Former Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III will become the first Republican presidential contender to say publicly that the three top-ranked party candidates are phony conservatives. ~The Washington Times

Well, I already like Jim Gilmore better just for making this claim in public, since it is what quite a lot of people out here in the country take to be obvious.  In the past, I have written dismissively, or usually not at all, about Gilmore’s bid.  However, as a former governor of what will likely be a swing state and someone with a generally good record, he is a far more plausible nominee than, say, Mitt Romney and he is probably a much more electable general election candidate than either of the other two from the Terrible Trio.  The problem he faces now is that he has entered the race relatively later than everyone else and has done so so hesitantly that even most people who are following the election probably don’t know that he is running.  By all means, take out the Trio at the knees for their lack of conservatism, Gov. Gilmore.  Will he be able to do anything more than that?  I guess we’ll find out. 

Update: Gilmore’s ad refers to his desire to lead the “Republican wing of the Republican Party.”  Ha!  Has the right found its Howard Dean, or just a pale imitation?

Updated Below 

1) McCain 164 (24.4%)  2) Giuliani 162 (24.1%)  3) Hunter 158 (23.5%) 4) Brownback 85 (12.6%) 5) Romney 80 (11.9%) 6)Huckabee (3.1%)

Let me start by saying that straw polls are pretty meaningless, especially when they are held 10 months before any primary votes are cast.  The Spartanburg straw poll is just such a meaningless straw poll.  In another five months, the Ames straw poll might tell us something more reliable.  Even so, the South Carolina straw poll can tell us some potentially interesting things. 

One of these things is that Romney’s vaunted organisation is completely failing to win the candidate much support even for symbolic votes.  Winning CPAC’s fairly meaningless straw poll will become that much more important to Romney. 

Update: According to Hotline, McCain, Giuliani and Hunter were the top finishers, followed by Brownback, Romney and Huckabee in that order.  McCain has to be less than thrilled with his finish, since it feeds into this sense that his campaign is faltering (whether or not it actually is faltering).  McCain pulled out a squeaker at the end, bumping Giuliani down a notch with Hunter a close third.  Virtually nobody hearts Huckabee. 

The other thing we can take away from this is that the media–and here I include the conservative opinion journals and Republican blogs–will have to stop pretending that the Terrible Trio are the natural triumvirate of Republican presidential candidates.  Hunter and Brownback are not only potentially credible challengers, but, if we took this straw poll really seriously as a gauge of grassroots attitudes (which I don’t), would have to be considered the close second and fourth-place candidates right now.  Even though the poll is not that meaningful, the main question coming out of this has to be: how long before Romney drops out?  He can certainly raise enough money to keep going, and he has a fair amount of the stuff himself, but at what point does he take his underperforming campaign and uninteresting message and go home?  Romney has been working South Carolina for years at this point, and he can’t come up with a better showing than this?  He has his resources and organisation and can’t beat out the relative shoe-string operation of Brownback?  Is this an early sign of the anti-Mormon factor?  Possibly, but it’s hard to say. 

Brownback’s campaign is already trying to spin Hunter’s success here as being simply a function of a good match between Hunter’s opposition to “free trade” and local conditions, but that drives home the point that Hunter’s views on trade (obviously unpopular with corporate Republicans) may be far more appealing in our present populist moment than Samnesty’s embrace of “free trade” dogma.  Hunter’s fairly solid record of opposition to immigration will also be a winner in GOP primaries, while Samnesty, McCain and Giuliani have nothing to offer conservatives on this question.  People should be taking Duncan Hunter much more seriously than they are.    

Having said all of this, as fun as it is, I have to stress again how relatively unimportant this result really is.  As someone who has said that Hunter is the dark horse who will come out of nowhere to seize the nomination, and as someone who agrees with Hunter on immigration and trade, I would like to think that his candidacy is a serious and competitive one.  However, I must recognise that he will have a horrible time raising money and will have the bulk of the establishment against him.  This result may help him a little in fundraising and getting some more publicity. 

