As America marks the first anniversary of the troop escalation in Iraq, at least one thing has become clear. Although the “surge” is failing as policy, it seems to be succeeding as propaganda. Even as George W. Bush continues to bump and scrape along the bottom of public approval, significantly more people now believe we are “winning” the war.

What winning really means and whether that vague impression can be sustained are questions that the war’s proponents would prefer not to answer for the moment. Their objective during this election year is simply to reduce public pressure for withdrawal, which is still the choice of an overwhelming majority of voters. ~Joe Conason

This is pretty much in line with what I argued in one of my TAC columns last month (sorry, not online).  As others have noted, the real political goal of the “surge” seems not to have been to stabilise a viable Iraqi government, but to shore up collapsing support for the war here.  Even so, the domestic political effects have mostly been limited to Washington.  Public opinion remains as resolutely against the war as it was a year ago.  Three quarters of Americans do not want a “large number” of troops in Iraq two years from now, and half the country wants most of our forces out in less than a year.

Rod looks to the future:

For us Huckaboosters, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for our man to drop out, and spend the next four years doing some hard thinking and networking, getting ready for 2012.

I don’t intend the title to be as insulting as it sounds.  What I mean is that a failed Huckabee run would put him in much the same position that Edwards’ failed ’04 campaign put him these last several years (and Edwards had the advantage, so to speak, of being the VP nominee, which I doubt Huckabee will receive given the intense hostility to him wthin the party leadership.)  Huckabee may spend the next several years doing hard thinking and networking if he drops out, but I doubt he will be preparing for another presidential run.  If the example of John Edwards tells us something, it is that repeat candidates for the nomination tend to perform less well in the second attempt (Reagan being a big exception that leaps to mind).  Despite his policy and philanthropy work in the last four years, and despite his intensive cultivation of supporters in the netroots and in Iowa, John Edwards has become a has-been and also-ran who does not yet realise that he is either one.  Given the incandescent loathing of Huckabee in elite conservative circles and among big-money donors, I don’t know exactly what kind of networking he could build that would make him more successful in four years.  Rod’s talk of Huckabee ’12 was premised on the speculation that the GOP loses this year and loses badly, which I think is quite likely at the rate they’re going, but then if that is what happens the incumbent Democratic President Huckabee would be running against would probably be, barring epic incompetence or disaster, able to resist any Republican challenger.

There has been a lot of speculation in recent weeks about the possibility of a brokered convention.  Yglesias even proposes that it would be good for the GOP to have the high drama of a nomination contest that came down to the end.  He’s right that it would draw a lot of media attention, and it would give endless material for political reporters and pundits to talk about, but while there would be a lot of media exposure it’s not clear to me that this works to the benefit of the eventual nominee and the party.  In some respects, a hard-fought nomination contest improves all of the candidates running and prepares them for the general election, but as with any long, drawn-out internal contest the winner at the end comes away muddied and bloodied and vulnerable.  In open elections, a party doesn’t really want an automatic coronation, which then allows the nominee to become lazy and rusty in his campaigning, but it doesn’t want the kind of free-for-all in which all of the participants are made to look vulnerable and small.  While the media would be paying more attention to a four- or five-way grudge match, the image that this sends to the country is that the party is in disarray, rudderless and imploding before their eyes.  While it’s true that a third candidate typically benefits from a fight between two leading rivals, no one really benefits from a four- or five-way scrum, since the very existence of the contest reminds the public that any one of these candidates was unable to weld together a political coalition within his own party.  If, as David Brooks has said, the Republicans are beginning to talk like the 1970s Tories on economics, they are behaving like the late 1990s Tories in their leadership contest, and it will have similar general election results.  Also, a contest that goes all the way to the convention makes it that much harder for any eventual nominee to unify the obviously fragmented party around himself, and in the course of the next six months until the convention the divisions wiithin the party would become wider and more damaging as each faction would be jockeying for position.  The Democrats in 1952 had a brokered convention and then lost badly that fall, but then they, like today’s GOP, were on the wrong side of public opinion regarding an unpopular war.  If the Republicans cannot unite around someone before April, this year could be even worse for them than it was already likely to be.

