So Karen Hughes has had enough and is going home.  (Mark down another departure, James.)  It has been easy to give Karen Hughes a hard time, and it hasn’t really been fair to her.  The administration has made an art form out of cronyism, and the President has chosen some of the most inappropriate people for fairly important tasks based on their close relationship with Mr. Bush.  Rather than a former ambassador or someone accustomed to the work of diplomacy, Mr. Bush thrust Karen Hughes into a role for which she wasn’t terribly well prepared and which was already going to be monstrously difficult for the most qualified person.  It is some consolation for Ms. Hughes that administration policy had already done so much damage to our international reputation that there really was little that she could do, and so perhaps it is not very surprising that she didn’t try to do very much.

The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function. And anybody who thinks I have, hasn’t been paying attention. ~Barack Obama

When you get down to it, I guess I’m sympathetic toward Hillary but really, really wishing that Obama would give me a good reason to change my mind and support him instead. But he just never does. Domestic policywise he’s been fairly cautious and mainstream. On the foreign policy front he’s better than HRC, but only by a couple of notches. And his Kumbaya campaigning schtick leaves me cold. Worse than that, in fact: it leaves me terrified that he just doesn’t know what he’s up against with the modern Republican Party and won’t have the instinct to go for the jugular when the inevitable Swift Boating commences. ~Kevin Drum

Then there was this bit from Ryan Lizza’s mid-September article on the leading Democratic candidates:

Edwards dismisses Obama’s argument that more consensus is needed in Washington. The difference between them, Edwards told me, is the difference between “Kumbaya” and “saying, ‘This is a battle. It’s a fight.’ ” When I asked whether he’s a populist, he lifted a riff from his stump speech: “If it means you’re willing to stand up for ordinary people, the kind of people that I grew up with, against very powerful, entrenched interests, then yes, I am a populist.”

There seem to be a number of people, whose job it is to pay attention to and be engaged in politics, who think that there’s a bit too much Kumbaya-ism in Obama’s campaign.  As I’ve said before, you can hardly blame people for coming away with this impression when Obama has offered such a vague and non-descript vision.

In fairness, most people, including myself, who use the word Kumbaya as a way of mocking someone’s ridiculously optimistic worldview are doing a disservice to the song in question.  The song itself is a perfectly unremarkable spiritual folk song.  The drippy, saccharine nonsense that Obama offers is so much worse that it demeans the song to link the two together.

And on yet another level, that issue highlights the way the West, including the U.S., has been preoccupied with the killing of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by mostly Muslim Turks and Kurds. ~Leon Hadar

Certainly, there has been some attention drawn to the genocide in the West over the last 90 years, though the attention tended to be greatest when it was happening and has since settled into the background or vanished from collective memory.  But preoccupied?  The West has been anything but preoccupied with the Armenian genocide.  But for active lobbying by Armenians, scarcely anyone would give it a second thought.

Ron Paul once again reframes the idea of “isolationism” in his discussion of Cuba policy:

Our isolationist policies with regard to Cuba, meanwhile, have hardly won the hearts and minds of Cubans or Cuban-Americans, many of whom are isolated from families because [of] this political animosity.

This echoes his statements in his response to the Union-Leader’s attack on him.

But every time you are somewhere that means you are not somewhere else. ~Fred Thompson

David Kirkpatrick’s article on the politics of modern evangelicals has some interesting details, including a general souring of many evangelicals on the war.  Then there was this:

“The first time I voted was for Carter,” Scarborough recalled. “The second time was for ‘anybody but Carter,’ because he had betrayed everything I hold dear.

“Unfortunately,” Scarborough concluded, “there is the same feeling in our community right now with George Bush. He appeared so right and so good. He talked a good game about family values around election time. But there has been a failure to follow through.”

He didn’t really talk that good of a game.  He played on his own experience with evangelical Christianity to sucker a great many people, both supporters and opponents, into believing that he was a hard-core social conservative.  There was never going to be anything like the “follow through” that would have satisfied many of these evangelical voters.

