Ross:

And crank or no, Paul won in Kentucky on the merits, out-hustling, out-organizing, and out-arguing a Republican establishment that took a solid candidate in Grayson and sent him to the hustings with a lazy caricature of a Bush-era national security message [bold mine-DL].

Ross links to this story showing one of Grayson’s ads, which mentions Paul’s opposition to the PATRIOT Act and a statement in which he articulates the argument for blowback as a cause of terrorism. These are perfectly reasonable positions, and outside the Republican hawkish bubble they would hardly be controversial now. The ad mentions these things as if they are supposed to be shocking and “strange,” which I’m sure Grayson and his allies think they are, but how were Grayson’s attacks a caricature of a Bush-era national security message? One might say that the Republican national security message during the Bush Era seemed like the caricature of a real policy view, but that is too easy.

Grayson was simply adopting the standard arguments for privileging any and all anti-terrorist measures over constitutional protections, and he was in complete denial that U.S. policies have any role in provoking, radicalizing or inciting violence against American and allied targets. I’m not going to say that Grayson ran a good campaign, because he clearly didn’t, but a crucial part of why his campaign was so bad was his obsession with Paul’s national security views and the lazy nationalist demagoguery he used to attack those views. This is not a caricature of the GOP’s Bush-era national security message–it is their message. It is a condensed version of everything Cheney, Giuliani, Santorum and other Grayson backers have said for at least the last nine years. One of the encouraging things about the Kentucky Republican Senate result is that most Republican primary voters in a very red state did not respond to this demagoguery and appeals to hawkish extremism. I am always pessimistic that rank-and-file Republicans are ever going to be willing to break with the defenders of an expansive national security and warfare state, and it would be a mistake to conclude this from Paul’s victory, but at the very least Paul’s landslide victory suggests that there are things that matter far more to party regulars.

A large part of the reason why Grayson’s attacks failed was that fiscal and economic issues loomed large in this race, which made Grayson’s obsession with Paul’s other views seem not only irrelevant but another sign that he, as the establishment’s preferred candidate, was wildly out of touch with what mattered to the electorate right now. It is fitting that Santorum was one of his endorsers, as he ran a very Santorum-like campaign with a similarly poor result. Four years ago, Santorum decided for some reason to make foreign policy alarmism and super-hawkish views into the core of his re-election campaign in a year when the public had already turned against the Iraq war and economic insecurity and anxiety were growing concerns. One could have said that Santorum was otherwise a solid candidate who was saddled with a “lazy caricature” of Bush-era national security views, but that would not be true. Santorum embraced those views, and if they resembled a caricature it was because he made them that way. While he did not spend quite as much time warning against the dire Venezuelan menace, the same was true with Grayson. Perhaps most strange of all, Grayson seems to have thought that voters were going to be deeply concerned that Paul was a libertarian in the wake of a financial crisis and recession that most Republican voters view as being caused in no small part by unwise government policies and decisions.

Grayson’s failure is interesting for another reason. The national Republican leadership and quite a few conservative pundits and bloggers have convinced themselves that excessive spending and government expansion were the things that drove the public away from the GOP, and this is not at all true. Nonetheless, when a primary candidate appeared who made an argument for strong fiscal conservatism and opposition to bailouts, much of the party establishment worked to try to defeat him. If the spending argument were correct, Paul would be an ideal candidate for the fall and the party leadership ought to have rallied around him. In refusing to do so and in actively working to defeat Paul, Grayson’s backers have made clear that they don’t actually put much stock in their own anti-spending rhetoric, and they have reminded everyone that their aggressive, ruinous views on national security take precedence over everything else.

Special elections give the party out of favor more opportunities to buck the national tide than they will have when all 435 seats are up in November. That is not to say that repeated losses shouldn’t temper Republican triumphalism — after all, they indicate that even in this tough environment there is a path to victory for Democrats in the kind of districts Republicans need to win to retake the majority. But it won’t be as easy to replicate these one-off successes when the entire House is up for re-election this fall unless the national political climate changes [bold mine-DL]. ~Jim Antle

One of the things that ought to temper Republican triumphalism is the recognition that it is their party that is still the party more out of favor with most of the public. This is something that I don’t think a lot of conservatives and Republican fully appreciate: voters have a more unfavorable view of the GOP than they have of Democrats. The difficulty for the GOP is that Republicans have been losing special House elections when the Democrats have been riding high in 2007, 2008 and early 2009 and when the Democrats have been struggling and losing support in late 2009 and now. When presented with golden opportunities to take advantage of a smaller, more engaged electorates to pick up House seats, they have failed every time. Part of this is the failed nationalizing strategy I discussed yesterday, but another part is the mistaken assumption that the public rejected the GOP because of excessive spending and all that the party has to do to win them back is to declare their hostility to all forms of new spending. Republicans have spent the last sixteen months addressing a grievance that most of the voters who turned against them in the last four years do not have.

