James Forsyth’s view of the prospects for the Annapolis peace conference make a good deal more sense than making comparisons to Munich.  The Economistalso thinks it will probably lead to very little.  Bret Stephens is pretty clearly vehemently opposed to the idea, but at least grants that the gathering, or meeting, or whatever it is, is “pointless.”  That is why the crazed reaction of Melanie Phillips (linked above) that talks of the “betrayal of the Jewish people” is particularly bizarre.  You can’t betray an entire people with a photo-op, no matter how freighted with significance it is supposed to be.  Granted, Ms. Phillips has been getting awfully agitated of late about Annapolis and Israel, but what puzzles me is why she is so bothered by a conference that will almost certainly change nothing at all.  Cal Thomas joins the chorus that the conference represents the “selling out” of Israel, which is absurd.  Andy McCarthy’s objections to the participation of the Syrians may be misguided, but at least it has a certain coherence by comparison. 

McCarthy and Phillips seem to agree that Syria’s participation renders the Bush Doctrine void, which would have to be a relief for sane people everywhere.  A foreign policy doctrine that insists that Syria is our mortal foe makes no sense.  To the extent that this conference helps weaken this idea about Syria, it may have done some good after all.  If it finally drives home the obvious–Secretary Rice really doesn’t know what she’s doing–we might be grateful for the clarification.

Even though it is distracting me from the far more important writing of the day (discussing the ins and outs of Battlestar Galactica: Razor), this weekend item (via Sullivan) from Michael Kinsley caught my attention, since it falls under the general category of Obama Supporters Who Are Intent On Making Obama Lose.  It is a fascinating phenomenon–it’s like an entire coterie of people who would have advised Michael Dukakis to wear the military helmet from the tank ad all the time.  Once more, we are presented with Obama as Globalised Leader or, as Kinsley puts it, World Man:

Obama also has valuable experience apart from elective office, and he also has to be careful about how he uses it. This is his experience as a black man in America and as what you might call a “world man” — Kenyan father, American mother, four formative years living in Indonesia, more years in the ethnic stew of Hawaii, middle name of Hussein, and so on — in an increasingly globalized world. Our current president had barely been outside the country when he was elected. His efforts to make up for this through repeated proclamations of pal-ship with every foreign leader who parades through Washington have been an embarrassment. Obama’s upbringing would serve us well if he were president, both in the understanding he would bring to issues of America’s role in the world (the term “foreign policy” sounds increasingly anachronistic) and in terms of how the world views America. Clinton mocks Obama’s claims that four years growing up in Indonesia constitute useful world-affairs experience. But they do.

Now, I have already said what I think of Obama’s claims in this area, especially when he chooses to describe those “formative” years as his “strongest experience in foreign relations.”  By this logic, if we want a really top-notch foreign policy “America’s role in the world-understanding” President, we should select our candidates for President strictly from the world of American expatriates, since they presumably have even more such experience overseas (and probably more relevant expertise at that).    Kinsley has the distinction of being one of the few prominent Obama apologists advancing this line of argument who is not originally from another country.  That in itself is telling–most of the people who see Obama’s global appeal are themselves looking at Obama with something like an outsider’s perspective, and so assume that Obama’s associations with the rest of the world are among his political virtues, rather than understanding that these represent some of his greatest political hurdles with the American electorate.  They think, understandably enough, that his experience abroad is valuable because they believe their experience is valuable (and it may well be in many cases, but it is far from clear that this applies to Obama with respect to the specific position he is seeking).  Here I think they make the mistake of assuming that having lived abroad for a few years and having a rather exotic family tree make for sound foreign policy judgement, when they simply provide at best just one piece of an intricate puzzle. 