Kagan manages to put together an entire column in which he never once shows that he understands the difference between “liberal autocracy” a la Singapore and illiberal democracy.  For the truncated democratist imagination in which there is liberal democracy and everything else lumped under “tyranny,” this oversight is typical.  No one, or at least no one of any consequence, thinks that Putin, Hu Jintao (or whoever will succeed him) or Chavez represent “liberal autocracy,” and only committed opponents of Putin’s and Chavez’s regime prefer to call their political systems autocratic.  I’m prone to throw around the word autocracy to make a polemical point, too, but it is plainly imprecise and does not describe the form of government that prevails in these countries.  

In China, the government is oligarchic and authoritarian and still significantly party-based.  Russia’s government is oligarchic and authoritarian and based in the security services, but retains a number of formal democratic and constitutional features.  Venezuela’s government is a much more straightforward illiberal democratic one, whose claim to being democratic has been denied by many American observers because the government is illiberal and quasi-socialist, which is to show that these observers cannot make basic distinctions in political theory. 

So it is difficult for “autocracy” to be resilient in a place where there isn’t actually an autocracy.  The authoritarianism in Russia and the populist demagoguery in Venezuela are both products of the very elections Kagan boosts.  The fact is that liberalism has a small constituency in both countries (outside of a very few western European, Anglophone and North American countries, this has often been the case), and when put before the electorates of Russia and Venezuela liberalism fares very poorly.  Some of this has to do with the fact that relatively liberal politics was associated with the wealthy elite and tycoons, and the effects of policies carried out in the name of liberalism were generally poor or even disastrous for the people who now back authoritarian populist leaders.  There will be objections that Russian elections in particular are not fully “free and fair,” but against this I would note that even with fully free and fair elections the overwhelming majority would still want nothing to do with the Russian liberals.  This is hardly surprising: in mass democracy, the politics of liberty tends to lose and lose badly, while one form of demagoguery or another (be it nationalist or revolutionary socialist) usually prevails. 

Update: Ross has more.

One of Ross’ commenters makes what I assume he thinks is a clever remark:

This is really important work you’re doing. Thanks. Now that we know Venezuela is not an “autocracy” I can go to sleep tonight, comfortable that my children will not improperly label the various oppressive governments around the world.

Very droll.  Of course, one might observe that misunderstanding the nature of a regime and then building an entire argument off of that misunderstanding will lead to the wrong conclusions.  One might suppose that sloppy and inaccurate use of language reflects poorly on an argument.  Suppose that someone thinks that the answer to the problems of Russia and Venezuela is a lack of elections, when the current regimes are at least partly the product of elections, and then that someone opts, whether out of laziness or sloppiness, to label these elected governments autocracies.  Suppose that he also has a record of promoting confrontational policies against other such “autocracies.”  Might it matter then that we give things their proper names and try to address the world as it is, rather than as it appears in the democratist comic book version?

Second Update: I have written on Kagan’s autocracy talk before.

Something very strange has happened.  Christopher Hitchens writes about the Armenian genocide resolution and actually makes sense:

If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth).

This has generally been my view since the debate heated up again this autumn.  I have more to say along these lines in my next column in TAC.

George Ajjan attended the recent Arab-American Institute’s National Leadership Conference and has some early remarks on one of the panels.  He spoke with Ron Paul while there, and promises to fill us in on their conversation, so keep checking back for an update.

On a similar theme, Michael Crowley writes in response to this LA Times article on Obama:

I sympathize with Obama’s desire to “elevate” politics but unfortunately I just don’t think it generally works. Certainly not the way he’s been doing it. Readers of, say, Matt Yglesias may thrill over swipes at the “conventional” DC foreign policy establishment.  But I suspect the only way Obama is going to get real traction with voters is if he’s willing to go after her character–on questions of trust and honesty.

It would also help him if his swipes at the “conventional” DC foreign policy establishment were supported by his actually charting out what an “unconventional” foreign policy would look like in some way that didn’t draw praise from the likes of Kagan, Giuliani and The Wall Street Journal.  In any case, trying to “elevate” politics clearly does not do much to elevate one’s poll numbers beyond a core constituency of true believers. 

Update: Via The Caucus, we can see that the random Obama supporter, Tod, who introduces the Senator is actually much more forceful in his criticism of Clinton than is Obama.  The Caucus post also points out that Obama’s latest Social Security-related ad is supposed to be an attack on Clinton, but the attack is so indirect and subtle that only people who already know Clinton’s position could decipher it as a criticism.