I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who’s terrified of Obama. ~Kevin Drum

Then they haven’t read his foreign policy addressescloselyenough.

Several times over the past few months I wondered why so many Catholics supported Romney.  I’m not sure I’m any closer to an answer, but if Douglas Kmiec is at all representative of Catholic Romney voters the explanation may simply be that they are very silly people.  There is something amusing about one of Romney’s advisors all but declaring for Obama in an article that comes out the day that reports come out that his former boss will be endorsing McCain (the Republican who routinely won the greatest pluralities of Catholic voters in almost every state for reasons that are equally obscure to me), but more entertaining still is watching a Romneyite go through any number of contortions to come up with unusually weak reasons to support anyone except McCain.  However, when it comes to political contortionism, Kmiec must have learned from the best, so his effort here is quite disappointing.

Consider his argument for Obama-as-Reagan:

Reagan liked to tell us he was proudest of his ability to make America feel good about itself. He did. Catholic sensibility tells me Obama wants it to deserve that feeling.

Actually, “Catholic sensibility” doesn’t tell him that–you can perceive this about Obama regardless of your religious sensibilities, since it is one of the most obvious elements of his campaign.  Kmiec then goes on to outline how relatively few Catholics seem to feel what seems to be the pro-Obama sensibility that he has:

But lately, Obama has been narrowing the gap, using the Catholic vote to vault to victory. In the Illinois primary, where Obama bested Clinton 65 percent to 33 percent, he attracted 48 percent of the Catholic vote. When Obama’s share of the Catholic vote drops, the races tighten: In still-undecided New Mexico, only 39 percent of Catholic voters went for Obama.

But he didn’t “use the Catholic vote” to win Illinois–he won Illinois because of his enormous advantages as Senator from Illinois, the strong backing of the Daley machine, and black and progressive voters in Chicago.  That is, he most likely won in Illinois despite his weakness with Catholics, rather like Huckabee wins on his home turf in the South in spite of his tremendous weakness with Catholics.  Where Catholics make up a larger proportion of the population (as they do in my home state), he struggles in the kind of caucus format in which he normally blows Clinton out of the water.  Of course, in New Mexico his problems are compounded by the plurality Hispanic population and the larger number of downscale voters in the state.

Actually less persuasive is Kmiec’s resort to Catholic teaching to rationalise what appears to be his support for Obama (or at least his refusal to support Romney’s former rivals).  Presumably he was applying the same standards when he chose to support Romney, who supports capital punishment and the war in Iraq, and yet now McCain and Huckabee are insufficiently pro-life to win him over.  But, gosh (as Romney might say), Obama sure is swell!  In Kmiec’s own words:

Beyond life issues, an audaciously hope-filled Democrat like Obama is a Catholic natural. Anyone seeking “liberty and justice for all” really can’t be satisfied with racially segregated public schools that don’t teach. And there’s something deeply hypocritical about being a nation of immigrants that won’t welcome any more of them. And that creation that God saw as good in Genesis? Well, even without seeing Al Gore melt those glaciers over and over again, Catholics chose Al to better steward a world beset with unnatural disasters. Climate change is driven by mindless consumption that devotes more ingenuity to securing golden parachutes than energy independence.

So, to recap, Kmiec used to work for the candidate who eagerly embraced the mantle of restrictionist and received the endorsement of Tancredo and who opposed cap-and-trade and Kyoto (all of which he must have found objectionable and wrong), but he might not support McCain, renowned champion of amnesty and these same regulatory regimes, because Obama is just too neat.

Concluding, Kmiec writes:

The launch of “Reaganites for Obama” might not be far behind.  We might not be there yet, but we’re getting close.   

It can’t say much for the article that the audience would have absolutely no better idea why this is the case at the conclusion than they did at the beginning.  As near as I can make out, the argument for such “Reaganites” to support Obama is that Obama is…not John McCain.  Now it is true that Obama is not McCain, but I’m still not clear on why that should make a “Reaganite” prefer Obama.

Jim Pinkerton, a senior Huckabee advisor, said the former Arkansas governor would carry on in spite of the count. “There’s the mathematics of these things, and there’s the metaphysics,” Pinkerton told Salon. ~Mike Madden

My view of Huckabee’s goals is here.  On the Virginia primary, Huckabee prevailed overwhelmingly in all the parts of the state where you would expect him to do well, and he even had some respectable showings in eastern Virginia where McCain was supposed to be strongest.  The trouble is that most Virginians don’t live in the places where Huckabee thrives–as in South Carolina, McCain succeeded in the regions with the most transplants from outside the state, while Huckabee prevailed with the native-born Southerners.  Huckabee’s apparent limitations electorally (he is the rural, Christian conservative candidate) were on display on Tuesday, as he could scarcely win any major urban areas except those, such as Roanoke and Lynchburg, where his natural constituencies were very large.  He was shut out of the eastern coastal cities, Richmond and the Washington suburbs, just as you might expect the perceived “very conservative” candidate to be.  The good news for Huckabee is that there will be many states that fit his ideal profile in the next few months, which could give him enough support to prevent McCain from winning outright.  The bad news is that most of them are in April and May.

