I just tuned in late to the debate to see Duncan Hunter blathering about pardoning Compean and Rampos.  He then turns around and says something sensible about appealing to Reagan Democrats.  Giuliani keeps talking and talking (and talking) about how important Scooter Libby’s case is.  Romney grandstands.  Brownback commits to pardoning Libby, as does Tancredo. 

A strong question on Iraq from the audience.  Hunter gives a boilerplate answer.  Did Hunter just compare Iraq to intervening in El Salvador?  Brownback reiterates his “three-state, one country” plan.  McCain’s going to give us some “straight talk” about mismanagement, and then proceeds to endorse the current plan.

A question on the Iraqi government from the audience.  Paul argues for withdrawal as the incentive for the Iraqis to put their government together.  Giuliani preaches nation-building and wants the media to report good news.  Yawn.  Gilmore blithers and blathers in response to a question about conservation.  Tancredo invokes Teddy Roosevelt.   

Huckabee gets a chance to express his thoroughgoing pro-life view.  “It should never be acceptable to us that people are treated as expendable.”  I don’t think I’ll be supporting Huckabee, but this was probably the best statement of his understanding of respect for life.  Did Giuliani just mention God?  What?  We should “explain” our ideals to people?  Where did that come from?  He mentioned God again.  Paul declares the greatest moral issue is the adoption of pre-emptive war–he makes a solid case.  The audience responds favourably to Paul.  Brownback is “pro-life and whole life.”  He takes an indirect shot at Giuliani.  Brownback talks about Darfur.  Ugh.  He dodges the Giuliani-as-nominee question fairly effectively.

Romney handles an immigration question fairly well.  He gets in a quick shot at McCain.  Tancredo won’t advertise in Spanish.  “Bilingual countries don’t work.”  He has a point.  McCain makes a rather lame comeback against Romney: “Muchas gracias, Governor.”  McCain tries to make this into an anti-Hispanic question.  Maybe it convinces someone, but it seems overwrought. 

McCain runs away from the last six years on spending (as usual).  McCain promises to veto all pork barrel spending.  Giuliani talks about accountability.  Romney: “It’s going from small-bore to large-bore.”  Romney would have to be the largest bore of all.  Brownback randomly talks about his anti-cancer project.  Tommy Thompson talks about “winding down the war in Iraq.”  Tancredo hits Bush for governing as a liberal.  Paul takes on Bush’s foreign policy.  Gilmore makes a decent point on immigration. 

“Cutting ties with the past” is the main attribute of being an American?  I understand what Tancredo is talking about (he’s referring to immigrants becoming Americans), but I think he muddled his immigration moratorium point with this remark.  Giuliani invokes Lincoln.  Ugh.  “It [legal immigration] makes us better.”  This seems debatable. 

Gilmore gives us a spiel on what it means to be an American.  A lot of proposition nation nonsense.  So someone who “believes in freedom” is automatically an American?  Hunter beats up on Rudy McRomney.  “We need to move away from the Kennedy wing of the Republican Party.”  Hunter has the quote of the night from the part I have heard.

Quiet Riots, aside from being an American heavy metal band, is also the theme of the AP’s coverage of Sen. Barack Obama’s speech to black ministers in Hampton, VA today.

“Obama warns of ‘quiet riot’ among blacks” is not the headline Obama might have expected from his speech. ~Marc Ambinder

Obama seems to like this theme of “quiet” problems.  It was part of his response to the Virginia Tech massacre, and it seems to keep cropping up in all the strangest places.

Incidentally, does Obama know when Hurricane Katrina actually happened?  He keeps talking about “19 months ago,” but Katrina made landfall in late August 2005, which was 21 months ago.

 I was focusing my comments at Rod and his Crunchy Conservatism (or at least my reading of it), which does share with compassionate conservatism many fundamental assumptions about the nature of “mainstream” conservatism as well as of the proper role of government and politics. ~Jonah Goldberg

