No one will claim that I am a fan of Marco Rubio. His CPAC speech was awful, and it was all the more awful because it is the sort of low quality speech that activists at CPAC seem to crave. That this was the speech that seems to have cemented his place as a modern conservative folk hero only makes things worse. It will come as no surprise that I regard any speculation about a Rubio presidential bid in the next two or even six years as frivolous and absurd. However, much like baseless Petraeus speculation, the equally baseless Rubio speculation is useful for what it tells us about the movement conservatives and Republican activists who engage in it. Matt Lewis writes (via Antle):

I know that at first blush, this sounds quixotic. But in my mind there is a better rationale for Rubio running for president than there is for almost any other candidate on the Republican side.

That is quite a remarkable admission. Surveying the field of possible Republican presidential candidates, Lewis cannot find one candidate more suited to being a presidential candidate than Rubio? Whether or not this makes any sense, it is telling that Lewis thinks it does. As weak as the Republican field really is, is it so weak that it makes more sense for Rubio to jump in than any of the others?

Some observers, including both liberals and conservatives, have sometimes referred to Rubio as the “Republican Obama,” but Lewis goes beyond this and essentially argues that Rubio should run for President fresh off of a Senate election victory he has not yet won because this is what Obama did after he was elected to the Senate. By promoting Rubio as a desirable presidential candidate this early, Lewis would evidently like to see an even less experienced state legislator seek his party’s presidential nomination. Obama causes a very strange reaction in Republicans. On the one hand, they want to regard him as a joke and an incompetent, but they also desperately want to find someone who can imitate his appeal and success, and so it is almost as if they go out of their way to anoint whatever young politician they come across as their new hero and then disregard all of the person’s liabilities by saying, “Well, he’s no more inexperienced than Obama was” or “She’s still better than Obama!” It is an odd mix of contempt for Obama mixed with admiration for Obama’s success and an even stranger need to outdo him in the categories that originally caused them to view Obama so poorly. So Rubio is touted because he is even more inexperienced, Palin is held up because she knows even less about policy, and so on.

What Lewis does not take into account are the key reasons why Obama’s relative inexperience was not much of a disadvantage and why the fresh face/blank slate appeal worked so well. First, the sitting administration was staffed by some of the most experienced Washington hands and was widely and correctly viewed as extremely incompetent. On the most important issue of the day, the war in Iraq, most of the experienced politicians (and all of Obama’s main rivals for the nomination) backed the invasion, while Obama had initially opposed it. Of course, Obama was never quite the foreign policy novice that his opponents wanted to make him out to be, but his better judgment regarding Iraq showed how little long years of experience in government counted when it came to making good decisions. In Rubio’s case, there is no obvious way that he turns the experience argument around on those who would use it against him.

Rubio’s signature issue is his opposition to the stimulus bill of last year, and it is on account of this that he has now taken a large lead over Crist, but this would not distinguish him from other potential Republican candidates and as an issue it is not nearly as significant. Even granting that the stimulus was poorly conceived and designed, supporting it was not the kind of mistake that is going to cause a massive electoral backlash from the general electorate. Meanwhile, opposing it and making that opposition the centerpiece of one’s candidacy are not going to guarantee electoral success in the fall. Perhaps Rubio’s biggest problem is that he simply does not interest or excite many people outside his own party. Right now he is tapping into the discontent of the Republican rank-and-file in a primary, and he is having great success so far because of this, but the things that excite and motivate the partisan rank-and-file tend not to excite and motivate people outside the party. Meanwhile, all of the other potential presidential candidates are tapping into the same discontent. The reason for Rubio’s success makes him virtually indistinguishable from almost every other national Republican figure.

Whatever else one wants to say about Obama since his inauguration, during the campaign he did present himself as a post-partisan pragmatist. Rubio seems to want to have nothing to do with such a label, and indeed the rationale for his primary candidacy is that he is both strongly partisan and ideological. Rubio has succeeded so far because he has cast himself as the true-believing ideologue and strong partisan, but it remains to be seen if that translates into victory in a presidential swing state.