Considering how little of any real worth he contributes, I’ve never understood why Jamie Kirchick has been part of respectable conversation, but I haven’t made much of an issue out of it.  If he would like to continue embarrassing himself with this pathetic obsession, that’s his business.

Ross agrees with James on the foreign aid debate: 

I might even go further than this, though, and suggest that even when these sort of efforts turn out to be ineffective at fostering the sort of order we ought to be concerned with, their effectivness as public diplomacy shouldn’t be underestimated.

Ross is right about the effect on foreign public opinion of even limited assistance, especially in cases of disaster relief, whether it is the Kashmir earthquake he refers to or the assistance for the Southeast Asian tsunami over three years ago.  In this respect, foreign aid to Africa has made Africa into an unexpected success story, if you measure success by how favourably many African nations view the U.S. relative to the rest of the world.  Then again, there also seems to be a general correlation between how much Washington generally ignores a part of the world, except to give aid packages, and how much the people in that region view America favourably.       

However, unless these programs really do help to foster some order and unless the goverments of the countries receiving aid are capable of maintaining some basic order on their own, I don’t think I have to tell you that American public opinion will sour on giving money to these governments over time.  There was a strong and understandable reaction here to the chaos in Pakistan after Bhutto’s assassination, which was actually much less pronounced and grave than the civil strife going on in Kenya, and to the extent that the American public thinks about aid to Pakistan I would guess a large plurality, if not a majority, was asking itself, “Why are we giving them all this aid?  What’s the point?”  In the case of Pakistan, there are good answers to that question, but the damage done by civil disorder to American support for this kind of aid, even when it may be strategically justified (as I doubt it is in many parts of Africa), should not be underestimated.

Rod commented on Huckabee’s recent “pandering” on the battle flag:

Similarly with Huck’s pandering on the Confederate flag. If he really believed that stuff, that’d be one thing. But I don’t think he really believes it.

Here’s the thing that puzzles me a bit about the reaction to Huckabee and his comments on the flag, which Ross has dubbed “unsavory”: this was the position that helped Bush in South Carolina eight years ago and helped sink McCain.  So you can put this in the “Huckabee is running like Bush in 2000” file, since this was exactly Bush’s position in 2000.  That is, leave it to South Carolinians to decide.  From what I’ve seen, Huckabee didn’t give a stirring ode to the importance of the battle flag, or the sacrifices of Southern soldiers who fought under it, but said simply that non-South Carolinians should generally keep their noses out of South Carolinian business on this question.  This has the virtue of being what I think is probably a widely-held view in South Carolina and also the correct one.  (Though how he reconciles his hostility to “outsiders” meddling in South Carolinian affairs with his disparaging remarks about federalism in other matters is another story!)  The effect of this pander is mitigated or complicated somewhat by the fact that he is campaigning alongside a former governor of South Carolina, David Beasley, who pressed successfully to have the flag removed from the state capitol’s dome.  This sends the message: “I am with Beasley, but it’s not up to me to decide what you do with your flag.”  That’s about as close to threading this particular needle as it gets.  Huckabee’s problem might be that people who value the battle flag will view him poorly because of the Beasley connection, while he will get no “credit” from others for being associated with Beasley.  That’s the problem with living off free media–you become in the public’s perception what they say you are.  

I don’t dispute that his flag remarks are a kind of pandering, but it isn’t the head-spinning, neck-snapping kind of radical change in a policy view that Huckabee’s signing of the “No Amnesty” pledge is, but even this isn’t purely pandering just for South Carolina.  It was direct pandering when he adopted an anti-amnesty position in Iowa after having had a quite liberal record on immigration, and now he is simply confirming or reinforcing his earlier about-face.  Viewed in a favourable way, he has locked himself in with a public pledge to oppose something that he had previously rejected only in rhetoric.  Viewed skeptically, as I would view it, he has simply repeated his earlier opportunism.  In case you’ve forgotten, his earlier opportunism worked out pretty well for him, so he probably thinks he can succeed with it again.

