My personal attitude, wholly consistent with that of my Church, is that I believe in peace on earth, good will to men, and that no country has a right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. I recognize the right of no church to ask armed intervention by this country in the affairs of another merely for the defense of the rights of a church. ~Governor Alfred E. Smith, c. 1927

Via Ross

The rights to which he was referring were those of Catholics in Mexico being persecuted by the revolutionary government.  Quite apart from anything else relating specifically to the “religious issue” Smith was addressing, I thought this statement deserved special attention.

He restates this conviction again at the end of the article:

I believe in the principled noninterference by this country in the internal affairs of other nations and that we should stand steadfastly against any such interference by whomsoever it may be urged.

I know that to some liberals, Barack Obama’s rhetorical style bespeaks a lack of commitment to progressive values.  I don’t see it that way. I’ve always seen it as a pretty transparent trick. He says he’s not one of those liberals, he doesn’t call people “wingnuts,” he understands the conservative point of view, blah blah blah, and then here comes his agenda of tax hikes, tons of new spending, ambitious carbon emissions curbs, less invading of other countries for no reason, gay equality, etc. And, remarkably, you keep seeing conservatives eat it up, discerning something incredibly “new” and “exciting” in a combination of conventional liberal policy views with vaguely conciliatory rhetoric. ~Matt Yglesias

This seems right, and I have thought that this was a trademark of Obama’s political style for some time now.  Last year I said:

All of this is supposed to show us that Obama is thoughtful, rather than callous, profound rather than predictable, but it does not.  It is the tactic of the man who says, “I appreciate your point of view,” when in fact he does not appreciate it and wants to neutralise your criticism by deflecting the question in an entirely different direction.  President Bush uses this same kind of tactic when he says, “Good and patriotic people hold this view, but I just strongly disagree.  I believe freedom transforms regions, burble, burble.”  He then concocts a straw man position, “Those who say that Iraq would be better off as a fetid wasteland filled with suicide bombers are simply wrong,” and declares victory. 

As I should have added at the time, Obama’s gift is to make what is otherwise obviously an aggressive rhetorical move seem completely inoffensive and almost boring.  It doesn’t sound like the sort of “red meat” denunciations that partisans want to hear, but it is all the more politically dangerous for conservatives because of that.  With perfunctory nods to the importance of family and personal responsibility, his God-talk and his rhetoric of American unity, Obama smuggles his very progressive record past those sentries who are always on the lookout for the next big left-winger.  People who somehow found the eminently centrist Howard Dean to be a scary and unhinged zealot find the genuinely left-wing Obama charming and amiable and (here’s the key word) unthreatening.  Thus, in the bizarre estimations of many Republicans, Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of DLC centrism and cynical difference-splitting, supposedly represents the radical left who will tear the country apart even more, while Obama represents a less polarising and more broadly appealing kind of politics, yet he is objectively to the left of everyone in the Democratic field (except on the war) aside from Dennis Kucinich and perhaps the current, latest incarnation of John Edwards.  Conservatives said of Dean, “Please nominate this man,” because they assumed a landslide victory for their side would follow.  Now, strangely, conservatives seem to be getting concerned that the Republican nominee will have to face Obama, even though this would probably represent the GOP’s best chance at political salvation.   

Obama also loves the device of invoking the line, “There are those who say…,” setting up the nameless, faceless opposition that he can characterise as he pleases, and now he has Oprah uttering the same kinds of remarks on his behalf.  Both men (i.e., Obama and Bush) have a habit of putting words in the mouths of their critics, and they enjoy evading criticism by ridiculing the credibility of the critic without addressing the merits of the criticism.  (You might say that a lot of people do this, but these two do it with a regularity that is noteworthy.)  For instance, when faced with criticism about his “half-baked” ideas on Pakistan policy, he used the critics’ mistakes on Iraq as his defense.  He is saying, “You can’t believe what these people say about foreign policy, so by default I win.”    

Progressives are annoyed with Obama over his Social Security position, and some probably take this as evidence that he is insufficiently progressive.  The short version is that they see Obama’s call to “save” Social Security from a coming crisis as a regurgitation of GOP talking points, and more than a few progressives have been pushing back, claiming that Social Security is not in danger.  This misunderstands why Obama is talking about Social Security in the way that he does.  Part of it is tactical–he needs to persuade many older voters to support him, especially in Iowa–but another part of it is his stated goal of “transforming” our politics.  Since Social Security is supposed to be too politically dangerous to touch, he wants to touch it to show that he is not bound by “conventional” wisdom or Beltway assumptions.  He makes similar arguments in defense of his foreign policy views, which he frames as very unconventional (which they are not), even in those cases (e.g., Iran, Pakistan) where his views are much more hawkish and aggressive–and much more in line with the worst elements of the foreign policy establishment–than his supporters’ views.

