Ross:

TARP may have saved the United States from 15 percent unemployment, but it also implicated our government in the kind of crony capitalism you’d expect from a banana republic. If it was necessary, it was also un-American. If it worked, it did so while doing grievous damage to the credibility of Wall Street and Washington alike.

This is a fair description of a main reason why so many people were and still are profoundly hostile to the TARP. At the heart of hostility to the TARP is the conviction that there was something inherently dangerous and outrageous in handing over money and ceding unaccountable power to part of the executive branch. It seemed even more dangerous and outrageous at the time, since the administration being entrusted with this power had already shown on many occasions how it would abuse vaguely-defined powers in the absence of strict oversight. There was also a visceral reaction against rewarding failure and directing taxpayer money to financial institutions that did not deserve public assistance.

What Ross’ column does not do is carefully analyze the claim that the TARP “worked.” I understand this is partly for reasons of limited space and partly because of the structure of his argument (i.e., “it worked, but at great cost”), but it really is vital to the debate. It’s one thing to say that opponents of TARP showed a healthy distrust of the outrageous way in which the program was forced down the public’s throat, and it’s quite another to say that their opposition to the program was sound on the merits. If TARP supporters can console themselves with the pleasant fiction that the program was vitally important and successful, they can dismiss the backlash to it as ignorant yahooism (as they have been doing for years) and congratulate themselves on their wise, statesmanlike ability to do what is necessary despite popular resistance. More to the point, in future moments of panic they will be certain to charge ahead with similar outrages in the confidence that they were right to insist on the TARP in late 2008. If we assume instead that a lot of this is self-serving twaddle, we will be a lot closer to the truth than the claims that the TARP “worked.”

People credit the TARP for having “worked” because they conclude that it had a lot to do with the stabilization of the financial sector. If the financial sector seems stable and most of the TARP money has been repaid*, they reason that the TARP must have worked. Never mind that financial institutions were being stabilized in other ways, and the accounting rule that had saddled them with enormous liabilities had been changed. In the meantime, TARP funds were being doled out to Detroit and were specifically not being used for their intended purpose of purchasing “toxic assets.” Yet somehow, magically, the TARP “worked.” Most of the banks that were forced to take TARP money didn’t need it, didn’t want it, and could fairly easily pay it back. It is small comfort that the TARP didn’t end up costing the public anything when the money wasn’t really needed in the first place. The major financial institutions were forced to take the money as a group because Paulson didn’t want to reveal the very shaky positions of a few major banks.

Whenever I read that the TARP “worked,” I am reminded of the many claims that the “surge” worked. What this means is that there was a dangerous, unstable situation in Iraq that later became more stable almost entirely for other reasons, and Washington claimed that it was the particular intervention of sending a few additional brigades on a temporary basis that was decisive in bringing about that stability. Nowadays it is common for more people to be skeptical of the claim that the “surge” worked, because more critics have been judging the “surge” by the standard set by the Bush administration that ordered it. If more people would judge the TARP by the standard of why it was supposedly necessary and what it was supposed to do, everyone would be able to agree that the TARP didn’t work at all. Indeed, as critics of the program said at the beginning, no one had any idea how to make it “work,” which is why the Treasury early in the Obama administration simply gave up on trying to make it work.

* The banks’ repayment isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. As this contribution at Naked Capitalism explains:

And how did the banks pay back TARP? First, we got rid of mark-to-market accounting, changing their balance sheets overnight, and then the banks have been borrowing from the Fed at ZERO and earning the spread on Treasuries or anything else they wanted to put the money in. The effect of this process is a transfer of wealth from savers (who depend on bank CD’s) and pension funds (who are often required to invest in goverment bonds) to the same banks that took money through TARP. This cost amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars each of the last two years. And TARP had negligible costs?

Yet neither the Democratic ascendancy nor the Republican humiliation meant the country had made a fundamental shift to the left. People had fired Tom DeLay’s congressional majority and quit on President Bush, but they had not become latter-day McGovernites. In fact, the opposite. A July 2009 Gallup report noted that by a 2–1 margin, people said their views had become more conservative in recent years.