Thank goodness it’s Friday–there must be another insipid Michael Gerson column to read!  And indeed there is.  This week, he’s complaining about mean, ol’ Fred’s remarks on government funding for AIDS in Africa:

While he is not an isolationist, he clearly is playing to isolationist sentiments. 

It is now “isolationist” to oppose foreign aid for disease prevention on a continent where the United States has negligible interests, because apparently our resources are as infinite as the ever-multiplying “interests” that the Gersons of the world discover for us in every problem around the world.  More than that, Gerson tells us, Fred has revealed his lack of “moral seriousness.”  For Gerson, governing isn’t a matter of making choices and setting priorities in the American interest, but of unburdening his conscience about suffering on the other side of the world with someone else’s money.  I can understand why Gerson is annoyed–this kind of foreign aid was one of his favourite administration policies–but the reasoning here is beyond laughable:

America is engaged in a high-stakes ideological struggle in Africa, where radicals and terrorists seek to fill the vacuum of failed and hopeless societies. Fighting disease and promoting development are important foreign policy tools in this struggle, which Thompson apparently does not appreciate or even understand.  

Now the overwhelming bulk of the foreign aid in question goes to sub-Saharan and East African countries, where there are not actually very many of these “radicals and terrorists.”  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t violent, brutal militias and governments, and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t political instability in some of these countries, but it does mean that the political woes of these countries do not figure in to any larger, much less “high-stakes,” ideological struggle.  Uganda, one of the recipients of our current aid, suffers from a long-running insurgency in the north, but this is not connected to a broader “ideological struggle,” unless you assume that the “ideological struggle” is being waged everywhere on the planet and can be used to retroactively justify any do-gooding overseas that comes under reasonable scrutiny.  If health-related foreign aid is a weapon in this “ideological struggle,” shouldn’t we at the very least be targeting it at countries that are more strategically significant?  But no, Thompson must be engaged in some kind of “isolationism” because he doesn’t favour frittering away resources on what are frankly, from the perpsective of the American interest, low-priority issues.  

Reading Gerson’s moral hectoring, you have to conclude that there is no logical limit to the outpouring of state-funded compassion that he would support, since to limit it would be to declare someone, somewhere, less of a priority for the U.S. government than someone else, and that would be evidence of a hardness of heart rather than responsible government.  In trying to lay a guilt trip on Thompson for expressing what I have to assume is the view of a substantial number, if not a majority, of Republicans, Gerson reminds us why so many of us on the right are instinctively averse to foreign aid proposals: the arguments used to advance them are usually loaded down with this self-important moral preening that says Americans must be concerned with the problems of people on the other side of the planet and that they are necessarily shameful and despicable people if they prefer primarily to help their own.  This is not simply an insulting way to make the argument, but it suggests a frankly deranged set of priorities in the one making the argument.  Gerson, like Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, seems to be able to see nothing closer than Africa.

The requirements of charity do call us to help the sick and the poor (which Thompson never denied, but rather took for granted), but what Gerson is talking about is almost the opposite and negation of charity.  Invoking the tradition in Christendom of public authorities providing for the poor, Gerson implicitly takes for granted that the United States government has the same obligation to provide for the poor of other continents that it may have for its own citizens, which suggests that he thinks that our government is the public authority for all the world.  Abandoning persuasion, the redistributionist resorts to coercion to send money to whatever cause he believes is most deserving, and here Gerson is no different.  This is his “heroic conservatism,” which does not conserve much of anything but fancies itself very heroic for wasting things that belong to other people.  As sure as public money always tends to drive out private money, foreign aid spending, when it is not misappropriated by the receiving government, will tend to reduce and limit the extent of private philanthropy dedicated to a particular country or problem.  It might just be that the public policy Gerson supports will ultimately hamper the development of private institutional and charitable support and so perpetuate dependency on this aid indefinitely.  As with so many proposals of state support, the helping hand of government, even when offered in good faith and with the best of intentions, can have a long-term crippling effect on the recipients who are “benefiting” from the aid.  