Since my earlier remarks were too “otherworldly,” let me address this a bit more concretely.  This claim of shared assumptions is simply wrong.  It is another example of Goldberg’s exceedingly poor reading of the book.  One part of the “crunchy” con critique is that mainstream conservatism is too materialistic.  He does manage to get that much right.  Compassionate conservatives say nothing about this.  Whether or not you agree with the “crunchy” con view, the two have nothing to do with each other.  “Crunchy” cons, both in the book and at the blog, tended to be skeptical of or hostile to development plans that came at the expense of the environment, historic buildings and the local community’s interests.  Compassionate conservatives are almost entirely unconcerned about this, though they will occasionally talk about conservation.  “Crunchy” cons find the the way that some on the right make a fetish out of the market and economic goods to be deeply misguided, as it seems to neglect man’s spiritual life and his obligations to transcendent moral order.  Compassionate conservatives are sometimes religious and use religious language, but their answer is not one of changing habits, cultivating virtue and building communities–if anything, they assume that this is already being done–but to “rally the armies of compassion” using federal cash.  It is the weak political answer to an extensive cultural problem, which makes it an entirely different sort of idea.  I’m sure Goldberg doesn’t understand how someone can object to a culture of consumption and self-indulgence without being a statist.  This is the essence of the problem of mainstream conservatism: mainstream conservatives seem to think that anything that criticises the degrading and uprooting effects of capitalism must therefore be proposing some state-led intervention, as if that were the only answer in a free society.  Obviously, the book proposes little or nothing by way of calls for regulation.  At several points, I believe you will find that Rod rejects the association between a desire to remedy a problem and reliance on the government to be part of the remedy. 

At bottom “crunchy” conservatism is cultural conservatism that tries to fight the culture war by actually living out a way of life dedicated to the practice of virtue and restraint.  Goldberg, he of the “partial philosophy of life,” wants nothing to do with this.  “Crunchy” conservatism assumes that our vision and imagination of a good, well-ordered society matters a great deal more than the tax structure or funneling subsidies to charities.  It does not share compassionate conservatism’s assumptions about the “role of government,” since it does not propose much in the way of a role for government to remedy the ills it describes.  It does not see government activism accomplishing very much when it comes to shoring up local communities and families, and it sees a great deal of harm in collaboration between public authorities and corporations.  Compassionate conservatism seems to have been an attempt to put a moderately social conservative spin on welfarism and use religious language to justify the continued centralisation of power in Washington.  “Crunchy” conservatism and the people in the book described as “crunchy” conservatives have nothing to do with any of that.  The difference between the two is the difference between Sam Brownback and Caleb Stegall.  If Goldberg doesn’t see the difference there, that is his problem, not ours.

He said he’s “150 percent” behind Bush on the war in Iraq.

“At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country,” Milligan said. ~Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Now it is easy to take the obvious shot at Mr. Milligan (where he’s supposed to be saying, “More 9/11-style attacks, please!”).  Far more ridiculous than anything so ugly and crass, Mr. Milligan seems to be saying that “the naysayers” (a.k.a., two-thirds of America) would realise their profound error of doubting Mr.  Bush and his Iraq policy if we suffered multiple catastrophic terrorist attacks, despite the small problem that the few remaining winning (albeit totally false) rhetorical points Mr. Bush has are that “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” and the claim that fighting in Iraq is vital to American security against terrorist threats.  In other words, Mr. Milligan thinks that the public would rally around Mr. Bush after multiple terrorist attacks showed his signature foreign policy initiative to have been a complete failure on his terms and would have also shown him to be incapable of effectively thwarting the very terrorist threat that he claims to understand how to fight better than anyone else.  It seems to me that a combination of multiple domestic security breakdowns, a mismanaged, aimless war and an incompetent foreign policy would pretty much destroy Mr. Bush’s remaining support.  It might also convince the “naysayers” that the sacrifice made by American soldiers in Iraq had been somewhat in vain.

If I am reading this new poll correctly, the right direction/wrong track numbers (question 3) have remained at their lowest “right direction” levels in 11 years.   37% still say (question 9) the war in Iraq has been worth fighting, but only 24% “strongly” believe this.  With some fluctuations back and forth, this is roughly the same level of support that could be found last year at this time.  It may be worth noting that there has not been a majority holding this position since September 2004.  55% want U.S. forces in Iraq decreased, but among those who want the numbers decreased only 27% support immediate withdrawal.  That seems to me a shockingly low percentage in favour of backing immediate withdrawal, considering the relatively high levels of discontent with the war.  32% believe that the U.S. is making significant progress in Iraq, which is 16 points lower than late June 2006.  Obviously, the bottom dropped out in the last year.  39% think the “surge” will improve matters in Iraq.  Only 37% believe Iraq must be won for the U.S. to prevail in the “war on terror.” 