Republicans, independents, and even Democrats had all moved to the right, although Democrats just barely so (34 percent had become more conservative, 40 percent hadn’t changed, and 23 percent had become more liberal). Gallup noted that “the results are conspicuously incongruous with the results of the 2008 elections.” Incongruous, indeed. ~Lowry and Ponnuru

The results seem incongruous partly because the ideological self-identifications in the survey have been divorced from questions of policy. Most Americans claimed in mid-2009 to have become more conservative in their views in recent years, but whatever “more conservative” meant for many of the respondents it does not obviously translate into support for political or ideological conservatism. Lowry and Ponnuru take respondents’ subjective assessments of “becoming more conservative” as proof that the electorate actually shifted right in recent years. A year after these “incongruous” results, Gallup found that majorities favored additional stimulus spending, “regulating energy output from private companies in an attempt to reduce global warming,” and “expand government regulation of major financial institutions.” If Americans have actually become “more conservative” in their views in recent years, that still leaves a majority in favor of a number of things that political conservatives abhor. That suggests that the electorate has been moving left, and possibly started moving left well before the 2006 and 2008 elections.

When the pollster asks more specific, policy-oriented questions, it becomes clear how limited or even meaningless the other result is. The second poll was taken just four months ago, and shows majority support for three things that Lowry and Ponnuru are telling us the majority ought to oppose or scorn. Unfortunately for their argument, it shows majority support for increased regulation of financial institutions when they insist that opposition to regulation is at an all-time high. Many respondents might be confused or have conflicting views on the subject, or perhaps their answers are shaped to a large degree by the phrasing of the questions. Lowry and Ponnuru are assuming that the public’s views are coherent, and they assume that ideological self-identification is a meaningful statement about policy preferences. These assumptions are doubtful.

What is strange about Lowry and Ponnuru’s article is that they are doing nothing that the people the target for mockery didn’t already do in the wake of the 2008 election. Like Carville and Tanenhaus, they have taken a transitory political moment to declare the public’s permanent or enduring support for their preferred politics, they are attaching ideological meaning to temporary changes in fickle, malleable public opinion, and they are arguing that their opponents’ political failures have resulted from failing to heed public opinion. To answer the charge that conservatism is dead, they have produced the claim that conservatism was never really sick and was actually growing stronger all this time. One of their concluding claims is one that we have heard so many times since 2006:

The public in the late 1970s had turned on liberalism. Today’s public had merely turned on Bush.

One can make the argument that a genuine, sane conservatism and the ideological conservatism of Bush’s supporters had nothing to do with one another, but that is not what Lowry and Ponnuru are arguing. They want to claim that 1980 represented the repudiation of a reigning ideology, but that 2008 was just a rejection of Bush. Of course, on the eve of the 1982 election one can imagine liberals making the claim that 1980 was just a rejection of Carter (who was in any case not one of them). Indeed, after the 1982 midterms that is what quite a few liberals did believe. If liberals were foolish to hype 2008’s long-term significance, this article is simply delusional.

The 2009-2010 cycle has produced the kind of facts on the ground that Republicans could only dream about. Thanks go to Obama and congressional Democrats. The political environment created by their unpopular policies has produced what Republicans couldn’t on their own—a united party. ~Fred Barnes

Unfortunately for the GOP, some of them are still dreaming. It is a fantasy to believe that the political environment was created by “unpopular policies.” It is almost entirely the result of economic weakness and economic anxiety. It is absolutely a fantasy to imagine that the reaction to Democratic policies has been driven by a straightforward rejection of “out-of-control-spending,” as Barnes claims later in the article. Aside from high unemployment, the most important factor in explaining Democratic weakness is that they have lost significant support among elderly voters. This probably would have happened at a time with much lower unemployment, but they have not lost this support because of “out-of-control-spending.” On the contrary, the reason so many elderly voters have turned against them is to express their anger at proposed cuts to Medicare. That doesn’t fit in very well with the argument that “out-of-control spending” has been the catalyst when the single-largest shift among voters came from a backlash against proposed spending cuts. Barnes writes that the “heart of the comeback in 2010 is the Rust Belt,” but he shows no awareness that this is driven almost entirely by the reaction to the more severely depressed economies across the Midwest and Pennsylvania.