There will be a wave of posts and articles latching on to Giuliani’s narrow first- second-place finish as proof of something.  What it will really indicate is that Giuliani’s celebrity wins over straw poll voters just as it wins over voters when they are being polled on presidential preferences.  Can a man run an entire presidential campaign on not much more than celebrity and a mayoral record?   Obviously, it’s never been done before, and there seem to be a lot of reasons why it won’t work.  It is somewhat telling that candidates who were not named Giuliani and McCain took nearly three-fifths of the votes about half of the votes.  Most Republicans do not want these old, unconservative candidates who are being foisted on them, and it’s no surprise.  They’re bad candidates who have any number of problems that make them unelectable in the general election.  It’s high time that pundits and voters started paying attention to the rest of the field.

After a rough 2006, conservative magazines are seeing an uptick in subscription renewals, right-wing websites are getting more hits, and Republican and conservative groups here at Harvard (yes, Harvard!) seem invigorated. ~Bill Kristol

Well, in that case, all is well.  As long as the groups at Harvard are “invigorated,” there’s no need to worry (of course, one can be invigorated by desperation as well as exuberant confidence).   If the websites are getting more hits, that has to be proof that everyone is full of joy (“cheerful” is how Kristol puts it), because no one ever goes online to vent his frustrations and express the views that are not getting represented in the major conservative media, right?  Oh.

No, it’s time for big grins all around.  Why?  Well, check out these exciting reasons!  First, of course, the “surge”!  Kristol says:

The ouster of Rumsfeld and Casey and the announcement of a new strategy backed up by additional troops and a new commander, General David Petraeus, gave hope to those who still think success is possible in Iraq–which, polls show, is still a healthy majority of Republicans.

It’s true that a majority of Republicans supports the “surge,” but what this has to do with their being cheerful is beyond me.  Most of the pro-“surge” talk I’ve heard is grimly purposeful in a last ditch, “we’re on the verge of real disaster” sort of way.  No one is smiling.  In fact, if someone were smiling, I suspect that he would get smacked in the face by the other people who understand the gravity of the situation.  Presumably cheerful, happy Republicans would not now be abandoning Mr. Bush in ever-larger numbers, or perhaps by “cheer” Kristol actually means “discontent.”

But it isn’t just the “surge” that should cheer everybody up.  After all, there are always Republicans in Congress to give everyone that warm, fuzzy feeling.  No, really:

Mitch McConnell’s performance as Senate Republican leader has also–for the first time in a long while–given Republicans a congressional leader worth rooting for as he outmaneuvers the Democrats in their efforts to put Congress on record against Bush’s Iraq policy.

I guess if tying your party ever more inextricably to a bad policy and ensuring that everyone thinks that Iraq is a purely Republican war are smart moves, Mitch McConnell should be feted as a genius.  If putting some space between the GOP and the war is one of the few things that may prevent another electoral catastrophe for them, maybe blocking maneuvers to stop a non-binding resolution are the expressions of stupid, broadly unpopular, tone-deaf political posturing that they appear to be.

If that hasn’t made you as much of a grinning idiot as Bill Kristol, there’s more: the Democratic and Republican fields for ’08.  The Democratic field is pathetically weak, that’s true, so it can hardly be encouraging that in every generic ballot the Democrats are routinely whomping (see question 12) the Republicans by 15 or more points and the GOP’s “best” candidates right now are in close races with all of these pathetically weak Democrats.  Meanwhile, Bill Richardson, who bizarrely has more executive experience than the entire Republican top three put together, waits in the wings to take up the mantle of “electable, centrist Democrat” who has some foreign policy credentials and is also strongly antiwar.  Meanwhile, in the other corner are….Giuliani, McCain and Romney?  Good grief.  As a Gopper, you have to be hoping that isn’t the real field and that someone has been playing a cruel joke on you till now.  You have to be hoping that one of these lesser-known candidates comes out of nowhere.  If I were a Republican party loyalist (which I assuredly am not), it wouldn’t seem to be a time for smiling.  It would look like it is time to start drinking heavily.