Let’s remember how many activists and pundits enthused over Jim Ogonowski’s better-than-expected showing in his loss to Nikki Tsongas three years ago as a sign of imminent Republican revival, or at least a “reversion to the norm.” One of the people making that argument was Patrick Ruffini, he of the 70-seat 2010 “gut” prediction. Ruffini said in late 2007: “2006 was a killing field. 2007-8 is not.” This was impressively wrong. Regarding Senate elections, 2008 was even worse. Conservative activists and pundits have consistently overestimated Republican chances during bad cycles and many have grossly overestimated their chances in better cycles, which is why I find it hard to take seriously arguments that it is now no problem that an election so many on the right were saying was neck-and-neck and a possible pick-up turned out to be something of a blowout for the other party. Like the absurd predictions of huge Republican gains in the fall, it was always pretty unreasonable to think that Burns had a chance of winning in a district as heavily Democratic as PA-12, but that didn’t stop a lot of people on the right from talking up Burns’ chances as if they were realistic.

This is a significant problem for Republicans: they continually set unrealistic expectations of success and naturally cannot meet them, and then they are forced to explain away the “failure” to achieve the impossible that they should have never claimed they could achieve. That doesn’t mean that PA-12 was not a “must-have” win. Just as everything had to go right for the Democrats to pick up all the seats that they did in 2006 and 2008, absolutely everything has to go right for the Republicans to win control of the House, and that includes winning seats in traditionally Democratic territory when those seats are open and the district’s voters are strongly against the administration. So far, that isn’t happening.

It would equally be a mistake to overinterpret a special election result in a district that Democrats should have won all along, but special elections should help the party that gains the most advantage from lower turnout. That party is the Republican Party. These are elections in which Republican candidates have their best chance to steal seats that they normally have no business contesting, and they aren’t getting it done. Antle mentions that the DCCC will not be able to devote as many resources and people to every competitive race as they devoted to PA-12, and that’s true, but it’s equally true for the NRCC, which continues to trail its Democratic counterpart in fundraising and cash on hand.

This race should serve notice to Democratic officeholders everywhere that no seat is safe and that voters will not accept business-as-usual. ~Michael Steele

PA 12 simplified: GOP tried to nationalize the race. Health care, Obama, etc. Democrats localized it (and the Dem candidate ran against Obama). And the DCCC put 200 people on the ground there in the last week. Meaning: Dems can be competitive in races if they run the right candidates the right way. And Republicans aren’t gonna cruise to victory in the fall. ~Marc Ambinder

There are many things about the PA-12 special election that are unique to that race and district, but one thing that ties it to many of the other Republican special election losses over the last three years is the party’s obsession with nationalizing House races that might have conceivably been won by appealing to local issues and concerns. In NY-23 we saw Hoffman scoffing at “parochial” issues, and in NY-20 Tedisco ran a disastrously bad campaign that frittered away all of his advantages as a well-liked local representative and re-made himself into a robot repeating the national party’s message. Before that we saw several failed attempts in IL-14, MS-01 and elsewhere to run against “Pelosi-Reid,” when the real competition came in the form of effective candidates with strong local connections. As I said last year in connection with the NY-23 race:

Something I don’t understand about the national GOP’s elevation of the NY-23 race to such a high profile is why they think nationalizing House races favors them. Nationally, the GOP remains toxic and its party ID continues to be very low. Nationalizing the race gains the GOP nothing in a traditionally supportive district, but it potentially saddles their preferred candidate with all of their baggage from the past several years. It is also mimicking the absolutely failed Republican tactics of almost every special election of the last three years. With depressing regularity, GOP attack ads have warned voters against such-and-such a candidate siding with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, when most people outside of Washington don’t know and couldn’t care who these people are.

There are two major problems with the Republican approach to these House elections. The first is that they tend to ignore or dismiss the interests of the specific district where they are competing in order to make a statement about national party agendas. The national GOP wants these elections to be mandates against Pelosi/Reid’s agenda or Obama’s agenda, and the Democratic committees and party leadership are more concerned with winning the election contests. The second problem is that they don’t seem to understand that even in districts where Obama is not particularly popular and where most voters did not support him in 2008, such as PA-12, most voters are not interested in vindicating a pre-scripted anti-Obama narrative. So long as the Democratic candidates can present them with a more appealing message of continued government funding and the promise of economic support, they are not automatically going to rally behind the candidates of the more unpopular, discredited party.

