The shameless insertion of the Kennedy line on the day of Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama is the epitome of a partisan argument: we are the New American Majority, we are the New Frontier.

P.S. Did she just wish the President a good night’s sleep?  That was weird.

Update: Word is that Sebelius is endorsing Obama tomorrow, which may help him a bit in Kansas next week.  For his sake, I hope that she delivers a better endorsement speech than she did a SOTU response.

“Caring for our children…is what grow-ups do.”  Apparently, grown-ups do this by passing federal subsidies.  This speech is a guarantee that no one will confuse Gov. Sebelius with a potential vice presidential pick ever again.

“Each of you is, above all, an American.”  I was wrong.  Sebelius is going to rehash Obama’s stump speech.  She’s right about the eye-rolling line.  The eyes are still rolling.

It’s like this, James: if you push for more neoliberal policies in Latin America, that will magically reduce the popularity of the “false populism” that has flourished on account of the backlash against the last round of neoliberal policies pushed by Washington, whereas if you don’t support those policies “false populism” will run wild.  That’s clear, isn’t it?

My assumption is that this response is going to be much more low-key than Jim Webb’s “I’ll show you where you can put your agenda” speech, especially since Sebelius is reportedly going to declare as an Obaman.  Her state holds a caucus next week, and it seems unlikely that she’s going to craft the response in a way that aids one candidate or another.  I expect a fairly unremarkable, ho-hum response.

So far, he has vowed almost as many vetoes (2) as he has actually issued (3) in his entire Presidency.

The emerging theme seems to be “trust.”  Bush makes for a rather odd messenger for this kind of “restore people’s trust in the government” message, wouldn’t you say?

Rod says of Obama:

A conservative’s dilemma: Is the pleasure one takes in watching the vaderish Clintons vanquished by Barack Skywalker worth the increasing possibility that not only will Obama win this fall, but he will transform the political landscape such that the GOP turns into what the Tories were under the Blair government?

There is a solution to this dilemma, which seems to be confronting more and more people, and it is simply this: stop cheering on Obama.  I drank a toast to him on caucus night, because it was satisfying to see those people humbled, but if you believe (I think incorrectly) that Obama represents a dire threat to your views and interests, stop giving him a pass.  Of course, if the Clintons are “vaderish,” that means that Bill Clinton fills the role of Obama’s father, which is a disturbing thought. 

Suppose that Obama admirers on the right are correct that he could be for the Democrats what Reagan was for Republicans.  Leave aside that only two post-war Democratic nominees have ever won over 50% of the vote in a national election (and Carter only barely achieved this under pretty unusual circumstances), and that a “liberal Reagan” would need to win by a margin of approximately nine points to get close to replicating the ’80 result. (That requires Obama to repeat Clinton’s ’96 re-election result and the Republicans will have to make a similarly, well, doleful effort.)  Forget for a moment that Obama has less experience in elective office than any major contender for the Presidency in at least a century and a half, or that his ADA is 95.  If that is right, and they can foresee the danger to their ideas and politics, why take the chance?  In a strange way, Republicans and conservatives have become so dead-set in their opposition to the Clintons that they would, by their own admission, embrace political and electoral doom rather than give them another chance at power.   

They take this view despite the fact that the Clinton administration was, relative to the current horror-show, more conservative in most of its effects and ultimately worked to the advantage of the GOP (an advantage they have shamelessly squandered).  The right reason to cheer on Obama is if you think he is the weaker of the two and the one likely to deliver the Democrats to unexpected defeat, while giving the GOP an entirely undeserved victory.  I am also not enthusiastic about going this route, since a failure to hold the GOP accountable in a presidential election will mean that they will ignore the ’06 elections as a fluke and will change little or nothing from the failed policies of the current administration.  If the Democrats nominate Obama, they let the GOP leadership off the hook.  Besides, what better way to drive home the error of their ways than to make it clear that the wages of Bushism are Bill and Hillary Clinton returned to power?   

What still puzzles me about the Obama-fear is how it can be driven by Obama’s delivery of speeches that are mostly about nothing.

Between Ryan Sager and Giuliani, that is.  In his analysis, Sager has missed the crucial point: there was never any reason to have a Giuliani candidacy when McCain provided a viable alternative for the “moderate GOP electorate.”  Because McCain was already occupying his space in the race, and because the one thing that nearly destroyed McCain’s campaign was the immigration debate last summer, Giuliani needed to win McCain supporters without appearing to be pro-amnesty (even though he has been, in fact, to the left of McCain on immigration all along).  Hence Giuliani’s laughable attempts to run to the right of Romney on immigration. 

Sager writes:

But faced with deficits to make up on abortion and past support for gay rights, Giuliani pursued a strategy that systematically dismantled everything that once made his candidacy appealing to his core supporters. 

