Dean Barnett on Hugh Hewitt’s educational background:

You don’t get those degrees from Michigan Law School at the bottom of a Cracker Jack Box.

That’s right.  I believe you receive them in the mail after sending in any three proofs of purchase of Fruit Loops (which, in Hewitt’s case, is entirely appropriate).

What has the usual suspects in such a fit this time?  After five days of their glorious pledge drive aimed at the Senate…the House Republican leadership has decided to propose a benchmark resolution on Iraq!  Ha!  Enjoy that one, Hewitt.

More Barnett:

The other scenario, and frankly I find this one both more likely and more chilling, is that Boehner has never even considered, not for one second, the effect his resolution will have on the enemy. Hugh’s question caught him off guard and without an answer because to him, it seemed like a non-sequitur. 

Perhaps it is a non-sequitur (that would be one of those other tough Latin phrases Barnett learned while he was in law school–maybe he even knows how to translate this one properly!), because perhaps setting benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet is a necessary and important condition for determining the degree of success the surge has so that the government will have more information about how to make any changes that might be needed to improve the chances of the surge’s success.  Perhaps the world does not revolve around Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett, and perhaps they do not have the final word on all military matters (thank God for that).  I don’t think the surge will succeed, and I think setting benchmarks for people in league with death squads is a waste of time, but I am not John Boehner.  John Boehner almost certainly thinks the surge will work (and he would support it even if he didn’t), and can probably be taken at his word that he is trying to help give the White House some cover on what is fast becoming a losing issue for Mr. Bush.  He probably hasn’t considered what effect a benchmark resolution would have on the enemy, since a benchmark resolution is essentially a suggestion about how you might measure progress that you assume follows from the surge plan.  It is an act of oversight inspired by support for the plan and demonstrates an interest in being able to gauge what kind of progress is being made.  Leave it to two such fine legal minds as Hewitt and Barnett to miss the crucial distinction between this sort of resolution and the more obviously critical language of the Biden resolution.  In their rather depressingly poor understanding of the matter, “resolution” = betrayal, so whenever they hear someone proposing a “resolution” (no matter what it says) they suppose that it is proof of that person’s irresolution on the war.  I submit to you that these sorts of people have no business speaking publicly about matters of grave national importance, much less should they hold any sort of popular leadership role that might significantly influence others.

Here’s my take: Put aside how rambling and unfocused it was. Maybe that can be chalked up to a bad night or fatigue. But to speak for 50 minutes or so and not to talk about the Iraq war before a conservative audience at a crucial moment in that war is bizarre and just wrong and almost offensive [bold mine-DL] in my view. This doesn’t seem like an oversight. He went out of his way to check off every conservative box—except the one that is politically risky at the moment. The rest of his foreign policy stuff—when he talked about Iran and the broader war—felt very shaky and about an inch deep. His account of how he came to change his view on abortion—through the issue of stem-cell research—isn’t very compelling and he would probably be better off not talking about it at all. Fairly or not, people aren’t going to believe it. ~Rich Lowry

I think it’s plenty fair, but then I am one of those people who don’t believe it.  Of course, he can’t not talk about it.  He has made it a central part of his makeover from Massachusetts squish moderate to Romney, Conservative Iron Man.  To avoid talking about it now would be to admit that all of his critics’ charges of insincerity and opportunism were correct, which would prove that the man will say anything for votes.  No, he has concocted his implausible “conversion” story, and now he must live with it.  Watch the video of his NRI speech and note his wandering, aimless delivery, his tiresome rattling off of his accomplishments, as if it were just some boilerplate stump speech, and the laundry-list, conservatism 101 nature of the speech (liberals want, uh, they want to increase the size of government and that’s, like, bad!).  Be warned–he drones on for around fifty minutes, so feel free to skip ahead. Look at the video at 32:16, where he informs his audience that “bloated social spending” is called “the welfare state,” in order to get a sense of the thin gruel he was dishing out.  The applause from the audience was suitably weak and scattered.

