Like Greg Scoblete, I am, well, skeptical that Cameron’s Euroskepticism will have much of an effect on the “special” relationship between the U.S. and Britain. All of this assumes that Cameron can actually win enough seats to form a government, which is far less likely today than it was six months ago, but if he were to become Prime Minister I doubt Euroskepticism would figure very prominently in how he governed. Even so, one of the common themes in a lot of Tory Euroskeptic rhetoric is that Britain should align itself more and more closely with the United States and keep its distance from Europe. This view has an intelligent, learned exponent in John Redwood and a ridiculous, ideological one in Daniel Hannan. Regardless, the most reliably “pro-American” Tories are typically the biggest Euroskeptics, and Europhile Tories tend to be more critical of U.S. policy. The question is not whether a Euroskeptic-led Britain will be “relevant” or valuable to the United States (there is far more to the relationship that London’s ability to act as go-between with other Europeans), but whether the British electorate will be satisfied with a foreign policy that tilts more towards Washington than towards Brussels in ways that most British voters don’t like and which seems to get Britain nothing in exchange.

Some years back, Cameron hinted at being more independent of the United States’ line on foreign policy. This may have been partly just political posturing to identify then-PM Blair as a reflexive supporter of Washington’s positions no matter what it cost Britain. The presence of Hague as shadow foreign secretary suggests that the so-called “Love, Actually moments” inner circle Cameroons once hoped for will not materialize. Nonetheless, I think Cameron’s Euroskepticism is exaggerated. Typically, it has been the Tory modernizers who have been the most reliable Europhiles, and my guess is that Cameron will gradually drift in this direction over time. That could lead to a greater willingness to criticize and even oppose the United States on certain issues, but those tensions might be mitigated as long as the administration in Washington is as interested in green issues and climate change regulations as Cameron most likely will be.

Come to think of it, from the British perspective there is not much of a “special” relationship to endanger. Antiwar Labourites already saw this when adamant British support for every Bush administration folly was repaid with nothing. After the Falklands quarrel, Britons across the spectrum have discovered that British solidarity and loyalty win Britain no American consideration or aid in supporting its rights and claims elsewhere in the world. Were the bogus “special” relationship brought to an end and a healthy bilateral relationship based on shared interests and reciprocity allowed to take its place, Cameron might be able to stake out a position that affirms ties with Washington without identifying himself completely with the administration. If a British government could pursue a foreign policy that served British interests first and foremost, rather than subordinating those interests to whatever Washington requires, that might permit a more balanced pursuit of those same interests in its dealings with Europe.

Marco Rubio declared at CPAC that we were witnessing the “single greatest pushback in American history.”  So, how’s the pushback coming?  Not so well:

This confirms what I was finding in the poll I discussed yesterday.  Overall majority opposition to this health care legislation does not necessarily translate into a backlash against the party that passed the bill, because many of the bill’s opponents are unhappy with some of the elements but ultimately they prefer something over nothing.  Even after we acknowledge that Gallup is surveying adults rather than likely voters, and bearing in mind that public opinion can be changed and shaped by dedicated propaganda campaigns, there is no evidence of the intense opposition of the majority that Republican politicians and conservative pundits refer to all the time. 

The “center-right nation” claim with which Republicans console themselves at night is a myth.  If the “center-right” consists of the people who are opposed to greater government intervention in the health care sector, the “center-right” would seem to be around 40% of the population.  That means that this is not really a “center-right nation,” at least as far as it concerns the role of government in the economy according to conventional American definitions of right and left.  There probably are some issues where a “center-right” position really does command a majority of the public’s support, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them.  

When 50% of respondents say that they are pleased or enthusiastic about some high-profile, controversial thing the government has done, this is not normally the prologue to political annihilation for the people in charge of the government in that year’s election.

Alex Massie points out that Mitt Romney continues to be utterly unprincipled. This has become so common and unremarkable that the only thing that should get Romney any attention is when he actually stays true to a position for longer than a couple of years. Romney has taken up the banner of repealing a bill closely modeled on the bill he signed into law. One could say that there are many cynical, opportunistic politicians willing to adopt whatever position works to their advantage. How is Romney any different? Well, he has become a pro-repeal leader while continuing to insist that the state health care bill he signed was good and necessary. So he has continued to advance the completely untenable Scott Brown position: we will never yield in our opposition to the outrageously irresponsible and unaffordable federal bill, and we will defend the outrageously irresponsible and unaffordable Massachusetts bill to the death!

Any ordinary opportunist would lamely try to say that he had been misled about the the original measure (see any prominent liberal hawk on the Iraq war resolution for that), or that new information had since come to light that changed his mind, or he could act like Harold Ford and openly abandon earlier positions out of political desperation. But Mitt Romney is no ordinary opportunist. He will completely abandon every position he held when it helped him gain power in Massachusetts, but at the same time he wants credit for his successful record of reform and his technocratic expertise in solving major problems. He wants to be considered a serious, mainstream part of the political class, and so he endorsed the TARP during the financial crisis, but he also wants to throw red meat to the rank-and-file and has since denounced the mismanagement of the TARP.

