Kirsten Powers of PowersPoint may be an even harsher critic of Romney than I am, and she offers pithier attacks:

Attacking France, Massachusetts liberals and Hollywood is not a plan. It’s a regurgitation.

She has also laid into Giuliani’s bogus line on judges, picking up Politico’s new story on the judges Giuliani has already appointed.  Surprise–they’re not all together conservative-minded folks.

There are all sorts of possible explanations for it.  Taranto gives us two useful ideas to start with: One is that the religious leaders don’t actually exercise as much power as we’re constantly hearing.  Another is that the religious right is actually far more thoughtful in their political picks than they’re often given credit for.  As a variation on that, I’d suggest that the religious right just isn’t as monolithic a group as it’s often characterized. Suggestions that they always act in concert, lurching along like some troop of zombies, forget the myriad regional and personal differences amongst religious, socially conservative voters.   ~Peter Suderman

I agree with Peter that there are all sorts of explanations for why some evangelical voters may say they prefer Giuliani right now.  One of the explanations may be that there are Republican and other voters ignorant enough to believe that Rudy is himself a born-again Christian and therefore “one of them.”  I am really not kidding. 

According to Diageo/Hotline’s February poll, 17% of Republicans, 14% of independents and 13% of Democrats say they would describe Giuliani as “born-again” or “evangelical.”  If those numbers are reliable (and Hotline’s numbers usually are), that represents a lot of people who know nothing about Giuliani and who instead are probably imposing their hopes (“Hurray, America’s Mayor is an evangelical!”) or fears (“That no-good authoritarian is an evangelical!”) on him.  Interestingly, Giuliani does the “worst” of the six big candidates in this area, except for Romney, since roughly one-fifth of those polled think that all of the others could be fairly described as evangelical.  Hillary, born-again?  17% of Republicans would agree with that label and 26% of Democrats, who would presumably be better acquainted with Hillary in all her complexity (ha!), say the same.  Maybe some Democratic voters think “evangelical” means “she believes in God.”  Kudos to the guys at Hotline for thinking to even ask this question about “evangelical” identity, which seems so bizarrely unnecessary to ask for almost the entire field (except for Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo) and yet reveals all kinds of things about the people being polled that we would never know otherwise. 

These are poll results that convey the kind of staggering ignorance of large swathes of the voting public that makes me feel vaguely terrified of elections.  This is not a fairly technical policy question like, “Does Tom Vilsack want to index Social Security benefits to prices or to wages?”  Lots of people might not get the right answer to that one and not be considered fools.  But this is simple labeling: evangelical or not evangelical?  Even allowing for a broad definition of evangelical, it is very hard to think of any of the six top candidates as being correctly labeled with either of these names.  McCain, born-again?  19% of Republicans think so.  Roughly one out of every five or six voters cannot figure out this most basic detail for any of the major candidates except for the one whose religion has become a major focus of media attention.  Even then, 7% of all voters think Romney is an evangelical!  These are people either fooled by his “I share your values” shtick, or they are really not paying attention, which means that their statements of candidate preference at this stage are virtually worthless (except to the extent that we in the chattering classes reify these meaningless preferences into “momentum”). 

So, consider that for a moment and reflect on the kind of stupefying voter ignorance that it represents.  Meanwhile, let me address these two tropes that have been making the rounds in the Giuliani/Christian conservative discussions.  These tropes are 1) support for Giuliani among evangelicals can be explained by saying that evangelicals are savvy, sophisticated multi-issue voters and not the single-issue yahoos they are supposedly made out to be; 2) evangelicals are diverse and won’t all necessarily respond to a candidate in the same way.  The first one simply makes no sense to me.  The second one makes a good deal more sense on its own, but when it is marshalled in support of the first one it creates problems.  Let me explain.

I say the first idea makes no sense to me because I don’t accept the idea that it demonstrates sophistication and savviness that voters are overlooking their core beliefs in support of a candidate whose chief qualification, as far as they know, is, as The Onion might put it, that he was mayor of New York on 9/11 and no one else can say that.  This is the height of unserious, celebrity-driven voter preferences.  This shows these voters to be not the complex, priority-balancing realists of pundit legend, but easily-led (yes, I really do want to use that word) and gullible people who will chant the name of any politician if they have heard it often enough in a positive context.  God help us, but many of these people may have concluded that Giuliani is their guy simply because they have seen him on TV more often than they have seen the others.  Yes, I do think it is that bad. 

