The rest of the country is looking, it seems, for a President who can end the war in Iraq and move on to addressing a litany of domestic concerns; the Republican base, though, is looking for a President who can win the war in Iraq, and that’s not a contest that Mike Huckabee is equipped for. ~Ross Douthat

Ross gives a good sense of Huckabee’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate.  What has struck me about his campaign is that Huckabee has failed to mention one of his biggest social conservative “achievements” of promoting so-called “covenant marriage.”  Romney talks all day long about strengthening families, and even McCain gets in on the pro-family act when he says some random thing about “preserving our American family,” but unlike most of the crowd Huckabee can plausibly claim that he has been actively encouraging stable, lasting marriages–the sort of positive, obviously beneficial social conservatism that would distinguish him from the crowd.  Arguably, he didn’t do all that much–he signed the bill into law and promoted the idea–and it didn’t have all that great of an effect, but it has to be at least as symbolically valuable as raging against gay “marriage.”

Ross is absolutely right that the GOP base, or least most of it, wants someone who will win the Iraq war.  It is also the case that, like everyone who has fantastic, unrealistic expectations, they will be horribly disappointed and embittered when such a candidate does not materialise.  Even so, I take Ross’ point that the GOP primaries will turn on questions of foreign policy and national security.  Huckabee clearly has no qualifications here, but then again neither do Romney and Giuliani.  If the Republicans are looking for an experienced national security candidate and a supposedly war-winning President, they would have to rally around someone like McCain or Duncan Hunter.  This is why I retain the small expectation that Hunter will fare reasonably well in the primaries: he has the requisite experience in government on these matters and he isn’t McCain.

For The Low, Low Price Of $800,000, This Could Be Yours!

But, wait, there’s more…

I’m curious: why is it that George Bush is apparently digging in his heels and planning not to intervene in the Scooter Libby case? ~Kevin Drum 

First of all, I don’t think the “conservative base” cares very much at all about Scooter Libby.  Was there a grassroots groundswell for Cap Weinberger’s pardon?  This is such inside baseball that only the most strung out of political junkies actually bothers to form an opinion about it.  Vocal pundits, radio hosts and potential presidential candidates are the only ones who can be bothered to care about Libby’s fate.  Second, speaking of Weinberger et al., my guess is that Bush wants to avoid the inevitable comparisons between himself and his father’s Iran-Contra pardons.  Third, it is just the sort of thing everyone expects him to do, and Mr. Bush seems to enjoy doing whatever it is that conventional wisdom says that he won’t do.

The political winds are blowing against the GOP, to be sure, but the Democrats really have an extraordinarily weak field of leading candidates, and the Republicans seem to have an unusually strong one. If, come the real primary season early next year, Republicans are looking at Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mitt Romney and the Democrats are looking at Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, who would you rather be? ~Yuval Levin

Is that a trick question?  It is interesting to follow the observations of people on both sides.  Progressives are convinced that they have a solid, impressive field and think the GOP is pretty hopeless; conservative observers have just the opposite view.  I am of the opinion that both fields are laughable, but the GOP candidates are still in a weaker overall position. 

If we assume that both sides are exaggerating the overall virtues of their respective candidates, as partisans and ideological allies will do, we can begin to gauge the actual strengths of the candidates.  Right now, Giuliani and Romney are clearly more effective in debate formats than their Democratic counterparts, and McCain has started to do reasonably well, but viewed more objectively we see that the leading GOP contenders are an ex-mayor, a former one-term governor of Massachusetts and a Senator whom large parts of his party hate with a passion.  There is virtually nothing about the experience of the first two that makes them obvious presidential material, and all three have serious political obstacles to winning the nomination.  The Democratic candidates are not really objectively any better–they are less experienced in government, for one, and possess no executive experience whatever–but most of the energy, money and activism is on their side.  Party identification and mobilisation of core supporters are going to be crucial factors, and none of the prospective GOP nominees from the Terrible Trio seems to have what is necessary to re-energise his party.  Plus, all three of the Trio are committed to an enormously unpopular foreign policy, two of them are pro-amnesty and one is prominently associated with the amnesty bill.  The Democrats have no such deep internal schisms and they are not as badly out of touch with the country on foreign policy.  The Democrats are much more unified and will be able to unify around their eventual nominee much more easily.  Even a weak Democratic nominee should be able to prevail in this environment, and the GOP would need an exceptionally effective nominee to get its act together in time.  None of the Trio fills that role, and each of them actually has significant, well-known flaws that make their ultimate success in a general election very doubtful.