Recent polls tell me that the Democratic Party is in the worst shape I have seen during my 50 years of following politics closely. ~Michael Barone

Yes, but what does common sense tell you? It should be telling all of us that the Democratic Party is in much better shape than it has been since before 1980, and it would also tell us that the Democrats have been in far worse shape in many other election years (e.g., 1950, 1952, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1994). What we see is a majority party that has won at least 52% of the vote in the last two elections, and the party has a President who was elected with almost 53% of the vote. Such a party is not likely to suffer a massive wipeout and lose its majority status in the very next election. By just about any important measure (i.e., presidential approval, unemployment rate, economic growth), the Democratic Party today is in better shape than the Republicans were in 1982, and even in 1982 with a less popular President (who had been elected with a smaller share of the popular vote) and higher unemployment the presidential party only lost 27 seats in the House. Yet Barone would have us believe solely on the basis of the generic ballot poll and some negative views of unions that things are worse for them now than they have been at any time since 1960. This still seems strained and not very credible.

One important factor in the 1946 elections that Barone keeps citing as his comparison was the long period of unified Democratic rule that preceded it. Democrats had controlled the House since 1931, and Democrats won every national election that followed until ’46. Wartime ruling parties in Britain and the U.S. that had been in power for over a decade were voted out once the war was over, and part of this was simply anti-incumbency sentiment and a backlash against a long period of unified government. The similarities between the 1910 and 1946 midterms make clear how different this election is from both of them. These were midterms when the non-presidential party won majorities in one or both houses after defeats in at least the last two cycles. What sets them apart and makes them very different from this midterm election is the extremely long period of unified government by the other party. We already had this sort of midterm election in the recent past, and this was in 2006.

The 1910 example is interesting for another reason. It marked the beginning of eight years of a House Democratic majority and inaugurated a period that saw a number of significant, enduring progressive measures enacted. These measures did not result in the loss of their majority. Looking at the elections that followed it, we see that the Republicans did not regain control of the House until the 1918 elections. Like the 1950 backlash against Truman, 1918 was partly a product of dissatisfaction with a foreign war that the public had not wanted and which was not yet over on Election Day. It was also the sixth-year election during Wilson’s Presidency. Based on this comparison, and barring unforeseen catastrophes, it seems plausible that the GOP might not regain the majority until 2014 at the earliest.

Of course, we are almost a hundred years removed from the political landscape that led to those results, and these comparisons are necessarily always very rough, but this should help give us some idea of how long it takes for a party to recover from losing majority status and successfuly regain that status. It takes time for the electorate to forget why they repudiated the old majority party, and it also takes time for voters to grow frustrated and disgusted with the new majority party. Even after we take into account the rise of many new forms of media and the constant stream of news and information that might speed up this process, it seems hard to believe that the electorate will shrink enough and tilt enough to put Republicans in power just four years after they were thrown out. Barone proposes that there has been a second sea-change in public sentiment very shortly after the first, and there doesn’t seem to be a compelling example from past U.S. House elections to support this claim.

After Gen. Petraeus as made it abundantly clear that he will never run for political office, why does anyone keep pushing the idea of a Petraeus presidential bid? It could just be a lack of imagination, but there may be a few more significant reasons why Petraeus speculation continues long after it should have vanished.

Most of the speculation comes from the right, and my guess is that it is fueled primarily by an awareness of the tremendous weakness of the prospective Republican 2012 field. Once the conversation turns to national security matters, none of the likely 2012 Republican candidates can be taken at all seriously. When Mitt “No Apology” Romney is the relatively well-informed, careful thinker on the subject, the party has a problem. Belittling Obama’s minimal foreign policy experience was a favorite pastime during the election campaign, but even Obama’s experience c. 2007-08 was greater than anything now on offer from the likely GOP field. It is all the more remarkable that Republicans believe foreign policy to be one of Obama’s vulnerabilities, when it has proved to be one of the areas where he wins the most public support. At least at first glance, a Petraeus candidacy would lend the party some credibility in this area.