So it would make sense to note the diversity of evangelicals and social conservatives if the evangelicals and social conservatives supporting Giuliani were doing so based on his record as a reforming mayor or based on his (very dubious) promises to appoint “strict constructionist” judges, but if they are supporting him based in misconceptions (i.e., that Giuliani is an evangelical) or simply because of his celebrity the real diversity of these voters becomes almost irrelevant.  If anyone is lurching along zombie-like it would have to be the voters who are rushing en masse to the banner of Rudy because they have heard his name somewhere and get a good feeling when people talk about him.

A lot of smart people are working very hard to come up with serious explanations for Giuliani’s early popularity (leadership! national security! tough-guy persona!), but all of these clever explanations rest on a base of knowledge that the actual Giuliani-preferring voters don’t possess.  Virtually no one outside of the Five Boroughs knows squat about Giuliani’s mayoral administration in any great detail, and furthermore nobody who didn’t live in New York at the time really cares all that much.  I fear we have reached a stage in our nation’s political life where the dynamics of presidential campaigns may be better understood by the sort of celebrity-watching media of the Us Weekly and In Touch variety.  As informed citizens with a strong interest in these things, political pundits of all stripes really want to believe that issues, resumes, qualifications and, well, the actual facts of a candidate’s personal history have something to do with whether voters support this or that candidate.  It may simply be the case that we are horribly, horribly wrong about so many voters that it renders all of our analysis moot.

Matt Corley at TPMCafe asks the obvious question over Romney’s latest weaseling rhetoric:

If Romney doesn’t think it’s a good idea to distinguish between people based on whether they have faith, then why should we do just that when picking a President?

The thing is that this is a no-brainer of an “issue.”  Actual atheists and non-believers make up a fairly small proportion of the population.  The odds of Romney “running into” someone on the trail who doesn’t have any religious or even “spiritual” beliefs are not very good.  Overwhelming majorities of Americans would not vote for an atheist for President, which means that an overwhelming majority of Americans agrees with Romney’s past statements that the President should at least believe in God some way somehow (though, apparently, if polls are to be believed, not in the God of Mormonism or Islam if it can be helped).  A religious conservative–which is what Romney is pretending to be at the moment–should have no problem saying that he considers “religious faith” an important and vital thing and the lack of it to be a real problem.  If it really makes no difference to Romney whether a man believes in God or not, which beliefs that a person holds actually do matter to him?

On the GOP side, the misreader-in-chief is clearly Mitt Romney. Can someone remind me why we were taking him seriously? I guess some people still are — just as the Democrats have their heavyweight troika, consisting of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, so the GOP has its version, which evidently includes Romney along with Giuliani and McCain.

But the only things Romney has done while in the public eye confirm glaringly that he just doesn’t belong there. His big Sunday-morning unveiling in early February, on This Week, was humiliating even to watch.

You know how when you’re reading a book that’s so bad you actually feel embarrassed for the writer? That’s what Romney’s appearance was like. George Stephanopoulos tore him to pieces, without even trying that hard. Romney emerged as a devout Republican who voted in Democratic primaries (for a reason — to lend his vote to the weakest Democrat — that was patent nonsense), an incorruptible conservative who supported state abortion laws, and a “lifetime” member of the National Rifle Association — for the last few months!

This last one is technically accurate. One can join the NRA at any moment and check the box that says lifetime member; you or I could become one today and start calling ourselves that tomorrow. But its technical accuracy just shows what a metaphor for the emptiness of Romney’s campaign his membership is. ~Michael Tomasky

I know, this must be part of the wide-ranging conspiracy to destroy that great conservative, Mitt Romney!  That is apparently the new GOP spin to explain away the reality that everyone has begun to notice that Romney is as airy and insubstantial as one of the souffles that he would probably have banned from the White House kitchen if he became President.  Usually, however, people on the other side don’t regard their gravest foes and most worrisome opponents as a bad joke of a politician who is not even fit to compete for the prize. 