At bottom, the urge to cast Obama as a man of the world, as globalisation incarnate, reveals the heart of the problem with Obama and Obamania: Obama is good because he is the antithesis of whatever Bush is (except that he really isn’t the antithesis).  If Bush made stubborn “unilateralism” his trademark, Obama is the essence of paralysing consensus-building.  He frames his policies in terms of how they differ with Bush, but frequently they serve as a strange mirror image of the Decider’s most utopian fantasies, and he seems to reach policy views based to a huge extent on how they diverge from Bush’s policies, almost without regard for the merit of his own proposal.  If Bush won’t talk to X regime, Obama will; if Bush has ruled something out, he will rule it in, and vice versa.  Obama has the odds in his favour–Bush is wrong so often that taking the exact opposite position from him will yield many of the right answers–but he gives the impression of being entirely reactive.  This is why he frequently responds to critiques of his foreign policy ideas by huffing and puffing about the poor judgement of others, as if their follies on Iraq make his crazy remarks about Pakistan responsible.  Goodness knows it is tempting to assume that literally everything the President has done or will do is wrong, but the entire Obama campaign has taken on the appearance of an extended knee-jerk reaction.  Now his supporters express their enthusiasm for an anti-Bush who will undo the damage that the incurious Mr. Bush has wrought…based on the reality that Obama has been outside the country quite a lot, while Bush had not been, and on Obama’s mixed and international heritage as opposed to Bush’s dull WASP pedigree.  It is the ultimate replacement of substance with style: you can apparently take or leave Obama’s ideas, but his biography and symbolism (the “candidate of life experience,” as Kinsley terms it) are supposed to make us exalt him.  Sorry, it’s been tried before, and John McCain lost, and he is losing again.  (One might also quibble with the strange view that John McCain’s time as a POW gives him some unique moral authority, considering that he has never seen an aggressive war he didn’t want to support.)

I wish all of my readers and colleagues a very happy Thanksgiving.  There will likely be no more blogging over the holiday weekend, and at least for the next few days all of us should be doing something more edifying or at least more sane than blogging and reading blogs.

One other thought about Mike Huckabee today.  I looked at his Chuck Norris ad again, and it struck me that once the joke wears off the ad seems to be saying: “here is a list of untrue, ridiculously exaggerated things about Chuck Norris, and here also is a list of untrue, ridiculously exaggerated things about Mike Huckabee.”  The audience will have to conclude that Huckabee is no more conservative than Chuck Norris is superhuman.

The latest TAC is now online.  Articles available online are Kelley Beaucar Vlahos’ good cover story on private military contractors, Peter Hitchens on North Korea, Kara Hopkins’ devastating review of Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism, plus Leon Hadar and my column on Islamofascism.

There are few things that drive partisan Republicans crazier than the Valerie Plame business.  The conservative establishment went mad when Libby was indicted, and became even more hysterical when he was convicted.  Practically everyone learned their lines to perfection: “No underlying crime!  Witch hunt!  Lying under oath is just a technicality!” 

Of course, this particular dead horse has now risen again to be flogged some more thanks to Scott McClellan’s book that appears to implicate Bush and Cheney directly in the decision to use Plame’s name and then helped in the cover-up.  My response was to yawn–of course they were involved.  That was the whole point of Libby playing the role of the fall guy; it didn’t make any sense otherwise.  For some unknown reason, Huckabee has decided that now, as he is making a play for Iowa, is the time to call for an investigation of Bush and Cheney’s involvement.  The Plame-Libby question is a purely insider concern of fairly arcane and tiresome complexity.  It is not one that will change popular attitudes about Huckabee, but it seems to me that Huckabee has just invited a round of furious attacks from activists and pundits that he doesn’t need.  Expect Fred Thompson, arch-defender of Libby, to try to make some hay out of this.

I agree with Ross that Goldberg passed over the most important factor in the mainstream GOP’s hostility to Ron Paul, namely his views on Iraq and foreign policy more generally.  This brings me back to something that has puzzled me about the mainstream’s response to Huckabee.  Several people at NR, and now the editors of NR together, have made it clear that Huckabee is undesirable because of his domestic policy views, but I have seen on more thanone occasion Republican observers making the charge that there is supposed to be something deficient about Huckabee’s foreign policy. 

When I looked over his CFR CSIS remarks, I found a few things that would make a dyed-in-the-wool interventionist blush (the maniac favours containing Iran–can you imagine?), but for the most part it was perfectly predictable boilerplate.  His adoption of the absurd word “Islamofascism” of late may make it look as if he’s trying too hard, but no one can accuse him of going “off the reservation” on foreign policy, nor do I think they can legitimately claim that he has not given the matter serious thought.  Yet his foreign policy views are, according to Krauthammer, “naive and unconvincing.”  Considering the source, Huckabee might take that as a compliment, but this criticism represents the difficulty Huckabee is having in gaining acceptance as one who is sufficiently hawkish and interventionist.

Returning to domestic policy, it isn’t all that surprising that Paul is also considered an extremist for his small-government, constitutionalist views, while Huckabee’s statism is really much less surprising, even if it strongly displeases key interest groups.  Huckabee’s domestic policy views are much, much closer to the way Republicans have actually governed over the last six years.  His departures from the “small-government orthodoxy” that supposedly has the GOP in its crushing embrace are mostly the departures that the entire party has made.  Where the national party leaders, including several of the leading candidates, mostly continue to pretend that the GOP still favours small government and just “lost sight of their principles,” Huckabee doesn’t wear that mask and bluntly proposes “compassionate” and big-government conservative schemes.