The whiff on Iraq is particularly amusing to me.  Here is Mitt Romney, Hugh Hewitt’s hero, at a friendly conservative gathering that is going on at the same time as Hugh Hewitt’s ridiculous pledge drive, and he says nothing about Iraq at all.  Imagine how many lackey points he could have scored if he took that opportunity to come out against the Senate resolutions.  I think Hewitt would have declared him fit for exaltation.  This is even funnier when you consider that his pro forma pro-surge position has been one of the things the Romneyites online have been using to bash Brownback and show that Romney is a better candidate.  Yet, when it came time for him to speak at some length about Iraq before a receptive audience, he had nothing.

To date, most of the discussion of Obama–on the part of those who favor him and those who are uncertain or skeptical–has been impressively race-neutral.  In the absence of evidence, Beinart’s focus on race, and his dismissal of white support for Obama as an odd kind of racialism, are not a public service. ~Cass Sunstein

Yeah, Beinart, what’s wrong with you?  I mean, what does Beinart think?  Does he think that every story that has covered Obama has started with the background statement, “the son of a white mother and a Kenyan goat-herder” or “the mixed race son of a white American and a Kenyan raised in Indonesia and Hawaii” or opens with the theme “Barack Obama’s compelling story is the meeting of two worlds divided by race”?  Well, actually, he would pretty much be right.  Every narrative that talks up Obama as a “new” kind of black candidate, and every column that questions his black “authenticity” all pay homage to Jackson/Sharpton style of politics of race-hustling as they recognise the established pattern from which Obama is deviating.   This is the style that many white people find so dreary and obnoxious, and this is the style they have come to associate with black politicians, so many respond to Obama with joy and relief: “At last, a black candidate who doesn’t talk about being black!  He doesn’t try to make me hate my ancestors–I think I like him!”  As I have said before, I really don’t understand this attitude. 

The relatively positive response to Obama across the spectrum is actually the fruit of a generation of imbibing egalitarian attitudes that purport to make race a secondary or irrelevant distinction.  Because Obama purports to transcend or unite races through his bland optimism and his personal history, he can pose as the “uniter” of American politics in spite of his far-out left-wingery, since a great many Americans have received the message that race is one of the great stumblingblocks in American history and Obama superficially appears to be someone who can help to fix part of this.  That he can speak in a religious, universal idiom undoubtedly helps advance this image of Obama, because that idiom provides a common point of reference for many whites.  Plus, by showing support for Obama they can demonstrate that they, too, are helping to heal the divide, etc.  Having been exposed for many a year to preppy white liberal self-flagellation over the plight of minorities, I find that this entire explanation sounds entirely plausible. 

Because Obama is “different” from the old style and because–according to some of his more trenchant critics–he isn’t black the way black people with long family histories in this country are black, he does not carry the baggage of that heritage and does not feel obliged to bring it up all the time.  Having been appropriately sensitised by decades of political moralising about race, most white Americans desperately want to see black success stories because they have internalised, at least to some degree, the feeling that past injustices have so crippled black Americans that they are somehow indirectly to blame for their problems.  These success stories–especially immigrant or second-generation success stories–also contribute to a sense of national pride and a confirmation about the “land of opportunity.”  Obama’s story tells them that they, white Americans, can stop blaming themselves.  When Obama paid tribute to the trailblazers in the civil rights movement for paving the way that allowed him to be where he is today, he was right in more ways than one: one of these ways is that without a traditional regimen of instilling self-loathing and guilt in white Americans, a black politician who does not traffic in guilt and blame would not seem to be the exceptional figure that the media have now made Obama to be.   

All of the mainsteam media cooing and oohing about his candidacy has been anything but race-neutral.  Race-neutral?  Are you kidding?  How many times have you heard that Obama will be the “first serious black contender for the White House” (what makes him a serious contender, when he stands no chance of winning very many primaries, still remains a mystery to me)?  You have heard this many times.  Everything positive that has been said about Obama has been  implicitly acknowledging that “we like Obama because he isn’t like traditional black candidates.”  That I basically agree with Beinart and argued very much the same thing as he did before he wrote his article doesn’t change the facts that the coverage of Obama’s candidacy has been anything but race-neutral.

