No, really.  It would serve the Democrats’ interest to have the GOP race be prolonged as much as possible.  Romney should show that he’s not going to play into their hands and drop out tomorrow.

No female — young, old, black or white — could ever play the knight-on-charger with meager experience. If she presented herself as the human embodiment of national unity and world peace, everyone would have fallen down laughing. ~Froma Harrop

This is quite right.  The question that keeps puzzling me is why there aren’t more people laughing at Obama.  His is an absurd and pretentious pose.  It seems unlikely that people will continue to indulge this fantasy for another ten months. 

Update: A Clinton adviser has an amusing, if self-serving, summary of the difference between Clinton and Obama voters: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”

In the wake of New Hampshire, I know we’re all supposed to ignore polls and pretend that they tell us little, but it seems useful to look at the most recent Iraq war polling again in response to this Jennifer Rubin piece.  Rubin wrote:

To look ahead to the general election, the surge may also have changed the landscape for the Republicans as a whole. If progress continues, the GOP will not face searing headlines and escalating body counts. The traditional image of the GOP as the more responsible and less skittish party in national security may be restored somewhat and the Democrats’ willingness to “cut and run” again becomes a viable campaign issue.

So the lessons of the surge are familiar ones, but ones repeatedly forgotten by politicians anxious to seek safer ground in any controversy. Short-term political gain does not always translate into long-term electoral success [bold mine-DL]. The public in the end will reward political courage — in part because it is so rare.

With all the usual caveats that the election is still ten months away and many things may change, I confess that I don’t see where Rubin is getting this impression that the “surge” stands to benefit the GOP.  Obviously, “surge” supporters hope that it does, and anything is possible, but there is little reason to think that it has had any meaningful impact on public opinion about the war.  On the surface, yes, McCain is doing better (because he won in a state he had won eight years ago, though with almost 30,000 fewer voters this time), while bizarrely losing to Romneyamong strong supporters of the war 44-23%.  Huckabee has probably temporarily benefited in the GOP primaries from being unequivocally for the “surge” while Romney was more skeptical about its success, but this may, in fact, prove to be a liability should he win the nomination.  It is worth noting that Romney’s very modest skepticism and caution actually put him closer to the majority of the country than does McCain’s mantra “we are winning.”  McCain’s best electoral asset seems to be that he wins the votes of Republican war opponents, as he did in New Hampshire, in spite of his close identification with the war–this is probably a function of the weakness of Republican war opponents’ opposition rather than McCain’s ability to appeal to those on the other side of the debate.  It seems implausible that non-Republican war opponents will be as willing to support him.

In the NBC/WSJ poll from Dec. 14-17, opposition to the war remained as strong as ever.  63% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war.  That would have to include, as of last month, the “surge” as well as everything that came before.  56% believe victory is not still possible.  44% believe the “surge” has made no difference, and 14% believe that it has made things worse.  These numbers are virtually unchanged from earlier months.  57% want to remove most troops by 2009.  In a Dec. 16-19 ABC News poll, 62% say they believe was not worth fighting.  More recent polling by Rasmussen from Jan. 2-3 tells us that 51% believe the war will be judged a failure in the long-term, and only 34% believe that things will improve over the next six months (this group includes 61% of Republicans, but only a fifth of Democrats and a quarter of “other”).  Barring fairly major shifts in public opinion in coming months, the relative military gains of the “surge” seem to have had no effect whatever on opinions about the war.  Since several polls last month showed that the public had more confidence in the Democrats on the Iraq war, it is not at all clear where anyone would get the idea that the “surge” is helping the GOP electorally.

Ross writes:

At the moment, though, there’s a big difference between the two parties’ divisions: The Democrats’ fault lines are primarily demographic (upscale vs. downscale, professional vs. working class, women vs. men), whereas the GOP’s fault lines are demographic and ideological.

This is right, but it’s also important to note that the fault lines within the Democratic Party seem to be mostly persistent and enduring ones.  The same divide seems to keep replaying over and over in every cycle, and as we all know Democrats have usually ended up choosing the constituency-oriented incumbent or machine politician rather than the upscale candidate of “new ideas” or reform.  I would add that there was a combination of demographic and ideological fault lines in the 2004 Democratic race, to the extent that there was a relatively more progressive, netroots-backed antiwar candidate of a sort running against a relatively more hawkish liberal and the then-“centrist” Edwards.  The ideological divide was really more between the supporters of the candidates than between the candidates themselves, and the election exaggerated the extent of this divide, but it was there. 

The main contenders and the eventual nominees on the ticket in ’04 arguably represented the last hurrah of neoliberalism on the Democratic side, and the last three years have seen the gradual strengthening of progressives within the party to the point where all three leading Democrats are running on a platform as progressive as any there has been in my lifetime and probably more so.  Ross is also right to point out that the prospect of victory and the desire to capture the White House are uniting the Demmocrats. Just as the hunger to win and eight years out of executive power pushed Republicans to unite around Bush in 2000, the Democrats are suppressing whatever real ideological arguments they might have over foreign policy, trade or anything else for the sake of winning.  In the ideological fragmentation on the GOP side, we are seeing something like the Republicans’ 1968 moment, but to the general convulsions within the party there is the added problem that there is also no incumbent to lead the party, which exaggerates the effect of the disagreements.  It makes the nomination fight a contest over the future direction of the party in a way that 2004 did not affect the Democrats.