Look out, kids–Vice President Rice is coming!  So says Nicholas von Hoffman, outlining the supposedly formidable features of Rice as a running mate.  Now I understand why Sullivan named an uncomplimentary award after him.  Wow.  Granted, we all make bad predictions (I make more than my share), but this one doesn’t pass the laugh test.  It’s so ridiculous that I have to assume that it’s an elaborate joke, since everyone knows that Rice is politically radioactive to much of the population and to important constituencies within the Republican Party.  It reminds me of suggestions that Tommy Franks should be considered as a running mate–it’s not going to happen, or if it did somehow occur it would be a disaster.  

Given that Scowcroft is an advisor to McCain, you could imagine how McCain might be hearing about Rice’s virtues, but then Scowcroft has been baffled by what happened to his protege once she entered the Bush administration and probably isn’t angling for her to become Vice President.  The priorities she pursued in the first term as NSA and then early in the second term at State have horrified the realists (and sane people everywhere), while her belated push for Israel-Palestine negotiations and other evidence of a more realist-oriented foreign policy in recent years have horrified and scandalised the hard-liners.  The point is that she has no natural constituency within the party, and so no power base, and her record as NSA is so spectacularly bad that it would allow the Democrats to fight the election over the mistakes made in the early years of the occupation, reminding the country of the massive incompetence of this administration.  It directly links the ’08 ticket to the old administration and makes it even harder for McCain to dissociate himself from Bush’s mistakes, and contrary to the analysis in the article it reassures nobody.  On the contrary it says that Bush loyalism will be rewarded, and that personal connections to the President count for more in advancing yourself in today’s Republican Party than any actual accomplishments in your career.  It would be an awesome endorsement of the cronyism at the heart of the Bush administration.  I can see why Democrats would want a Rice VP pick, since it would help them immensely, but it makes absolutely no sense for McCain to do this.  McCain is crazy, but he isn’t that out of it.  

This part was really too much:

They can attack Hillary’s experience claims as consisting of her being Bill’s wife. They can challenge her boast that she is a strong, independent woman and paint her as a weak, hopelessly-in-love woman under the spell of a man subject not only to “bimbo eruptions” but also eruptions of smarmy deals with shady business figures.

Right, and they will do that by nominating a Vice President whose career has depended lately on her personal relationship with the President and whose experience consists of being the President’s confidante/wife wannabe, and someone who is hopelessly under the spell of a man who led her to endorse one of the worst foreign policy agendas of modern times.

I took the “Huckabee will drop out once Romney does” view a couple weeks ago, which was obviously wrong, so I have completely missed what Huckabee has been trying to accomplish.  He is trying to rack up more delegates to become the candidate with the second-most delegates overall, but I think there is an impulse behind “giving the people a choice” that makes Huckabee and his campaign want to test the proposition of whether McCain can, in fact, win the nomination outright through contested primaries.  This isn’t just a way for Huckabee to gain status and prominence in the party, but possibly a way to try to deny McCain some of the 352 delegates he still needs.  It is very unlikely that Huckabee will succeed even in this blocking maneuver, but if there continues to be a strong backlash against McCain it is possible that he could fall short of the required number.  Through March 4, McCain cannot acquire as many delegates as he needs to end it (only 305 are at stake in Wisconsin and the March 4 states), so Huckabee can keep prolonging it after that for the sake of prolonging it and testing McCain’s ability to win in many of these other states in the Midwest and the South.  That requires him to win Texas and probably a couple other states as well, or else McCain will wrap things up very quickly after that regardless.  After March 4, except for the territorial and Puerto Rico votes, things theoretically become more more favourable for an anti-McCain effort: Mississippi, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Idaho are all likely to be good states for Huckabee, and Pennsylvania has a strong contingent of Christian conservatives as well.  Huckabee cannot win, but it is still conceivable that McCain might still not win.  For this to happen, obviously it would require over a dozen states to choose Huckabee knowing full well that he will not be the nominee.  Maybe the convention then chooses McCain anyway in exchange for concessions and pledges that he makes on the platform and on policy, or maybe it is thrown to someone else. 

