There an idea out there that supporting Huckabee “really” lends support to Giuliani, but what this idea does is to boost Romney by advancing claims that aren’t necessarily true.  It tells you that the only person who can “stop Giuliani” is Romney, and it justifies this claim on the shaky ground that Romney, whose definite support in South Carolina is very limited (see page 11), is in a position to compete against Giuliani, who is supposedly in a position to dominate the race without a heroic Romney to stand in his way.  Don’t you believe any of it.  Huckabee today ties Giuliani in Rasmussen’s daily national tracking poll.  Now I don’t think much of national polls, but if they have justified labeling Giuliani a “frontrunner” for all these months, they now justify calling Huckabee a co-frontrunner.  (As of right now, it appears as if Romney peaked in early October and Giuliani peaked in mid-October, with the latter shedding five points in the last week and dropping below 20% for only the second time in the last two months.)

Also, South Carolina voting is strongly influenced by what happens in earlier contests, and on the Republican side the Iowa winner tends to win in South Carolina as well.  This has usually worked to the advantage of the party establishment’s favourite, but this cycle things are much more scrambled and divided than usual.  The profiles of the GOP electorates in Iowa and South Carolina are similar enough that a surging Huckabee could also do quite well in S.C. if he could win in Iowa, assuming Huckabee could get some money for advertising during late December and early January.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for pro-life voters to remember this guy named John McCain. ~Matt Yglesias

In a different cycle, this might have actually happened.  David Corn has made a similar proposal, arguing that McCain is in a good position because he is just marginal enough now that other candidates aren’t attacking him, but he has the credentials, at least “on paper,” to appeal to the party.  Corn makes the good point that McCain should have reserves of support based on his views on the war and the political support he has lent the war over the years.  I think he is grudgingly respected because of this among core Republican voters, but it doesn’t outweigh what they see as his flaws.  “The answer is right in front of your face!” Corn declared to Republican voters, but I don’t think they are going to go that route.  As Jim Pinkerton reminded Corn during that episode, immigration and campaign finance reform (important to the activists who have an outsized impact in Iowa) are the dealbreakers for McCain.  Unlike Huckabee, whose immigration views are probably still not widely known, and unlike Giuliani, who can pretend that he cares about border security, McCain has been the standard-bearer for deeply unpopular immigration legislation and his allies (such as Graham) pushed for that legislation by denouncing the party base as racists.  Being on the wrong side of the party on immigration is politically dangerous enough in the primaries this cycle, but McCain is prominently and inextricably linked with one of the most hated pieces of legislation of the last ten years.  He might turn in a decent result in New Hampshire, given the role of independents in the primary and his history of popularity in that state, but the virtual consensus at the end of summer that he was finished was probably right.

P.S.  Of course, I have had such a lousy track record this cycle of picking winners and losers that whenever I am ready to dismiss a candidate, he begins to make a comeback, and when I predict a candidate’s victory it is a sure sign of his impending doom.  For instance, the RCP national average shows McCain gaining.

Slightly related to our modern theologically-inflected political controversies, my copy of Nicaea and its Legacy by Lewis Ayres arrived today.  I haven’t looked at it before, but I’ve heard many good things about it.  The fourth century controversies are fairly intimidating in their complexity even to those of us who spend our waking hours contemplating the significance of monotheletism.  We who work on the seventh century have the luxury, so to speak, of a paucity of sources and limited prosopographical information, so we are not simply inundated with information, and the fourth century looms so large and has been the focus of so many works that it quite an undertaking to put forward another general interpretation.  I look forward to reading it during vacation this month.

Romney seems eager to tie himself to the administration position on Iran:

Acknowledging some good news in a recently released National Intelligence Estimate saying Iran stopped actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003, Mitt Romney said the country remains a threat, even with only a peaceful nuclear energy program. “They, of course, are continuing making the ingredients which would be used in a nuclear weapon,” Romney told Politics Nation today. “If they had stopped both I would feel a great deal more confident about their intentions. But their continuing to produce enriched uranium is of great concern to the world.”

