This republic has its ample tasks. If we put an end to false economics which lure humanity to utter chaos, ours will be the commanding example of world leadership today. If we can prove a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded. ~Warren Harding, c. 1920

David Frum extols the virtues of the Mugwumps, carefully excluding any mention of their principled anti-imperialism.  Indeed, if the modern GOP would like to regain some credibility with the general public on foreign policy they could do worse than to imitate that brand of Republicanism.  That is not, of course, what Frum has in mind, which is yet another reason to consider it.

At the risk of over-thinking something that obviously epitomises the unintellectual nature of much of CPAC, it occurs to me that the “I’d rather be waterboarded than vote for McCain” T-shirt (so stylishly modeled by Michael in the photo shown here) makes no sense from the perspective of anyone who didn’t buy it as a joke.  To listen to many of the people most furious with McCain, particularly relating to the treatment of detainees, his objections to waterboarding are misguided because, according to them, waterboarding isn’t torture (it’s just trickling some water down someone’s nose–no big deal!).  But if it isn’t all that bad, it doesn’t say much about your contempt for McCain that you would rather be waterboarded than vote for him.  Then again, perhaps the best thing about the phrase is that it works for both crazy and sane audiences: for the true believers, waterboarding isn’t torture, but voting for McCain would be, while for the rest of us voting for McCain might seem even worse than actual torture.

Via Yglesias, a great mock-up of a “Yes, We Can”-style video for McCain.

Paul Krugman’s hostility to Obama’s campaign, which makes my opposition seem mild, has now entered the realm of self-parody.  But the reference to “Nixonland” did remind me of Reihan’s first bloggingheads appearance, in which he described Nixon as the “hidden figure behind the 2008 election” and argued that it was actually Hillary Clinton who was the Nixonian in the Democratic race in terms of her economic policy proposals.  Returning to Krugman, it is rather strange for him to complain about a politics characterised by “racism, misogyny and character assassination” while using this complaint to defend the Clintons.  It’s the last one in particular that is striking, since there are few operations more interested in character assassination than theirs.

One of my final parting shots at Mitt Romney can be found here.

If speculating about electability is a mug’s game, speculating about electabilityon the basis of primary and especially caucus wins is simple insanity.  Every campaign promotes this speculation, but it is very misleading to make any claims for the general election based on such outcomes.  After all, Bush was destroyed in New Hampshire in 2000 by John McCain, but he then carried that state in the general against Gore.  His relative weakness with independents against McCain was obviously irrelevant when he had to run against Gore.  Florida, meanwhile, was a Bush romp in the primaries and was not, to put it mildly, nearly so easily won in November.  Likewise, McCain has won New Hampshire twice in primary season, but I don’t think any sane strategist believes New Hampshire will vote Republican in November, McCain or no McCain.  So when McCain talks rubbish about being competitive in New York in the fall, or Mark Penn blathers about competitiveness in “swing constituencies,” or Obama fans become excited because their man won an Idaho caucus, we should acknowledge this as nothing more than very unpersuasive spin.  It is interesting that Obama has won a lot of caucuses and relatively few primaries (except where he has a certain natural demographic advantage), which we might call the political Mitt Romney Disease.  National polling shows Obama as the more competitive Democratic candidate nationwide, while the same polling showed Romney as a hopeless disaster, so there may be no relationship between electability and reliance on caucuses.  Still, I would suggest that if the nominating contests tell us anything about the general they may tell us that the candidate who relies more heavily on caucuses is probably the one who excites and mobilises activists and not the one who wins over large swathes of the electorate.  But this is really every bit as unreliable as the national polling of candidates about whom most voters know nothing.

Yglesias challenges the criticism that Obama is not wonkish or detail-oriented enough, and makes one of the better arguments on this point that I’ve seen:

Unlike dynasts like George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton or ex-veeps like George H.W. Bush or Al Gore, Obama hasn’t had the luxury of simply inheriting a vast apparatus by default, he’s had to build it himself. That’s hard to do if experts come away from talking with you worried that you don’t know what you’re talking about.  

I have criticisedObamain these terms, particularly with respect to the speeches that everyone else seems to find so deeply stirring and impressive, noting that these speeches are largely devoid of content.  Arguably, Obama can be wonkish and detail-oriented, and he has demonstrated some of this during the debates.  Yet many observers have noticed that Obama can either be inspiring in his gaseous, empty hopemongering in his major speeches or he can be more substantive and rather dull in his delivery on the stump or in a debate.  You might say that different venues require different kinds of rhetoric, and different occasions call for different kinds of answers, which may be true, but I think what Yglesias misses is that the criticism he is answering is not aimed at Obama‘s intelligence and knowledge as much as it is at the intelligence and standards of Obama’s audience.  That is, Obama is rallying millions of people behind him not on the strength or quality of his policy ideas, about which many of his supporters haven’t the first clue, but by throwing out insubstantial boilerplate about change and transformation.  It is Obama the orator, not Obama the former law school professor, who has made the campaign the success that it is, so while Obama may be personally well-versed in policy details he does best as a candidate and secures the level of support he does through oratory that “uplifts” and actually says very little.  You could say that this is true of most supporters of all candidates, but the degree to which Obama wins over voters through sheer “uplift” is so much greater that it stands out as unique in this cycle.   