Huckabee offers the anti-McCain forces an ideal champion in one sense: whether or not you actually like him or his views, he truly cannot become the nominee now no matter how many primaries and caucuses he wins, so supporting him is simply a way to express dissatisfaction with McCain.  Romney was a poor figure to rally around, since there was always the unpleasant reality that he might actually win the nomination.  The virtue of Huckabee’s resistance is the impossibility of his ultimate victory.

Far be it from me to advise John Edwards on anything, but it seems to me that if he’d like to retain even a smidgen of credibility (if he has that much right now) he has to endorse Obama.  The news that he is seriously considering a Clinton endorsement is remarkable and politically foolish.  This would be the equivalent of Romney endorsing Huckabee, and it would be met with the same shocked disbelief and laughter.  Only yesterday he was saying how unacceptable Clinton was as a “change” agent and all the rest of it, and then he is going to turn around and affirm that she is the best candidate?  No one will believe it, and the last several years he has spent building up his new progressive persona would be ruined instantly, and his admirers in the netroots and elsewhere would ridicule him.  Likewise, Romney couldn’t back Huckabee even if Huckabee had a chance of winning–he would not just make a mockery of all the criticisms he leveled during the campaign, but he would horrify and stun the movement figures who had started to embrace him as one of their own. 

In the dynamic of the three-way race, Edwards and Obama were natural allies and their respective bands of supporters perceived them as such.  Edwards was the former centrist doing his best progressive imitation, and in the process compelled everyone, including the actual progressive, Obama, to tack left.  The two of them clearly represented the challenge to Clinton from the left.  It is probably true that Clinton needs Edwards’ endorsement more than Obama does, but Edwards needs to back a winner and right now that isn’t looking like Clinton, despite her formidable advantages in several of the March 4 states.  Edwards cannot bring his voters over to Clinton simply by the fact of his endorsement (and many of them may have gravitated to her already)–the endorsement has to make sense, and from where I’m standing it makes no sense at all. 

He could simply wait, as I assume Romney is going to wait, until the nomination is sewn up and then declare his full support for the party’s candidate.  No one could fault him for that, and he would probably even win some plaudits for not having tried to block either candidate.  He misses his chance to be a “kingmaker,” but he has to be suffering from excess pride if he thinks that he is in the position to be a kingmaker.  On the other hand, if he endorses and it has a lamentable Gore effect on the endorsed candidate, not only will he have diminished his perceived influence on the Democratic race but might even be blamed for hurting his preferred candidate.   Best to lay low.

Ross is right that this proposed anti-Obama strategy is a loser, but there’s a larger problem with the proposal, and this is the habit of a remarkable number of observers on the right to assume that Iraq will either be irrelevant, a “wash” or could actually work to the GOP’s benefit.  The lack of imagination on domestic policy is striking, yes, but it is not quite as far out there as the idea that drawing attention to Obama’s support for withdrawal will hurt him with an electorate that wants our soldiers out of Iraq.  This seems to be based in the view that most Americans don’t want to withdraw from Iraq and, per McCain, don’t care whether we remain in Iraq indefinitely, which is as wrong as you can be.  As I have noted before, the “as long as it takes” position garners8% support (see page 31 of the poll).  Republicans may not be able to run away from Iraq with any credibility at this point, especially with McCain as the nominee, but they could make some meager effort to demonstrate that they see the folly in remaining there in perpetuity.  If the choice is Clinton and withdrawal within 18 months or so of inauguration or John “10,000 Years” McCain, huge numbers of Republicans and independents will not support the latter.  Obama may simply be too weak of a general election candidate to defeat McCain, even when he has an absurd view of the conflict.  If McCain adopts a potentially more realist-oriented position, endorses withdrawal in principle but rules out a rapid withdrawal he will probably do quite well.  If Republicans want to win, they have to limit the advantage the Democrats really do have on the war.  Continuing to pretend that an uncompromising position on the war is a political asset is a sure way to lose. 

Unfortunately, the only way that the war is going to end quickly and without endless recriminations at home is if majorities in both parties accept withdrawal as a legitimate goal.  The threat of another electoral repudiation may push Republicans in that direction.  Certainly, they will have an incredibly difficult time if they don’t begin acknowledging that most of the public is solidly against them.  They may be too locked in to their own justifications to adapt, in which case their defeat becomes that much more certain.