Yet the very things that Sager finds so distasteful are the things that made him remotely viable: playing the tough authoritarian leader who will “get things done,” restore order and protect you from the villains of the world.  Without that, he had no possible claim to the support of a majority of Republicans in a nominating contest.  Of course Sager thinks Giuliani pursued the wrong message.  But then he doesn’t think that Giuliani’s liberalism on social issues matters and doesn’t really see it as a deficit, he thinks the one issue where the GOP has an advantage (immigration) is one of its greatest liabilities, and he continues to operate under the strange assumption that “the Christian Right” runs the Republican Party, which ought to make you doubt the value of his analysis.  Giuliani’s mistake was not that he tried to appeal to the majority of Republican primary voters, but that he ran for President at all, especially when McCain was already in the race and was likely to attract likely “moderate” Giuliani voters anyway. 

Finally, if Giuliani’s “the Arabs are out to get you” ad sickened him, he must not have been paying much attention to Giuliani’s view of the rest of the world before that ad aired.  His entire campaign has always been centered around such fearmongering.  The only reason he was still a national political figure was that he had played on the reaction to 9/11 and the urge to lash out at anyone that followed; his would have been a more successful candidacy in 2004, when much of the country was still much more in that frame of mind.  Sager was too busy painting Giuliani as some kind of “libertarian” to notice.

I will second Will Wilkinson up to a point when he complains about this pro-McCain article, since I am probably just as appalled for different reasons by “National Greatness Conservatism” and its cousins as he is.  The misspelling of Friedman’s name in the article (and the fact that no editor there managed to catch it before it was published) is indicative of a general inattention to what libertarians say, and the purpose of libertarians in this article is obviously to serve as a foil for the supposed prudence and virtue of John McCain.  It is particularly unfortunate that someone from the Committee on Social Thought would seem not be familiar with the most famous economist ever to work here at the University, but in defense of the Committee I have to add that it is, by its nature, an eclectic and wide-ranging program that could not be reduced to the “big fire and antlers on the wall” approach to life that Wilkinson imputes to it.  Plus, it was once home to Hayek, so that must count for something.  Most libertarians (and Mr. Wilkinson in particular) would probably say that I don’t pay enough attention to what they say, either, but even I would argue that the description of libertarianism here is rather crude.  Of course, it is intended to be.  If you can make a candidate into a Man of Virtue who resists pernicious ideology, his reputation will increase and his opponents will be demonised as fanatics.  It helps, though, if the effort isn’t completely transparent and entirely unpersuasive.  

The Wall Street reference reveals something else important about the real source of hostility to McCain in the Republican Party: McCain’s worst enemies are not adherents to “strict free-market ideology,” because his worst sins, according to the indictments columns you read these days, are departures from adhering to the demands of corporate interests, which need not have anything to do with the free market, much less “strict free-market ideology.”  (That doesn’t mean that he isn’t, in general, on board with corporate interests with respect to trade, etc., but he is being criticised in these cases not because he questions the Market, but because he threatens to raise costs for multinationals.)  Republicans and mainstream conservatives these days certainly do not actually espouse a “strict free-market ideology,” yet it is they, not primarily the folks at Reason or elsewhere in the Beltway libertarian set, who wish to be rid of McCain more than anyone.  The libertarians are dragged in to serve as the right-wing version of the “dirty hippies” who threaten to thwart the glorious onward progress of the state.  (If the way many Beltway libertarians have run away fron Ron Paul in recent weeks is any indication, it should be clear that the “national greatness” types have nothing to fear from them on this score.)  This Weekly Standard article reminds me of nothing so much as Michael Kinsley’s op-ed, in which he claimed to be talking about Ron Paul and modern libertarianism, but never actually engaged any arguments of living, breathing libertarians (or Ron Paul supporters of any kind for that matter).  The difference is that this article was openly pushing for McCain, while Kinsley was just wasting our time.

As for the objection that “liberal individualism” is more functional than the cluttered and garish “National Greatness Conservatism,” I also have a hard time disagreeing in this particular case.  Though he would probably not agree, what Wilkinson objects to here is something that I think any sane conservative who takes seriously ideas of virtue, honour, duty and sacrifice should also reject.  What Wilkinson is objecting to in this case is, in fact, the crass abuse of these things and the manipulation of their meaning in service to the state and to the constant drive for conflict.  Virtue would require not only andreia in a conflict, but also the wisdom and temperance to not start wars (McCain has never shown much of either on this count).  Virtue also calls for restraint and moderation, which you do not find in the unseemly eagerness to offer up young Americans to a “cause higher than themselves,” as McCain always puts it.  Sacrifice in defense of your friends, your family,  your neighbours, your plot of land is a worthy thing, but it has precisely nothing to do with what “National Greatness Conservatism” is calling for.  In lumping these worthy things in with what he calls a “quasi-fascist” impulse, Wilkinson does more to validate the Storeys’ criticism of libertarians than they could ever have done in their own polemic.