The response to question 45 is amazing.  Asked of “leaned Republicans” whether Bush is leading the GOP in the right direction or the wrong direction 65% still say he is leading the party in the right direction.  There is no hope for a party base this out of it.  Sorry, folks.  Curiously, conservative self-identification is up to its highest level in months (37%), matching or beating results from last summer.  The support for Bush’s party leadership helps to explain why most of the GOP presidential candidates are not heading off in bold new directions.  They find themselves confronted with core constituencies that apparently think Mr. Bush has been good for the Republican Party and is doing the right sorts of things for that party, so they have to play along.  It is basically inexplicable why all these Republicans think this, but there you have it.

On the Republican side, there’s Mitt Romney at one extreme (high zombie quotient), Rudy Giuliani at the other (still hewing to the pro-choice line, still talking with the cheerful opinionatedness of a New York City mayor), and McCain as a kind of phoniness parable, a cautionary example of what happens when a leopard tries to change its spots. ~New York Magazine

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who regards Romney as intensely inhuman and creepy.  Normally robot is the word that comes to mind, but zombie conveys the same sense pretty well.

Not to revisit old fights, but my problem with Rod’s admonition is that it leaves out the fact that his Crunchy Conservatism actually rests on many of the same assumptions of Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Conservatism, according to Crunchy Conservatism, has become too cold and calculating, too obsessed with the mighty dollar and the moral unimpeachability of the free market. Conservatism isn’t spiritual enough, humane enough, activist enough, quoth Rod. “Hillary Clinton got a bum rap from the right,” he admitted, “it really does take a village to raise a child.” Well, this is pretty much the same indictment at the heart of compassionate conservatism, which speaks relentlessly of leaving no children behind.

I’d take Rod’s laments about how we all should have turned on Bush earlier if only compassionate conservatism and crunchy conservatism didn’t have so much in common. Indeed, now that he’s aligning himself so much with so-called “paleos” it’s worth also noting that Pat Buchanan considered Bush’s compassionate conservatism a rip-off of his “conservatism of the heart.”  ~Jonah Goldberg

Ross and Rod have made the main points, so I won’t get into this too much.  Not to revisit old fights, but Goldberg demonstrates once again that he still has no idea what “crunchy” conservatism is.  Also, any “rip-off” from Buchananism was at the level of rhetoric only, since no one could possibly confuse Mr. Bush’s actual policies for an appeal to the interests of Middle Americans.  

At the core of “compassionate conservatism” is the notion that, as Mr. Bush once put it, “when people hurt, government has got to move.”  Compassionate conservatism was, is, a justification for conservatives to nationalise virtually all issues, use the welfare state for their ends and put forward inclusive rhetoric.  It is the “big tent” plus big government.  On the other hand, “crunchy” conservatism (in addition to not being a set of policy prescriptions or an attitude towards how to use the central government for conservative ends) looks to the legacy of the Agrarians and traditionalists, who obviously abhorred an activist federal government far more than Goldberg the wannabe libertarian.  They also obviously defended local communities and intermediary institutions as necessary to the cultivation of a stable, well-ordered society that would not need the constant intervention of a bureaucratic state apparatus.  That is the tradition from which “crunchy” conservatism is derived, and that is its message.  In the traditionalist view, the breakdown of social order and community inevitably invited state interference: as traditional morality and local communities withered, the state would use the resulting problems as pretexts for intervention and increased control.  Compassionate conservatives are the ones who would like to bring the state in to fill the gap, whereas traditionalists (or neo-traditionalists, as we are sometimes disparagingly called) want to build up more self-sufficient communities and support a greater decentralisation of power away from Washington.  Those interested in reducing the role of government in Americans’ lives–which is what a supposedly increasingly libertarian person might want–should be naturally inclined towards “crunchy” conservatism, rather than confusing it with something diametrically opposed to it. 

The difference between these visions is not a small change of emphasis, but rather a huge, yawning chasm between entirely different conceptions of what conservatism is, what our current predicament is and how we should go about addressing that predicament.  That Goldberg should conflate two radically different, even opposed, tendencies is typical.