The fact is that a suave, inexperienced Senator of no particular distinction would not receive this kind of superstar treatment were it not for his race and the novelty of his candidacy.  He receives such attention in excess because the media believe they have found at last a nationally viable black candidate to become the nominee of a major party.  You can lament this or praise it or dismiss it, but what you can’t do is pretend that it isn’t happening.  John Edwards was, in terms of government experience, actually a little behind where Obama is now when he ran for President and received a fair amount of attention, but he was never the subject of a media phenomenon characterised by such embarrassing overkill as we have witnessed over the past two months.   

Related query: doesn’t it trouble Mormons and blacks that their respective potential “firsts” in ’08 are someone with badly compromised records or someone seriously lacking in experience?  Is it not a liability for these communities that their most prominent representatives in politics right now are almost certainly overhyped, overexposed and unable to match up to what are inevitably going to be excessive expectations of success?  Doesn’t it bother Mormons watching the Romney campaign that their most public political representative stands accused of blatant waffling and pandering on a whole range of issues and that, in effect, the first real potential Mormon nominee is likley to go down in flames as a flip-flopping fraud?  The risk here is that they do not represent the pioneers who are leading the way for others, but may in fact make future candidacies from their communities even less likely to win if they fail.

Looking back at my pre-election predictions about Obama’s intentions about running, I am embarrassed to admit that I got it wrong.  Back on 16 October I wrote:

Obama does not want to become the John Edwards of the future, and therefore will not run in two years.

Obviously, that was not right.  I do stand by my prediction that Obama ’08 will fail.  I don’t say this to be particularly hard on Obama–lots and lots of no-hopers are going to fail.  Let’s be clear about that much–Obama is a no-hoper this time around.  He may be an interesting no-hoper, but he is one nonetheless.  His campaign’s failure is entirely predictable, which is why it remains hard for me to understand why he is running this time.  In the next cycle, he stands a good chance of being up against a weak incumbent, no matter which party wins in ’08.  In the cycle after that, depending on his performance in the intervening years, he might very well stand as the heir presumptive to the Democratic nomination.  Rather than a hard-scrabble, desperate insurgent campaign to unseat HRC, which will probably succeed in knocking the nomination over to someone else entirely, he might have a chance to be virtually given the nomination in ’12 or ’16.  (The even more hyped-up expectations for a later Obama campaign would be so great than not even the Aesir could live up to them.)  A true Machiavellian would let the next chump handle the aftermath of Iraq and then step in afterwards.  As it stands, Obama is going to go into this election in wartime with all the foreign policy experience of an international relations major.

To be clear, I don’t care where these men stood on life 13 years ago. ~Nathan Burd, Evangelicals for Mitt

How about five years ago?  How about two?  Romney’s pro-life credentials are slightly younger than Mr. Bush’s second term.  Isn’t that relevant?  Whatever his views before 1994-95, Brownback has been an obviously prominent pro-life Senator.  If there were doubts about his commitment about that, he put them to rest a while back.  Gov. Romney has only been a declared pro-lifer for a little over a year–what kind of record can he possibly have put together in that time that begins to match Brownback’s?  There really is no comparing the two.

An old Amy Sullivan article for Washington Monthly on Romney’s “evangelical problem” from 2005 included this interesting tidbit that has lessons for Ryan Sager and Romneyites alike:

These latent evangelical concerns about Mormonism don’t pose much of a problem in the general course of political and social life. In the real dynamics of a campaign, though, they are huge vulnerabilities, waiting to be exploited. To see how this might happen, take a look at the 2002 gubernatorial race in Arizona. In that campaign, Democratic state attorney general Janet Napolitano faced popular Republican congressman Matt Salmon for the open governor’s seat. A month before election day, the race was neck-and-neck, when a third-party candidate named Dick Mahoney began running a television commercial that raised Salmon’s Mormonism in the context of a Mormon fundamentalist sect that openly practices polygamy on the Arizona/Utah border. The ad was offensive and was immediately denounced by religious and political leaders. It was also effective.