Update: The smiling Republicans are apparently not at CPAC.  The Washington Times reports:

Regular CPAC attendees spoke yesterday of a “malaise.” 
“It’s a sense, a feeling that none of the top candidates really excite conservatives this year,” Illinois publisher Jameson Campaigne said.

Maybe by “malaise,” he meant “cheerfulness.”  Or maybe Bill Kristol is a tiresome party propagandist.

If the base is really so wary, how exactly is Mr. Giuliani so far ahead in the polls?

The fact is, the base is already fairly comfortable with Mr. Giuliani and is quite seriously considering his candidacy. ~Ryan “Blame The Christians” Sager

Mr. Sager’s “argument” here is a good example of a habit that a lot of activists and pundits on the right have: whatever it is that you believe and desire, “the base” somehow magically always believes and desires the same thing.  Hugh Hewitt is always talking about what “the base” wants, when he actually means to say, “what I, Hugh Hewitt, want.”  Many a socially conservative pundit will cluck his tongue about the “sophistication” of social conservative voters, when what I suspect he is basing this statement on is his own sense that he is a social conservative and a sophisticated voter and therefore other social conservatives must be similarly complex in their approaches to voting.  More than any of us like to admit it, political observers will substitute what we know or what we think we know for explanations of what is motivating other people.  To some degree, this is unavoidable, since we are alll bound up in our own contingent perspectives and have a hard time forgetting that other people are not necessarily viewing things as we do.  When this method is employed for obviously polemical purposes, however, as Mr. Sager has been employing it here, it becomes rather grimly self-serving.  Even being self-serving would be less of a problem if it were at least based on something more substantial than these ridiculously early polls. 

We are familiar with the politicians’ method of pretending to speak for “the American people,” and we’re all used to ignoring what they have to say on this score, but on the right we are still inclined to listen very seriously when someone begins speaking in hushed tones about “the base.”  Perhaps because the party leadership and talking heads have so assiduously ignored most ordinary folks on so many other their major policy decisions (e.g., immigration, trade, foreign policy, etc.) or simply paid mostly lip service to their socially conservative values, there is some desire to overcompensate by constantly gesturing towards the constituents whom they routinely ignore on almost everything that matters.  Still, you’d think we’d just received a prophect revelation the way some people fall all over themselves trying to scrutinise the true intentions of “the base.”  Just watch the haruspices fumble with the bird entrails that are polling results to divine the appropriate conclusion!  Of course, you, the pundit or activist, haven’t necessarily surveyed “the base” yourself, nor do you have some automatic telepathic connection to all other conservatives, but you just know (because it’s so obvious!) that “the base” agrees with your position.  That everyone on either side of every question is confident that this claim of support from “the base” is true might begin to inspire doubt that “the base” even exists and is actually just a figment of pundits’ imaginations. 

Even though it would normally be considered perilous and unwise to base an interpretation of the state of the GOP on preliminary polling ten months before the first primary, quite a few people are popping up to tell us how the rise of the Terrible Trio and Giuliani’s popularity show us that everything has changed.  The rise of the “metro” Republican, instead of being stunning proof that the party establishment is once again foisting a bunch of unpopular elites and Northeasterners on their constituents quite against their will, is taken as proof of a new “trend” in GOP politics.  There is, of course, nothing new about the GOP establishment imposing bad but well-connected candidates on the party.  That is what the GOP establishment does–it can do no other without losing its essential self.  Conservatives have just lived through six years of the results of that same practice when Mr. Bush was made the prohibitive favourite early on.  Unlike 1999, however, the “frontrunner” in the polls has not received the blessing of the overwhelming majority of party honchos.  Giuliani boosters would have us believe that his numbers in the low 30s (rather comparable to Liddy Dole’s 27% or so around this time in ’99) show that the party faithful are going for him even when the leadership is not.  If so, this would be a rather shocking change in Republican practice.  It is the case that GOP voters do tend to follow where the party leadership takes them (whether it is to follow Dole off an electoral cliff or to follow Bush to Iraq), which makes Giuliani’s lack of support from those leaders a clear sign that he will ultimately not go very far.  Even so, why anyone should wish to repeat the undemocratic anointing of a mediocrity, such as the GOP experienced in ’99-’00, I will never understand.  Yet to listen to some tell it, the field of three has already been determined.  The early polling for Giuliani is being taken as “proof” that the traditional leaders of social and religious conservatives no longer have the same influence they once did, which works very nicely with Mr. Sager’s story of a social conservatism in decline.  Here’s Sager:

And these gatekeepers are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a party that wants to find its way out of the political wilderness and, to some extent, blames the more extreme elements of the religious right for leading it into the woods in the first place.  

This is Mr. Sager’s “base”-invoking rhetoric at its laziest.  The “party” doesn’t blame the “more extreme elements of the religious right” for electoral defeat–Ryan Sager does.  In fact, whenever you see him make a generalisation about what the GOP wants or needs today, it is usually a statement of what Sager believes and not much more than that. 

In fact, however, there are actual conservative voters whose apparent preferences for Giuliani have nothing to do with their “comfort” with Giuliani and everything to do with celebrity, ignorance and misconceptions about who and what Giuliani is.  Giuliani the pro-life evangelical sounds like a formidable candidate, and for a sizeable percentage of voters (roughly 15% or so) Giuliani evidently must be pro-life and evangelical because, well, he just has to be.  What it means for the rise of secular and “libertarian” forces in the GOP that many of the people who back Giuliani may actually think they are backing a pro-life evangelical candidate is not something that Mr. Sager would want to have to talk about.  If I were Sager, I would probably also say that the polling is “unambiguous” (even though there is rarely anything more ambiguous than early primary polling), because if I were Ryan Sager I would have to believe that this is true. 

Mr. Sager’s “discovery” that “the base” is comfortable with Giuliani fits very nicely with his other “discoveries” that the GOP is dominated by religious maniacs (unbeknownst to all but Andrew Sullivan and Heather Mac Donald) and that it was this supposedly overflowing religious mania (not outrageous deficit spending, the war, catastrophic incompetence and, well, failure in almost everything) that doomed the GOP in ’06.  Strange that someone like Harold Ford could come very close to winning in a strongly Republican state by talking up his religiosity and traditional upbringing–Tennesseans must simply have been driven towards him by their disgust with that Bible-thumping theocrat Bob Corker.  Yeah.  It’s a good thing that Michelle “Fool for Christ” Bachmann didn’t win election to the House, or you might begin to think that religious conservatives aren’t that much of an electoral liability after all. Oh, wait, she did get elected.  In Minnesota.  But obviously a big social-con such as Marilyn Musgrave would get swept out in the “libertarian West”…oh, wait, no, she’s still there.  Mr. Sager is confident about all of these “discoveries” because they also fit very nicely with his own policy views and factional preferences, which are decidedly not those of a religious conservative.  After the year when Democrats felt compelled to fall over themselves in talking about God (and a year in which, separately, economic populism triumphed all over the place), Mr. Sager is selling secular “libertarian”-conservatism.  No wonder he is clutching on to the hem of Giuliani’s dress–he needs to find some sign that his kind of politics is not destined for complete marginalisation.  How better than to go on the offense and declare that his rivals are finished and their time has ended?  Religious conservatives are in full retreat, he declares to us.  “There are no American soldiers in Baghdad,” said another equally confident propagandist.  

