“You know, the term ‘Christian’ means different things to different people,” Romney told me. “Jews aren’t Christian. That doesn’t preclude a Jew from being able to run for office and become president. I believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world and is the son of God. Now, some people say, well, that doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian because Christian refers to a certain group of evangelical Christian faiths. That’s fine. That’s their view. Others say, no, anyone who believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the Savior should be called Christian. That’s fine, too. I’ll just describe what I believe and not try to distinguish my faith from others. That’s really something for my faith to do and for the churches amongst themselves to consider.” ~Byron York

You would think that Christian conservatives would have a hard time swallowing this “I’m OK, You’re OK” approach to defining basic terms.  I suppose this is the sort of relativistic babble you end up having when you start out from a position of espousing shared “values,” but Romney is making a mistake here.  He will not say directly that he believes Mormons are Christians, which he seems to believe, but he doesn’t want to say that those who think otherwise are mistaken.  This attempt to have it both ways is going to dissatisfy a lot of Christian and Mormon voters alike.

This was a funny slip-up on Obama’s part during his press conference in Iowa:

Now, what we said in our statement originally was, if in fact, this is not something that is true, then all the Clinton Administration needs to do [bold mine-DL] is, all the Clinton operation needed to do was just say it wasn’t true.

Chuck Todd sees Obama’s weekend hyperventilating  serious response about the vague hints of Clintonites pushing “scandalous information” about him in the context of his relatively weaker campaigning in the week after his impressive speech Sunday before last.  (For my part, I think his slightly incredulous reaction when he was confronted with a voter who apparently thought that Iraq had a connection to Al Qaeda is perfectly understandable, but the video of the exchange probably doesn’t help him.)   

Meanwhile, Mark Shea and Sullivan disagree with my view that Obama’s reaction (which I still think was a mistake) was evidence of a “flailing” campaign (Shea disagreeing more strongly).  

One source of the disagreement is that Shea thinks that the Clinton campaign is actually actively engaged in spreading these stories about “scandalous information,” and further that Obama is showing strength by taking the smear artists head on.  It does sound like the sort of thing the Clintons would do, and I don’t rule out that they will slime their opponents in other ways (probably through independent expenditure groups or other indirect attacks that cannot be traced back to them as easily), but in this case it really doesn’t make much sense. 

First of all, for a smear to have maximum effect, it has to be timed correctly.  If it is false or extremely vague, it can be debunked or ignored soon enough, which is why these tactics come during the primaries, if they come at all, in the weeks and days immediately before the relevant vote.  The goal of such tactics is to shift voters, especially undecided voters, to your side or at least shift them away from your opponent and to preoccupy the opposing campaign with refuting the charges in the closing stretch when the campaign’s time is most valuable and should not be wasted on such distractions.  (What makes Obama’s reaction so strange and misguided is that he has chosen to waste his campaign’s time and consume much of the recent news coverage of his campaign with this story.  Plus, responding to what a columnist said about intra-party gossip is the ultimate insiderish sort of thing to spend your time in Iowa talking about–it weakens Obama’s self-professed identity as someone who has not been in the world of Washington very long.)  Besides, if Clinton were going to slime Obama, she wouldn’t be doing it through a whisper campaign that could be easily traced to her.  If she is the “Lady Macbeth” that many of us see her as, she will be more cunning than this. 

Meanwhile, Obama has taken the odd position that he trusts the account of a columnist, one who is widely reviled on the left, and distrusts Clinton.  That hurts his credibility with Democratic voters, and makes those voters think that he will not be up to a general election fight.  It also partially undermines his claim to represent moving beyond the politics of the past, since the framing of his response is clearly that of a campaign haunted by what happened to John Kerry in 2004.  Responding “swiftly” to so-called “Swift-boating” charges, no matter how vague or baseless, has become the new “defensive crouch.”  It is an expression not of confidence, but of the lack of it.   

The origin of the “Obama was a Muslim” meme was first attributed to the Clinton campaign, which was also untrue.       

Update: Ambinder relates Fund’s reporting on the core of the “scandalous information” in question:

The murmured charge is that as an Illinois state senator, Mr. Obama engaged in a real estate deal that benefited him in exchange for legislative favors. In short, what might pass for standard operating procedure in the Illinois legislature could nonetheless prove embarrassing to someone campaigning as a paragon of political virtue for president. So far, however, no proof of the allegation has been presented.

As Ambinder notes, the Rezko business is common knowledge in the media (Rezko was included in Obama’s Meet The Press interview last week), which makes Obama’s reaction seem even more bizarre than it already did.

My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris. ~Mike Huckabee

This comes from Huckabee’s new television ad that will be running in Iowa.  If you’re familiar with the joke, you will probably think it’s not a bad use of Norris’ support, but for those people inclined to vote for Huckabee because of Chuck Norris they might see the two of them sitting together and wonder, “Why can’t we have Chuck Norris instead?”  For everyone else, it will seem silly.  