Obviously, Steele has to spin a loss in a potentially winnable open seat as best as he can. The reality is that the NRCC sank $1 million in a district carried narrowly by McCain and no longer represented by a veteran Congressman and the GOP candidate managed to win a little over 44% of the vote in a low-turnout special election. That is slightly better than the Republican nominee Russell did in 2008 in a much smaller electorate that ought to have favored the Republican. Burns and Critz will face each other again in November, but it will be that much harder to dislodge Critz once he is a member of the House. Far from showing that no seat is safe, it showed that when it came time to deliver on overblown predictions of massive Republican gains this year the GOP failed. I don’t expect Republican leaders to announce this to the world, but if they are to have any chance of coming close to their goals of winning back the House they have to contest House elections differently than they have been doing over the last few years.

P.S. Nagourney reports on the special election:

Tom Davis, a former Republican House member and top party campaign strategist, saw the win by Democrat Mark Critz, a former aide to Mr. Murtha, over Republican Tim Burns as a serious blow to the Republican claim to be within reach of the 40 seats needed to recapture the House.

“If you can’t win a seat that is trending Republican in a year like this, then where is the wave?” asked Mr. Davis, who said Republicans will need to examine what went wrong. “It would be a huge upset not to win this seat.”

Let’s be clear about this: Bill Halter and Joe Sestak, in broad terms, represent challenges from the left, and their success is fueled by the energy and intensity of liberal activists. ~Greg Sargent

This strikes me as common sense, but as E.J. Dionne points out common sense apparently has nothing to do with voters’ preferences:

Also, there is this fascinating bit of data reported by Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com. He cites a blog post by Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen reporting that in the last poll taken in PA-12, Sestak led Specter by nine points, 44-35. “Among liberal voters in the district Sestak and Specter are actually tied at 44% each,” writes Jensen. “Sestak’s lead comes largely thanks to a 49-21 advantage among conservatives within the party [bold mine-DL] who make up 26% of the primary vote in this district, almost equal to the 25% who identify as liberals.” This goes to show the kind of branding problems that can occur when one switches parties.

This finding is bizarre, but perhaps there is a way to reconcile the two claims. In fact, Sargent is correct that Sestak and Halter are challenging their respective incumbents from the left and derive important support from progressive activists. They have based their candidacies on being more progressive representatives of their states. That said, it is necessary to distinguish between the ideology of activists and the preferences of the electorate, and it is also necessary to distinguish the ideological leanings of the candidate from that of the people who end up voting for him for whatever reason.

It is important to emphasize how relatively unimportant ideological identifications are in determining intra-party voting. For example, Ron Paul was obviously to the right of all of his competitors in the presidential primaries on almost every issue (and I would argue that his foreign policy views also put him far to the right of the 2008 field), but he received a disproportionately large part of his support from self-described moderates because they tended to be weaker Republicans and therefore more likely to be responsive to a dissident candidate. On paper, it makes no sense that moderate and conservative Democrats would prefer Sestak to Specter while liberals are evenly split between them, but then it doesn’t make rational sense that John McCain won the antiwar and anti-Bush vote in New Hampshire in 2008.

What many of these voters probably have in common is weaker partisan attachment. Specter has the backing of the state party machine, and so there will be liberals who are also strong partisans who rally around the candidate the party machine supports. What those McCain voters apparently perceived in McCain was someone whom they identified as being at odds with Bush, mainly because of their rivalry in 2000, and they bought into his reputation as someone who broke ranks with his party, so they may have assumed that the way to express their opposition to Bush and the party leadership was to support someone who was, in fact, virtually identical to Bush on every major policy question of the day. Perversely, the anti-Bush and antiwar Republicans with weak attachment to the party supported the party establishment’s original preferred candidate because they had the superficial, basically false impression that McCain was not a reliable partisan and Bush ally. It seems likely that Sestak, who is running as the real, progressive Democrat against the phony newcomer, will receive support from weaker partisans while the opportunistic “centrist” with establishment backing will receive a surprisingly large amount of support from the left because those voters are also strong partisans.