Another source of admiration expressed in speculation about 2012 is the remnant of the Petraeus cult that formed on the right before, during and after the “surge” in Iraq. Despite the lack of Iraqi political reconciliation, which was the essential measure of the plan’s success, the “surge” has been widely praised as a great success and Petraeus is identified with that. Inside the GOP, the man responsible for “turning around” the Iraq war and thereby somehow redeeming it enjoys enormous popularity. Unlike most other Republican favorites, Petraeus is also widely respected outside the party, which would make him a rather unique political figure. Of couse, all of this is irrelevant for the reasons Alex Massie hasgiven, but I wouldn’t underestimate how important it is for most Republicans to put up a candidate whose election could be spun as an ultimate vindication of the Iraq war. Even though Petraeus will never run, it is what Petraeus represents that many on the right would like to see in the next Republican nominee: someone identified with, but not politically tainted by, the war in Iraq, and someone whom Beltway pundits and national media have already sanctified as more or less beyond reproach.

The problem with our thinking on Iranian influence in Iraq is we assume it to all be nefarious and cabal-esque, when in truth much of it is just geographic destiny. Iranian influence in Iraq is inevitable and – thanks in part to the United States – now expedited. There’s no horse race to handicap in this case; that race was lost in 2003. ~Kevin Sullivan

All of this is right, and the same lesson could be applied to other parts of the world. Instead of describing Russian influence in its near-abroad as “revisionism” or “imperialism” or, more absurdly, taking it as proof of a “neo-Soviet” Russia, we could acknowledge that neighboring states that are heavily dependent on Russia for energy and trade are going to end up in Moscow’s orbit. We might go one step beyond that and say that it is futile and probably dangerous to try to prevent this, and the experience of Georgia in the last few years should serve as a cautionary tale for what happens when we do try.

We could also draw another lesson from the growth of Iranian influence and power following the invasion of Iraq, and this is that policies that are supposed to increase and advance American power can be short-sighted and counterproductive. Indeed, these policies can ultimately produce the opposite result. More than that, we could conclude from this experience that the people most intent on securing and perpetuating U.S. hegemony are often the worst judges of how to do this. So, instead of gnashing our teeth over the growth of a left-populist bloc of Latin American states that tends to take a dim view of American intervention in their region, we could see this instead as the natural result of democratization in countries where majorities of the population are finally being empowered. These majorities are understandably reacting against the neoliberal consensus that Washington pushed on Latin America during the last two decades, and they are electing governments that profess their disagreement with some or all of this consensus.

Michael Auslin does his best to paint a picture of the dire “dimming of our age” (via Scoblete) that will come with gradual reduction in U.S. military presence overseas, and the future he predicts does not seem very gloomy at all:

The upshot of these three trends will likely be a series of decisions to slowly, but irrevocably reduce America’s overseas global military presence and limit our capacity to uphold peace and intervene around the globe. And, as we hollow out our capabilities, China will be fielding ever more accurate anti-ship ballistic missiles, advanced fighter aircraft, and stealthy submarines; Russia will continue to expand its influence over its “near abroad” while modernizing its nuclear arsenal; and Iran will develop nuclear weapons, leading to an arms race or preemptive attacks in the Middle East.

Under such conditions, global trade flows will be stressed, the free flow of capital will be constrained, and foreign governments will expand their regulatory and confiscatory powers against their domestic economies in order to fund their own military expansions.

In other words, unsustainable U.S. hegemony will not be as great as it was, and that will mean that other major and rising powers will be able to exert something more like the normal influence in their regions that such powers have exerted throughout most of modern history. Will there be conflicts in such a world? Of course, there will be, but we already have a number of conflicts in the world that have either been deemed irrelevant to the maintenance of Pax Americana or they are the products of policies designed to perpetuate Pax Americana. In practice, securing this “peace” has involved starting several wars, the largest and most destructive of which has been the war in Iraq, as well as supporting proxies and allies as they escalated conflicts with their neighbors.

China will build up its military, as it is already doing, and Russia will continue to extend its influence into its “near-abroad,” and Iran will develop nuclear weapons. What is important to stress here is that all of these things already are or soon will be happening anyway. These things are happening despite, and perhaps in some cases because of, American military presence in their respective regions. The reality of multipolarity makes these first two more or less unavoidable, and as we have been seeing over the last few years there is nothing short of full-scale war with Iran that could realistically interrupt the development of its nuclear program. If Iran definitely decides to acquire nuclear weapons, there is remarkably little that any outside government can do to prevent this from happening. One sure way to guarantee that Iran pursues this route is to continue to act punitively towards Iran. If Western powers actively resist Russian efforts to exercise influence along its own borders as the U.S. and some European states have been doing, all that will result is the use of Russia’s smaller neighbors as Western proxies. This will have very unfortunate consequences for the proxies, which the Russians will intimidate and/or attack and which Western powers will not aid in direct conflicts with Russia.