Some candidates use new media in interesting ways…and then there’s Chris Dodd.

This is the strangest thing I have seen in a long time (via Crooked Timber and Yglesias):

A case in point is the following. The GSS folk actually made the mistake of asking the following question as part of their science module:

Now, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?

Here we go. Now what follows is real social science data folks. No joking around:

Earth around sun 73.6%
Sun around earth 18.3%
Don’t Know 8.0%
Refused 0.1%

————

Among those who were up to date with seventeenth-century Galilean basic science, they actually dared to ask the follow-up question: 

How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year?

One day 19.0%
One month 1.1%
One year 71.2%
Other time period 0.1%
Don’t Know 8.5%
Refused 0.1%

I suppose the ignorance here shouldn’t really surprise me.  The historical ignorance of the average American is proverbial, so why should anyone be shocked that a fifth of the population displays such ignorance here?  I would agree that this is the kind of basic knowledge that one learns in, oh, elementary school, but, if high school graduates don’t necessarily know when the Civil War happened or where America is on a map, why should 25% being clueless about heliocentrism strike us as being all that remarkable? 

But where does this come from?  Where do these people live?  Have they never seen a diorama of the solar system?  Have they never read about the formation of planets?  Did no one ever tell them about Kepler and elliptical orbits?

The Bush administration’s plans for the missile-defense shield call for a radar-tracking station to be built in the Czech Republic and for 10 interceptor missiles to be placed in Poland. The Czech and Polish governments have signaled their support even though national opinion polls in both countries show strong opposition to the U.S. plan. ~The Seattle Times

Yet dislike of Russia’s current path does not create unity. Both France and Germany are unenthusiastic about America’s planned missile-defence installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. President George Bush continues to protest that these are aimed at Iranian nuclear weapons, not at Russia. But with the exception perhaps of Britain’s Tony Blair, a lame-duck ally who will shortly leave office, he will find little support from his western counterparts. ~The Economist

It turns out that the idea is wildly unpopular across Europe, especially in those countries where the interceptors are going to be based.  The Polish and Czech governments are in favour of it, just as they have been supportive of the war in Iraq against the explicit wishes of their citizens.  Had Putin held off with his confrontational bluster, he could have easily detached most European countries from the U.S. on this particular issue.  Most Europeans don’t believe that there is a threat from Iran in any case, and they’re the ones who would be protected under any missile shield.  Iran does extensive business with Europe.  To launch missile strikes on any EU country would mean greater economic ruin for their country.  What is this strange American habit of seeing dangers in other parts of the world that the people in those other parts of the world do not see? 

If we took the government at its word, this missile shield would be built to counter threats from mighty Iran (whose Shahab missiles can probably only barely reach some parts of Europe).  However, it seems rather obvious that the current plan has nothing to do with countering an Iranian threat.  For instance, Voice of America tells us:

The U.S. plan suggests deploying 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic. The system would cover NATO members except Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and parts of Romania [bold mine-DL].

In other words, the allies closest to Iran that would be the most easily targeted by any Iranian attack would have no protection whatever under this plan.  This plan does cover all ex-Soviet and former Warsaw Pact states now in NATO that border on or are closest to Russia.  It also protects the rest of the alliance west of Poland and the Czech Republic, but our easternmost NATO allies would be out of luck.  What were the Russians supposed to conclude from the obviously two-faced nature of the official justification for the missile shield?