Essentially, Romney’s position is that sanctions have worked, so he concludes that continuing to engage in punitive sanctions is obviously the thing to do.  In other words, Iran should be punished when we think they’re developing nuclear weapons, and Iran should be punished when we know with some confidence that they aren’t.  Apparently, Iran should always be punished.  That pretty well sums up Romney’s views.  You can imagine that he would say the same thing if Iran gave up the fuel cycle all together: “They might start up a program in the future, so they’re still a threat, if only in my mind.” 

Romney made clear that the NIE would not have too much influence on his thinking about Iran:

My perspective on matters of importance is that you don’t look for a homogenized view. You look for people who have different perspectives and you want to listen to the debate between them and see the basis of their thinking.

In short, he will listen to more accurate information as well as listening to nonsense as if they were equally valid sources.

Ralph Peters says something that doesn’t drive me up the wall (for a change):

Our instinctive response is to praise the results of Sunday’s balloting in Venezuela and question the same day’s results from Russia. But, dirty politics notwithstanding, democracy worked in both places: It just worked differently – because the two electorates wanted different things.

It’s a shocking idea, I know, but it might just catch on.  He then goes on to make this a vindication of a thesis of global democratisation, which I find less compelling.  This seems not to take account of the billions of people who are not living in functionally democratic states.  Further, it seems to take no account of the understanding that global democratisation is generally a very bad thing for political freedom.  Also, the willingness of authoritarians to ratify their policies with plebiscites and elections is hardly new, and represents the easy coexistence between democracy and despotism.  Democracy may or may not sweep the world, but if it does the chances for real political liberty in the world will have gone down dramatically.  This is one reason why I have never understood the enthusiasm for democratisation, and why those who have dubbed it the “freedom agenda” have always been on the wrong track (assuming, that is, that they were ever genuinely interested in promoting liberalism, which I don’t assume).  Even if democratisation “works,” liberty will typically be the loser.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Monday that he would not focus on his Mormon beliefs in a major speech on religion this week and instead would discuss his concern that “faith has disappeared from the public square.” ~The Los Angeles Times

So, after all of our fevered speculation about why Romney was going to address questions about his religion at this politically sensitive time, “The Speech” is going to be “some speech on religion.”

Ross may be right that the NIE causes the issue of Iran policy to recede into the background during the election next year, but it seems to me that it still pretty badly compromises several of the leading Republican candidates.  In fact, the one leading Republican candidate whose foreign policy ideas on Iran aren’t completely absurd, and the leading candidate who stands to be vindicated the most by the NIE on the Republican side is (yes, that’s right) Mike Huckabee.  Certainly, Ron Paul has taken the most unequivocal (and correct) line that Iran does not pose a threat to the United States, so he may also benefit from this news, but Huckabee is in the best position to take advantage of his relatively more sane Iran position.  Like the others, he assumed that Iranian proliferation was happening and posed a threat, so he cannot be credited with some great prescience or insight on the proliferation question itself, but unlike his leading competitors he had a very different view of how to treat Iran.  In his CFR speech, Huckabee said of the Iranian regime:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them. 

Negotiate!  No wonder neoconservatives were uninspired by his remarks.  He has since been derided for his “naive and unconvincing” foreign policy ideas by those most invested in the idea that Iran is not a rational state actor, but rather an apocalyptic land of crazy people.  They appear to have been demonstrably wrong in their judgement, while Huckabee and other more “realist” observers appear to have been right.  Compared to John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain, Mitt Romney, who is apparently on a mission to indict Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention, and Giuliani, whose campaign is advised by the likes of Norman Podhoretz and who has said  that we need to stay “on offense,” Huckabee’s recommended approach to Iran is a picture of sanity.  You will object that this may not be saying much, but it’s still the case that the one currently leading Republican candidate who espoused containment of Iran (albeit combined with continued support for the war in Iraq) was Huckabee.  He was the one whose foreign policy credentials were supposed to be non-existent and whose ideas were supposed to be unacceptable to “national security conservatives.”  Huckabee comes away from this latest news looking more responsible and competent–at least on Iran–than the other leading candidates.