My guess is that Sestak’s support among moderate and conservative Democrats in Pennsylvania matches up very closely with the disapproval these voters have for Obama and the Washington Democrats with whom Specter is identified. This just underlines why many strongly ideological voters are often frustrated with the direction of their parties: many strongly ideological voters support candidates endorsed by the party establishment because they are also strong partisans and tend to conflate what is good for their party with what is good for their political views. Bizarrely, the people more likely to oppose the Congressional Democratic leadership’s priorities are going to help put a reliable supporter of those priorities into the Senate and help throw out an opportunist who would probably turn against the Democratic leadership at the drop of a hat if he thought it would serve his self-interest. Realizing this actually makes the result of today’s voting in Pennsylvania even harder to interpret and weave into a larger narrative.

Ross:

Benjamin Netanyahu and Abe Foxman may have accelerated the process, but it’s hard to imagine that the more secular, more assimilated sections of the Jewish-American population wouldn’t have eventually drifted away from an intense connection with Israel anyway, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Italian-Americans are less attached to both Italy and Catholicism than they were in 1940 or so, or that Irish-American are far less interested in the politics of Eire and Northern Ireland than they used to be[bold mine-DL].

My impression is that ethnic groups in diasporan communities retain strong connections with their respective nation-states overseas in direct proportion to the intensity of political upheaval and controversy in those states and in inverse proportion to the relative power of the nation-state in question. The Armenian diaspora has been very involved in funneling funds to the Republic and to Karabakh ever since independence and the war, and it is partly because of the relative political and economic isolation Armenia experienced during the last twenty years because of the Karabakh war that Diasporan support has been forthcoming and also very important. This has happened at the same time as successful Armenian assimilation in the U.S. and in other countries around the world, and indeed it is thanks to that successful assimilation that Diasporan Armenians can provide as much aid as they do. In the event that Karabakh’s status could be normalized or some negotiated settlement with Azerbaijan and Turkey could be reached, we would probably see a gradual weakening of attachments as Armenia comes under less pressure economically and politically.

The Irish case seems similar. It was not all that long ago that a U.S. administration strongly influenced by Irish-Americans in the Democratic Party was very actively pushing the British to reach a settlement with the IRA and Sinn Fein. After the Good Friday agreement, the armed conflict that was a significant driver of Irish-American sympathy for the republican cause more or less came to a close. Sinn Fein won some political concessions in the process, and all of the rhetoric of struggle and violent resistance faded into the background. Disarmament and the power-sharing agreement in Belfast made previous American sympathy for Irish republicans in Ulster increasingly redundant, and whatever pro-republican sentiments still exist are not being exploited for any particular political issue. Most Irish-Americans in the 1990s were at least third-, fourth- or fifth-generation Americans, but what kept sympathy for the republican cause strong and politically significant was the continuation of the conflict in Ulster.

What seems different in the case of American Jewish attachment to Israel is that the relevant conflicts and controversies have only intensified and deepened during the same period, but the American Jewish attachment has weakened, or at least the nature of the attachment has changed significantly. What may explain this may not be secularization and assimilation so much as it is the very different position of Israel vis-a-vis its neighbors and subjects compared to the positions of Armenia and Irish republicans. By all accounts, Israel has a relatively flourishing economy. Following the financial crisis, its market was one of the best-performing in the world, and its tech sector has been very successful. Militarily, it enjoys superiority over all of its enemies and potential rivals, and enjoys the patronage and support of a superpower. Even though Israel is probably more diplomatically isolated in the world than it has been in decades, Israel is secure and more than capable of defending itself. At least partly for that reason, rhetoric that emphasizes that Israel faces an “existential threat” or “second Holocaust” seems absurdly alarmist, and the urgency and uncritical solidarity that once characterized the attachment to Israel make sense to fewer and fewer people. So the attachment to Israel grows weaker as Israel becomes stronger and wealthier and ceases to resemble the much more vulnerable state of earlier decades.

Reihan:

And Republican strategists are confident that the president’s approval rating will continue to erode, which is why they’re banking on even bigger gains.

Were any of these the same strategists who speculated that the GOP would gain seats in 2008? It’s easy to forget that there were more than a few pundits and analysts on the right who believed this, which was based on the same assumption that the Democrats held too many “naturally Republican” seats, but there were. Obviously, the unusually high Democratic and unusually low Republican turnout in 2008 will not be repeated this year, but it is worth remembering that we have heard this story about a sizeable comeback in Congress once already in the last few years and it proved to be false.