This fiction that the leaders are adhering to a “small-government orthodoxy” does a disservice to both Huckabee and Paul.  (I don’t like Huckabee, and I don’t want him to do well, but both he and Paul drive different parts of the establishment crazy and could throw the entire race into disarray, which would be a good thing for many reasons.)  If you want a real small-government conservative, your choices in the current field are  limited (Paul, Tancredo and probably Thompson), and if you want someone who will reveal his big-government credentials up front either Huckabee or possibly Hunter is your man.  With perhaps one exception among the “leading” or big-name candidates, I doubt very much that any of Huckabee’s main competitors strongly reject an activist, interventionist federal government on principle.  Romney, of course, has his MassCare and its mandates (which would, at first glance, make him more of a “statist” than Obama in this area), and the idea that Giuliani somehow adheres to a small-government vision because he has cut taxes in the past seems bizarre.  

Big-government conservatives enjoy cutting taxes, too, and they also like to spend enormous amounts of money and expand the size and scope of government, particularly if it can be justified in any way as part of national security.  What I think really bothers the mainstream about Huckabee, to the extent that they are bothered (and if he wins Iowa, you can expect them to come after him with guns blazing), is his view on trade.  Along with Hunter, he is really the only other protectionist in the GOP field.  Like Hunter, he has not had much luck raising very much cash, because his position on trade alienates wealthy donors and establishment figures.  The main orthodoxy Huckabee is running up against is not over the size of government, but rather the free trade orthodoxy that has almost completely captured the GOP (and which is, incidentally, killing them in the Midwest and elsewhere).  In practice, this is a much more important “orthodoxy” and politicians who go against it have a much harder time getting support.  What I think frightens the mainstream about Huckabee is that he may be able to smuggle in his protectionism under the cover of the big-government conservatism that the GOP has been practicing for years.  What is also frightening to them about Huckabee is that his views on trade are much closer to a strong plurality view within the GOP (his views on immigration, not so much), which gives him a decent shot at appealing to the voters in the primaries and the general election.  If he advances very far, Huckabee’s appeal will throw free traders into a bit of a panic, since it will mean that major candidates on both sides are openly talking skeptically about the benefits of free trade.

Rasmussen’s latest polling on the war again shows strong pro-withdrawal sentiment: 63% want American soldiers out of Iraq within a year, which nearly matches a mid-October result of 64%.  Public opinion about the war in November 2007 is virtually unchanged, despite many fluctuations back and forth, from where it was just after the midterms.  Whatever else it may have done, the “surge” has not changed public opinion about staying in Iraq. 

Some notable things compared with the most recent weeks: 28% now want immediate withdrawal, slightly higher than last week (26%); 41% of Republicans now want the soldiers brought home either immediately or within a year, as opposed to “staying until the mission is complete.”  The latter still commands a small majority of Republicans (53%), but this is the lowest level of Republican support for staying in Iraq that there has been since Rasmussen started taking this poll.  It is tenpoints lower than last week, six points lower than two weeks ago and four points lower than the mid-October poll.  Since last year at this time, Republican support for staying in Iraq has dropped five points.  Support for immediate withdrawal is limited on the GOP side and fluctuates a bit (17% favoured it two weeks ago, 10% last week, 16% this week), but there is now a combination of increased support for immediate withdrawal and withdrawal within a year among Republicans at the same time (25% of Republicans want out within a year this week) and .  Republican support seems to be trending back downward gradually after it had increased during the “surge.”  71% of Republicans wanted to “stay until the mission is complete” in late September.  This week’s result among Republicans marks an 18-point drop since then.  For a bit of perspective, last November’s poll using the same questions showed 58% of Republicans supported “staying until the mission is completed.”   

So over the last year we have seen a firming up and strengthening of the pro-withdrawal position with some slight erosion of Republican support for remaining in Iraq.  The percolation of information about improved security conditions has not weakened support for withdrawal, but may have instead started to undermine what little support for the war that remained.

Ross has covered most of Chait’s article pretty thoroughly with a biting tone and plenty of vim, but he seems to have overlooked the most glaring problem with Chait’s argument–the concluding line.  Chait wrote:

If it makes sense to support public figures because they share our religious beliefs, then it also makes sense to oppose public figures who don’t.