Update: James makes the much more cogent case for ths kind of aid on the grounds of promoting or preserving stability and social order in these countries.  It still seems debatable to me that doing this is the U.S. government’s responsibility or that the stability of Uganda or other such African nations should be a priority of our government, but this is the only kind of argument for this aid that will persuade and it is the just about the only kind of argument for it that can be defended coherently.  That said, Peter makes the good pragmatic case against the actual aid program that the government has.  Before throwing money to corrupt governments, it would be wise to know whether the money will ever assist the people for whom it is being donated.  Americans generally and conservatives in particular would have far fewer objections to foreign aid if there was much confidence that the money would not be wasted or stolen, and that it would accomplish the things that the government says that it will.  In principle, containing the spread of disease strikes me as a far more useful and humane use of our resources than invading and occupying other countries that pose no threat to us, but there need to be cogent arguments as to why we should focus on one region rather than another and why our government is the one that should be doing this.  Given the current state of the federal government’s finances, I’m not sure that we can afford to keep throwing good money after mostly bad on programs that are being minimally effective.

This Chris Hayes report of the mind of the undecided voter (via Peter Suderman’s bloggingheads with Ezra Klein) is amazing to me.  Voter irrationality I understand, even when it infuriates me, and voter ignorance is frequently a given, but the completely apolitical thinking of undecided voters just baffles me.  Here’s Hayes:

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To the extent that many voters are like these undecided voters, this could explain many things.  It could help to explain why largely issue-driven protest candidacies always fail: the people to whom the protest candidate should be the most attractive ((i.e., the embodiment of the anti-establishment, the opponent of the failed system, etc.) are the very kinds of people who don’t even think in terms of “issues.”  It helps explain how McCain succeeds with voters, while those informed on and actually concerned about his policy views rule him out as unacceptable.  He talks about himself as he does in this ad and bases his candidacy on his biography.

This reminds of some of the basic insights of Applebee’s America, according to which, “People are desperate to connect with one another and be part of a cause greater than themselves.”  That last part of the sentence is virtually McCain’s campaign slogan.  He talks about a “cause greater than ourselves” all the time, and evidently people love it.  If voters crave authenticity, it does make you wonder what Michiganders were doing electing Mitt Romney, but nationally it seems to be the case that many voters are responding to McCain and Huckabee with the baffling irrationality of the undecided voter’s mentality.

Cross-posted at The American Scene

Let’s assume for a moment that Huckabee finishes strongly in South Carolina, thwarts the Thompson comeback and overtakes McCain.  Among February 5 states with polls available, he’s still running in first in Oklahoma, Alabama and Georgia and might still win in these states regardless of what happens on Saturday, and a South Carolina win might propel him on to a surprise success in Florida.  Assuming that he can then wend his way to the nomination, which is by no means certain, and perhaps hones a winning Pinkertonian-style message, is it so far-fetched to think that he would be competitive in the general election?  I know that he does poorly among Catholic voters, and he seems to be stuck in the evangelical ghetto that is partly of his own making (and partly the media’s fabrication), but in head-to-head polls among likely voters he tends to do much better against Clinton and even beats her in a couple of match-ups.  Given that Clinton is a machine when it comes to reciting policy wonk details and Huckabee would prefer to tell an amusing story than give a straight answer, this may all be very misleading, but there is nothing obviously implausible about a Huckabee nomination or even a Huckabee victory…except that every conservative activist and pundit (except for Jim Pinkerton) wants him to go jump in a lake. 

P.S.  There is the additional problem that Huckabee has lately started to take on the traits of a factional leader rather than someone who is trying to lead the entire party.  He is vying for influence, rather than trying to consolidate all factions behind him.  Am I the only one who is reminded of the desultory Tory leadership battles of the pre-Cameron years?  It seems as if we are still in our William Hague phase–who will be the GOP’s ineffectual Iain Duncan-Smith?

