many loyal Paul supporters will tell you, Rep. Paul eschews the label “isolationist” and has made reasonably persuasivearguments that defenders of militarism and economic sanctions policies represent real isolationism in practice.  Second, John McCain has no idea what he’s talking about when he speaks about “isolationism.”  In this he bears a strong resemblance to Michael Gerson.  Personally, I find the label “isolationist” annoying, because of its origins as an internationalist slur.  I prefer non-interventionist if we have to give it a technical label.  According to the foreign policy paradigms that split U.S. foreign policy thought into four traditions, we are the Jeffersonians, and that seems to me to be a much more agreeable label.

From that same Ryan Lizza article:

Factor has reason to be concerned. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, McCain called for the kind of costly nation-building capacity that makes libertarians shudder, arguing that the United States should “energize and expand our postconflict reconstruction capabilities” and create a “deployable police force” that would prop up collapsing states. Echoing Norquist’s book, Factor insisted that the war in Iraq is not a unifying issue for the right. He told me, “The bottom line is that to the base of the Party the war isn’t Communism—to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, Communism was a rallying point. This is not like that.”

This is true.  There was almost unanimous consensus about the Soviet threat and about the appropriate response to it, and there simply isn’t the same degree of agreement on Iraq.  The glue of anticommunism was far stronger and more powerful, for both good and ill, than support for the Iraq war taken in isolation.  The GOP has become by and large a party defined by the war, and McCain’s nomination will confirm that, but it has also been the last five years that have seen the GOP go from an ascendant, would-be majority party to its current miserable state.  That is one reason why, of course, supporters of the Iraq war have made tremendous, completely unpersuasive efforts to link Iraq to a broader anti-jihadist effort, because I think that even they know that an open-ended nation-building project in the Near East will lose the support of many of the American nationalists who make up the ranks of the party.  Even general anti-jihadism doesn’t seem to succeed in unifying Republicans in quite the same way that the Cold War did, probably because enough Republicans and conservatives understand that the threat from jihadis, while real and grave, will never be on the same scale as the Soviet threat and that attempts to claim that they are comparable strain credulity.  The GOP’s problem is that no other single issue unites as many factions around McCain as the war, but even the war is insufficient as a rallying cry to unite the entire party, since at least one third of the party openly opposes the war.

Instead of battling the corporate wing of his party, McCain has decided that it’s the isolationists—a group that he defines broadly, and which includes the left and the right—who are the real threat. ~Ryan Lizza 

One of the more remarkable things about this is that McCain seems to have no intention of governing as Eisenhower did.  Unlike Eisenhower, he is decidedly not going to settle for an end to the war in Iraq.  He wants to play Eisenhower since that would mean that he wins the election, but politically he is in the unhappy position of Stevenson, saddled with the legacy of a corrupt administration and an unpopular war.  If this is the equivalent of 1952, McCain is on the wrong side of the major foreign policy issue of the day and in the wrong party.  Regardless, can you see McCain acting to stop an allied war effort as Eisenhower did in the Suez crisis?  Of course you can’t, because McCain is certainly no Eisenhower.   

Ross discusses McCain’s apparent fixation with Republican “isolationists” and notes that this is a rather, shall we say, eccentric assessment of the state of the GOP.  This is right–speaking as an “isolationist,” if we must use that word, I’m afraid I don’t see the great political power we are supposed to wield.  In the young cohorts of Ron Paul supporters, I see some potential for the future, but in the here and now it’s just silly.  This reminds me of the buzz from a couple of years ago about a so-called “paleo moment,” which was correct in the sense that public opinion was swinging in a paleo direction on trade and immigration and completely ridiculous as a description of the actual state of play in Washington. 

Swatting at “isolationists” and “protectionists” is what proponents of unpopular and/or discredited foreign and trade policies are often reduced to doing, since their arguments are usually otherwise pretty shaky and because it offers the public the choice of either enduring the status quo or adopting the most radical critiques of the establishment.  Confronted with this choice, the public will tend to stick with the horrible policies they know than take a chance on what is supposed to be the only alternative, which represents too much of a sudden change for most people to want to support.  (People who prattle about how they want “change” don’t really want that much change–they want modest tweaking of the system that exists, and style themselves visionary because of this.)  But, in fact, the actual, electorally viable alternatives on offer are anything but “isolationist” and “protectionist,” much to the dismay of those of us sympathetic to one or both of these views.  