Incredulity was my response when I heard that Huckabee claimed to have a plan for securing the border.  You’ll notice that Chuck Norris doesn’t say anything about Huckabee’s policies relating to the border and immigration, since his record on the latter is not something that many people in the Iowa GOP are likely to appreciate.

So a Novak column said that Clinton operatives were spreading word about “scandalous” information that Clinton had on Obama, but which she wasn’t going to use, prompting Obama to…demand that she reveal whatever she has.  If this sounds strange, that’s because it is.  Obama issued a statement:

She of all people, having complained so often about ‘the politics of personal destruction,’ should move quickly to either stand by or renounce these tactics.

File this under the “not ready for primetime” category.  Obama here gives Clinton an opening to appear wise in the ways of the political world, while he flails about over some Beltway gossip in a column most Democrats probably will not even have read (and may not have heard of until he drew attention to it). 

By all accounts, Obama is remarkably clean for an Illinois politician (save the Rezko business, which may still dog him in months to come), and there seems to have never been any suspicion of any infidelities on his part, so I suppose I can understand reacting strongly to suggestions that there is something “scandalous” out there about him.  But given his reputation, he shouldn’t need to respond to some rumour in a column.  It doesn’t end up helping him, and confirms the impression that he is getting outmaneuvered by Clinton and that he would be an easy target in a general election fight.

Update: Obama’s campaign issued a retort to the Clinton campaign.  They won’t let it go.  Here was the latest statement:

The ‘experience’ America’s looking for today is not the practiced Washington art of evasion and deflection. Once again, the Clinton campaign refuses to answer two simple, direct questions:

Are “agents” of their campaign spreading these rumors? And do they have “scandalous” information that they are not releasing?

Yes or no?

This is bizarre.  Why keep alive a controversy that makes you look either a) weak and a little bit whiny or b) defensive about vague ethics charges? 

Second Update: Mark Halperin has a different view of the episode, seeing Obama’s response as “a tough call-to-arms for his supporters.”  Maybe it will work out that way, but I doubt it.  It can very easily be turned around him and show how easily he can be “rattled” or “distracted” by trivia.  It probably doesn’t change anything about the primary contest, but confirms Obama supporters in their assumptions about “conventional Washington politics,” while reconfirming Clinton supporters in their belief that Clinton is more politically experienced and capable of winning the general election.  Obama needs to break out of that dynamic, and what he has done this weekend reinforces it.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. ~Mark Steyn

It’s true that we have been fortunate in having had a political system that, while far from unchanged, has been far more stable than has been the case in other countries.  But as seems to be the case these days with all expressions of admiration for America, it is impossible for Steyn to leave it at that and must resort to belittling and mocking other countries for their internal upheavals and political misfortunes.      Speaking just of the Greeks, they had a functioning vasileomeni dimokratia (democracy with a king) in reality at least from 1864 until 1924, twelve years of admittedly fairly chaotic republican government, and then another two decades of post-war democratic government until the regime of the Colonels seized power (and received Washington’s endorsement).  Like many other European countries, Greece was deeply affected by WWI and its aftermath to a degree that was impossible in America.  Greece was affected particularly by the outcome of Greece’s own war in Anatolia and the Katastrofi that followed, whose consequences deeply divided the country, as did the experience of Axis occupation.  Not having to cope with such enormous changes with relatively limited resources, we have been fortunate–and should be thankful–not to have to experience the trials that Greece has gone through in the last century. 

Because of our fortunate geography and our distance from the centers of global conflict, we have never been confronted with quite the same kinds of political strains of many European nations.  We also enjoyed fairly unique circumstances in not having an entrenched established hierarchical order that was violently overthrown with the same degree of massive political and social reorganisation as many European nations did.  Because our War for Independence was in many respects a fight for preserving constitutional practices, we have enjoyed continuity of political institutions that societies split between forces of revolution and counter-revolution could not realistically have had.  Steyn notes the rarity of the American experience without considering that a good reason not to mock the turbulent political histories of other peoples.  There, but for the grace of God, go we.

I still think it makes no sense, but here is Paul Weyrich’s explanation of his endorsement of Romney.  The section on Romney’s foreign policy views strikes me as the weakest in the defense of the endorsement.  On the life and gay marriage questions, there are obviously going to be social conservatives who believe Romney is now sincere in his very newly discovered beliefs and those who think he cannot be trusted.  It seems futile to rehash all the reasons why Romney isn’t credible on those questions, since many people simply take him at his word that he just happened to change his mind at the same time that he was contemplating higher office.  Those who are already willing to look past the man’s naked opportunism, or who see it as a genuine conversion, will not be persuaded by another round of the same arguments. 

However, it is on foreign policy where there seems to me to be the greatest gap between the views of someone inclined towards a non-interventionist or even realist foreign policy and those of Romney.  First, Romney’s foreign policy receives fairly faint praise:

In the defense arena, Mr. Romney is a strong supporter of missile defense. I believe he would make President Reagan’s vision of a strategic defense initiative come true. I also believe he would be far more cautious than the current administration when it comes to nation-building. He is much more realistic than those who believe in making nations safe for democracy.