Mr. Sager’s preferred policies and loyalties wouldn’t be as much of an issue, except that he has decided to make virtually everything he writes these days part of this unfolding narrative that religious/social conservatism has destroyed the Republican Party and he has chosen to tell this particularly unconvincing story without much in the way of evidence.  Since virtually nothing much that might be confused with a social conservative agenda was ever passed or signed into law in the last six years, it is difficult to understand what that ever had to do with Republican defeat.  This is not a problem for Mr. Sager’s arguments, since his “blame the Christians” rhetoric benefits from its sheer vagueness: social-cons are to blame because, well, they just are and everyone knows it (but you should still buy my book!).  Hence the importance of Rudy’s early lead in the polls–it proves that “the base” is headed Sager’s way and that “the base” agrees with his diagnosis about what’s ailing the party.  What could be a better indication that the rank-and-file share Sager’s weariness with social conservatism than the full-on embrace of someone like Giuliani, right?  Presumably the early “embrace” of Joe Lieberman by a plurality of Democratic voters in early ’03 reflected their abiding love of the Iraq war and their conviction that unrealistic hawkishness was the wave of the future.  That would pretty well describe the Democratic Party rank-and-file of the last three years, wouldn’t you say?  It’s not as if there would be some revolt of “the base” later on in the year that would propel a staunchly antiwar candidate to the front of the pack!  How could that happen?  After all, the polling was unambiguous, right?

Former Sen. Rick Santorum has drawn at least one conclusion about the Republican presidential primary field: Anybody but John McCain.

The Pennsylvania Republican, who signed a contract Thursday as a Fox News contributor, said he has spoken with every GOP candidate – except the senator from Arizona – but it’s still too early for him to endorse.

“The only one I wouldn’t support is McCain,” Santorum said during an interview in his office at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, where he is a senior fellow.

“I don’t agree with him on hardly any issues,’’ Santorum said. “I don’t think he has the temperament and leadership ability to move the country in the right direction.” ~The Politico

While this will no doubt undermine McCain’s appeal to the large (and, I’m sure, influential!) Venezuelan exile community, you would almost have to think that McCain has recruited Santorum to make a public statement in which he absolutely refuses to endorse him.  As the man who suffered what I believe was the largest margin of defeat of any incumbent Pennsylvania U.S. Senator ever (an 18 point margin) and someone whose “gathering storm” speech draws either groans or laughs from most people in this country, Santorum is not exactly the person whose endorsement a campaign manager bends over backwards to acquire.  Indeed, his endorsement might well be the beginning of the end for a struggling campaign.  The headlines would prove awkward at best: “Repudiated politician fears the rise of Venezuelan empire, supports McCain” ; “McCain, si! Chavez, no!” ; “One good warmonger deserves another,” and so on. 

Santorum’s repudiation, on the other hand, is something that McCain can hold up as proof of his electability.  It does hurt McCain’s vain attempt to win over Christian conservatives, many of whom still admire Santorum for his stands on social issues in spite of his wacky foreign policy views.  (It is worth noting that Santorum refuses to rule out Giuliani, who makes no pretense to being pro-life and whose temperament is, if anything, worse than McCain’s famous temper.)  There is always the danger that McCain can now be cast by his enemies as being “weak on Bolivia,” but I think that’s a risk he’ll be willing to take. 

On a separate note, it is interesting that Santorum doesn’t want to go into lobbying now that he is out of government.  Why?  One reason is that it isn’t his kind of thing, but there’s another:

Besides, he added, “I want to keep my political options open.”

That’s a good idea, Rick.  You don’t want to prematurely rule out all those opportunities for a political comeback that are just piling up for you.

But I’m actually in the camp of people who thought that Dennis Miller’s abrasive, I’m-smarter-than-you shtick was never, ever funny – and I can’t tell you how annoyed it made me that of all the entertainment-industry types who could have converted to right-wingery after 2001, all we got was him. (Why couldn’t, say, Angelina Jolie have discovered the virtues of pre-emptive war? I’m sure PNAC would have been as eager as the CFR to have her on board.)