I have a couple of ideas about what McCain is doing here: he could be, like Bush, recklessly tarring his opposition, any opposition, as “isolationist” as a way of undermining them, or possibly conjuring up a mythical political foe that he can then easily overcome (since it barely exists) and claim credit for “saving” the party from what he is portraying as a dangerous resurgence of Taftism.  But this is where I am at a loss–what prominent figures in the GOP or in the Democratic Party actually represent anything that could reasonably be defined as “isolationism”?  I understand that the key to McCain’s position here is to define “isolationism” unreasonably, but even so the entire thing seems untenable, and more to the point unnecessary.  It’s as if the Tories ran an election campaign declaring their firm opposition to nationalising industry, when no one who is likely to be elected is going to do any such thing.  For his next trick, McCain can take a bold stand against the powerful forces that are trying to abolish the Federal Reserve.

P.S. This makes clear that Ron Paul’s decision not to run on a third party ticket is a wise one, since McCain and his supporters would be able to explain away any loss in November as the product of Paul’s presence in the race and would not have to be held to account for the role their own disastrous foreign policy has played in wrecking the GOP.  Perversely, a Paul third party run at this point would feed into McCain’s delusions about the “isolationist threat” and ensure that the GOP binds itself ever more closely to reckless interventionism in the future.  The GOP may remain hitched to these terrible ideas for many years to come, but it is unfortunately more likely to remain so if it can scapegoat its electoral defeat in November on the “isolationists” who regrettably do not pose much of a political threat.

What is so hard to understand is why this Russian leader has chosen the route of autocracy over the peaceful democracy so available to him as an outgrowth of his popularity. Why return to the totalitarian fabric of the Soviet Union? The answer is in the Russian predilection for strong leadership as a counter to a national paranoia. ~George Wittman

What else could we expect from an old member of the Committee on the Present Danger?  Reviving Cold War era fears is the stock in trade of such people.  These questions are absurd, and the national psychoanalysis isn’t much better.  Every modern nation is susceptible to the appeal of a strong leader as a counter to national paranoia about foreign threats–that’s why those who want greater power in the executive are always exaggerating threats and stirring up the public against various official enemies.  There is nothing particularly Russian about this.  This is how people everywhere respond to state propaganda, and it is also how they respond to genuine insecurity.  The Wittmans of the world would like us to ignore our part in contributing to Russian fears and anxieties and presumably do even more to cause them more worry, which will in turn guarantee increasingly authoritarian presidents in Russia.  The Kremlin’s best friends are not those who argue for a sober and rational approach to Russia policy (i.e., the “apologists”), but those who provide the Kremlin numerous pretexts to consolidate more power in fewer hands at home and adopt confrontational positions abroad.  If there are elements in the Russian government that thrive on building up the West as the enemy, the Westerners who are only too eager to oblige in that role are their enablers.  Naturally, leave it to hysterics talking about “the new god-king of Russia” to lecture other people about being irresponsible on national security!

Putin hasn’t chosen the route of autocracy, and people who keep using this word to describe the Russian government show that they haven’t a clue what autocracy is.  Autocrats don’t hand over power to successors, even hand-picked ones, and then settle for being prime minister.  Autocrats stay in power until they die or can hand over the reins to their offspring.  Autocrats also rule on their own, and not as part of an extensive bureaucratic and formally constitutional apparatus.  Yes, Putin is an authoritarian populist, not a liberal democrat, but we already knew that.  Talk of “the totalitarian fabric of the Soviet Union” is the sort of ludicrous American national paranoia that seems to be only too muchin voguethese days.  It is an insult to the people who suffered under the actual totalitarianism of the USSR to compare what is happening today to that.

Politicians who offer hope win elections. Despite his age, John McCain offers an alternative Republican programme. He is not a neo-Conservative and would be very unlike George Bush. ~William Rees-Mogg

If McCain is not a “neo-Conservative,” he is certainly the favourite of neoconservatives and has been for at least ten years.  As we all know, The Weekly Standard endorsed him over Bush in 2000 and their editors and contributors have not exactly made a secret of their interest in his candidacy.  In his hostility to Russia and his reflexive support for military campaigns, McCain is arguably more on board with neoconservative foreign policy ideas than Bush has been.  The idea that he represents some break with the current administration is odd, and I don’t understand how anyone can keep saying it with a straight face.  People keep repeating this claim, as if saying it were enough to make it true, but if there is one thing McCain represents it is continuity with the worst of the Bush administration.