This last part may be true, though it is a little hard to discern from what Romney has said publicly.  What can be said is that Romney’s understanding of the Near East is both ignorant and incoherent, and his hostility to Iran is well-known.  What is striking about this section is that these are presumably the best things that Mr. Weyrich can say about Romney’s foreign and defense policy views.  We get no sense of what Romney’s views on the war are (for one thing, he doesn’t think that the war is a “disaster,” as Messrs. Weyrich and Lind have correctly described it), nor will the audience hear about his loopy idea of indicting Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention.  We hear only about missile defense and a soothing claim that Romney is much more “realistic” about nation-building and democracy promotion without any particulars to support this.  The trouble is that Romney is otherwise not terribly “realistic” in the rest of his foreign policy views, and doesn’t really see a meaningful distinction between “realists” and “neoconservatives.”  As he said in hisFA essay:

More broadly, lines have been drawn between those labeled “realists” and those labeled “neoconservatives.” Yet these terms mean little when even the most committed neoconservative recognizes that any successful policy must be grounded in reality and even the most hardened realist admits that much of the United States’ power and influence stems from its values and ideals.   

You couldn’t ask for a more typical Republican establishment interpretation than this.  Romney believes that “even the most committed neoconservatives” understand that policy must be grounded in reality–those are the words he and his campaign have used.  That seems irreconcilable with the record of many leading neoconservatives, whose grasp on reality was and remains tenuous. 

Later, Romney makes clear that he thinks that large-scale post-1991 demobilisation and defense reductions (which were actually begun under a certain Defense Secetary whose name begins with C and ends with -heney) were mistakes.  He evidently believes that maintaining the size of our Cold War-era military was something that we needed to do in the early ’90s, even though there was no rationale for having such a large force.  Indeed, unless one thinks that we should be engaged in multi-year occupations of other countries with no clear end in sight, a larger military makes little sense even today.  There is relatively little that an antiwar conservative or simply a foreign policy realist could find in Romney’s views that would be reassuring.

George Ajjan had additional comments on Romney’s essay at the time.

Well, so much for that:

Lou Dobbs of CNN swatted away rumors today that he might run for president.

“I don’t know where this is coming from,” he said in a quick phone interview. “I have no interest in running, and I’ve said that throughout.”

He doesn’t know where it’s coming from?  Perhaps the “friends of Lou Dobbs” who were floating this idea hadn’t bothered to mention their speculations to the man himself.

Glenn Greenwald has a good post (via Sullivan) on the absurdities of Bush’s speech to the Federalist Society, but I think he still doesn’t go quite far enough.  It is ridiculous that this President delivered remarks about the co-equal branches of government and the theory of checks and balances, given everything he has done to usurp new powers for the executive branch and run roughshod over the limitations placed on his office.  Yes, it’s shameless and almost unbelievable. 

But this is nothing new.  His nods to strict constructionism have always been entirely cynical, and he has never demonstrated in the conduct of his own administration or in his handling of legislation that he believes this in the least.  This speech is pure pandering to the people at the Federalist Society, and serves as a convenient way to maintain the fiction that Bush-style “conservatives” respect the Constitution.  This allows most Republicans to pretend that the leaders of their party are still substantially better than and different from their Democratic counterparts on questions of constitutional interpretation and the judiciary, which are some of the last things that are supposed to hold the coalition together.  Without this fiction, anyone on the right remotely interested in constitutionalism would be forced to judge the two parties based on what they have done (at least recently), which would not give the GOP a very good reputation.  This fiction also lends a patina of respectability to what has become a prolonged episode of “executive tyranny” every bit as harmful to our institutions and form of government as the judicial tyranny against which conservatives have (correctly) railed in the past.  

Giuliani is playing the same game now during the campaign, telling people that he will appoint strict constructionists and oppose judicial activism and all the rest.  This is seen mainly as a way to placate social conservatives, but it should be understood as an attempted deception of anyone on the right who still attaches some importance to constitutionalism.  Should he somehow be elected (God forbid), he will continue the same dual-track approach to the Constitution, mouthing Jeffersonian phrases and insisting on enumerated powers in the morning and embracing the most abusive policies possible under the President’s supposed (non-existent) “inherent powers” as “Commander-in-Chief” in the afternoon.  There is something slightly less disturbing about an out-and-out believer in the “living Constitution,” since we can be confident from the beginning that he will twist and warp the fundamental law to whatever end he so desires.  This false front of strict constructionist fidelity allows Bush and others including Giuliani to continue to exploit resentment over judicial activism and usurpation when it is done by the left, all the while merrily subverting civil liberties, separation of powers and constitutional limits on presidential authority.  It is a rhetorical tactic used to keep conservatives afraid of the left while engaging in abuses of the Constitution that, were they committed by liberals, would have these same people calling for impeachment and a rejection of consolidated power.

His fourth quarter fundraising has crossed the $8.5 million mark, leaving only $3.5 million until the campaign reaches its goal for the quarter.  Obviously, the campaign is ahead of schedule so far, and the December 16 Boston Tea Party-themed fundraiser will likely put him over the top.