On election day, Salmon lost to Napolitano by a razor-thin margin. Napolitano won in part by picking up votes among moderate female voters, but also because Salmon ran far behind congressional candidates in the most conservative and heavily evangelical districts. In each of these precincts, his support was between 10 and 20 points lower than right-wing congressmen Trent Franks and Jeff Flake. Exit polls aren’t available for 2002, but a look at the precinct results makes it clear that some of these conservative voters must have even split their tickets, casting a vote for Napolitano while also backing the extremely conservative congressional candidate.

When trying to understand how Arizona, once the land of Goldwater, has become Janet Napolitano’s fiefdom, her narrow victory over Matt Salmon evidently thanks to the effect of a third party’s egregious (and false) anti-Mormon attack is instructive.  Democratic control of the Arizona governorship in 2002 did not come about because the GOP alienated libertarians through big spending and religion.  Anti-Mormonism broke the GOP in Arizona in 2002, and effectively handed the Governor’s Mansion in Phoenix to the Dems for eight years. 

In 2002, any evidence of the themes of religion and big spending during the Bush Era had not yet become fully formed in any case, and 2002 was the year of the first Khaki Election.  In neighbouring New Mexico, Richardson won anyway, because all but die-hard partisans would have sooner voted for Richardson than the nobody state senator, John Sanchez, the GOP ran against him.  In Arizona, the Democrats very nearly lost, and we might have talking about Matt Salmon’s re-election this past fall but for the crippling weakness of visceral, ignorant anti-Mormon sentiment among Salmon’s own partisans. 

This means that at least two of the five governorships Ryan Sager takes as evidence of libertarian defections into the Democratic camp because of GOP excesses in religion and big government went over to the Democratic side for entirely different reasons.  It also means that the explosive potential for visceral anti-Mormonism in a generally ignorant voting public is huge and may add to the already tremendously large numbers of people who have already said that they will not support a Mormon for President.

Another instructive lesson from the Salmon episode:

Salmon lost evangelical votes at the polls even though he enjoyed the backing of evangelical leaders, some of whom denounced the anti-Mormon ads. Arizona Republic political columnist Rob Robb told me that Salmon’s support from evangelical leaders “did not translate into support among evangelicals at the grassroots.” “Around here,” he said, echoing my childhood experience, “evangelicals are regularly instructed that Mormonism is a cult.”

This is why the roll-call of evangelical leaders who have so far shown their willingness to consider Romney’s candidacy may ultimately be meaningless.  Falwell and Bauer et al. can talk about how they don’t care about Romney’s theology and how they want to focus on the issues all they like, but the people who normally heed their words will still withhold their support.

Separately, here was one line from the article that serves as a priceless example of how quickly things can change in politics:

It’s hard to see evangelicals lining up behind Romney instead of, say, Virginia Sen. George Allen.

This is from September 2005, so at the time Allen did look like a formidable competitor for the nomination.  Can it really have been as recently as one year ago that people still took George Allen seriously as a major player on the national stage?  What a hoot!

Barack Obama does not put the fear of God into conservatives quite like Hillary does. But the Republicans know they would need a charismatic candidate to take on a man with such a phenomenal life story — the son of a Kenyan goat-herder running to be the most powerful man on earth — and presence. ~James Forsyth

Only in America would the epithet “son of a Kenyan goat-herder” be considered a compliment and proof of someone’s inherent virtue and near-mythic stature.  Everywhere else, probably including Kenya, it would be a heavy-handed insult designed to put you in your place.

As I tend to, I liked a lot of what he said — he’s a Mr. Fix it (business, Olympics, Massachusetts budget…) who came to a full appreciation for the dangers to human life and marriage afoot only as governor. But in a dinner speech that mentioned bond caps, he didn’t make the case for Romney 2008 in a rallying way. ~Kathryn Jean Lopez

He only came to a “full appreciation” of the dangers to life and marriage while governor?  Forget “full” appreciation–before he was governor, according to everything he said on the trail, he had no appreciation of these dangers and only discovered that these dangers existed at all in the last two and a half years.  Do you suppose Ms. Lopez would be as credulous if Giuliani were campaigning against the dissolution of the family or something else to which he would be a very recent convert? 