Too many American policymakers and policy analysts remain devoted to restoring a degree of American preeminence that existed in 1991-92 and will probably never come again. The reality is that we may not even see American preeminence c. 2008, much less the way it was twenty years ago. Our policies and our military deployments around the world have not adjusted to this reality. Now some of our closest allies are forcing us to come to terms with the way the world has changed.

Of course, one could simply dismiss Auslin’s argument as an attempt to justify the current, indefensible size of the absurdly overgrown warfare and security state. This would hardly be the first time that a defender of an entrenched government program or institution resorted to exaggerating the calamities that reduction in services would create. It is also not the first time that such a defender simply imagines a threat to the program or institution. As usual, the danger/promise of reducing America’s overseas military presence is not nearly as great as Auslin claims.

What provoked this vision of the “dimming of our age”? The British Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report pronouncing the “special relationship” dead and the continued resistance by the DPJ government in Japan to the location of a Marine air station in Okinawa. Oh, and health care. It is telling that the foreign examples Auslin provides are the results of national backlashes against perceived excessive identification with or dependence on U.S. power. Britain walked in lockstep with the United States before and during the war in Iraq, and it was badly burned by the experience. Japan has tolerated a continued military presence on Okinawa despite a history of abuses suffered by the civilian population. Some of our best allies feel used or put-upon, and their complaints stem from precisely the sort of overbearing hegemonist attitude that tends to treat many of our allies more like satrapies rather than treating them as sovereign, independent states with their own interests.

So some of the countries that theoretically benefit most from the American ability to “to uphold peace and intervene around the globe” want to adjust their relationships with the U.S. so that their national interests are better served. Britain and Japan are not proposing to scrap their alliances with America, nor are they necessarily declaring their opposition to America’s active role in their parts of the world, but they do seem to be saying that they should give more thought to how often their security and foreign policies line up closely with our own. Instead of taking advantage of the potential for increased burden-sharing these moves represent and instead of encouraging allies to tap into their own resources to provide for their defense, we hear laments foretelling the “dimming of our age.”

As for the so-called “romantic belief in global fraternity,” which very few people actually hold, there have been no greater romantics than the idealists who have deluded themselves and many of us that the interests of the rest of the world and the interests of the United States frequently converge. American hegemonists have been fairly certain that democratization and globalization advance American power, and so they have tried to encourage both on the unfounded assumptions that economic interdependence and democracy will tend to prevent conflict and will lead other governments to align with Washington. As both emerging-market democracies and long-established industrialized democratic powers have been showing us in recent years, neither democratization nor globalization magnifies American power, but instead has tended to create more increasingly powerful centers of resistance to Washington’s policies. In a way, that is a credit to past successes of U.S. policy: American power provided the protection and shelter to permit war-ravaged nations to rebuild and become capable of providing for their own needs and defense. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us the chance to end our abnormal and untraditional global role, and Washington failed to seize the opportunity. We are now at a point when we can still disentangle ourselves from many places around the world largely on our own terms and when we can shift the burdens for regional security to the regional powers and institutions that are capable of taking them up, but there seems to be no political will and no imagination needed to make this happen.

CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD,
TRAMPLING DOWN DEATH BY DEATH,
AND UPON THOSE IN THE TOMBS
BESTOWING LIFE!

CHRISTOS VOSKRESE IZ MERTVIKH,
SMERTIYU SMERT POPRAV
I SUSCHIM VO GROBEKH
ZHIVOT DAROVAV!

CHRISTOS ANESTI EK NEKRON
THANATO THANATON PATISAS,
KAI TOIS EN TOIS MNEMASI
ZOEN KARISAMENOS!

Let God arise, and his enemies be scattered: and let those that hate him flee before his face.

A sacred Pascha has been revealed to us today, a new and holy Pascha, a mystic Pascha, an all-venerable Pascha, a Pascha that is Christ the Redeemer, an unblemished Pascha, a great Pascha, a Pascha of the faithful, a Pascha that has opened for us the gates of Paradise, a Pascha that makes all the faithful holy.