Though I suppose there are always worse people who could have joined the conservative fold . . . ~Ross Douthat

I share Ross’ sense of annoyance, though mainly just because I find Dennis Miller to be really, really annoying.  Anything that would have associated him, however extremely remotely, with my kind of politics has to be quite unfortunate.  Fortunately, most of Miller’s move to “the right” has had a lot to do with becoming a booster for Bush and very little do with anything recognisable as conservative ideas, so the association is minimal.  But I think Miller’s shtick explains a good deal about why he joined up with the Red Republicans when he did.  If there was one thing that the Bush Administration implausibly exuded for years and years, it was that they were the trusty, competent hands who knew better than we did.  How many times did silly war supporters say things like, “The President knows more than I do”?  I bet they wish they could take those statements back!  Dennis Miller is the embodiment of the continuing war supporter pose of claiming to know a whole lot about the world and claiming to be more firmly in tune with reality than the morons whom he happily derided  combined with a stunning lack of understanding of any of the relevant subjects.  Miller is, in this sense, the living symbol of the snide condescension that many Bush supporters expressed towards anyone who lacked their profound vision of the future world they were going to create.  The government was able to invade Iraq because tens of millions of people were as self-important and ignorant as Dennis Miller and could therefore be easily manipulated into backing the war if it meant that they could brag to everybody they knew that they possessed superior “moral clarity” and idealistic zeal for freedom.  Perhaps that sets too much importance by Dennis Miller–indeed, talking about him this much already invests him with too much importance–but it is worth considering.

But Miller was not alone in his political move, even if he didn’t have much company.  Ron Silver stands out as one of the more high-profile, post-9/11 “converts” to the Republican cause in the entertainment industry and one who “converted” entirely because of 9/11 and the administration’s response.  Silver is an odd character, but perhaps he is one of those socially liberal jingoists to whom a Giuliani ticket would theoretically appeal.  He is, as he said to the convention in ’04, a “September 11 person,” which apparently means that he is one of those people whose core values are so easy to ignore that he could embrace an entirely different political agenda because of one particularly traumatic and terrible event.  In a sense, the move for Silver was an entirely logical one, if what I understand about him is correct. 

I first heard of Ron Silver from an anecdote about Clinton’s first inauguration.  The story that I heard goes that there were fighter jets flying overhead in honour of the new President, and Silver was initially bothered by this until he thought to himself that the jets were “our planes now.”  It was now okay to enthuse about displays of militarism, because the right people were in charge.  So it is not really all that terribly surprising that when there was an actual war on and there was a chance to be on the side of the “war President,” Silver would join the side of that President.

Now, criticism of Israel, as of anything else, is all a matter of context, and if the context, from a Jewish point of view, is acceptable—if, that is, the identification with Israel is clear in it—then the criticism itself, whether or not one agrees with it, is certainly permissible. The question really is then: when is “identification” clearly present and when isn’t it? Ira Youdovin, for example, wants to know what’s wrong with Rabbis for Human Rights, “an Israeli-based pluralistic organization that . . . advocates a two-state solution, even as it accuses Israel of violating human rights.” Dan Fleshler argues on behalf of Jewish activists who are “ideal candidates for addressing the [anti-Israel] claims of the far Left [because they] aren’t afraid to say publicly that the occupation is morally repugnant.”

This is curious language for someone who “identifies” with Israel. “Morally problematic?” I’d have no difficulty with that. “Morally injurious?” I’d sign to that, too. But “repugnant?” It’s obviously not the Palestinians who are being labelled “repugnant” here, but the Israelis—the same Israelis who (whether or not you think they should be) are living, at considerable danger to themselves, as settlers in the historic heartland of the Hebrew Bible and whose presence there alone can enable Israel to redraw the perilous 1967 borders to its advantage. How identified with Jewish history or Israel can you be if you find such people, or the army that is protecting them and preventing daily acts of terror aimed at Israel proper, nothing but “repugnant?” How “identified” are you if you see in all this only a “violation of [Palestinian] human rights” and not, at the same time, an upholding of Jewish rights? ~Hillel Halkin

Of course, Mr. Fleshlerdoesn’t say that Jewish history, Israel, Israeli settlers or the Israeli army are morally repugnant, and presumably doesn’t believe that they are any such thing, but he did say that the policy of occupation that the Israeli government continues is “morally repugnant.”  Mr. Halkin regards this as excessive.  A certain degree of criticism is okay, but real, fundamental criticism is not tolerable.  This is comparable to the “centrist” hawk line that it is legitimate to criticise the administration on how it has managed the Iraq war, but not on the fundamental necessity and justice of the war.  You can be a respected dissenter, provided that it is of the McLieberman variety in which you find fault with the administration for moving too slowly and using too little force and not increasing troop levels sooner.  To do otherwise, at least as far as much of the American right is concerned, is to have entered the land of the moonbats and crazies, though this is still better than being cast out among the outright traitors and “unpatriotic” (translation from jingo: sane) conservatives. 