At this point, it appears that Republicans will gain 35 seats. If all of the toss-ups broke for the Republicans, they could realistically gain 41, which would be just enough, but all of them are not going to break their way. The most certain pick-ups are pretty well-known, but I’ll list them here: LA-03, TN-06, KS-03, AR-02, CO-04, FL-24, IL-11, IN-08, MD-01, OH-01, OH-15, TX-17, TN-08, VA-02, PA-03, NH-01, PA-11, VA-05, FL-08, NY-29, and AZ-01. The likely pick-ups include: NM-02, M1-01, IN-09, IL-14, FL-02, PA-07, IL-17, PA-08, WI-07, OH-16, WA-03, and WI-08. The least certain pick-ups are AR-01, ND-AL, OH-18, MI-07, NH-02, NV-03, and SC-05, but I am still assuming Republicans win these. Democratic pick-ups will include the three everyone expects in LA-02, DE-AL and IL-10, and will most likely include Hawaii’s First District and Florida’s 25th.

If that’s right and Republicans come up five seats short of a majority, all this talk of “miraculous comebacks” will seem rather silly. Obviously, people pushing the “1994-but-bigger” argument will have some explaining to do. Gaining 35 seats in the House is impressive, and it will be the second-largest turnover in my lifetime, but after the overhyping of Republican chances for the last year it will seem anticlimactic and unsatisfying. The reality that gaining 35 won’t be enough to win a majority serves as a reminder just how far down the GOP had sunk in the last four years, which should remind us that the GOP deserved to be so far down. It should also make us realize the gains the GOP makes this year are largely unmerited. Right now, everyone in the “biggest tent” is working together and setting aside disagreements for the sake of winning the election. What happens if Republicans don’t win? The round of post-election recriminations will be that much more severe and bitter when it becomes clear that the party failed to take advantage of one of the most favorable election years in decades.

If Republicans do manage to eke out a House majority, the electorate won’t have provided them with even the illusion of a mandate, and their leaders have already made clear they have no desire for fiscal responsibility. Riding an entirely negative electoral wave created by a weak economy, Republicans will see that they have not have been elected for any particular reason. They will devolve into their usual time-serving habits even faster than before. It will probably be a very bad outcome for the Republicans to return from the political wilderness before they have learned something from the public’s rejection of them in the past.

James Fallows noticed this remarkable Citizens Against Government Waste ad. As should be clear to anyone who knows anything about Chinese economic policy, putting American fiscal conservative rhetoric into the mouth of a professor from the PRC is simply bizarre. As Fallows writes:

And if you know anything about the Chinese economy, the actual analytical content here is hilariously wrong. The ad has the Chinese official saying that America collapsed because, in the midst of a recession, it relied on (a) government stimulus spending, (b) big changes in its health care systems, and (c) public intervention in major industries — all of which of course, have been crucial parts of China’s (successful) anti-recession policy.

I understand that the ad is supposed to tap into American anxiety about the size of the debt and Chinese holdings of U.S. debt, and I understand that viewers are supposed to react viscerally against a future in which China is economically dominant, but isn’t it a rather glaring problem that most of the undesirable debt was not produced by any of the policies singled out as the causes of (future) American decline? According to the fictional professor’s telling, great nations fall because they abandon the principles that made them great, which is a nice moralizing tale that would satisfy nostalgists of every era, but how does stimulus spending fit into this narrative? Has it been a long-standing American principle during America’s time as a major world power not to engage in stimulus spending?

The problem isn’t just that it is absurd to imagine a professor in the PRC saying this now or twenty years in the future, but that it is absurd to blame the size of the current debt on policies adopted in the last year and a half. CAGW seems to be trusting that the audience doesn’t know this. The makers of the ad hope the audience will conclude that policies that half the country dislikes have something to do with creating our massive debt, and that they will also conclude reversing or repealing these policies will therefore have some significant impact in reducing the debt.

AIPAC would likewise wield much less influence inside the 21st-century beltway if the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts hadn’t thought of themselves as reenacting the exodus of the Hebrews from bondage in ancient Egypt. ~D.L. at Democracy in America

As the distilled essence of Mead’s argument about the reasons for pro-Israel attitudes in America, this captures quite nicely just how silly it is. It must be that South Africa’s Nationalist government was also interested in developing a close diplomatic relationship with Israel during the 1970s and 1980s because Calvinist Afrikaners also thought of themselves as a New Israel. When we put it that way, it’s clear how ridiculous it is. Can I just point out that Reformed Christians who identified themselves as a New Israel were making a statement that is necessarily not really compatible with enthusiastic support for Jewish self-determination? National and religious groups claiming to be a New Israel are not more likely to feel strong sympathy with Jewish political causes; they are more likely to be indifferent or antagonistic. If a national or religious group believes it is a New Israel, they are not saying that they are natural allies of the people of Israel. On the contrary, they are saying that they are a replacement or successor in God’s providential design. They are appropriating Israel’s claim to being the People of God. It is hardly shocking that Protestant colonial settlers in new, unfamiliar lands drew on the examples of the Israelites coming into Canaan for consolation and guidance. These were the examples that were most familiar to them and most relevant to their experience as settlers in a new country. So the “broader history of identification with Israel in the American imagination” didn’t and doesn’t necessarily translate into ready American support for Zionism, and it certainly doesn’t automatically cause unflinching support for a close military and political alliance with the modern State of Israel.

