But what policies exactly? Mr Obama’s voting record in the Senate is one of the most left-wing of any Democrat. Even if he never voted for the Iraq war, his policy for dealing with that country now seems to amount to little more than pulling out quickly, convening a peace conference, inviting the Iranians and the Syrians along and hoping for the best. On the economy, his plans are more thought out, but he often tells people only that they deserve more money and more opportunities [bold mine-DL]. If one lesson from the wasted Bush years is that needless division is bad, another is that incompetence is perhaps even worse. A man who has never run any public body of any note is a risk, even if his campaign has been a model of discipline.

And the Obama phenomenon would not always be helpful, because it would raise expectations to undue heights [bold mine-DL]. Budgets do not magically cut themselves, even if both parties are in awe of the president; the Middle East will not heal, just because a president’s second name is Hussein. Choices will have to be made—and foes created even when there is no intention to do so. Indeed, something like that has already happened in his campaign. The post-racial candidate has ended up relying heavily on black votes (and in some places even highlighting the divide between Latinos and blacks).

None of this is to take away from Mr Obama’s achievement—or to imply that he could not rise to the challenges of the job in hand. But there is a sense in which he has hitherto had to jump over a lower bar than his main rivals have. For America’s sake (and the world’s), that bar should now be raised—or all kinds of brutal disappointment could follow. ~The Economist

This leader sums up a couple of important points that I was trying to make earlier: however many detailed plans he has, he typically refers to his proposals in the vaguest terms when he addresses crowds.  This last point about raising the bar is related to something implicit in the earlier post: for whatever reason, Obama has received something like a free pass for a long time from the media, and it is actually a disservice to his supporters if he is not tested and scrutinised a bit more intensively than he has been.  Whether or not Obama has a “glass jaw” as such, the only people who can take solace in the kid-glove treatment Obama has received are Republicans.

I can’t wait to actually know what it feels like to be proud of my President and not embarrassed by him. ~A Giddy Youth

In my 29 years, I have never felt proud of any President, and I truly cannot understand how a politician could make anyone feel giddy (except in the way that standing on the edge of a precipice might give you this feeling).  At Reagan and the elder Bush’s best moments, I found that I could respect the President, but then I was very young and impressionable.  Except for about a one-year period in Mr. Bush’s first term, I can’t remember even having that respect.  What would be a truly remarkable accomplishment for the next President would be if he could cause me to have respect for him.  I don’t think people should feel proud of their politicians–this is to ask and to give too much–but it certainly shouldn’t be too much to ask that they earn our respect.

Speeches don’t put food on the table. ~Hillary Clinton

While I know what Clinton means to say by this, it’s a bit rich for her to say this when one of the principal sources of her family’s income over the last eight years has been…Bill Clinton’s speechmaking.  Meanwhile, I think Mike Huckabee would also dissent from this claim, since he has been very explicit recently that making speeches does put food on his table (albeit low-cal, non-fat food, which barely qualifies).   

Then again, if you put food on the table, where will you put all of the options?

The 2/11 issue of the magazine is online.  Available online are the threeanti-McCainpieces that have been up for a while, plus Steve Sailer on affordable family formation and Peter Wood on D’Souza.

Sullivan is frustrated that more people don’t acknowledge Obama’s copious outpourings of wonkery.  There are two separate problems here.  There are apparently people who believe that Obama has no specific policy proposals, which is a ridiculous thing to believe and does reflect their inattention to Obama’s campaign.  Then there are people who believe that he does not use these policy proposals in many of his major speeches or on the stump, and that he and his admirers very consciously cultivate an image of the visionary.  That seems to be not only a defensible view, but a legitimate criticism of the style of the campaign.  I notice that some progressives remain underwhelmed by Obama for the same reason: rhetoric and persuasion are all very well, but they want it to be persuasion in the service of their politics, and they simply don’t see Obama doing that nearly enough to their satisfaction.    