Update: I keep forgetting that Republican voters don’t like responsible and competent foreign policy ideas.  60% of Iowans, according to Pew’s latest, choose one of the four other leading candidates as the best candidate on Iran, and 11% select Huckabee (graphic on page 8).  Of the top five, Huckabee is tied for fourth here.  The crazy guy leads the pack on Iran, followed by McCain.  Sometimes I just really don’t understand this party.  It’s even worse in New Hampshire (page 10)–69% select Romney, Giuliani or McCain as the best candidate on Iran, while Huckabee and Paul together get 8%.

Putin’s reelection, Larison says, “is a fact that should be viewed with some dispassion.” (Er, why exactly?) ~Michael Moynihan

Since Putin himself wasn’t being re-elected yesterday (it was the election for the Duma, and Putin headed United Russia’s list), as Moynihan knows, this sentence is strange enough, but the implication that non-Russians should have something other than fairly dispassionate reactions to an entirely unsurprising (and, yes, obviously rigged and inflated) United Russia election is stranger still.  The original article’s thesis didn’t really merit comment in my first post, because the thesis, particularly as it related to international affairs and Russian politics, was ridiculous.  I addressed his characterisation of Laughland’s TAC piece, because it seemed quite misleading and the article is not available online where it can be easily checked.  Here’s Moynihan’s opening line to his original article:

On December 2 voters in Russia and Venezuela will go to the polls, choosing to either accelerate the Sovietization and Sandinistaization of their respective societies or—an eventuality that seems less likely—to curtail the centralization of power in the hands of increasingly villainous chief executives. 

But a vote for United Russia wasn’t a vote for an accelerated “Sovietization” of Russian society.  Call it the entrenchment of Putinism or populist authoritarianism, or call it proof of illiberal democracy, but one thing it was not was an acceleration of “Sovietization.”  “Sovietization” is what you might expect from the Communists, who are now the lone opposition party.  The use of the word “Sovietization” in this context is absurd, and the statement in the concluding paragraph isn’t much better when he says, “Both Chavez and Putin are attempting to reset the clock on the Cold War…”  This takes symbolic use of Soviet nostalgia as proof of “Sovietization,” and seems to assume that this supposed “Sovietization” makes Russia into a threat and Putin into a villain, whom, it practically goes without saying, we are supposed to oppose.  The assumption behind the article seems to be that developments in the domestic politics of Russia and Venezuela pose some sort of threat to the West, presumably comparable to those posed by the USSR and its satellites.  This is basically fearmongering of the kind that has clouded our debates on foreign policy for years.  The generally awful results–for both America and the “beneficiaries” of our policies–of marrying power projection and “freedom agenda” meddling speak for themselves. 

We should view the Russian election results from yesterday with “some dispassion” for many reasons.  First of all, it is really none of our business and railing against it will change nothing, but more than that the proper approach to Russia that is clearly dominated by Putinism is to try to find some way to cultivate good relations with Russia, since it is obviously in the American interest to have good relations with a Eurasian power with which we have common security interests and whose continued political and economic stability we have an interest in supporting.  Continually lecturing the Russians on the deficiencies in their political system seems a good way to promote anti-Russian sentiment at home and give the impression that Westerners are intent on meddling in the internal affairs of Russia, which gives the Putin regime many pretexts for claiming that the West is trying to subvert and weaken Russia through the promotion of liberal political forces.  If Russian liberals are closely associated with the West and receive vocal support from Westerners, as they now are, they will never gain any traction inside Russia, and the attempted promotion of Russian liberals by outsiders will simply strengthen anti-Western attitudes within Russia that are also detrimental to the cultivation of good U.S.-Russian relations.  One of the points I was trying to make is that articles that try to revive Cold War mentalities, or articles that pretend that a new Cold War is upon us, as Moynihan’s certainly seemed to do, partake of an imprudent alarmism and vilification of other states that have very real damaging effects on the quality of foreign policy thinking in this country.  There are already voices in Washington who would like to imagine Russia as our enemy, and those who would like to avoid renewed confrontation and tension between our two countries should all do what we can to challenge what these voices are saying. 