For all kinds of weird psychohistorical reasons tied up with a lack of their own ideas and the experience of the ’90s battles with Bubba, many conservatives regard Hillary as something like the incarnation of what the Zoroastrians called Drug, The Lie, and see in her election the end of all things good and true on earth (well, maybe it’s not quite that bad, but for some people it’s pretty close).  These people do not view her as a ridiculous buffoon, but as a deadly serious adversary.  Meanwhile, the left is falling over on the floor laughing at Romney, and no wonder.  He is a laughable candidate.  Not just flawed, not just lacking in credibility, not just out of sync with this particular political moment, but laughable.  Anyone who doubts this need only consider, as Tomasky notes later in his piece, that a key theme of his campaign will be his strong opposition to…France.  Tomasky neglected to mention Romney’s strong stand for freedom toast, liberation onion soup, the American way dip sandwich and liberty truffles, as well as his proposal to rename L’Enfant Plaza as Kid Square.  Some politicians succeed politically by vilifying hostile countries, but Romney is one of the first to try his hand at demagoguing against an ally.

While I understand the temptation among Republicans to please their base by French-baiting — though it probably had more resonance circa Freedom Fries in the spring of ’03 — there is an enormous political downside  for a presidential contender in tweaking Paris:  New Hampshire, where next-door Romney will be expected to place well in the primary, has the highest population of Franco-Americans in the nation. ~Jonathan Martin

Just consider the phrase “French-baiting” to consider how absurd Romney’s campaign has become: it actually has a strong position in favour of French-baiting.  What’s next?  Will a future candidate run on an “At least I’m not Canadian” platform?   

I have had a fewthings to say about why Romney’s Francophobic strategy is generally ridiculous and stupid, but I had not considered just how politically stupid this tactic would be in New Hampshire.  This might not help him too much with Cajun folks in Louisiana, either.  Laissez les bons temps roulez!     

Update: As Bruce Reed notes, when Romney saved the Salt Lake Olympics he also ensured (on our home soil, no less!) our national humiliation in the winter games at the hands of…the dreaded French!  In other words, Romney can’t even be trusted to consistently oppose the interests of France.  Qu’est-ce que le parole pour “flip-flop” au français?

Actually, it has been tried several times before, so there’s a track-record. ~Michael Rubin

Rubin means that there have been other occasions when Westerners have talked to representatives of leaders in the Near East and North Africa.  There actually haven’t been attempts to negotiate directly with Iran and Syria on this subject, and there haven’t been direct talks with the Iranians for decades.  So that’s not much of a track-record, unless, of course, you want to argue that “those people” all think the same.

There are (at least) three things fundamentally wrong with Frank Gaffney’s article on negotiations with Iran and Syria.  First, he assumes that merely entering into talks with Tehran “legitimates” the regime.  Presumably, this has already occurred when the British, French, Germans and countless other respectable countries talk to them, trade with them and enter into military cooperative structures with them (e.g., India).  Tehran’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world is actually not in question, except in the United States and Israel, so we would be conferring nothing on them that they do not already possess in abundance. 

Second, he assumes that the United States government has “natural allies” elsewhere in the world, in this case the “Iranian people” (apparently including the “Iranian people” who voted for Ahmadinejad!).  This is entirely wrong.  We have allies, but none of these is a natural ally, because no two states or entities are ever really natural allies.  Their interests may coincide for a time, but they are never permanently aligned and their “natural alliance” is as changeable as the circumstances that bring it into being.  France and Russia became “natural allies” only after the unification of Germany, and ceased to be “natural allies” the moment that Germany was divided.  Now that France and Germany are oddly on good terms with one another, France and Russia have no “natural alliance.”  Alliances fulfill certain functions and address certain needs, and when these functions are obsolete the alliance has no longer any reason to exist, because there are only accidental and never natural alliances.  The very idea of a natural alliance is absurd, and all the more so for a country whose tradition it was and still should be never to have permanent alliances.

Third, he assumes that entering into negotiations means that there can be no turn to other options if the need should arise.  This is demonstrably false.  Does the opening of diplomatic channels foreclose the possibility of ever being able to close them again?  Once you open that door, are you actually obliged to keep it open forever?  Of course not.  This is a scare tactic.  A very lame scare tactic, I grant you, but there it is.  If these negotiations yield nothing of value, there will actually be a stronger push to use punitive sanctions or even less desirable means of coercion.  Not only does this move not “foreclose” the possibility of future military action, but the failure of these negotiations could be used (and will be used by people like Frank Gaffney) to argue that the time has come to act. 