Ultimately, whether or not he is capable of being wonkish is almost beside the point, and it may be a liability for national candidates, especially “change” candidates, to appear to be too familiar with the inner workings of the government apparatus.  Behind my criticism of Obama’s largely content-free speeches is the assumption that if most people heard his actual policy addresses they would run quickly in the other direction.  (The people who pay attention to the substance of his foreign policy views and feel drawn to him are some of the most hawkish interventionists; his antiwar supporters’ skins would crawl if they realised how popular he is with such people.)  Obama remains as popular and appealing as he is because most people who have heard him speak have never heard him say much about what he would do concretely (except maybe end the war in Iraq, which most Americans support).  Those of us who have looked at what he actually says on non-Iraq foreign policy, for instance, see that he can be reasonably well-informed and yet come to some absolutely dreadful conclusions.    

P.S.  Here is Obama’s policy booklet, which is littered with the verbs “require” and “ensure,” which are other ways of saying, “imposing additional mandates and regulations.”  You’ll notice that he doesn’t talk about these things in his speeches, many of which would raise costs in the very areas where he proposes to reduce them.  Meanwhile, “ensuring” that health care is made more affordable implies either limiting access (which Obama rules out) or increasing federal spending.  For all of the alleged wonkishness of his “blueprint,” I see no explanations of how to pay for any of this, and he certainly won’t include that in his speeches.  On trade policy, he becomes ever more vague: “Obama believes that NAFTA and its potential were oversold to the American people. Obama will work with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to fix NAFTA so that it works for American workers.”  But if he is against CAFTA entirely, which he says he still is, how can NAFTA be fixed to meet this criterion?  Obama may have some idea what he means by this, but we have no more clue about it than when we started.  It seems to me that this is sort of “yes, but” affirmation of free trade that a national Democrat feels obliged to say when he doesn’t really believe in challenging free trade policy but who still wants support from workers.

Inspired by Reihan’s wild imaginings and amused by this, I started thinking about McCain’s possible choices as a running mate (assuming that he is not on the verge of an unprecedented collapse and Huckabee is not at the start of an unprecedented comeback with Saturday’s wins).  As entertaining and implausible as a McCain-DeMint ticket sounds, a name came to mind that seemed a good choice to shore up McCain’s right, which almost immediately sank back into the darkness once I realised that it would become the cause of a thousand jokes at McCain’s expense (a happy outcome, if you ask me).  The name, of course, is Frank Keating.  Former governor of Oklahoma, Catholic, generally well-respected by conservatives as far as I know, Keating would make for a fine choice, but obviously putting his last name next to McCain’s on every sign and advertisement would not work at all.

So who are these angry voters? I call them “restless and anxious moderates,” or RAMs. Most come from the third of the electorate that identifies itself as independent, but some Democrats and Republicans have also joined this new bloc. These voters tend to be practical, non-ideological and unabashedly results-oriented — people such as Gary Butler, 60, who lives in Show Low, Ariz.  Both parties, he says, “are way too far apart, and nobody is looking out for the good of the people.”

“Address my life and the problems I face in my terms,” another RAM told me. “Cut political rhetoric, cut political fighting, cut the game-playing, stop the five-point programs; just address my issues in a real-world, straightforward way.” ~Douglas E. Schoen

Speaking as an independent who is known to get angry about political matters from time to time, I find this sort of view annoying and extremely frustrating.  Once rhetoric, political fighting, “game-playing,” and “five-point programs” are cut out, not only do politicians have very few means available with which they can “address issues,” but I am doubtful that anyone could draft a policy, organise a coalition, persuade fence-sitters and pass actual, you know, legislation without some measure of all of these things that the archetypal RAM above wants to throw out.  There is something deeply anti-political and actually unethical in the desire for the sort of deep bipartisanship that such people desire.  It is as if varied and opposed interests of constituencies in a large country were anything other than natural and unavoidable.  Viewed from a traditional conservative persecptive, these complaints of polarisation are the hardest to take, since there is nothing more clear to us on the right than the frequent agreement of both parties on many, though not all, major policy questions.  What is worse is that these “moderates” usually cannot describe what “results” they want to see, and so necessarily have difficulty selecting the policies that would get them those results and likewise later have difficulty assessing whether they have, in fact, received the results they wanted.  Such voters are ideal fodder for shoring up the status quo and the existing establishment consensus on some of the most significant areas of policy (e.g., trade, foreign policy, etc.), because they can be lulled into thinking that a stifling elite consensus that supports reckless or short-sighted policies is the same thing as a government that is showing “results.”  When in doubt, call for bipartisanship. 

These “moderates” claim to be pragmatic, but are fundamentally, one might even say ideologically, opposed to using tools of persuasion (rhetoric) and political maneuvering necessary to do anything.  They claim to be interested in results, but are interested neither in the details of proposed policies (those hateful five-point programs) nor in any of the tools legislators must use to achieve those results.  The so-called RAM is the perfect example of a variety of mass man that is not even interested in mass politics, someone who not only isn’t interested in how his political institutions work, but who also assumes that engaging in politics–the very sort of action that pragmatists should appreciate–is itself without value and a corruption of whatever it is that they think politicians are supposed to do (“address issues”!).  These are the sort of people who are perfect targets for appeals from an Obama promising “change” and a new and improved politics, and who will almost immediately after voting for him return to griping about his use of political rhetoric and all the rest, even though the reason he won them over was through the use of soaring, often quite empty, but nonetheless attractive rhetoric.

P.S.  The final suggestion in the article (the creation of a McCain-Lieberman ticket) and the claim that Joe Lieberman is a “well-regarded moderate,” when he is neither moderate nor all that well-regarded, encapsulate everything that is wrong with arguments for a “post-partisan” political order.  In this world of Broderism run amok, McCain and Lieberman are the ideal candidates to transcend the partisan divide because their respective party bases despise them but they have numerous admirers on the other side of the aisle.