Moynihan cites Laughland’s past works, which I was not defending in my post, but which he takes as vindication of his claim that Laughland is  writing as an apologist in this particular case.  Indeed, he can’t be bothered to find the article he was criticising.  The article in question was not an apology for Putin.  It was a corrective against the steady stream of vilification that we have become used to (and to which Moynihan’s article was another contribution), for the reasons I laid out before.  Moynihan needed to cite someone in the West as a “supporter” of Putin’s regime to show some relevance, and so he read into Laughland’s TAC piece the support he wanted to see in it.     

Another TAC piece from earlier this year by an author Moynihan will have a harder time trying to demonise was this cover article by Anatol Lieven:

And in contrast to the launching of the Cold War, for the U.S. to take these risks is not remotely justified by vital American interests. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the heartland of a revolutionary ideology that threatened to suppress free-market democracy, freedom, and religion across the world and, by dominating Western Europe and East Asia and fomenting revolution in Latin America, to pin the U.S. within its own borders, surround it, and eventually stifle it.

Today’s Russia is like many U.S. allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire [bold mine-DL]. Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans but entirely in line with world practice outside the U.S. and U.K. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand, the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration holds lessons for the present U.S. administration, not the other way around. Like India, Turkey, and many other democratic states, Russia has used brutal means to suppress a separatist rebellion.

Like Turkey for several decades when it was a member of NATO, Russia combines an increasingly independent judiciary and respect for the rule of law with selective repression (both formal and covert) against individuals seen as threats to the state or the ruling elite. The media scene is rather like India until the 1980s—a combination of state domination of television with a free and vocal, but much less influential, print media.

Above all, when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority—mostly because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s. Thus, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, American attacks on Putin in the name of democracy only foment the anger of ordinary Russians against the United States.  It does not help when criticism of Russia’s record on democracy and freedom comes from that notorious defender of human rights Dick Cheney or when these statements are immediately followed by warm and public American embraces of even more notorious ex-Soviet democrats like President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

Russia today is by no means a pretty picture, but to compare it in terms of repression and state control with the Soviet Union—or indeed with contemporary China—is grotesque [bold mine-DL]. We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

That is the voice of intelligent realism speaking.  It is worth noting this last point about comparisons with the USSR being grotesque, since this is exactly what Moynihan was doing.  It was against just such grotesquerie, and the hostility to the Russian government that it represented, that I was objecting.

P.S.  Later in the piece, Lieven said this, which is especially relevant to the Laughland piece, since it was Putin’s pragmatism that Laughland was trying to stress:

In fact, we should be very glad that the Putin administration is as pragmatic as it is in its international policy and as relatively law-abiding at home. During the 1990s, given what was happening to both Russian living standards and Russian national power and prestige, I and many other Western observers in Russia feared an eruption of outright fascism, with catastrophic results for Russia and the world.

This is one reason that present U.S. attacks on the Putin administration are so over the top. The other is that the post-Cold war era should have begun with a presumption of Russia’s innocence on the part of the West. After all, two years before it collapsed the Soviet Union had already withdrawn peacefully from Eastern Europe on the informal promise that these countries would not be incorporated into NATO. This withdrawal removed the original casus belli of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, which began not because of anything that the Soviet state was doing within its own borders but because of its domination of European states beyond its borders in ways that were clearly menacing to Western Europe and vital American interests there.

This last sentence drives home the point that the success of United Russia on Sunday likewise has nothing to do with a restart or return of the Cold War, since the Cold War, if we are to be precise about what the name means, referred to U.S.-Soviet great power rivalry centered in Europe. 

Maybe some voters who are inclined to hold Romney’s Mormonism against him will feel guilty when Romney cites the principle of religious tolerance. ~Marc Ambinder

Perhaps, but for them to feel guilty they would have to have done something they actually thought was wrong.  Not voting for Romney because of his Mormonism is not intolerance, and it is a measure of how distorted, or rather inflated, the concept of tolerance has become that strong disagreement over religion can be equated with religious intolerance.