With the Kemp endorsement earlier this week, McCain is definitely becoming the second coming of Dole.

Via Jim Antle

When he’s not talking about Venezuela or Iran, Rick Santorum can be pretty sensible (via Sullivan):

And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened. I mean, this is a guy who says he believes in these things, but I can tell you, inside the room, when we were in these meetings, there was nobody who fought harder not to have these votes before the United States Senate on some of the most important social conservative issues, whether it’s marriage or abortion or the like. He always fought against us to even bring them up, because he was uncomfortable voting for them. So I mean, this is just not a guy I think in the end that washes with the mainstream of the Republican Party. 

That sums it up pretty well.  Meanwhile, you supposedly three other leading candidates, one of whom has no real credibility on social issues, one of whom is effectively on the other side of the debate and the third who is evidently entirely reliable.  Social and cultural conservatives make up a much larger part of the party than do economic conservatives, and three of the four leading candidates are essentially unacceptable to large numbers of them for different reasons.  All other things being equal, if you wanted to choose the candidate who had the best chance of turning these voters out in November and keeping as much of the coalition together as possible, wouldn’t you choose the one who can most reliably motivate your largest voting bloc?  Are economic and “national security” conservatives really going to sit out a Huckabee-Clinton or Huckabee-Obama election?  It’s not as if they are likely to vote for the other party!  (Bush Hawks for Obama does have an amusing ring to it, but I don’t think we’re going to see it this year.)  As they have said to social conservatives so many times before: where are you going to go?

Rod responds to John Savage’s critique of what Savage sees as Rod’s undue enthusiasm for Huckabee and excessive willingness to engage or reconcile with the Left.  Inasmuch as this second point repeats canards about crunchy conservatism generally and Rod personally, I don’t agree.  I agree with Mark of Protestant Pontifications that crunchy conservatism is the real version of Brooks’ “conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year,” and I also grant that Huckabee doesn’t have the right answers for these folks and usually isn’t even asking the right questions.  What he does seem to do, and this is where I think many of us find ourselves mildly sympathetic to Huckabee in spite of ourselves, is to gesture in the right direction.   

Savage wrote:

But the way that most crunchy cons look to him [Dreher] alone to define crunchy conservatism is unhealthy, especially when he’s the type who’s easily made to feel apologetic about taking conservative positions, and has an excessive need to just get along and ingratiate himself with the Left. 

As someone who has written a good deal about crunchy conservatism, I grant that crunchy cons and their sympathisers have acknowledged Rod’s role in drawing attention to this kind of conservatism and we have defended him against the more ridiculous and unfair attacks that have been leveled at him, but I question whether the “crunchy cons” have generally looked only to him.  To the extent that they are what he says they are, they were already looking to Kirk, Berry and others before Rod came along to document what they were doing, or they were practicing the kind of conservatism of place, virtue and proportion that Rod was describing in his book without articulating what they were doing.  Were they relying entirely on Rod, or on any single figure, I think that would be unhealthy, but I don’t think that this is what has been happening.  I doubt that Rod has an “excessive need to just get along and ingratiate himself with the Left.”  If he had, he would not have made such a point of challenging Dallas-area Muslims over the dangers of Islamism, nor would he remain as staunchly pro-life as he has always been.  Those who wish to “get along and ingratiate” themseves with the Left do not typically rail against local Muslims and condemn the iniquity of abortion.     

Savage says:

Dreher is mostly a single-issue “conservative” whose single issue is traditional morality, narrowly construed as being pro-life, anti-promiscuous-sex, and anti-homosexual-unions. 

Rod can speak for himself on this point, and he has, but I would add that this is a strange argument to make against the author of Crunchy Cons, whose most controversial and contested claims involved matters of conservation, consumption and economics.  If he were simply the “single-issue” social conservative described here, Rod and crunchy conservatism would have created little resistance.

The least persuasive part of Savage’s post was this:

I resent that I can hardly defend crunchy conservatism in good conscience from people I meet on non-crunchy blogs, who assume on the basis of the name that crunchy conservatism is just another form of left-wing hippie-ism.

Most of us who have defended crunchy conservatism against its critics have lamented the name, which doesn’t really capture what it is.  Most of us prefer simply to apply the name traditionalist or even neo-traditionalist conservative to what Rod was talking about.  We should not allow such assumptions to be a cause of discouragement.  Who knows what people assume what the name paleoconservatism means?   It is up to paleos, if we insist on using the name, to explain what we are to those who do not yet know.  The same goes for those attracted to the best elements of crunchy conservatism.

I have a new post on New Hampshire and Romney at Taki’s Top Drawer.  Also take a look at Richard Spencer’sposts on Ron Paul and the Kirchick attack piece.  Richard makes the right points.  I agree that this newsletter business reveals that Ron Paul showed poor judgement in allowing his name to be used, especially if he is being entirely forthright (and I have no reason to doubt his word on this) on his lack of involvement in the writing and oversight of the newsletters.  It is, of course, ludicrous to claim that Ron Paul holds the views that have been highlighted in this article, as anyone who knows the first thing about the man already understands.