Now, bond caps–I’m sure that’s something that we can all get behind.  Well, all of us, that is, except for John Edwards.

I’d just note, as I have before, that no part of America is actually “libertarian.” Bad ideas like the minimum wage are going to pass pretty much anywhere you put them on the ballot. But, relatively speaking, this is a region that wants low spending and little regulation of people’s private lives. It’s a broad definition, to be sure, but I’m convinced it’s closer to libertarian than liberal. ~Ryan Sager

Er, okay, and I’m convinced that it isn’t.  How’s that for an argument?  Perhaps if libertarians and their champions would present more of an argument for why “low spending and little regulation of people’s private lives” constitutes a more libertarian (or dare we say “libertarian-leaning”?) view than it does other possible alternatives, we could debate the merits of that argument.  If we’re simply listing things that are only debatably libertarian and then declaring, “I prefer to call this the ‘more libertarian’ position,” we might as well go home and have a drink.

Sager’s column doesn’t do much better.  Here he cites evidence that the Interior West is becoming more “purple” in a centrist Democrat way (i.e., socially liberal, fiscally conservative):

Data from the Pew Research Center show that when it comes to issues of religion and morality, the Interior West is much closer to the socially liberal Northeast and the Pacific Coast than it is to the South. At the same time, however, folks in the Interior West are fairly conservative on fiscal matters.

This means that the region is going the direction of the politics of the DLC, the Concord Coalition and Dick Lamm (former Democratic governor of Colorado, one-time Reform Party VP nominee in ’96).  If you want to call DLC centrism and old Reform Party-type politics “more libertarian than liberal,” knock yourself out, but you will not be describing anything that most can recognise as a libertarian politics. 

Sager’s definition of “more libertarian than liberal” fits nicely with the vague definition Boaz and Kirby used to determine the size of a “libertarian” voting bloc.  In their estimation, to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative effectively makes you a libertarian.  Except that everyone and his brother knows that it doesn’t make you any such thing–it typically makes you a moderate Republican, who has no strong objection to most of what the government does (so long as it does it “efficiently” and within budget) and who may not even have a problem with, say, the government providing funding for abortion.  Like Mitt Romney of old, they would have balanced budgets and no “imposing” of moral beliefs on others–if that’s all it takes to be functionally libertarian, it doesn’t mean very much.  No outrageous deficit spending, and no “unnecessary” tax cuts–these are the golden rules of the moderate Republican/fiscal conservative.  (With a slight tweak, that definition could even work just as easily for some neoconservatives, whose incandescent moral outrage about Iran does not necessarily extend to any social issues here at home.) 

In any case, Sager’s thesis that religiosity and big spending have driven away some voters who had supported the Republicans in the past but who have now switched sides may be partly correct.  These things probably did alienate some voters in the last six years.  Almost certainly, excessive spending and the war had far more impact on the voters who bolted than did superficial God-talk that resulted in literally no policy proposals of any significance in the last four years.  It is Sager’s hits on the pernicious influence of religious conservatives on the party’s fortunes where he is least convincing, but that is not part of this column. 

The main problem is that the people who are switching sides aren’t “libertarians” in the Interior West, but are these moderates, centrists, and independents–David Brooks’ suburban managers–who recoil at the sight of Republican incompetence and budget imbalances mixed with what they, the suburban managers, may regard as demagogic intolerance.  Even among Boaz and Kirby’s libertarian-leaning voters, the GOP’s share of their vote stabilised between 2004 and 2006 after a notable drop-off between 2002 and 2004.  That means, as I have tried to argue before, that those whom Boaz and Kirby defined as libertarians stopped fleeing from the GOP during their two worst years of war, religious enthusiasm (think Schiavo), reckless spending and corruption revelations.  The things that were supposed to be driving away libertarians got worse in those two years, and yet these libertarians remained in essentially the same numbers as they had in 2004, which either means that they aren’t terribly libertarian or the GOP’s hemorrhaging of support is coming from an entirely different part of the coalition.  Neither is promising for claims of the importance of the libertarian vote or the importance of libertarians to the GOP.  Neither is exactly a ringing endorsement for the theory that the GOP is losing ground in the West because of neglect of libertarian voters.