What is the basis for this confidence in the future erosion of Obama’s approval rating? Since Obama’s post-Massachusetts nadir and some weakness during the final stages of the health care debate, Obama’s approval rating has improved slightly and held steady in the high 40s ever since. His approval has never dropped anywhere as low as Clinton’s did, and his average rating is higher than Clinton’s Gallup rating was at any point in 1994. It is likely that Obama’s approval rating has dropped about as far as it is going to drop.

There are two other problems with the assumption. For one thing, the economy has been growing steadily for the last three quarters, and there are some signs of steady job creation, which probably means that Obama’s approval will at the very least stay where it is. Considering how high the unemployment rate is, it is more than a little amazing that Obama’s approval rating has consistently remained above 45%. The other problem is that Obama’s approval rating has dropped below his 2008 share of the vote as much as it has largely because of disaffection among his core constituencies, and it seems that he has now stopped losing those supporters and could be slowly winning them back. Disaffection on the left may depress Democratic turnout, but over the last few months we have actually seen the “enthusiasm gap” narrowing. Republicans remain more highly motivated to vote, but they are typically more highly motivated to vote in midterm elections.

It hasn’t been remarked on much yet, and it may change in the coming weeks and months, but the generic ballot average on which so many ludicrous Republican predictions depend has been slowly shifting back to the Democrats in the last few months. As of today, the Democrats have a minuscule lead in the RCP generic ballot average. If the parties remain tied on the generic ballot, everyone acknowledges that Republicans will benefit because of their higher turnout, but it is still difficult to see how this translates into gains of more than 30 seats. It may now be a “commonplace observation” that the GOP can retake the House, but it remains a far-fetched prediction that the GOP definitely will do this, but that has not stopped pundits and House Republican leaders alike from issuing increasingly crazy forecasts of landslide triumphs with gains far in excess of the necessary 40 seats.

The more one looks at the individual seats that the Republicans have to win, the harder it is to see how they get there. I have mentioned Travis Childers’ local political appeal in MS-01 as an example of a House Democrat who may be able to survive in what has been heavily Republican territory for over a decade, and there are other races where local quirks and candidates may allow some vulnerable Democrats to hang on. Reihan mentions the Tea Party several times in his column, so it is worth adding here that Tea Party Express endorsed Walt Minnick, the Democratic incumbent in ID-01. That endorsement may or may not help Minnick in the fall, but it reminds us that Minnick is not a typical Democratic incumbent and may not be as vulnerable as he may appear. The quality of candidates matters and can turn a race one way or another. Minnick also has a substantial fundraising advantage. Most commentary on the midterms has consistently ignored the advantages that incumbents continue to have even in a cycle dominated by anti-incumbency sentiment, and chief among these is the ability to raise more money than their challengers.

Pennsylvania’s 12th District is one district that Republicans had no realistic chance of winning when Murtha was alive, and it is not certain that they will win it today, but I mention it here because PA-12 is one of the districts that Republicans must have and must hold to get anywhere close to gaining 40 seats this year. Pennsylvania’s 7th District, left open by Sestak when he left to run for the Senate, is another must-have seat that might see the conservative vote split between the Republican Joe Meehan and the independent Jim Schneller, and whose Democratic nominee will be decided today. Sestak won that district with 56% and 59% of the vote, and it is a district that was carried by Gore, Kerry and Obama. The district has a Cook PVI of D+3. Many analysts list the seat as a toss-up, but there is reason to think that this may be exaggerating the Republicans’ chances here. The primary upset of Mollohan in WV-01 has removed an incumbent tainted by hints of corruption and replaced him with a new Democratic nominee, which may make it more likely to be held by the Democrats. All of these examples suggest that local political conditions will define many competitive House races this year, and many of the districts that Republicans have to have to realize their “dramatic comeback” may not cooperate with the party’s self-congratulatory narrative.

“Thirty-five percent of Iranians like this government and Ahmadinejad,” a college student told me outside a Sufi shrine in the southeastern town of Mahan. “Twenty-five percent are against. The rest don’t care.” ~Stephen Kinzer

There’s no good way to verify that estimate, but it sounds plausible and it makes sense that there is a large number of disaffected Iranians that have no strong desire to side with regime or opposition. For the opposition to have even partly succeeded in having its grievances addressed, it needed to find some way to mobilize this apathetic and/or thoroughly disillusioned bloc, and this didn’t happen. It’s not clear how the tactics of the movement were going to make that happen, and it is possible that the more radical and secular elements of the movement alienated potential supporters in this otherwise indifferent middle. It is possible that other Iranians would have told Kinzer something very different about the status of the Green movement. Because he could not meet with opposition leaders and activists, Kinzer was bound to encounter more Iranians who were less directly engaged in or more disillusioned about politics. It still seems telling that he could not find anyone who believed that the movement has not stalled or failed entirely.