Ross commented on Noah Feldman’s article on Mormonism recently, which reminded me that I had also wanted to respond to one part of it and arguments like the following:

Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt.

Put that way, Feldman might have a point, except that the claim of new revelation is actually the least “ridiculous” part of the story.  It is, and always has been, the content of that revelation that has drawn the most criticism, and so for the most part the majority dutifully ignores or downplays how the content of this or that religion is theologically untenable.  To do otherwise would begin us down the road to taking one set of theological claims more seriously than another, which might even (gasp!) lead us to assign different significance and measures of truth to different sets of claims.  The problem with this argument is that, for the sake of promoting toleration for minority religions, it essentially grants that every religion is just as inherently plausible as any other, which not only makes discussion of doctrine pointless, but actually impedes the possibility of religious dialogue and persuasion.  Granting this equality of religions paves the way for exactly the kind of arational sectarianism that skeptics believe is unavoidable with religion in public life.    

There is this very strange attitude about religion out there, and it is held by more than a few observant Christians as well as secular skeptics, that says that no revelation is more plausible than any other, which implies that revelation is entirely outside the realm of rational discouse and demonstration.  This is essentially fideism or a kind of neo-Barlaamism, which holds that believers should hold to their traditional faiths primarily because they are ancient–there is nothing that we can actually say rationally about a doctrine of God.  One of the reasons why this bizarre idea can gain such currency is the lack of respect people have for theology and dogma.  In our culture, if you want to dismiss someone’s position, you say that he is being dogmatic, and if you want to discredit an argument you refer to his worldview as a “theology,” preferably preceded by adjectives such as arcane. 

Such is the depth of our divorce from Christian intellectual tradition that many people do not recognise the substantive difference between an elaborately reasoned theological view and the ramblings of a science-fiction author.  Simply put, we lack discernment.  Militant atheists are at least consistent in the implications of holding such a disparaging view of revelation–for them, it is all made-up and undeserving of any respect.  Out of some misplaced sense of solidarity with other religious people against the Christopher Hitchenses and Dawkinses of the world, Christians seem to feel obliged to make general defenses of generic theism or the even more amorphous category of Religion, and woe betide the bishop who attempts, as Pope Benedict did, to illustrate the implications of radically different doctrines of God.  This then forces these Christians to argue that all these things are purely a matter of faith, where faith is defined not only as something inspired and the result of God’s grace (which it is), but also as something arational, rather than understanding that it is faith rightly understood that is the highest form of rationality.  Having conceded the high ground and having bought into a functionally extreme apophaticism, the Christian finds himself at a loss to make any argument from revelation, because he has already effectively granted that speaking kataphatically is impossible.  Trying to include everyone in a big tent of ecumenical anti-secularism eventually leads to being unable to say something about God and maintain that it is actually true, when there is nothing more fundamental to preaching and evangelising than speaking the truth about God in prayer and homilies. 

This brings me, oddly enough, to the question of evolution.  Fideistic understandings of religion and materialistic philosophies that seek to exploit evolutionary biology to their advantage enjoy a symbiotic relationship, since they both thrive on promoting mutual antagonism between reason and faith.  Tell the Christian that he must either endorse evolutionary theory or accept the Bible, and he will typically take the Bible, especially if he is not grounded in an authoritative teaching tradition that tells him that this choice is a false one.  Tell the average educated secular person that revealed religion is incompatible with scientific theory, and he may very well conclude that those who continue to adhere to revealed religion must be either ignorant, insane or up to no good.  Huckabee is someone who falls into the former category, of course, and declares himself agnostic on “how” God works in creation, which is actually a far more honest view–and one that a majority of Americans would share–than affirming evolutionary theory because you know that it is socially unacceptable in certain circles to admit that you don’t understand or accept the theory.  As Rod has said before, evolution serves as a “cultural marker,” and it is deployed as a litmus test to see whether you belong to a certain kind of educated elite.  Ironically, the cultural bias against dogmatism and theology in religion has come around and struck science by making it permissible, even admirable, to doubt statements made with certainty.  Were it not for the tendency of many religious and secular Americansto oppose reason and faith, there would be no difficulty in affirming the truth of revelation and recognising the reasonable, albeit always provisional, nature of scientific inquiry.  Obviously, approaches to faith that prize doubt and uncertainty simply reinforce the tendency towards extreme apophaticism and fideism that make it impossible for believers and non-believers  to speak intelligibly to one another (to the extent that people working in two significantly different traditions can speak to one another).

Some home truths: a tough, long primary battle will take the sting out of the powerful backlash that he [Obama] is the function of a fad of euphoria, marketing hype, or gas-baggery. It will take the edge off the criticism that he is untested. It will help him prove his mettle and endurance. ~Andrew Sullivan

Alternatively, the next five weeks will vindicate all of these assumptions and drive home just how media-driven and imaginary the entire phenomenon has been.