I would never say that the religious culture of a nation is irrelevant to its foreign policy, but it does not shape a state’s foreign policy in the way D.L. and Mead describe. Even when there is something in a nation’s culture to be exploited by a government, such as a shared ethnic or religious heritage with another country, it is the government that exploits and mobilizes it to build support for a policy that it already wants to pursue. Russian Pan-Slavism did not create Russian strategic goals of weakening the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and seizing Constantinople; Pan-Slavism emerged at a time when Russia was already pursuing those goals and the government was trying to rally support for Russian intervention in the Balkans. In Mead’s version, we have the exact reverse, which is a combination of crude cultural determinism with a strangely naive belief that foreign policy is a product of democratic consensus.

The Strategic Defense and Security Review released this week by Prime Minister David Cameron is bad news for anyone who believes that a strong Britain is a vital bulwark of liberty. ~Max Boot

I can’t be the only one who laughed at this sentence. Hawks often make the claim that any and all military spending is essential for defending freedom or guarding liberty, and that significantly reducing any military spending must mean a reduced ability to protect “liberty.” This takes the basic claim that a military deterrent can protect a reasonably free society from external threats and exaggerates it beyond all recognition. Reducing Britain’s ability to launch overseas expeditions has no real relationship with political liberty, except possibly to increase it in Britain by making British participation in unnecessary foreign wars less likely. This must make Boot feel particularly gloomy, since he is one of the few truly unabashed neo-imperialists around with a gauzy view of the British Empire. This is what he was writing a month after 9/11:

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.

Aside from more sharp pangs of nostalgia for the Empire that they must be causing him, the real problem Boot has with Britain’s military spending cuts is that it will make it much harder for Britain to participate in and lend political legitimacy to the next unnecessary war that Boot and other hawks are interested in starting. This is what Boot euphemistically calls “the burden of defending what used to be called the Free World,” which has nothing to do with defending the “Free World” and everything to do with projecting power to various corners of the globe for mostly dubious or bad reasons.

Britain’s ability to defend itself is not being endangered. The coalition government is proving that it is interested in a strong defense. What it is not willing or able to pay for any longer is the ability to intervene on the other side of the planet in wars that don’t actually have anything to do with British security. In Boot’s world, where 9/11 was the result of “insufficient assertiveness,” the unwillingness of U.S. allies to waste their resources on neo-imperial missions abroad is scandalous. Obviously, the coalition government is going to continue honoring the commitments of previous governments to the war in Afghanistan, but it has given notice that there probably won’t be significant British involvement in other wars in the near future.

Boot is also concerned that the Republicans may be so inspired by the coalition government’s austerity measures that they will take an axe to some of the Pentagon’s budget, but here his fears are even more unreasonable. Everything we have been hearing from Republican leaders before the election makes it clear that there will be no serious consideration of military spending reductions. Unlike the Tory-led coalition, the GOP pretty clearly has no intention of being a responsible party of government. That would involve making hard, unpopular decisions to reduce the debt in ways that will make no one happy. Besides, the hawks’ pre-election positioning over military spending has probably all been for nothing, since it is still far from certain that Republicans will take control of the House, much less both houses. Even if they wished to make significant cuts, Republicans will be in no position to threaten cuts to military spending or to anything else.

Earlier this month, U.S. and Georgian officials had high-level meetings in Washington where Secretary Clinton expressed U.S. support for Georgia, denounced the “occupation” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, pledged continued aid for the Georgian government, and endorsed Georgia’s strategic concept for the “occupied” territories. Perhaps many Americans think this is entirely appropriate. Maybe many Americans think U.S.-Georgian relations should be no one else’s business, and Georgia should be free to make its own foreign policy decisions. Of course, these relations don’t take place in a vacuum, and it does matter to neighboring states if a great power from the other side of the planet begins building up influence in their “near-abroad.” The claim that the U.S. rejects spheres of influence is true only in the sense that our government rejects it when other states claim them. For our part, the entire world is treated more or less as our sphere of influence. As long as Washington treats the rest of the world this way, other major powers are going to try to gain influence anywhere they can. Indeed, other major powers would be doing this anyway, but there is no way that the U.S. and other major powers could ever come to any understanding about respective spheres of influence so long as our government insists that we have them all and they have none.