But I think it’s bogus to assert that the reason for Governor Romney’s upcoming speech is a rival’s poll numbers. Rather, it’s the fact that a rival appears to be running an overtly sectarian campaign — something that is just not good for America. ~Charles Mitchell

I”m holding off commenting more about the speech for a while, but I did want to address this claim of sectarianism, which I think is excessive and a sign of how increasingly panicked Romney supporters are becoming.  I will say also that I think Huckabee’s rise is not a major factor behind the decision to give the speech.  It is not just Romneyites who have been accusing Huckabee of making a religious appeal, but they are virtually alone in claiming that Huckabee is running a “sectarian campaign.”  His recent advertisement, entitled “Believe,” has received criticism from almost all quarters for its graphic that reads, “Christian Leader.”  According to Huckabee on ABC’s This Week, where he appeared yesterday, the purpose of the ad was simply introductory.  Huckabee is an ordained minister, and he has been in the forefront of various Christian conservative endeavours, such as the promotion of so-called “covenant marriage,” both of which give him some legitimate claim to the description “Christian leader.”  Observers are assuming a sectarian and anti-Mormon motive behind to this part of Huckabee’s ad, when this is both unproven and seems directly contradictory to everything Huckabee says publicly and the general tenor of his campaign.  Might his ad have the effect of directing voters who do not want to support a Mormon towards Huckabee?  Yes, it might, but if you wanted to run a “sectarian campaign” you would make the appeal much more straightforward.  Huckabee isn’t running such a campaign, because I suspect he knows that this would grate on the sensibilities of a lot of voters.  He probably also believes that strongly affirming his beliefs isn’t the same, or at least doesn’t have to be the same, as ridiculing someone else’s. 

At most, the ad very vaguely alludes to his past work as a minister (which you would only recognise if you already knew this about him), but never mentions any of that explicitly, and it seeks to identify the candidate with his target constituency, Christian conservatives.  Unless it is now supposed to be illegitimate for a Christian to describe himself as such, I fail to see what Huckabee has done wrong.  Some Christian conservatives are rubbed the wrong way by such overt appeals to Christian identity, but then I suspect Ross was not won over by George Bush’s claim that his “favourite philosopher is Jesus Christ” or by the story of his religious awakening.  The voters won over by these appeals see nothing the matter with a candidate stating and embracing his religious identity, and they think it is entirely appropriate to judge candidates based on this, because they do not think religion is something to be kept out of the public eye, nor do they think it is somehow shameful to speak about it in public.  If a person’s religion informs his “values” and shapes his judgement about matters of public policy, it should be something that voters take into consideration. 

The basic argument against this, and it is the one that Chait has made, is that this is unfair to candidates who are unrepresentative of the body politic in their religious affiliation, which is essentially a complaint that there is a majority religion and that candidates in a mass democracy are likely to come to from that majority religion in nationwide elections.  Short of completey removing religion from public discourse or awaiting the day when there are no majority religions, it seems inevitable in a mass democracy that religious identity will have an impact on elections, just as other kinds of identity have and must have in a political system that is, for good or ill, inherently identitarian.  Secular voters respond to secular candidates and react against publicly religious candidates in the same way, because they are interested in being represented by someone like them who shares their worldview.  Secular Americans treat an entirely non-religious politics as the norm and the neutral ground upon which publicly religious candidates intrude, but having that kind of politics is a preference that can and will be contested.     

In any case, it seems to me that the intended message of Huckabee’s ad seems to be not simply, or even necessarily, “You should vote for me because I am a Christian,” but rather, “Because my faith defines me, I have principles that will not change or waver.”  This ad does implicitly criticise Romney, not because he is a Mormon, but because Romney is an opportunistic fraud.  If you want to damage Romney with the voting public, you would never need to say a thing about his religion–just remind them of the man’s utter lack of scruples when it comes to public policy positions.  In the end, that will be more than enough.

P.S.  Incidentally, I agree with the argument that identity is a terrible basis for selecting candidates if you are actually interested in selecting the person best qualified for the office, because it will often cause voters to choose inferior candidates, but then democracy and selecting the most meritorious candidates have never gone together.  If you aren’t a fan of democracy (and I’m definitely not), this is probably one of the reasons why, but it is an unavoidable part of the process.