Update: This Pew poll shows that Huckabee runs a decent second to McCain in all of the states from Jan. 29 onwards (see page 8).  If McCain falters and Giuliani does not recover, doesn’t he benefit the most among voters?

Ironically, given the intense dissatisfaction of conservative elites with Huckabee, the same poll shows that GOP voters place Huckabee furthest to the right of any of the leading candidates, and they place him just to the left of Bush, while all of the others are perceived as being to Bush’s left (which may be true in a couple of cases).  Among all voters, Huckabee is seen as being furthest to the right.  Only 34% of GOP voters see Huckabee as moderate or liberal, yet this is the overwhelming consensus of conservative elites.  Arguably, this is because they are better-informed, but it also means they are entirely out of step with a majority of Republicans. 

In 2004, the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” did have a fairly low opinion of liberals — they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are “extremely conservative” or “extremely liberal,” the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

——————-

The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s. ~Arthur Brooks

This seems like a lousy way to measure tolerance of differences.  I may be unrepresentative (no, in fact, I am unrepresentative), but take this for whatever it’s worth.  I grew up with Clinton hatred.  If you were young and exposed to a lot of conservative media in the ’90s, it just came naturally to distrust and loathe these people.  I certainly still strongly dislike both him and his wife, but I guarantee that my “thermometer” score for Bush and Cheney would drop below whatever it would be for the Clintons.  It does seem to be true that more progressives are furious with Bush and Cheney than conservatives were furious with Clinton and Gore, but then that might have something to do with the respective policies of the two administrations. 

There are plenty of things in the last administration to find fault with, trust me, and whatever I say about the Clinton administration is just in comparison with the current administration, but it is difficult, even as a conservative, to view Clinton and Gore more negatively when they objectively presided over a relatively more conservative government overall.  Some of this was imposed on them by the voters in the 1994 election, but comparatively the last seven years have simply been worse in most important respects.  If that’s how I see it, how much much more true would that be for progressives who regard Bush (incorrectly) as a crazed right-winger?  Brooks is prepared for this, but gives a response that isn’t entirely persuasive:

Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush — whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler — is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

But how many people on the left actually compare him to Hitler?  This is a favourite of some in the netroots and the crazed world of ANSWER and MoveOn, but how representative are they really?  There were more than a few (not always inapt) Nazi references in conservative circles when Clinton was pushing his gun control legislation or after Waco.  It may be that there is simply vastly more vilification of Bush, but if you were trying to make a case for relatively greater liberal irrationality and intolerance I can scarcely think of a worse way to show it. 

Probably a much more relevant measure of tolerance of different ideas would be to look at how left and right respond to dissenters in their ranks.  You could try to make an argument that progressives are more intolerant of war supporters than conservatives are of war opponents and cite the example of the netroots’ campaign against Joe Lieberman (the Purge of Joe Lieberman!), but that would end up being pretty unpersuasive, since the lone antiwar candidate on the right is widely loathed and shunned by a majority of conservatives and the actual antiwar candidates on the left are trailing behind a woman who voted for the authorisation resolution.  Even granting that Clinton has now adopted an antiwar pose, she is most reluctant war opponent you’ll ever see.  

Looking beyond foreign policy, you could find more ideological rigidity on the left, and these days you could argue that the right is overflowing with dissenting views on all kinds of things (or you could see this simply as evidence of chaos and confusion), but it seems to me that it is in policy debates and arguments over ideas (or the lack thereof) that you’re going to find the real proof of tolerance or intolerance.  In the end, it will probably depend on the issue or policy.  On abortion, pro-lifers on the left keep a lower profile than pro-choicers on the right, and on trade free traders try to stamp out any hint of opposition on the right.  Tolerance of differences tends to decline as you approach core beliefs, or positions that are considered untouchable or inviolable.  It is human nature to be more tolerant in those areas that are less important to you, and perfectly normal to be less compromising and accommodating over things you believe are fundamental.  In this sense, evidence of greater “intolerance” of this sort is also possibly evidence for firmer conviction.