Last week, Russian President Medvedev signed an agreement with Venezuela’s government on a Venezuelan nuclear power plant built by the Russians. By itself, this isn’t very worrisome. If the Iranian nuclear program isn’t a threat (and it isn’t), a Venezuelan nuclear program wouldn’t even be cause for concern. This deal doesn’t threaten “the global order,” and it’s silly to say that it does. If Americans would apply the same standards to Latin America that our government applies to the former Soviet Union, Venezuela’s government should be able to make deals and alliances with any country. Naturally, many Americans do not apply the same standards to “our backyard” that we expect other states to respect in theirs.

The IBD editorial (via Scoblete) invoking the Monroe Doctrine is amusing in a couple ways. The most obvious is the blatant double standard many Americans have for what Russia can do outside its borders and what the U.S. is allowed to do along Russia’s borders, but that’s old news. What is amusing is the idea that the Monroe Doctrine has anything to do with dictating the foreign policy of Latin American states in a post-colonial world. Rather like President Bush’s much-maligned, rarely-read “Chicken Kiev” speech, President Monroe’s message to Congress in 1823 is not very well understood. President Monroe said this:

We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere [bold mine-DL]. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States [bold mine-DL]. In the war between those new Governments and Spain we declared our neutrality at the time of their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shall continue to adhere, provided no change shall occur which, in the judgement of the competent authorities of this Government, shall make a corresponding change on the part of the United States indispensable to their security.

In the context of the early 1820s, when Spanish liberals had just been crushed by French forces aligned with the royalists, Monroe was saying that the U.S. viewed the re-introduction of a monarchical form of government into any of the newly-independent Latin American republics as a threat to the United States as well. Essentially, it was a message that the U.S. would not tolerate campaigns of restoration in the Western Hemisphere. Arguably, during the Cold War the same argument might have applied to the establishment of communist states, since such a change of government could have had geopolitical consequences. What the Monroe Doctrine was not and could not have been was a claim that European powers could have no dealings with independent Latin American states. It wasn’t a claim that European powers could not wield influence in the Western Hemisphere. Monroe was making clear that there were limits to the extent and nature of that influence. So long as those states were allowed to remain independent and retained their form of government, the U.S. was largely indifferent to their relations with the rest of the world.

One thing that can be said with certainty about Russia today is that its government has no fixed ideology, and it is not attempting to promote an ideological system abroad. Chavez’s authoritarian populism may have some things in common with what has been called Putinism, but it is also entirely indigenous and retains the support of a substantial percentage of the Venezuelan population. Obviously, negotiating technology transfers between two governments has nothing to do with Venezuela’s independence or form of government. The Monroe Doctrine is as irrelevant in this case as can be.

P.S. Incidentally, as Greg Scoblete mentions, Venezuela is thousands over a thousand miles away from the continental United States. No one would take seriously the idea that countries that far away from Russia were in Russia’s “backyard,” but a common American expectation of hemispheric hegemony lets us imagine that we have some claim on nations that are as far removed from us as Iraq is from Russia.

Quite often, America’s most pro-Israel politicians are people who don’t get much Jewish money or many Jewish votes. Sarah Palin had an Israeli flag in her office when she was Governor of Alaska; this didn’t help her much with Joe Klein, and it didn’t make her the toast of the Upper West Side. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was the most consistent supporter of a hard-line pro-Israel position among the top presidential contenders in 2008; somehow, the Jewish vote didn’t come through for him. ~Walter Russell Mead

If Mead limited his argument to arguing that there are and always have been ardently pro-Israel Christians in the United States, no one would bother contesting the claim, because it is so obvious. Once again, he has thoroughly demolished an argument about U.S. Israel policy that no one of any consequence in America is making. However, he remains committed to his genuinely odd notion that U.S. foreign policy is guided by popular consensus rather than entrenched interests, and then he makes statements like the one quoted above. It is hard to think of any policy overseas in the last seventy years that has flowed out of a pre-existing public consensus. More than almost any other kind of policy, foreign policy is something fashioned at an elite level and then rationalized or justified to the public after the fact. Public opinion on foreign policy issues does not existy fully formed, but it is constantly being shaped by what the political class and media tell the public about these issues. Mead is actively creating the consensus that he pretends has always existed.