No he will not transform politics. He won’t abolish our problems. He won’t eliminate our enemies. He won’t disappear partisanship. That’s not the point. ~Andrew Sullivan

So, in other words, he lies to his audiences frequently when he is explaining the main rationale of his candidacy, or if he isn’t deceiving them he is not disabusing them of what you could call their false hopes.  But then Obama doesn’t believe in false hopes, so perhaps he thinks he doesn’t have to disabuse anyone of anything. 

Perhaps you will say that Obama doesn’t actually promise these things, but then why is it that so many people who listen to him think this is what he is offering?  Why do prominent supporters claim to believe the same thing?  For example:

“Barack is the best candidate to unite our country and transform our politics in the cause of progress,” said Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who was the first governor outside of Obama’s home state of Illinois to endorse the Illinois senator.

“Today, voters showed confidence in Barack’s ability to unite this country and transcend divisive Washington politics as usual,” he added. 

Transform!  Transcend!  Excelsior! 

Story after story reports that this is what he is offering:

Obama runs as a visionary who would transform politics by inspiring a broad new coalition united behind change.

Bloggers at his own campaign site say the same:

Hillary is running to change of parties in Washington, while Barack is running to transform the political system.

Finally, there is the man himself:

This election is about the past vs. the future. It’s about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today or whether we reach for a politics of common sense and innovation, a politics of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.

More to the point, even if Obama never explicitly made such promises his entire candidacy has now been identified with the promise of not just bipartisanship, but “post-partisanship,” whatever that might be, and the appeal of his candidacy to his fans is that he will accomplish these goals that have been set absurdly high by him and his supporters. 

This is why, incidentally, I can’t stand optimism.  Optimism is the creator of a thousand false hopes and the source of profound disillusionment and resentment when those hopes are not realised.  Few things are more dangerous to sober, responsible citizenship than movements that promise such transformation and transcendence in the political realm, because these things are not available in a realm governed by disparities of power.  It is the antithesis of pragmatism.  Ultimately, optimism is at the heart of every flawed modern ideology that believes the basic structures of human society and the inevitable factionalism within human polities are somehow mistakes that must be erased or overthrown.  The problem with optimism is that it is always and everywhere at war with reality.  It is also pits us against the future, as Prof. Dienstag argues in Pessimism:

Optimism makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectations, which means all future moments.  It is when we expect nothing from the future that we are free to experience it as it will be, rather than as a disappointment.

The Obama campaign is a giant expectation-generating machine, which is another way of saying that it will also generate enormous disappointment.  It is not just politically foolish to build up expectations so high, but it is actually the cause of future suffering.

Martin Wolf’s Financial Times article on Putin and Russia is not as truly awful as most Western commentary on these subjects, and unlike some of the more ridiculous Putin critics out there he acknowledges a couple of the mistakes of Western policy that aggravated the situation (while ignoring most of the mistakes that matter).  Fortunately, he does acknowledge that there is not a “new Cold War,” which is a marked improvement over most columns about Russia.  Of course, it’s true that Russia’s economic growth over the last nine years is not really the result of Putin’s presidency (the doubling and tripling of the price of oil in the last five years had something to do with it), but it is also true that their government has established relatively greater order compared with the ’90s and so has provided relatively better physical security as well as certainty for investors.  Except when it comes to the oil sector (which, I grant you, is a sizeable exception), investors are more secure in their property than they were.   

One of the persistent problems in Russia is the need for a consistent rule of law.  It appears at present as if Medvedev understands this, or at least understands that he must acknowledge it to reassure foreign investors:

A speech he gave last week, before representatives of the Kremlin-approved great and good, was music to moderate liberal ears. With a straight face, Mr Medvedev talked of the importance of pluralism, freedom and justice. Property rights and free media were essential to building democracy. And Russia must follow the rule of law. At present, he admitted, “Russia is the country of legal nihilism.”

Now there are hard-core Russophobes who are not interested in what Medvedev has to say, and they will declare that all of the above is just rhetorical nonsense.  It may be, but then I have never considered pursuing constructive relations with Russia to be contingent on these things, so it hasn’t been my main concern in thinking about our Russia policy.  If it isn’t nonsense, but represents a gesture towards reform, the Russophobes will find a Medvedev presidency very disconcerting, since it will become harder and harder to use Russian government abuses and excesses as pretexts for meddling and belligerency. 

Wolff is much less persuasive when he falls back on flawed terminology (whatever Russia is today, it isn’t an autocracy, as I have been saying for a long time) and the usual fearmongering:

Mr Putin then is a failure, not a success. But he is a dangerous failure. The regime he has created is unpredictable: nobody can know how the post-election duumvirate will work. But it is unlikely to provide sustained improvements in prosperity.