In the wake of the new nuclear deal brokered by the Turkish and Brazilian governments, another part of Kinzer’s account is worth noting:

Iranians seem puzzled by the Obama administration’s intense focus on their country’s nuclear program, which officials in Washington describe as a grave threat to global security.

The Iranians aren’t the only ones puzzled by this. Even if you accept that Iran’s government is intent on building nuclear weapons, the obsession with Iran’s nuclear program is hard to explain rationally. The trouble is that it is not a rational policy: it has an impossible objective and it is based in an unreasonable fear of a potential future arsenal for which there is little or no evidence. This arsenal would most likely be built, if it ever were built, as a deterrent against the attacks that Western governments continually say they will never rule out launching.

The Turco-Brazilian diplomatic effort is a product of growing international consternation with Washington’s fixation on this issue. It is a reflection of just how few non-Western governments take the Iranian “threat” at all seriously. An increasing number of governments does not really believe that the threat exists and they are more willing to say so after the Iraq debacle. Now there are more non-Western governments, including both large democracies and allies, that are in a position to wield influence internationally and many of them have been building constructive trading relationships with Iran at a time when the U.S. and major European governments have gone down the dead-end route of isolation and sanctions. Turkey and Brazil have demonstrated what real diplomatic and commercial engagement can achieve. If Iran hawks regard the nuclear deal these states have brokered as insufficient and unsatisfying, that is more a measure of their unreasonable demands and expectations than it is a measure of the deal’s flaws.

The new nuclear deal will not satisfy the U.S. and our European and Israeli allies, because nothing short of the severe limitation or abolition of Iran’s nuclear program will satisfy most of these governments. The administration insisted on pursuing a diplomatic track to try to craft an international consensus against Iran, and it always acknowledged that it was doing this as a necessary prelude to punitive measures later. All along the flaw in the administration’s policy was not that it was pursuing a diplomatic solution, but that it was pursuing an objective that it could never realistically achieve by any means. We now see what kind of fuel swap deal Iran will accept, and it is clearly unacceptable to Washington.

Instead of rallying the world around a new round of sanctions against Iran, the pursuit of those sanctions has reminded us that even many important democratic and allied powers around the world are effectively more sympathetic to Iran’s position than they are to ours. By pursuing the same irrational policy goal in a relatively consultative, multilateral way, the administration made clear to rising powers that there was nothing that Iran would realistically do that could have prevented punitive measures. Instead of exposing Iran as the uncooperative “rogue” state thwarting the “will of the world,” the administration has unintentionally done all parties a favor by pushing a new round of sanctions hard enough that the U.S. and our allies were exposed as the unreasonable, uncompromising creators of a “crisis” that need not have happened.

This is not the result the administration or Western hawks wanted, but as far as regional peace and stability are concerned it is a fairly good result. The deal probably will not prevent unilateral U.S. sanctions, but the new deal shows us just how few allies we will have in trying to penalize Iran and it will make it increasingly difficult to pretend that our Iran policy serves the interests of international security and stability.

On the eve of Rand Paul’s likely primary victory over Trey Grayson, I want to make a few observations about the importance of Paul’s candidacy and the apparent failure of party and movement establishment figures to defeat him. First of all, Paul is one of a very few Republican candidates in the country who is truly serious in his desire for fiscal responsibility. In his hostility to expansive government and reckless spending, he does not make exceptions for military spending, and he is appropriately skeptical of government power whether it comes in the form of military adventurism and empire-building or sweeping social legislation and bailouts. Paul is the candidate of both austerity and peace, which is why he is particularly terrifying to David Frum, who has spent many years arguing for an agenda that values neither.

It is possible that Paul’s positions will be too fiscally conservative and too sensible on national security for his state’s electorate, but it is also quite possible that Paul could be representing Kentucky in the Senate next year. Oddly, Frum consistently makes the same mistake that many Republican officeholders and activists make in their total opposition to any and all of the administration’s agenda: all of them believe that the policies that they believe are correct are also going to yield electoral success. Right now, winning by default during poor economic times and total rejectionism seem to be working for the GOP, though perhaps not as well as many Republicans think they are, but this is the opposite of what Frum said would happen if the GOP did not become more accommodating. The Kentucky Senate seat is not going to be in jeopardy if Paul wins tomorrow, nor are we on the verge of a massive Republican blowout in the midterms driven by a public backlash against government spending. Virtually everyone on the right is investing election outcomes these days with far more ideological meaning than they actually possess, and to the extent that there is an ideological message in the backlash going on right now almost everyone is misinterpreting it.