Presumably, Mead understands the religious and ideological reasons why Palin and Huckabee are hard-liners on anything related to Israel, and he must also know that groups such as CUFI exist to represent the views of hard-line Christian Zionists and to bring pressure to bear on politicians. CUFI doesn’t speak for all evangelicals, and probably doesn’t even speak for most of them, and the hard-line positions of Palin and Huckabee do not simply grow out of a pre-existing consensus among their conservative constituents. These are positions that they have learned to adopt, or have been conditioned to adopt, because they understand what is expected of Republican politicians with ambitions of higher office. Part of what is expected is unfliching support for allies no matter how harmful the alliance or allied policy is to the interests of the United States. To the extent that Palin and Huckabee are already predisposed to the same kind of reckless hawkishness they endorse with respect to Israel and Palestine, they will be happy to oblige.

To the extent that a consensus on Israel exists on the right, it is something that has been fashioned by conservative political and intellectual leaders over decades, and it is something that has been reinforced through a steady diet of slanted or incomplete news coverage, government propaganda, and the constantly repeated claim that Israel is a reliable ally. Young conservatives receive this information from virtually every conservative media outlet they encounter, they have it reinforced for them by virtually every conservative columnist they read, and they are taught to look askance at any self-styled conservative who offers a dissenting view. This sort of ideological conditioning is hardly unique to this issue, and it certainly isn’t unique to the right, but it is helpful to focus on this example to understand where part of the rigid, uniform, fanatical support for “pro-Israel” policies in America comes from.

One side of the issue has dedicated, organized activists, and the other side does not have anything like the same intensity or organization. One side has effectively dominated the public discussion of the issue for decades, not because they happen to be telling the public what it already wants to hear, but because they have been trying to shape public opinion for decades. Most politicians are not going to try going against the tide by actively courting the displeasure of organized activists on an issue that doesn’t actually matter to them much one way or the other.

It is useful to look at a different case of irrational U.S. acquiescence to the uncompromising policies of another government and unflagging support for said government to understand how some of this works. The United States has no conceivable national interest in the Caucasus that merits the degree of support our government has given to Georgia over the last seven years, but that has not stopped a strong bipartisan consensus from forming around the idea that the U.S. must show unwavering support for Georgia no matter what it does. This has already had disastrous effects for U.S.-Russian relations and for Georgia itself in 2008. The complete failure of this approach has not discouraged members of both parties from insisting on toeing a Georgian nationalist line that can only undermine U.S. relations with Russia and encourage Georgia in its own dead-end obsession with winning back lost territories. Obviously, there is no national consensus for unstinting support for Georgia, about which most Americans know little or nothing, nor is there broad pro-Georgian sentiment that has made this happen, as Mead’s thesis would require. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t powerful interests that have a stake in getting the U.S. to meddle into the Caucasus to the detriment of the U.S., Georgia and Russia. Of course, there is a Georgia lobby, and it doesn’t need to be especially large or powerful to wield outsized influence thanks to the lack of much concerted opposition.

“Changing America’s mind about the Middle East” isn’t hard because Americans have such deeply-rooted, firm beliefs about the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship or anything else in the region. It is hard because so few Americans care about U.S. policy in the region enough to give it much thought, much less bother with promoting alternatives to the status quo.

Jim Antle addresses an important point regarding responses to Jack Conway’s bizarre “Aqua Buddha” ad:

Zengerle’s TNR colleague Jonathan Chait opined that “Rand Paul harbors a private contempt for Christianity” based on really little more than college-era letters Paul wrote about Ayn Rand. But there are lots of people who have imbibed the objectivist thinker’s individualism and libertarianism without embracing her anti-Christianity, probably in greater numbers than radical liberation theologians who square Marxism with Chrisitianity.

It’s certainly true that there are are hard-core Ayn Rand devotees who are also vehemently anti-Christian, but Jim is right that agreeing with Rand on certain political questions need not imply an endorsement of her other views. Indeed, one thing that most libertarians have in common is their practical indifference to religion when it comes to the activities of the government. They have no interest in promoting it, and would find state promotion of religion obnoxious, but they aren’t particularly antagonistic towards religious belief, either. Even if it were true that Rand Paul harbors contempt for Christianity, for which there appears to be zero evidence, that might alienate some voters, but it would have no effect on what he believes the government should be doing. Of course, it isn’t true, which makes the attack that much more laughable and desperate.