This is a fine example of the tendency among pro-Israel activists of all stripes to say, “Why, yes, we welcome criticism, provided that it is not fundamental or very deep criticism that strikes at the heart of one of our preferred policies.  By all means, express concern about some of the methods employed, but don’t question the inalienable right to illegally occupy someone else’s land and repress the current inhabitants.”  You, the dissenter, can disagree about how to reach the same goal that these activists have, and you can find fault with certain individuals for their failures to execute the necessary plans properly (no one excels in Olmert-bashing more than the ardent hard-liners), but you cannot question the goal, much less issue moral condemnation of a fundamental state policy–at least not without forfeiting your claim to have any real identification with Israel and implicating yourself, in the eyes of the ideological guardians, as an unwitting (or perhaps not so unwitting?) abettor of the enemies of Israel. 

I am not Jewish, but this strikes me that this is a supremely lousy tactic to employ against other Jewish people who insist that they are pro-Israel and who refuse to define being “pro-Israel” as reflexive support for whatever the Israeli government is doing.  It seems to me that, if Israel were the weak, endangered state that its defenders routinely make it out to be, its defenders would want to have as many allies as they could possibly find and would not impose maximalist demands of ideological purity on those who actually try to fend off Israel’s harshest critics.  Halkin’s test is similar to the standards used by watchdogs here in America on the lookout for “anti-Americanism.”  Expressing opposition to government policy or contempt for figures in government somehow translates into being “anti-American,” when there is every reason to think that the policy and government officials in question are opposed to everything good about our country and violate many of the moral ideals that we aspire to as a people.  We often hear the old refrain that we are undermining the government or enabling the enemy, but what we are actually doing most of the time is challenging bad policy that certain ideologues and chauvinists would have us believe is some kind of embodiment of the nation’s highest purpose.

Does Romney really not understand how big of a problem his Mormonism is with a sizeable chunk of the electorate?  As Roger Simon notes in Politico that “poll after poll shows [Mormonism] is a significant problem for him.”  Is his campaign staff so oblivious or so, shall we say, brainwashed by the multiculti lie that voters don’t care about these sorts of things (even when they say that they do care) that they aren’t even considering how it would affect his candidacy?  His not-so-secret top-secret battle plan suggests that they are aware of the problem, but I don’t think they have even attempted to understand just how serious of a problem it is for their candidate.  His public remarks to date indicate that he has no idea what he’s about to run into in the next year.  If he weren’t such a pandering opportunist, I would even feel sorry for him.

Update: Leaving aside the Mormonism business for a moment, just consider the shift in Romney’s fav/unfav rating in the Post poll.  He went from 22/24 (not great, but not disastrous) to an even worse rating of 26/34.  Simon concludes:

But something very troubling has happened to Romney over the last 10 weeks:

The more voters learn about him, the less they seem to like him.

That basically obliterates the happy-talk in the memo from Romney’s senior strategist Alex Gage (is every top level staffer for Romney named Alex?) in which he declared, among other vain attempts to put lipstick on a pig, that the more people know about Romney the more they like him.

The attenuated attacks are so unusual that I think it proves that the media has determined who the conservative candidate is because they’re going after me with hammer and tong and that’s the way you would expect to go after the conservative candidate. And I’m proud of the fact that the mainstream media isn’t wild about my candidacy and that’s why I’m going to win. ~Mitt Romney

Attenuated?  The attacks themselves are weakened and diminishing?  Certainly the attacks will attenuate Romney’s political appeal, but the attacks are not attenuated.  If anything, they are too strong and dense for Romney to handle!