In another state at another time, Paul’s Senate run might have ended up as nothing more than a protest candidacy, but things seem to be coming together to make victory possible. Fiscal austerity is generally a very unpopular message: it demands that voters either pay for the services they want or it says that they have to do without those services. It is not normally a vote-winner, because it goes against the basic assumption of most democratic voting for at least the last eighty years that we should regularly look to government for assistance. Even if Paul wins, it will not necessarily prove that unflinching fiscal conservatism is always the key to electoral success, even in Kentucky, and Paul’s example may not be easily repeated elsewhere. In many ways, Kentucky is a very unrepresentative state. While Democrats have a significant registration advantage there, the state still went heavily for McCain (57-41%) during a second consecutive Democratic wave election and it has voted heavily for Republican candidates for President in the last three cycles. What succeeds in Kentucky will not necessarily translate to larger, more urbanized, more diverse states. That is an argument for giving local candidates more flexibility in how they appeal to their voters and recognizing that a party trying to push a uniform agenda nationwide is going to make itself uncompetitive in many parts of the country.

What Paul’s likely win tomorrow suggests is that the close identification of national security conservatives with the party leadership significantly blunted the impact of Grayson’s attacks on Paul on these issues. If the Kentucky primary electorate is in a fiercely anti-establishment, anti-Washington mood, what could be better for Rand Paul than to be denounced on a fairly regular basis by establishment Republican politicians and pundits? For his part, Paul has been careful to emphasize the issues where most Republican voters seem to agree with him rather than stressing points of dispute. The efforts to misrepresent many of Paul’s views on social issues also seem to have backfired and weakened the effectiveness of the overall negative campaign against Paul. The push to derail Paul’s candidacy because of his insufficiently hawkish views should also remind rank-and-file Republican voters that national security hawkishness trumps all other issues.

Dan McCarthy points us to Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s criticism of Cameron. Wheatcroft recalls a particularly troubling episode:

And Cameron’s sheer lack of judgement has been alarming. Only the week before last he flew to Belfast to strike a deal with the Ulster Unionists, a crazy mission. Worse still – the worst single moment in his party leadership – was the summer before last, when Cameron flew to Tiflis during the conflict between Georgia and Russia, and said that Georgia should be admitted to Nato immediately. Apart from the fact that, as plenty of us guessed at the time and has since been confirmed by independent observers, Georgia was not in the right, Cameron’s words meant, if he was serious, that he was ready to send the Coldstream Guards to fight and die for South Ossetia. Did he mean it?

The easy answer is that he didn’t mean it and was simply trying to get to “the right” of Brown during an international crisis. This was a case of the cheap, irresponsible hawkishness in which all opposition parties can and most center-right opposition parties do engage in, and calling for Georgian admission to NATO at a time when Georgia membership had obviously become politically impossible and insane was both foolish and also safely irrelevant. Georgia’s chances of joining NATO died in August 2008, never to be revived, which made what Cameron said little more than a piece of absurd but ultimately empty posturing. This was how many anti-Russian hawks in the West responded to the war in Georgia. Having failed to trap NATO into going to war wih Russia over disputed territories in the Caucasus with Georgian admission, the hawks lamented that not admitting Georgia immediately had “emboldened” Russia, when in fact the promise made in Bucharest earlier that year to include Georgia in the alliance was what emboldened Saakashvili to escalate the conflict and provoke the Russian response.

This is an important reminder that the foreign policy views of the Conservative front bench (and most of the backbenchers) during the last decade have generally been awful when it comes to foreign wars and NATO expansion. One of the great failings of the Conservative opposition to Blair and Brown was their unwillingness and inability to align themselves with public opinion against the reckless military adventurism of the New Labour years. They were only too happy to provide a British echo of foolish Republican arguments, and that helped to keep them out of power for several more years. Much of the discussion of the future of British foreign policy under a Cameron ministry thus far has revolved around the nature and degree of his Atlanticism and what Cameron might mean for the relationship with the U.S. and Europe, and as far as these relationships go Cameron has been taking roughly the best positions one could reasonably expect given the pressures within his party. That certainly doesn’t give him or his colleagues a pass on their terribly poor decisions in the past.