What is even more odd is that the substance of Rand Paul’s opposition to funding for faith-based initiatives puts him on the side of many Christian conservatives who view any government funding of charitable and religious institutions as a potential threat to the religious liberty of those institutions. For these Christians, faith-based initiatives do not represent constructive cooperation between government and religious institutions, but are simply another form of intrusion and potential control. By emphasizing Paul’s opposition to this funding, the ad is almost certainly going to make him more popular among the conservative Christians who are supposed to be scandalized by it. Besides being offensive and untrue, Conway’s ad has the added flaw that there is no significant constituency that is going to respond to the ad’s message.

It is hardly news that Christine O’Donnell is a talking head with dreams of being a television celebrity, so I’m not sure that it proves much of anything when she demonstrates that she doesn’t know much about the amendments to the Constitution. Andrew focused on her apparent ignorance of the First Amendment near the end of the video, but I thought the far more telling moment was when she asked her questioner to explain to her what the 14th and 16th Amendments were. Actual constitutionalists have at least some basic familiarity with these, not least since they tend to see these amendments and later interpretations of the 14th Amendment as having been particularly damaging to republican self-government. Based on her responses, O’Donnell not only doesn’t agree with them, but she wouldn’t even be conversant with the relevant arguments. So we can confirm what a lot of people already knew: Christine O’Donnell is a professional political activist who has no real grounding in the fundamental law she has been repeatedly invoking as the core of her beliefs during this campaign season, and as far as respecting the Constitution is concerned she is simply a phony. Anyone on the right who wants to keep defending her as anything else is wasting his time and embarrassing himself.

The real shame is that O’Donnell could have had a valid point on the question of church-state separation, but she didn’t begin to know how to make it. As an activist and talking head, she has learned slogans about the separation of church and state, but evidently she has not learned anything more than that. The establishment clause has been wildly and mistakenly misinterpreted so that a restriction created solely to prevent the federal government from imposing a religion on the states has been turned into a general imperative for all levels of government. This is not what critics of the Constitution wanted when they argued for a guarantee that the federal government would not establish a religion, but more important it is an unnecessary and obnoxious restriction of the free exercise of religion. Of course, one has to know that the establishment clause exists and know what it says before one can criticize its misinterpretation.

P.S. I should add that O’Donnell’s defenders have already attributed arguments to her that she never made. She sat there grinning like a fool, not realizing that she had been thoroughly discredited by the exchange, and they confidently declare that she has superior understanding of the Constitution because they know that the “wall of separation” line came from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists. This reminds me of the ridiculous contortionism some Palin defenders engaged in during the ’08 campaign when she would say something that betrayed her awesome cluelessness. As I said then:

Over the last few weeks, I have been watching Palin’s defenders deploying their expertise to make sense of answers by Palin that were wrong, insufficient or embarrassing. When she manifestly knew nothing about the Bush Doctrine, her defenders chimed in that her answer was fine because the precise definition of such a doctrine–if there really is a doctrine or just a jumble of policies–is so intensely disputed. In short, the sheer nuance and complexity of an issue excused her utter cluelessness, or, to put it another way, she knew so little about the subject that she would have no way of knowing that Biden or Gibson erred. When she talked vaguely about Putin rearing his head, there was only a relative handful of people who could have deciphered that she was referring to long-range Russian bomber flights. Even on something like that, where presumably Palin did know something about what she was saying, she could not articulate it. No doubt her claim that she reads “all” newspapers will soon be cited as proof of her voracious appetite for knowledge and her curiosity about the world. What Palin’s defenders are showing is that it takes well-informed, very engaged policy wonks to lend even minimal coherence to her statements.

Update: O’Donnell’s campaign put out a statement explicitly denying that O’Donnell believes what her defenders claim she believes:

In this morning’s WDEL debate, Christine O’Donnell was not questioning the concept of separation of church and state as subsequently established by the courts. She simply made the point that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution.

If that were the case, it would mean that O’Donnell is pedantic as well as clueless. If she wasn’t questioning “the concept of separation of church and state as subsequently established by the courts,” why was she complaining about a court ruling against a school board that wanted to teach I.D.?