As far as New Mexico goes, I would simply say, for the umpteenth time, that Richardson’s two victories do not contribute to evidence for a regional trend away from the GOP.  His competition was anemic in both races (he was all but unopposed this last time for most of 2006, and faced an extremely weak challenge for the last few months of the election), he had enormous advantages in name recognition and popularity to start with and he has a natural majority Democratic vote in New Mexico that he can rely on.  The last point distinguishes our marginally “red” state from everything around it.

There are a couple especially odd moments in that old footage of Romney’s 1994 Senate debate that struck me when I watched it recently.  First, he affirms that he believes that abortion should be “safe and legal,” going on to say that he has held that view ever since his mother took that position during her 1970 run for Senate.     

The even more odd moment comes a little later, when he explains why he and his mother took that view.  As he is fleshing out his commitment to a “woman’s right to choose” and defending himself against Kennedy’s “multiple choice” accusation, he comes up with a personal tearjerker story worthy of Al Gore: a “dear family relative” of his had died from an illegal abortion, which was what had convinced him and his mother to defend “abortion rights.”  “It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter.”  His mother’s 1970 Senate campaign was apparently a pivotal moment in the evolution of Mitt Romney, since he reiterated his story about it just five years ago, as recounted by Jennifer Rubin in The Weekly Standardthis week:

In much the same manner as he had done in the 1994 Senate debates, Romney repeated his pro-choice views later that year in the October 2002 gubernatorial debates, even invoking his mother, Lenore Romney, who favored abortion rights when she ran for the U.S. Senate in Michigan in 1970. 

Now, after at least 32-34 years of consistently following through on that conviction informed by the loss of his relative, he had a change of heart because…someone talked to him about stem-cell extraction?  It just doesn’t track.  (It also doesn’t help that the account of his “road to Damascus” meeting with Dr. Melton doesn’t match up with Melton’s view.)  Virtually no one becomes pro-life by way of concerns about ESCR–usually, one opposes ESCR as the logical conclusion of an already serious pro-life view.  From The Boston Globe‘s feature on Romney’s “evolution”:

“In considering the issue of embryo cloning and embryo farming, I saw where the harsh logic of abortion can lead — to the view of innocent new life as nothing more than research material or a commodity to be exploited,” Romney wrote in an op-ed in the Globe that July.  

His statement is correct, but think about how he phrases this.  The “harsh logic of abortion can lead” to embryo farming, and Romney is right to abhor this (if, in fact, he does abhor it), yet for millions of people it is much easier to see the evil of killing a fetus or an even more fully developed child in the womb while the importance of protecting human life to its earliest stages appears increasingly abstract and difficult to follow.    You don’t need to follow the “harsh logic of abortion” to its ultimate conclusions to see how profoundly unethical and wrong abortion is, but can see in the basic assumptions of personal choice, autonomy and “rights” that allow such a horror the unethical nature of the act.  In the killing of partly and mostly fully developed children in utero, one has all the evidence one needs for the evil of the act.  Does Romney really mean to tell us that until 2004 he hadn’t noticed any possible ethical problems with killing unborn children in the second or third trimesters?  It required an insight into the processes of ESCR to convince him that something unethical was going on? 

If he has, in fact, had an “awakening” on this and related matters, that’s well and good, but why should anyone particularly trust a Johnny Come Lately to the issue with the presidential nomination?  (Speaking of which, while Brownback was freezing on the Mall marching in the March for Life, Romney was in Israel helping to stir the pot for a new war with Iran–now tell me who has the greater credibility as a defender of human life?)  Why should anyone assume that he would expend real political capital in trying to effect meaningful changes in the law or in appointing suitable judges to the bench, when he has only just yesterday discovered his commitment to the sanctity of life?  More to the point, virtually no one goes through most of his life believing that it is fundamentally wrong and inappropriate to “impose” moral beliefs on others and then discover, after having the highly technical question of stem-cell extraction presented to you, that he should start imposing those beliefs.  It is such a rare, fundamental and complete transformation of the entire view of the appropriate relationship between “personal beliefs” (as Romney had always called them before) and public policy that it would have to make any observer very skeptical. 