The good news is that being in government will probably make Cameron less reckless in the future. Like Cameron, Biden went to Tbilisi during the war, and he was going there in a more important capacity as the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and after a short-lived brush with sanity Obama began mouthing all the predictable phrases about Russian aggression, but in practice the Obama administration has been fairly cool towards Saakashvili and mostly constructive in its relationship with Russia. The alternative to Obama/Biden was the truly crazy John “We Are All Georgians Now” McCain, and the Labour alternative to Cameron offered nothing better. Whenever I find myself getting discouraged by the shortcomings of the administration or the Conservatives in Britain, I have to remind myself how much worse it could be.

There is reason to think that Cameron will have enough on his plate at home and overseas in Afghanistan that he will have neither the time nor inclination for picking fights with Russia over NATO expansion, which has become much less practical in the last two years. There is not much to say in defense of Cameron’s overall foreign policy record, except that it is approximately no worse than the records of Obama and Biden on Georgia and other matters, and that it is probably as much as one could reasonably hope for from a Conservative Party whose leadership has been in the thrall of American and “pro-American” hegemonist and neoconservative ideas for over a decade. Cameron undeniably showed appalling judgment on Georgia, but in this he was unfortunately entirely representative of most Conservative and Republican reactions to the war. The consensus in the major parties in Britain and America in favor of NATO expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine, to which Obama also belonged, has been made outdated and irrelevant by events. There is some reason to think that Cameron’s pragmatism will allow him to recognize this and adjust accordingly.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives. ~Peter Beinart

Once again, the old proverb seems quite appropriate: “the yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” It is one thing to defend a government against unreasonable and unfair criticism, and quite another to try to discourage, discredit or ignore any and all criticism and to treat all criticism as if it were always inherently biased and driven by vile motives. Beinart explains very clearly how leading American Jewish organizations have played the role of yes-men to Israel’s government, effectively enabling it to pursue its ultimately ruinous policies in the territories, while the younger generation sees no value in remaining uncritically supportive of Israeli policies. Indeed, much of the younger generation presumably sees this uncritical backing as directly harmful to the long-term well-being of Israel. This has been happening while the politics and culture of Israel and the American Jewish community have changed in ways that make such backing unsustainable in the next generation.

Naturally, Philip Klein has a ready-made and remarkably unpersuasive response:

The problem, however, isn’t with leading Jewish organizations that defend Israel, but with liberalism. As sickening as it sounds, Jewish liberals see their fellow Jews as noble when they are victims being led helplessly into the gas chambers, but recoil at the thought of Jews who refuse to be victims, and actually take actions to defend themselves.

Whether Klein finds it sickening or not, the more important point here is that this doesn’t seem to be true. I can’t speak for liberal Jews, but my guess is that what causes them to recoil is the thought of fellow Jews imposing inhumane, unjust policies on people under their power. If it were simply a matter of self-defense, rather than one of sustained occupation and the attendant humiliations and degradations visited on a subject people, there would be far less criticism because the government’s policies would be much easier to justify. Nationalists here in the U.S. insist on uncritical support for our policies abroad because they see this as an expression of loyalty to their country “right or wrong,” and “pro-Israel” hawks insist on offering the same kind of uncritical support for Israeli policies regardless of their merits or their consequences.

Of course, nationalists typically have a defective understanding of loyalty and a distorted understanding of patriotism, and hawks have a similarly defective understanding of what constitutes real, effective support for an ally. Encouraging a government in its worst habits and instincts, remaining silent in the face of its abuses and focusing all of their energies on attacking dissidents and critics are not the acts of friends or supporters. They are instead the acts of the blindly loyal who ultimately contibute to the ruin of the state they claim to defend.

P.S. As Beinart’s essay makes clear, it is the hard-line Israeli politicians who constantly invoke the history of Jewish victimhood to justify what they want to do. On the whole, it is “pro-Israel” hawks in the U.S. who grossly exaggerate the vulnerability and weakness of Israel’s position in the region to justify aggressive policies vis-a-vis Israel’s neighbors and other Near Eastern states. The trouble isn’t that Jewish liberals are uncomfortable with the power of Israel, but that “pro-Israel” hawks refuse to acknowledge the disparity between the power of the Israeli government and its enemies and the disparity in power between Israelis and Palestinians. On the whole, Jewish liberals seem to be willing to accept responsibility that wielding such power requires. In the meantime, “pro-Israel” hawks prefer an Israel that wields power under the constant protection of invoking victim status whenever someone criticizes the Israeli government’s abuses of power.