Those who have doubts about Bush’s plans (e.g., Brent Scowcroft on Iraq) get little sympathy from him, however. They’re seen not as prudent realists but as cultural imperialists, even racists: What, you think Iraqis are incapable of democracy? What, you think the immigrants from south of the border are any different from previous immigrants? ~Mickey Kaus

Via Ross

One of the notable things about Fred Thompson’s pre-campaign campaign is the great emphasis he has placed on using all forms of modern communication.  From using YouTube to blogging to texting, Fred seems to think that this will be an effective way for him to compete organisationally against the candidates who have declared earlier and already raised (and spent) large amounts of money.  Aside from the mostly spontaneous Internet surge for Ron Paul, Republicans have not had a candidate making use of these media with quite the same sense of purpose.  This leads me to guess that Thompson’s campaign will prove to be a lot like Howard Dean’s in 2003-04 in some important respects.  Unlike Dean, Thompson is already well known and has already received enormous signs of support in polls, but structurally Thompson so far is leaning heavily on online efforts that do not necessarily have any relation to the strength of his overall campaign organisation.  Add to this his relatively late entry and reputation for laziness, and after the initial post-announcement Thompson boomlet we may see Thompson going nowhere fast. 

He probably will have entered too late to compete at Ames.  If polling has been accurate and at all meaningful, he has the most to gain from a Giuliani dropout from Ames, since Thompson voters are actually overwhelmingly otherwise Giuliani voters (Poulos knows what he’s talking about here), but he probably won’t have the time, money or staff to mount a meaningful effort.  This means that he will probably have missed his best opportunity to shock the field with a big showing, which will further hamper fundraising and force him to rely still more on his name recognition, his folksy reputation and his ability to fill the need of the GOP base for the “Reaganesque” will o’ the wisp they are always chasing.  In the end, enthusiasm for a folksy actor who hits all the right notes politically will not overcome established campaigns.  However, I assume the Terrible Trio will all suffer collapses at one point or another, and Thompson may find himself the default winner as a result.  This would show the entire process to be a mockery of anything resembling representative government, but it would be consistent with the Rise of Fred Thompson, a phenomenon so bizarre that I still cannot quite understand it. 

Update: McCain is also dropping out of the Ames straw poll.  They are simply abandoning this early battle to Romney and possibly Brownback, who has been visiting the state often enough and is supposed to have a better chance in Iowa because of his Kansan background.  Thompson’s late entry will probably prove to be an even bigger mistake than it already was.

Thinking about the differences between “compassionate conservatism” and “crunchy” conservatism this week, I proposed thinking about the differences between Sam Brownback and Caleb Stegall.  I think these examples do summarise quite well the differences between the two “positions” (though Caleb will always appropriately insist that he considers himself simply to be a traditional conservative).  Brownback seems to be a very earnest, serious and faithful man.  I have given him so much grief over the months because I disagree with many of his policy proposals and because many of his policy priorities seem to me to be perfect examples of what happens when sincere conservatives, especially religious conservatives, have become disconnected from constitutionalism and a sense of proportion and scale.  It seems to me that Brownback’s activist goals come from an abstract defense of Life and a generic commitment to “compassion.”  For Brownback, it is appropriate to use federal power to intervene on behalf of Life, whether this means intervening on behalf of Terri Schiavo or intervening in Darfur, because the support for abstract Life everywhere compels him to disregard any number of normal distinctions.  He does not ask whether the government should be doing something, or whether there is another, more local authority that might be capable of handling the question, but apparently simply asks what the compassionate thing to do would be in this or that case.  Inevitably, the “compassionate” thing is almost always to intervene and “do something.”  Instead of asking, “What is my relationship to these people?” Brownback always assumes a profound obligation to aid everyone everywhere.  This has the zaniness of Obama’s foreign policy (which might be dubbed, in keeping with his favourite phrases, “quiet imperialism”), but with a social conservative spin.  Rather than minding your own business being the root of justice, Brownback theoretically wants us to mind everyone’s business for the sake of preserving Life and being “compassionate.”

Inasmuch as “crunchy” conservatives are simply a kind of Kirkian traditionalist, the difference between Brownback’s view and a traditionalist view is fairly simple: Kirk returned to his ancestral village and stayed in his native place, specifically rejecting calls for crusading overseas as surely as he rejected all “armed doctrines,” while Brownback has effectively said that our “goodness” as a nation depends on what we do in Sudan and Congo.