As smoke vanishes, so let them vanish, as wax melts at the presence of fire.

Come from that sight, you women, bearers of good tidings, and say to Zion, ‘Receive from us the good tidings of joy, of Christ’s Resurrection. Exult, dance and be glad, Jerusalem, for you have seen Christ the King like a bridegroom coming from the grave.

So shall the wicked perish at the presence of God; and let the just be glad.

The myrrh-bearing women at deep dawn came to the grave of the giver of life. They found an Angel sitting on the stone, and he addressed them and said, ‘Why do you seek the living with the dead? Why do you mourn the incorruptible as though he were in corruption? Go, proclaim it to his Disciples.

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

A Pascha of delight, Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha, an all-venerable Pascha has dawned for us, Pascha. Let us embrace one another with joy. O Pascha, ransom from sorrow! Today Christ shone forth from a tomb as from a bridal chamber, and filled the women with joy, saying, ‘Proclaim it to the Apostles’.

My new column on U.S.-British ties for The Week is now online.

There will be no blogging until after Pascha. I wish everyone a happy and peaceful Easter.

When the glorious disciples were enlightened at the washing of their feet before the supper, the impious Judas was darkened by the disease of avarice, and to the lawless judges he betrayed You, the Righteous Judge. Behold, this man because of avarice hanged himself. Flee from the insatiable desire which dared such things against the Master! O Lord Who deals righteously with all, glory to You!

It would probably be better just to ignore Barone’s latest article, but his argument contains so many dubious and fantastical claims that it is useful as an example of how short Republican memories are and how stupid mainstream conservative pundits must think their audience is. One of the most incredible claims is one of Barone’s most important:

The Progressives have always assumed that people needed safety nets and would welcome dependence on government. The public’s clear rejection of the Democratic health care bills has shown that this assumption was unwarranted. Americans today prefer independence to dependence on government, just as they did 200 years ago [bold mine-DL].

If we have found out anything over the last few months, it is that the public’s views on health care and health care legislation in particular are anything but clear. For every survey showing a narrow majority declaring the bill to be a “bad thing,” there is another survey that shows real opposition to the bill is closer to 40% of the population (i.e., the base of the opposition party). The polling numbers fluctuate depending on the phrasing and timing of the questions, and the reasons for opposition are many and varied. There has been no “clear public rejection” as of yet. Much of the opposition to health care legislation has came from Republican Medicare defenders and voters 65+ who overwhelmingly oppose the bill because the new legislation reduced Medicare payments. Real entitlement reform is unthinkable and Paul Ryan’s proposed budget is politically radioactive (and totally unacceptable to his own party leaders) because most Americans are quite satisfied with significant dependence on government. This health care bill is a bad bill in part because it exacerbates and deepens this problem. The trouble is that there are scant few heirs of the Founders out there, and the more you press modern Americans you will find that hardly any of them actually believe that the federal government should be as limited, small and relatively weak as all of the Founders believed it should be.

In the last ten years, it has been the party of insolvency, the Republican Party, that has been offering up free lunches and government expansion: new entitlements and lower taxes. I won’t pretend that the Democratic Party is really any more fiscally responsible, because it is not, but it is important to understand that the discontent the bill is causing does not derive on the whole from hostility to bigger government as such. The political problem is that the new legislation will impose some costs instead of providing subsidies that will be paid for entirely by the next generation. To the extent that the health care bill is unpopular, it is mostly unpopular because it theoretically deprives people of benefits from the government they are used to receiving. What we are more likely to see is the restoration of all cuts under tremendous pressure from the constituencies that depend on them.

I should also object to Barone’s retrojection of 20th century political issues onto the late eighteenth century. Liberty and independence were watchwords of the revolutionary and early republican period, and there was a strong Country political tradition that stressed the importance of economic independence as the basis for political liberty and constitutional government. This was the tradition Jefferson relied on as he articulated his agrarian republican theory, which so many supposed defenders of American identity mock and scorn, and it had as much to do with opposing concentrated private wealth as it had to do with opposing concentrated power in government. On the whole, the Republican Party has opposed and repudiated this tradition for its entire history, and it is only a series of historical accidents that have led any sympathizers with this tradition to align themselves with this party in recent decades.