Strange diction aside, this is blind optimism in the face of (political) death.  I suppose you have to spin it positively and make it seem as if articles that describe you as a “loser” are really being written because the left secretly fears that you are a big winner, but nobody except for the true loyalists are buying this stuff.

It is possible that you can make a hostile media into your adversary and try to rally populist resentment against the media to boost your candidacy by non-traditional means, but that is hardly something that any candidate enjoys or wants to have to do.  The media across the spectrum actively hated Pat Buchanan, and that did not exactly win him the nomination.  If media loathing were an indication of the certainty of future conservative success, Barry Goldwater would have been President for eight years.  Of course, Romney is neither Buchanan nor Goldwater nor anything like them.  As Dean, Obama and McCain have shown, if the media love you they can generate a lot of “buzz” and make you into a viable candidate when you would normally have no business even being in the race. 

What I think is so amusing about this latest bout of Romneyite whining about the media is that Romney would not even be a remotely serious candidate right now but for the tremendous attention the media have been giving him.  He has no more business running for President than Obama, yet he has been promoted and taken seriously by many observers (including the great election watcher Chuck Todd, who believes, in opposition to everything Democrats actually say about Romney, that the Dems are most afraid of a Romney nomination) who should know that he is not that great of a candidate.  Without the mainstream media, which really has to include the major conservative opinion journals that have been boosting his candidacy to one degree or another over the past year, Romney’s candidacy would be nowhere.  Very few people know who he is, but even fewer would know about him if he had not been getting the third-degree over his flip-flopping and the publicity from the endless stream of “Mormon question” articles.  The Weisberg and Linker articles, while deeply wrong or mistaken in different ways, probably generated more attention for Romney in the press than some of his own campaign activities!  Because he has apparently been deemed by many insiders to be the anointed establishment alternative to McCain, in spite of Romney’s record and opportunism, the media have treated him with far more serious scrutiny than he really deserved, and now he is discomfited by the attention and wants to use the scrutiny as proof that he is the real conservative that all of the media coverage has proven him not to be. 

This scrutiny has less to do with the media’s concern to “get” the conservative candidate as such, and has much more to do with the inevitable intense scrutiny that any major candidate will face.  Romney has failed the test of this scrutiny time and again and is now using the last trick he has, which is to lump the media into his enemies’ list as a last-ditch way of rallying people around him.  Now if he could just get Le Monde to run a hit piece on him, he would really be in good shape!   

Update: If Romney were confident that he was the obvious conservative candidate in the race, he wouldn’t be bringing in Michigander students and activists to CPAC to make sure that he wins the meaningless straw poll there.  He desperately craves legitimation from a prominent conservative body, because he knows how badly he needs it.  The other candidates, except for Giuliani (obviously), don’t need to rig meaningless votes to win credibility–they already are conservative!

Their biggest headache was insufficient troops on the ground despite the increase ordered by President Bush, the former official said. “We don’t have the numbers for the counter-insurgency job even with the surge. The word ‘surge’ is a misnomer. Strategically, tactically, it’s not a surge,” an American officer said.

According to the US military’s revised counter-insurgency field manual, FM 3-24, written by Gen Petraeus, the optimum “troop-to-task” ratio for Baghdad requires 120,000 US and allied troops in the city alone. Current totals, even including often unreliable Iraqi units, fall short and the deficit is even greater in conflict areas outside Baghdad.

“Additional troops are essential if we are to win,” said Lt-Col John Nagel, co-author of the manual, in an address at the US Naval Institute in San Diego last month. One soldier for every 50 civilians in the most intense conflict areas was key to successful counter-insurgency work.Compounding the manpower problems is an apparently insurmountable shortage of civilian volunteers from the Pentagon, state department and treasury. They are needed to staff the additional provincial reconstruction teams and other aid projects promised by Mr Bush. ~The Guardian