Here is the full and correct quote from his DNC speech last year that I rephrased in another post: “We’ve had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we’ve had is a shortage of hope.”  The implication of that line is that plans are secondary or almost irrelevant, but, in fact, plans (and preferably good plans) are what distinguish the successful executive from the wistful hopemonger.  The point of this line of criticism is not that Obama has no ideas, but that his supporters do not embrace him because of his ideas, he doesn’t use his policy ideas to attract support and he doesn’t employ his considerable rhetorical skills to advance an agenda.  This is true to some extent of all successful candidates.  Part of this can be attributed to the sheer closeness of the Democratic candidates on policy questions, which makes differences in style and rhetoric seem more significant, but not most of it.  As I am reminded time and again, substantive policy campaigns fail, because most voters are not voting on policy, but are voting on sentiment, identity and almost anything else except policy.  But even by the standards of normal election year gasbaggery Obama stands out as exceptional in his preference for high-minded “uplift” over specifics.  Yes, he gives policy speeches, as he has done on a number of topics, and some of us have read or heard themandthenmadecriticalremarksaboutthose speeches, but on the whole that is not what Obama does.       

Those who have been following his campaign since last year know that he does have some specific proposals and has made them public long ago.  I tend to focus on candidates’ foreign policy positions, so I am best-versed in his proposals in this area.  In his address here in Chicago last year, his Foreign Affairs essay, in the debates and in his much-discussed remarks on Pakistan, he has been quite specific and generally quite horrifying.  No non-interventionist or realist voter could look at his foreign policy and rationally conclude that he is their candidate, but somehow he has become a tribune of many antiwar and realist voters.  What I find frustrating about Obama supporters is their desire to stress the international potential of Obama’s symbolism and rhetoric as part of the primary appeal of Obama, while casually ignoring or downplaying all those policy views on foreign policy that Obama has held that all but guarantee that an Obama administration would be virtually as unpopular abroad as the current one.  There simply is not all that much engagement with Obama’s views in this area of policy in particular.  One of the reasons for this may be that once his supporters looked closely at what he was proposing in foreign policy they would not be feeling nearly so inspired.  This is one part of the problem I have with Obama and Obamamania: the enthusiasm for the candidate is almost entirely detached from what the candidate proposes to do, and the assessments of his symbolic potential, whether domestically or internationally, essentially have to ignore Obama’s leftist politics and interventionist foreign policy (i.e., the substance of his views and record) to craft this notion of Obama as a unifying or conciliatory figure.

This post is a day late, but the message from Reihan’s new bloggingheads has lasting value: down with Valentine’s Day!  Reihan’s argument for this is, as you might expect, quite unusual. 

Also, the discussion about modern marriage that follows is very worthwhile.

The fourth Indiana Jones film preview is now available for viewing, which reminds me that I have been hearing stories about another Indiana Jones sequel for at least twelve or thirteen years.  It seemed like a bad idea back then, too.  Here’s the problem: even if they make a reasonably good movie, they will never be able to match the expectations of the audience, and they cannot possibly top The Last Crusade.  At the end of Last Crusade, you had them literally riding off into the sunset, and before that you had Sean Connery stealing the show the entire time.  You cannot improve on this.  Besides, you’d think after the spectacle of the painfully bad (and badly written) Star Wars prequels that George Lucas would have learned that he shouldn’t try to recapture the magic of the original films.  Then again, I suppose millions of people will go to see it and he will make huge piles of money, which is why they’re doing it.

Therein, the irony to Ramesh’s reference to the Miers episode, as it illustrates the proximate cause of the disaffection with Senator McCain and the possible attractiveness of Senator Obama to Reagan Democrats, Catholics, and I daresay even run-of-the-mill conservatives: the patience to give a Bush sequel yet more “benefit of the doubt” is exhausted. Frankly, many of us who answered Reagan’s call and came to Washington are tired of having only a theoretical commitment to budgetary restraint, limited government, the importance of ensuring the economic well-being of average families, and the lack of measurable progress on respect for life. ~Douglas Kmiec

Okay, I suppose I see Kmiec’s point, which is that Bushism has ignored or betrayed all of the things mentioned above and McCain represents a continuation of the Bush administration.  That is all correct.  Does it make any sense, then, to talk up the virtues of someone who has no theoretical commitment to budgetary restraint, limited government or respect for life, and who makes dubious proposals for “ensuring the economic well-being of average families”?  More to the point, did it make any sense for him to work for the Romney campaign, when his entire candidacy was based on “only a theoretical commitment” to all of the things Kmiec finds important?  If many Catholics find McCain to be on the wrong side of the war, how could they have found Romney to be any different?  If many Catholics find McCain to be on the wrong side of the war, how can they indulge themselves in sympathy or support for Obama when he openly supported the bombardment of Lebanon?  Kmiec’s arguments against McCain all make a certain amount of sense, but they work just as well against the candidate he supported and the one whom he now seems to be boosting.