That his change to being pro-life would come by way of one of the most convoluted areas of the debate and one of the thornier questions in bioethics has to strike a neutral observer as odd at best.  Those who already have reason to distrust Romney can hardly take it seriously.  That his change of mind has just happened to coincide with Mitt Romney’s appearance on the national scene and his preparation for bigger and better things beyond Massachusetts is too perfect.  The entire “evolution” of Romney is like a how-to guide for politicians to do complete 180s while pretending to appear deeply thoughtful and committed to whichever new position he takes.  The problem is that he was already setting himself up for the national stage by the time when, in mid-2005, he finally (for the first time) declared himself to be pro-life, so his “deeply thoughtful” stage comes off appearing as little more than early pandering.   

Romney might or might not have actually believed his tearjerker story at the time that he recounted it in 1994, but how is this really any different from Al Gore’s pained remembrance, c. 1996, of his sister’s death from lung cancer (and thus his deep, personal motivation to fight Big Tobacco) that had replaced his former enthusiasm for the stuff?  Back in ’88 he said, as some will remember, “Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.”  His sister had, of course, died in 1984, so it evidently took a while for the evils of tobacco to become apparent to him.  In a similar way, through 2002 Romney seems to have clearly held fast to an Obama-like shtick about not wanting to endanger women’s lives by outlawing abortion and even had a personal story that he could use to convince people of the sincerity of his commitment not to “impose” his beliefs about abortion on other people.  What is to stop him from reverting to form and returning to the position he held quite comfortably for three decades?  You can almost see the national address in which a President Romney (let’s just imagine this impossibility for argument’s sake) describes his thoughtful and difficult discovery that, actually, it is wrong to impose his personal beliefs on others and his brief flirtation with pro-life views was simply another part of his ongoing “evolution.”  “You live and learn,” he will say.

There is great wisdom in the Psalmist when he says, “Trust ye not in princes.”  If the defense of human life remains bound up in the arcana of intra-GOP political squabbles, it will continue to be exploited as a way to mobilise voters and dupe those voters into supporting candidates who may not really share their commitments.  It will continue to be diverted to the margins and pro-lifers will probably achieve far less this way than if they diverted most of their energies to changing cultural attitudes through other kinds of work and advocacy.  The conscious and unconscious modeling of the pro-life movement as a political struggle movement borrowing its templates from abolitionism and civil rights activism is unfortunate in many ways, but it is most unfortunate in its fixation on finding redress through the political process.  Tere is a basic incongruity between the goals of the pro-life  movement and the fixation on using the mechanisms of government to advance that movement’s goals; the movements whose rhetoric pro-lifers copy were progressive movements that were well-suited to the encouragement of government activism and the violation of precedents, while pro-lifers have long been diametrically opposed to these things. 

Because so many pro-life activists have been geared towards politics for so long, this has encouraged in them the tendency to accept spokesmen for their cause who usually give their issues the most basic lip service, a little access and not much else.  For their pains, they have received two Court nominees who affirmed in sworn testimony that they considered Roe the settled law of the land–and this has been their greatest “victory” in twenty years!  They console themselves with the idea that “at least they [Roberts and Alito] probably won’t make it any worse,” yet it was a Court with a majority of Republican appointees who decided Casey, cementing Roe into the legal structure as sure as anything could have.  When push comes to shove, I think we all know that the Roberts Court will reconfirm those rulings if the opportunity arises.  Those appointees got there in part because pro-lifers backed the Presidents who nominated them, because pro-lifers were satisfied with occasional nods to their concerns and nothing more.  By putting such an emphasis on capturing the Presidency as the means to their success, and consequently settling for nominees who simply had to mouth the right pious phrases during the campaign, pro-lifers have set themselves up time and again to be ignored and marginalised once the elections have come and gone.  In the rush of some pro-life Christians and conservatives to the Romney banner, we see the same farce unfolding before us yet again.  This time, it is even more inexcusable, when there are at least two reasonably credible pro-life Republicans running against Romney, at least one of whom has an outside chance at being competitive.  