Reid Wilson has done the latest Senate race rankings and lists New Mexico at number 2, saying:

News can’t get any worse for Republicans in New Mexico. But if it can, it probably will.

This is right.  I have some mixed feelings about the slow-motion implosion of the New Mexico GOP, since New Mexico has hardly benefited from seven decades of uninterrupted, virtual one-party rule from the other side, but it was unavoidable that the state parties that would suffer the most from the anti-Republican backlash are those in states where they are numerically weakest. 

The most remarkable thing on the list, which wouldn’t be possible without Lott’s retirement, is that Mississippi is almost as competitive a Senate race as Maine.  In addition to woes in Alaska and Mississippi, the GOP may have to start worrying about the Lone Star State.  Via Rod, I see that John Cornyn’s job approval numbers are quite bad for a scandal-free incumbent.  31% say they want him re-elected, which is remarkably low.  If a Democrat were to be elected to the Senate from Texas, it would be the first general election victory in such a race for them since Lloyd Bentsen won re-election in 1988.  It would probably also reflect the steady demographic changes in the state resulting from mass immigration.  The DSCC’s absolute best-case goal of picking up nine seats to reach a filibuster-proof majority of 60 is now looking slightly less implausible.   

P.S.  A September poll gave Cornyn better numbers, but showed that he is vulnerable.  His approval rating, if the later polling is to be believed, has gone down pretty dramatically.  Any Texans out there with an insight into why people are souring on him?

Rod wrote the other day:

I don’t think Huckabee was saying here what Mark (and others — I see that Larison took the same point) interprets him to be saying.

Rod is referring to Huckabee’s “law establishes morality” remark that I found so troubling.  I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Huckabee meant something other than what he said, but based on what he said I think that Shea and I drew the right conclusions.  Huckabee is not normally so clumsy or inept with language as Bush that he is in the habit of saying ludicrous things that he doesn’t mean.  He may well say ludicrous things, but they are usually intentional.  There are three alternative interpretations: 1) he meant just what he said in just the way Shea and I interpreted him; 2) he didn’t mean what he said, and was repeating a truism about codifying norms; 3) he has no idea what the word “establish” means.  Two of those don’t reflect well on him, and the one that gets him off the hook assumes that he cannot properly and clearly explain his understanding of the relationship between law and morality.  That’s not exactly something that inspires confidence in him as the social conservative candidate running for President.   

But suppose Rod is right.  Suppose that every time Huckabee, or one of the other candidates, says something deeply, profoundly wrong that we assume that he misspoke and meant to say something with which we can agree.  In short, we are admitting then that we cannot really rely on anything these people say.  This highlights a bigger problem with several of the major candidates.  Huckabee has recently found religion, so to speak, on immigration policy and has discovered that strongly opposing illegal immigration is a good political move in the fight for the nomination.  On substance, restrictionists should be slightly pleased that the political climate forces someone like Huckabee to adopt more of their positions, but the issue here, as with Romney’s numerous changes of position, is one of credibility and confidence in a candidate’s reliable support for the policies he advocates.  To some extent, it is always hard to know what you will get with a pol once he is in power, but obvious craven pandering is not a good sign.  If we cannot rely simply on their records as guides (because they have run away from their past positions), if we cannot take what they say literally, but must assume that we know what they must have meant (because the literal meaning of what they said sounds crazy), and if we cannot trust their new policy positions (because they have adopted them within the last year or two), it seems that there is no good reason to vote for any one of them.

“The Republicans as a whole lose because of these revelations,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington. “If Chuck Hagel were running, he would be the beneficiary, but there’s no one like Hagel on the Republican side.” ~Helene Cooper

Yes, we get it.  Steve Clemons really likes Chuck Hagel.  A lot.  Remarks such as these are part of the reason why I am frequently so hard on Chuck Hagel: the man is built up by his admirers into a champion of a foreign policy vision that he has never, well, actually championed.  There is nobody like “Chuck Hagel” in the Republican Party, including the Senator from Nebraska named Chuck Hagel, because the Chuck Hagel you hear about from his boosters doesn’t really exist.   