The struggle between the Crown and the patriot rebels was not concerned with dependence on the state of the kind we debate today. Obviously, the independence sought by the rebels was that of would-be sovereign states separating themselves from the existing polity. The points of contention were encroachments of Parliament against the rights of colonial legislatures, the imposition of taxes without the consent of those legislatures, and an unwillingness on the part of colonials to shoulder part of the tax burden needed by the British state for funding the colonies’ common defense. It was a matter of retaining political prerogatives and chartered rights guaranteed to all Englishmen. As attractive as a simplistic scheme of anti-statist/statist can be, this completely misrepresents the nature of the struggle before and during our War for Independence.

What is more, the Founders did not “stand for the expansion of liberty,” but obviously were committed to the preservation of existing chartered liberties. From their perspective, there was no question of expanding liberty. The issue was one of protecting what liberty they had against the encroachments of Crown and Parliament. In many respects, they would have agreed with the Burkean idea that liberty had to be limited in order to be possessed. Their conception of liberty was on the whole a negative one. They aimed to limit and constrain what the government could do, and constructed a political structure that they hoped would do that. As many Antifederalists warned at the time, the restrictions and checks on government power would prove to be illusory and ineffective. In any case, for the Founders there was no notion of “expanding liberty.” That suggests a kind of activism and an idea of positive liberty that would have made much more sense to later Progressives. Indeed, many mainstream conservatives today speak of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” that would only make sense in light of a Progressive interpretation of American principles.

It is all very well to look to the Founders for guidance and argue that we should adhere strictly to the constitutional limits they envisioned for the federal government, but it is useless to pretend that political opposition fueled by dependence on existing entitlements and partisan attachment to an historically centralizing party that normally favors the interests of concentrated wealth have anything to do with fidelity to the ideas of the Founders.

If the West is going to pursue sanctions then those sanctions should be strong enough to actually compel behavior. Otherwise, war proponents will simply reject them entirely and instead offer the choice of containment or war (and guess which option they think will be more palatable for the American public).

I can appreciate Obama’s incrementalism in dealing with China, but he’s handing his political rivals their 2010 (and perhaps even 2012) message on Iran. ~Kevin Sullivan

This is why I remain firmly opposed to new sanctions on Iran, and it is why I think it has always been a mistake for the administration to focus its diplomatic efforts on the implementation of a new sanctions regime. As Kevin correctly notes, war proponents will find whatever sanctions regime the administration cobbles together to be inadequate and call for military action, because they are proponents of war with Iran. This would have been their response even if the administration had somehow managed to win over other major and rising powers to support “crippling” sanctions. Whatever deal the administration made to get other states on board for any round of sanctions, it would be too much of a compromise for these hawks to accept.

This is why the administration should never have gone down the path of pursuing new sanctions: the administration has committed itself to a policy mechanism that will not yield the results it wants. There is no sanctions regime short of embargoes that would be seen as acts of war that could conceivably compel Iran to act as Washington wishes, and an embargo could easily lead to war anyway. The pursuit of sanctions will not only open the door to a hawkish Republican political challenge, which is forthcoming no matter what Obama does, but which will also contribute to the constant pressure for escalation against Iran regardless of who occupies the Oval Office after Obama’s first term ends. We have heard it all before: sanctions have been tried and they failed, and now we have no choice but to attack to prevent a “growing and gathering” threat, etc.

Of course, there is always the choice of accepting what cannot be prevented, but the administration is horrifed by the thought of being the ones in charge when Iran acquires a nuclear weapon (even though Iran is probably far away from acquiring one) and fears the political attacks that will follow if it “fails” to prevent the inevitable. All of these troubles stem from the original mistake of making the elimination or severe limitation of Iran’s nuclear program the objective of U.S. Iran policy, and instead of correcting this error upon entering office Obama redoubled our pursuit of this objective. It may be that the administration is now recognizing the degree of international indifference to the Iranian “threat” and coming to understand the impracticality and risks of imposing “crippling” sanctions. Now that it has come this far, it has trapped itself in a position in which it will not compel any change in Iranian behavior, and it will be mocked at home for its “weak appeasement” while simultaneously destroying whatever chance there was of some sustained engagement.