Invariably, politicians will be unreliable and untrustworthy.  That is a given, and anyone disappointed by politicians would be well-advised to stop expecting much at all from them.  Even Mr. Bush, who at least had a longer record of at least publicly posing as someone who was pro-life than Romney has had, has been fairly abysmal when it comes to what should have been the relatively easy decision about whether to allow federal funding for stem-cell research (his mighty veto of last year was simply a veto of a bill that would have increased the funding levels he had previously approved).  Imagine what kinds of compromises and sell-outs Romney might accept.  The sincerity of his “conversion” is almost beside the point, since it is potential lack of commitment for such a recent “convert” that strikes his critics as a key problem. 

Update: Referring to the Planned Parenthood questionnaire Romney filled out in 2002, Matt Yglesias makes a good, concluding point:

As you can see in the Medicaid answer, he wasn’t even a moderate on the issue — Romney was taking a strong, strong pro-choice stance. Maybe pro-lifers just enjoy being lied to, but I think it’s got to be obvious at this point that you can’t trust anything Romney says on the subject of what he thinks about political issues. It doesn’t seem like a quality you’d want in a presidential nominee.

I think many pro-lifers really want to believe that someone could go from Obamaesque levels of support for abortion to Brownbackian fervour opposing it.  These folks really want to believe that the obvious rightness of their position should win over their most staunch adversaries.  According to the questionnaire he filled out five years ago, Romney used to be one of the most staunch adversaries of the culture of life and has now supposedly become one of the most staunch advocates of the same.  Indeed, Romney seems to be counting on the idea that the extreme and brazen nature of his flip-flopping proves that it isn’t just flip-flopping, but a real change of heart.  I can’t rule out that it is genuine (unlike Mr. Bush, I do not possess heart and soul-vision), but usually when a candidate repudiates a view he has apparently held for decades at the moment when he is preparing to run for higher office (where said older view would be a distinct liability with his future core constituents) we do not assume this is proof of the man’s deep spiritual journey or a miraculous awakening.  No, we assume that he is a fraud and a liar.  Why should we assume anything else in Romney’s case?  Because we like the sound of the lies he is telling us?

It has really gotten out of hand.  It’s not even February of ’07, and we’re practically drowning in exploratory committees.  If this horrifying rumour is true, the race will have already entered its terminally silly phase (normally reserved for the period between South Carolina’s primary and the conventions that is also known as “the election year”).

It’s not as if the sheer mass of candidates has brought us any increase in quality.  Forget Munchkinland–we are on our way to Lilliputian levels of political stature (the candidates’ egos, however, are evidently Brobdingnagian in proportions).  When Obama spoke of the “smallness of our politics,” this was not what he had in mind, but it fits the scene pretty well. 

How many are there?  Last week I counted seventeen, and that’s still about right.  Let’s go over it again and marvel at the teeming crowd of unsuitable pole-climbers.  On the one side, you have HRC, Obama, Biden, Dodd, Edwards, Kucinich, Richardson, Vilsack and Mike Gravel (Mike who?).  What a crew!  Sharpton could always liven up the mix and bring us to an even ten.  On the other side, there is the Terrible Trio, naturally, plus Brownback, Hunter, Thompson and Huckabee.  Paul, Tancredo, Hagel, Pataki and Gingrich are also possible entrants (Paul’s exploratory committee seems to be very much on the tentative, exploratory side right now and not on the “I’m rolling out my campaign” side).  If all those listed jumped in, that would make for twenty-two.  Don’t Evan Bayh and Mark Warner feel silly for not running now?  Compared to some of the no-hopers out there, they are practically shoe-ins to at least get the VP nod.  If the field gets much bigger, the logistics of the early debates will be a major obstacle all their own.  Fortunately, except for the few fence-sitters already mentioned it would appear that we will be spared an additional wave of candidates.