Buried in Tuesday’s defeat of nine-term incumbent Wayne Gilchrest is a message that should be heeded by incumbents everywhere. You must earn the support of the people you represent. When Gilchrest was first elected, incumbents were considered nearly unbeatable. But during the 18 years he served in Washington, the world changed and he failed to change with it. The change is not Fox News, YouTube and text messaging. They are symptoms of the change. The real change is that elected officials can be held more accountable. And if you forget this lesson, someone will remind you. ~Tom Blakely (Andy Harris’ campaign consultant)

Let’s be clear here–Gilchrest lost a three-way primary by nine points because of intra-party fratricide spurred on by the Club for Growth and pro-war Republicans.  In 2006 Gilchrest was re-elected with 68% of the vote in a bad year for Republicans, and the only thing that changed between then and now was his vote on withdrawal from Iraq.  The main issue where Gilchrest differed from his Republican constituents was the war, and the people who wept over the “purge” of Joe Lieberman in the Senate primary in ’06 had no problem with a similar litmus test on the other side of the aisle.  This must be one of the few times that an incumbent was voted out in a primary because he was on the popular side of an issue state- and nationwide.  There may have been local issues that have escaped the notice of outside observers, but I would trust Mr. Blakely’s assessment of this race about as much as I trust Dan Gerstein explaining the flaws of Ned Lamont.

“We [the Clinton campaign] basically ceded every one of these small red states that he has racked up victories in. And the reason that he has racked up victories at this level isn’t because he was so much more well received, or because his message was any better; it was because we didn’t put any resources in there. We weren’t campaigning there. We didn’t have anybody in Utah, in Idaho, in the Dakotas. In Alaska.” ~New York Observer

It’s been interesting to watch as reporters and bloggers (including myself) concluded that there was something deficient in Romney’s campaign because he kept winning uncontested races, caucuses and primaries in states where he had natural advantages or personal connections, but many of the same people treat Obama’s rather similar pattern of wins as meaningful evidence of his campaign’s increasing strength and proof that Clinton is slipping and on the verge of collapse.  One obvious reason for the different treatment is that very few people wanted Romney to win and perceived everything he did, even his victories, as evidence of his weakness as a candidate, while many reporters and bloggers very clearly want Obama to prevail over Clinton. 

But the argument for Obama doesn’t make much sense: how can the candidate who mostly wins uncontested caucuses be considered the leading candidate in the field?  This isn’t a question of whether the states he has won “count” or not, but whether the victories there are all that meaningful when he faced no serious opposition there.  Look at the delegate count, someone will say.  Well, all right, but for several weeks Romney was the undisputed delegate leader, but that had been based mostly on his success in two uncontested Western caucuses.  Many people noted that Romney did best in the Mountain West, which seemed to make him the regional “Western” candidate, but where he really performed well was in those states where the other campaigns (except Ron Paul’s, which also did well out there) were hardly present.  The profile of Romney victories made it clear that he cannot win seriously contested primaries, just as Huckabee’s victories and competitive showings make it clear that he doesn’t fare well where there is not a strong concentration of conservative Christian and evangelical voters.  Obama’s victories are remarkably like Romney’s in their character and even their location (with a couple exceptions).  Even if Romney had not had such a large delegate deficit, he would have had to recognise that he was going to have relatively few chances to win in the next three months.  With the possible exception of Wisconsin, Obama is looking forward to a similar scenario, and Wisconsin is by no means guaranteed for him.  It is, of course, the p.r. system that the Democrats have that has made it as close as it is, and which promises to keep it closer than it would be, and it is making Obama appear much more viable than he probably is. 

All that said, Clinton needs to win Wisconsin to end her drought and put a stop to talk of her imminent collapse.