Clemons also seems constitutionally incapable, both here and on his blog, of noticing that there is an antiwar Republican candidate in the race who has argued against targeting Iran, who has argued against illegal treatment of detainees, and who has argued against the entire aggressive foreign policy approach that Clemons also deplores.  Based on his policy views, Ron Paul is the most obvious political beneficiary of these revelations, but you would never know that from listening to coverage of the last week.  It is true that there’s no one like Chuck Hagel on the Republican side this cycle.  While Chuck Hagel was voting for the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war resolution, Ron Paul was voting against them.  While Hagel was making critical remarks, Ron Paul was actually voting against failed policy.  While Hagel was making quips about “tough jobs” and shoe-sellers, Ron Paul was about to start running for President and providing a challenge to the GOP establishment on foreign policy.  While Chuck Hagel made jokes about being Mike Bloomberg’s running mate and appeared on the covers of men’s magazines, Ron Paul was representing the dissenting view in the Republican primary debates. While Hagel dawdled, Ron Paul spoke out and acted, and when Hagel started finally to speak out more forcefully Ron Paul started running his insurgent campaign to protest all the abuses that Chuck Hagel helped to create.

“People were saying, ‘It was like George Washington,’ ‘It was the Gettysburg Address,’ ” she said in an interview just after working a room of about 120 audience members, mostly women, at a restaurant in the JW Marriott in Summerlin.

“I mean, it was unbelievable, the response I heard from the people in there that heard it today. Almost everyone said they were moved to tears” by the speech, she said. ~The Las Vegas Review-Journal

It is unbelievable.  I don’t believe it.  The people who said these things are exaggerating.  It was a reasonably good speech.  I would be shocked if anyone was moved to tears by what was said.

During his recent visit to the Globe, Obama was asked if the change he is talking about is more style than substance, and if that is the real distinction between him and Hillary Clinton, his chief rival. “I’m not sure you can separate out the policy from the atmospherics in the sense that all of us are talking to the same experts,” he replied. He went on to say, “During the course of a campaign, there is going to be a strong convergence in a Democratic primary on various issues.”

In other words, yes, the major difference with Clinton is one of style, not substance – Obama’s “being able to work both sides of the aisle,” versus her alleged inability. Of course, there’s no absolute certainty a Congress controlled by Democrats would go along with an Obama agenda any more than a state Legislature controlled by Democrats went along with Patrick’s. From Beacon Hill to Washington, ego has a way of kicking in. ~Joan Vennochi

It’s a clever game that Obama is trying to play: he accuses Clinton of being too close to the Republicans and too much like the Republicans to be trusted (and allegedly worrying about what “Rudy and Romney” are going to say), but at the same time he wants you to think that he is far better at striking deals with Republicans based on fairly limited success he has had collaborating with a couple GOP Senators for the past couple of years.  In other words, she is a collaborationist, whereas he is bipartisan.  See the difference?  If you don’t, perhaps he just needs the right “atmospherics” and you can begin hallucinating substantive distinctions between them.

You know, Charles [Krauthammer] is probably one of my very favorite columnists. I don’t know of anybody who I love to read more than him, and I love almost every column he writes except the ones he writes about me. ~Mike Huckabee

The word pathetic comes to mind.

Iran is the most striking example. As recently as June, a debate question for GOP candidates was whether they would use tactical nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nukes. That none of the major ones ruled it out now looks excessively hawkish in light of the latest intelligence estimate that Iran ended its atomic weapons program in 2003. ~Michael Goodwin

Now it looks excessively hawkish?  What did it look like back then?  The voice of reason?

The prevailing Huckabee narrative maintains that he’s benefiting strictly from the loyalty of the religious right. ~Frank Rich

As it happens, the narrative is (so far) absolutely right.  Rich argues that this cannot account of his national polling, where he hovers around 16-20% these days.  But if Amy Sullivan’s figures are right (taken from this very early assessment of Romney’s religion predicament), evangelicals make up 30% of the GOP electorate.  Even assuming that Huckabee is rising simply as the evangelical and religious conservative candidate, that would suggest that Huckabee has not yet reached his ceiling.  Nonetheless, despite the flaws of Rich’s electoral analysis, he may have a point in seeing Huckabee as the GOP’s Obama.  Obama is a progressive who preaches a saccharine, feel-good message of hope and unity, and in a lot of ways so is Huckabee.