If Iraq-weary voters are looking for someone who will call on America to “come home,” they won’t find that candidate here. ~Fred Hiatt

Quite.  Hiatt is talking about Romney and Obama, but he might just as easily be talking about most of the other major contenders.  This is Hiatt’s point–in spite of the Bush debacle, interventionism goes marching on in slightly differen, but substantially similar ways.  McGovernites and non-interventionists can look somewhere else.  On this, Hiatt is right.  It may be a redundant, even uninteresting point, since it has been obvious to anyone who is paying attention that Obama’s foreign policy is blood-curdlingly aggressive and activist.  (This foreign policy receives the stamp of approval from Kagan, Peretz and The Washington Post.)  The appropriate thing to say about Hiatt’s column is that he is coming very late to the subject and isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know.   

Obama does not reject in principle the “leadership” role that hegemonists insist that we have, but he criticises execution.  Romney does not reject the paranoid, “existential threat” style of Bush’s foreign policy (neither, in fact, does Obama, whose vision is in some ways even more paranoiac), but also complains about competence and execution.  They agree more often than they disagree, and as George Ajjan pointed out earlier this week both of them offer absolutely dreadful and amateurish foreign policy outlines. 

As I mentionedyesterday, both of these candidates contributed their respective foreign policy position pieces to Foreign Affairs, and Hiatt is only now discovering that these are robustly, obnoxiously internationalist and interventionist.  No kidding. 

Hiatt’s argument is not what Yglesias makes it out to be when he says:

Then he reads Barack Obama’s Foreign Affairs article, sees that Obama is not an isolationist or a pacificist, and concludes that Obama has the same views as Mitt Romney and his views are also “strikingly similar to Bush administration policy.” 

Hiatt doesn’t say that Obama and Romney have all of the same views.  He says that they do share quite a few, and they share even more policy priorities, even though they are going to address those priorities in different ways.  Obviously, they differ significantly on Iraq, and unlike Romney Obama has not shown pervasive ignorance about all things Islamic, and where Romney absurdly conflates Hizbullah, Al-Ikhwan and Al Qaeda Obama does not.  Relative to the laughingstock Romney, Obama seems slightly better, but this isn’t saying much.  Their overarching foreign policy visions are actually very much alike, which from the perspective of this non-interventionist is an assuredly bad sign for the future.

As a movie star, he [Fred Thompson] didn’t need a wife right away. He had groupies. ~Libby Spencer

This seems implausible.  To the extent that we can say that Fred Thompson was ever really a “movie star,” his groupies, if he had any, must have surely been from the B Team of groupies. 

I share Ross’ reaction to Fred Thompson and his considerably younger wife.  Ross talked about Thompson’s “trophy wife” weeks ago.  Then again, if Thompson, like Kucinich, has an incredibly attractive wife who seems to be way out of what would normally be his league, I don’t actually see how this has to work to his disadvantage.  It will probably just make the people who already like him like him even more.  On the other hand, it could make some people question still more his “man of the people” routine, since a lot of guys, no matter how old they are, are not married to women who look like that.  

Update: On the minus side, Thompson’s wife also elicits reactions like this one.

Second Update: Here is Scarborough’s shot at Thompson’s wife put in context.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan. ~The New York Times

So if all goes well according to this new schedule, the “surge” will be running about two or three months behind its original timetable…just in time for it be judged by all and sundry in September.  Simply from a political standpoint, this is the sort of information they needed to be giving the public months ago.  (Of course, Bush might have had a harder time winning on the funding bill if the public knew just how relatively little progress has been made.)  They needed fewer pundits declaring the “surge” to be a success and more assessments that say, “Yes, it’s working, sort of, but it’s taking much longer than we anticipated and it remains extremely difficult.”  This is not exactly a confidence-booster, but it sounds much more realistic and sober.  Frankly, Americans are suffering from an overdose of confidence-boosters.  They could stand some plain, matter-of-fact talk right about now.  Support for the war would have bled away at a slower rate had the administration and military been more cautious in their pronouncements of progress and much less optimistic about the time it would take to get things done.  Of course, the truth would be unpopular, but inflating everyone’s hopes and then having them disappointed exacerbates the problem of an already unpopular war.  Having heard from the usual suspects that violence was waning, Sadr was on the run and so on, the public will take the relative lack of substantial progress in securing all of Baghdad that much worse than it would have done had those in authority talked down the “surge.”  Perhaps it is inimical to a military ethos to do this, but with this administration it seems like the safe advice for managing expectations is “aim low.”