Of course, “the regime” doesn’t “provide” sustained improvements in prosperity now, so Wolff has ensured that one of his predictions will be proved right.  What he is implying, however, is much less likely: that the supposed unpredictability of the regime will create economic insecurity and weakness in the long-term.  The problem is that Wolf has now way of knowing whether the regime is actually an unstable “duumvirate” or is, in fact, going to run according to its proper structure with Medvedev as the real authority.  Once he holds the reins, Medvedev may surprise us in his willingness to ignore Putin and follow his own counsel, but whether he does or not the charge of unpredictability seems the hardest of all to believe.  If we look at the structure of the Russian state and the interests of the institutions that control it, we can predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy what the regime will do.  It will continue to seek greater influence in its near-abroad.  It will continue to wield energy as a diplomatic-cum-geopolitical weapon.  It will continue rebuilding and reinvesting in the Russian military, and it will in all likelihood continue to quash groups or centers of power that threaten to challenge the central government.  Alongside maintaining state control of energy firms, the Russian government will keep encouraging investment from abroad, building up its gold reserves, paying off any debts it still owes and taking no drastic actions that will drive capital out of the country.  The aims of populist authoritarian regimes are, contrary to a certain conventional view, easy to read.

Wolf proposes a course of action that is not so much foolish as it is futile:

The west must again form a concerted policy: it must resist efforts to divide westerners against themselves; it must insure itself against over-dependence on Russian energy; and it must make the price of revanchism high for Russia itself. But it must also repeat a powerful truth: the west is no enemy of the Russian people. On the contrary, nothing would be more desirable than for a vibrant and self-confident Russian democracy to take its place in the world of western values.

This assumes that “the West” has a unified set of interests with respect to Russia, which the second point on his list drives home: western Europe (like many parts of eastern Europe) is dependent on Russian energy, and America is not.  Washington has had the luxury of poking the Russians in the eye, and cannot possibly put together a unified Western policy towards Russia when it does not have to bear the consequences of confrontation.  Meanwhile, Europeans have less interest in McCain-esque hegemony in the Caucasus and sabre-rattling over South Ossetia (!), and they are interested in Georgia solely for its potential as a means for non-Russian pipelines connecting Central Asian supplies to Western markets without Russian involvement.  They do not care about the Caucasus as an outpost of the empire. 

Russia has shown little taste for anything that could be meaningfully called “revanchism.”  The term revanchism itself is meant to summon up spectres of Hitler and Mussolini, as the opening of Wolf’s article also sought to do, but it implies that there was something that was done to Russia deserving of revanche.  Remarkably absent from the entire article was the discussion of U.S. security and military policy in Europe and the Caucasus: the absurdity of possible NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, missile defense in central Europe, NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, and the backing of pro-Western lackeysdemocrats despots in their near-abroad.  However, in spite of provocation after provocation the actual “revanchist” actions of Russia have been negligible, so much so that one has to wonder what Wolf is talking about.  If the West is no enemy of the Russian people, perhaps “the West” should begin showing that by not taking actions that will be and are perceived as hostile and threatening.  One way to start doing that is by rejecting talk of a mythical Russian revanchism that must be met with stern responses and to start treating Russia as the valuable strategic ally that it should be.  Toning down the vilification of the government backed by 60-70% of the Russian people (the people with whom we have no quarrel) would be a good beginning.  Medvedev’s “election” would be an excellent opportunity to start rebuilding relations with Russia.  Over here, the best thing Americans could do to make sure that U.S. Russia policy does not become even worse in the near future is to make sure that John McCain gets nowhere near the Presidency.

Gilchrest’s defeat is discouraging, not least since he had Ron Paul’s endorsement, but I have to marvel at the Club for Growth’s enthusiasm for Pyrrhic victory in this case.  Certainly Gilchrest’s changed views on the war were not the only thing that his challenger used against him, but you have to wonder what the the Club is thinking when it ousts a Republican moderate (Gilchrest has a lifetime ACU of 61) from the district who is on the popular side of the war and replaces him with a pro-war tax-cutter who stands much less chance of keeping the seat in GOP hands come November.  In a cycle that seems to be trending Democratic overall, when the party already has dozens of open seats to defend, other seats are at risk and the NRCC has the wild notion of retaking seats lost in ’06, the Club has helped to ensure that there will be one more open seat to protect when the incumbent would likely have much more easily won re-election (Gilchrest received 68% of the vote in ’06).  The 1st District is not exactly prime Club territory–it is a closely divided district in party registration and leans only slightly Republican in general.  Whoever was responsible for selecting Gilchrest as a target for elimination was extremely short-sighted.