So, that’s 0 for 3 for Gaffney.  Is there any reason to think that the rest of his fearmongering “analysis” is any more sound?

Having concluded a deal with the North Koreans that seems to have, for the moment, handled the situation there, Washington now turns to two members of the Fearsome Foursome (or whatever we’re calling it these days) for talks.  This has produced the predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth in allthe right places, which suggests that it may not be such a bad idea.  This blogger has been arguing for a much more radical diplomatic move vis-a-vis Iran (i.e., full normalisation of relations and engagement leading to rapprochement), but this is a promising first step in the direction of 1) taking account of the political reality of the modern Near East in which Iran is the predominant regional power and 2) ceasing the tiresome preoccupation with old hostile acts of the regime from 1979 and thereafter.  (I remember how vehemently some people argued against normalisation of relations with Vietnam in the mid-’90s, and at the time I was more sympathetic to this view, but Vietnam had killed tens of thousands of American soldiers, while we can blame Iran for, at most, a few hundred American deaths.  If we can open up diplomatic relations with the Vietnamese 20 years after the end of the war, we can surely do so with the Iranians almost 30 years after the hostage crisis when it is clearly in our interest to do so.)  These are the main things that have prevented Washington from entering into direct negotiations with Tehran for any reason.  These are the things that compelled Washington to outsource its diplomatic work to the Euro-Trio without much to show for it one way or the other. 

The belief that Iran could be bottled up and diplomatically ignored indefinitely after we destroyed the main bulwark against their power in the Near East was unrealistic and based out of the need to guide foreign policy by striking the right moral pose.  Since most observers are quite reasonably convinced that Iran has control or strong influence over the main Shi’ite militias, and these militias represent some of the main sources of violence in Iraq, it makes a certain amount of sense to talk to the masters rather than pretend that the servants are the real players.  If you could persuade or entice the masters to restrain these forces, it would be wise to do so.  If you cannot, either because Tehran will not make a deal on this or because it actually has far less control than some believe, all the more reason to get out of Iraq while the getting is good.  The sooner you can discover what is and isn’t possible in this regard, the better off you will be.

Speaking more widely, it strikes me as thoroughly perverse that those who like to argue that “nothing” should be off the table when it comes to Iran and Syria find a little diplomatic conversation as something too ghastly to contemplate. ~Andrew Stuttaford

Well, talking could lead to all kinds of embarrassing moments in the press and fills people with uncertainty, whereas first-strike nuking sends a clear signal that our government is run by madmen and fills people with terror.  How can you rule out the latter and actually engage in the former?  Let’s call that way the Tamerlane approach to foreign policy.

Half-joking aside, the turn to talk to Iran and Syria is good news and should have happened weeks ago at the very latest.  Mr. Bush has so boxed himself in with absolute statements about Tehran’s perfidy that it will be difficult for him to sell this move now as anything more than a last gasp desperation move, while he could have come from a position of strength had he done this a year or two ago.  Having waited until he has next to nothing to offer either state, Mr. Bush will find that Iran and Syria will be a lot more implacable than they might have been in, say, 2003, when at least one of them apparently wanted to make a deal.  Now that he has waited too long and negotiations may very well yield little or nothing, the very stalling encouraged by the hard-liners will then perversely vindicate these same hard-liners.  The negotiations, which they would have opposed in every circumstance, may wind up being fruitless in no small part because of their insistence that negotiations could never have yielded anything useful.  On the other hand, if the negotiations do yield some positive results in terms of Iranian and Syrian cooperation in Iraq (and at this point they have less reason to bother) and around the region, how much more might they have yielded if Mr. Bush had not heeded the counsel of Cheney et al.?   

Diplomacy is a tool of statecraft, just as war is, and for a President or any high government officials to refuse to use any tool when it can both justly and reasonably work in the interest of your country is an incomprehensible failure to fulfill one’s duty.

And so I think people’s faith in the United States is their, certainly, you know, what it is. Each person has the right to choose whatever faith they want and it’s a very important part of our country. ~Laura Bush

And they say that she’s the one with the firm grasp on the English language?  Imagine the conversations these people must have.