Not that!  This is supposed to be the killing blow, the conclusion that shows us why “faith-based politics” is ultimately so pernicious: it leads voters to judge candidates according to their beliefs!  Religious beliefs, yes, but beliefs all the same.  Unless we think that religious teachings have no effect on the education and cultivation of the minds of religious people, it seems entirely arbitrary to declare one set of beliefs off limits to public scrutiny and out of bounds for public discourse.  The secularist declares quite confidently that voters should not take this into consideration, which is to say that voters are supposed to ignore what is generally granted to be an important element in the lives of most Americans.  Yes, this does mean that voters will oppose public figures who do not share their beliefs, or at the very least this difference of beliefs will create an obstacle that the candidate will need to overcome and address.  How is this ultimately any different from any other aspect of democratic politicking?  Candidates, if they are to be successful, must reach voters “where they live,” so to speak, and so long as Americans are at least nominally religious we can expect public expressions of this and we should also expect the influence of these views on the government.  

Separated from a coercive state apparatus mandating this or that doctrine, religious arguments or policy arguments that draw on religious language must rely on their persuasive power.  If this kind of language has real persuasive power and my political opponents were using it, I could see the temptation to keep it out of public discourse as much as possible.  Yet the core of the secularists’ own view of the world is that religious language is not persuasive (not to them anyway) and that appeals to Scripture, tradition and ethical arguments derived from these sources are spurious.  In short, secularists want to bar the door to a styule of politics that they themselves find entirely unpersuasive on the grounds that it is…too dangerously powerful.     

Then there was this section that jumped out at me:

The depth of American religiosity is precisely why secularism is so important. Since religion is premised on faith, theological disputes cannot be settled through public reason [bold mine-DL]. Even the most vicious public policy disputes get settled over time. (Americans now agree on slavery and greenback currency.)  But we’re no closer to consensus on the divinity of Jesus than we were 200 years ago.

What would constitute a consensus on this?  Who is “we”?  All Americans?  Christians have enjoyed a general consensus on this for a lot longer than 200 years.   How wide and broad is the neo-Arian movement these days?  There was a good deal more consensus about this among all Americans at a number of points in the last 200 years than there is now, if only because we used to be a much more religiously homogenous country to the extent that even larger majorities identified themselves with one part of the “Great Tradition” of Christianity or another.  In a strange way, what Chait seems to be saying is that a lack of consensus about the final conclusions of a debate means that we should not have an ongoing debate.  He takes for granted that there cannot be a consensus on such matters, since they are theological, but this is to misunderstand how theological claims are made and judged.  

At the root of Chait’s claim is a conceit about theology that bears no relationship to what theology actually is.  For the secularist and, I’m sorry to say, for more than a few believers, theology is something abstract and divorced from “real” religious experience.  As the Fathers teach us, theology is best understood as prayer and spiritual experience and only subsequently as formal doctrine that expresses the realities encountered in that experience in technical and philosophical language.  In the Church, those most expert at marrying these two, the life of prayer and spiritual experience and precise exposition of the Faith, are given the epithet Theologian (Sts. John, Gregory of Nazianzos and Symeon bear this title in the Orthodox Church).  The danger of the conceit that “theological disputes cannot be settled through public reason” is that it encourages the view that religious life is purely experiential and subjective and has no rationality to it at all.  This is what we all know as fideism, and it is not Christian theology (nor would other religious traditions recognise this arational form of their teachings).  There are axioms at the heart of any theological system, just as there in any philosophical argument, but the demonstration of theological truths has been since the early centuries of the Church a decidedly intellectual and rational enterprise. 

Obviously, divorced from praxis and a living faith this theology will not be sufficient, but there is a basic misconception here that theology exists outside the realm of the rational and is therefore unfit for public discourse.  It is a matter of record, however, that public discourse in pre-modern Europe was frequently entirely theology, and the rhetorical and intellectual traditions we and modern Europeans inherited from that history remain suffused with a theological dimension and the practice of deliberating on doctrinal matters in public.  Chait deploys the phrase “public reason,” which is a way of saying “a kind of reason that makes an a priori exclusion of anything related to metaphysics or revelation.”  In other words, a deficient kind of reason.  I agree that this sort of reason cannot settle anything, since it barely begins to grasp the fullness of reality.

Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in southeast Asia. ~Barack Obama

I forgot this is supposed to be reassuring and make us want Obama to be President.  I’ve been reading The Economist since I was 10–do I get to be Secretary of State? 

So his strongest experience isn’t the work that he’s done with Sen. Lugar on Russian nukes, or his time on the Foreign Relations Committee–it’s a four-year period in his childhood.  It’s bad enough that he’s made this silly claim before, but it’s just sad that he’s making it into a sort of centerpiece of his foreign policy credentials.

P.S.  Living overseas offers a different perspective, I grant you, but how it could be his “strongest” experience really is a mystery.