Just as he wants credit for what he claims are the good aspects of TARP while taking no responsibility for the abuses that inevitably grew out of the TARP he supported, he wants credit as a health care reformer and as a stalwart opponent of the Democratic health care legislation that copies the most significant legislation he ever signed while governor. To use Romney’s TARP formulation, Governor Romney’s health care reform was a great success, but President Obama’s health care reform was a disastrous blunder the likes of which we have rarely seen. One of these claims is probably true for both, but either way Romney loses. Either he helped undermine the fiscal health of Massachusetts, or he is now opposed to the substance of similar federal reforms purely because of political expedience on the national level. If the former is true, he should never be entrusted with power again, and if it is the latter he cannot be trusted.

So it isn’t really true that Romney disavows the state health care bill he signed. He just desperately wants people to think that there is some substantial difference between the legislation he signed and has praised ever since and the legislation he has been denouncing.

Americans have witnessed, in the last days, an ugly and extraordinary display of how the practice of democracy can so often overwhelm its theory: They saw, first, how those who claim an exalted moral stature for health-care reform made a naked attempt to dodge a basic constitutional requirement for the passing of a bill. The subversion of the Constitution was abandoned when it became clear that the Supreme Court would not put up with a law that had been “deemed” to have passed. ~Tunku Varadarajan

I do love it when conventional conservatives and Republicans become outraged by the unconstitutionality of something. In recent years, it has become so rare that I had almost forgotten what it looked like. As with most people’s concerns on this score, their constitutional concerns are almost entirely conditional and situational. I distinctly remember when Republican members of the Senate wanted people to believe that filibustering judicial nominees was unconstitutional, when the filibuster is a rule set up by the Senate and for Senate as the Constitution empowers the Senate to do. Now that they are in the minority and desperately cling to their ability to filibuster, we don’t hear about the evils of the filibuster any more.

As I understand it, “deem and pass” was perfectly legal in the past, much to the consternation of the Democrats when they were in the minority, and it is only in approximately the last 14 months that it has become an unconstitutional affront to all right-thinking people. In the end, it was not any threat of the legislation being overturned by the Court that prevented the majority from pursuing this tactic. As it happened, they did not need the parliamentary trick to pass the bill. Now what you have is a bill passed by a clear majority of the House, whose members were elected by a majority of the people in the previous election partly on the promise that those members would pass health care legislation during this Congress. This is supposed to be a display of ugly practice overwhelming pristine theory? Of all the arguments against health care legislation, the weakest and most easily refuted has always been that this is not what the majority of the people wanted. What the majority wants may be a terrible idea, what the majority wants may not be constitutional, but it is beyond silly to insist that the majority did not want it and actually cannot wait to get rid of it.

It is even more amusing when these new champions of the Constitution also wrap themselves in the mantle of the people’s tribune. Of course, democracy, even indirect democracy, does not necessarily produce good or constitutional legislation. I assume Varadarajan was equally put out in 2003 when he saw “the legislative souk at its most squalid” during the passage of Medicare Part D. It would be quite shocking if that were not the case! All things considered, I think opposing the bill was the correct thing to do, but as we are probably going to find out it was not actually the popular thing to do. Having lost the last two elections to the party that favors health care legislation, Republicans are in an awfully odd position when they claim that the vote yesterday represented a perversion or distortion of democracy. For good or ill (and I think mostly ill), the American public will likely now receive some significant part of what they voted for, whether or not they fully understand the implications. Elections do have consequences, and this bill is one of them. I hope all the Iraq war supporters on the right are pleased with what they have wrought. These Democratic majorities and the Obama Presidency would have been inconceivable had the previous administration not taken the country to war in Iraq and destroyed their party in the process.

Often enough, when people use the word unconstitutional they really mean that something is inconvenient, unwelcome, annoying or otherwise objectionable. The federal government does any number of things it is not empowered to do by the Constitution. I should think this is obvious. It exceeds the limits that were put on it on a regular basis in dozens of ways every day. This is why Ron Paul votes against pretty much everything that comes up for a vote in the House. The constitutionality of legislation is something that he takes seriously in every case, which is why he casts so many nays on the losing side of lopsided votes. Both major parties are filled with people who ignore unconstitutional government powers when they serve the constituencies and interests that back their party, and they become deeply offended when the other party’s constituencies and interests are being served in the same way.

Late last night I was writing a fairly dyspeptic post on the shamelessness and contradictions of Obama’s mainstream Republican foreign policy critics. This was provoked by some of the early complaints that Obama had postponed his trip to Indonesia and Australia to oversee the final stages of the health care voting. After I finished, I looked it over and decided to delete it. It occurred to me that I must have been overreacting. Surely his mainstream Republican critics would not fixate on the postponed trips as anything meaningful!

Then Daniel Blumenthal chimed in, and it became clear that I should have kept the post much as it was. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it from the trash. Here were the main paragraphs:

It is hardly optimal to delay scheduled foreign visits to secure passage of domestic legislation, but the people who are complaining about this now would have said that Obama was ignoring America’s problems and jaunting off to foreign locales if he had gone as scheduled. Had he gone, and had the health care bill failed in the House, he would be widely mocked on the right as a failed, ineffective President who ran away on the eve of the most important vote of his Presidency to date. Now that he has stayed and apparently succeeded in advancing the centerpiece of his domestic agenda in the face of strong resistance, he will be attacked for disrespecting and ignoring important allies abroad. Having ridiculed him for failing to lead, his opponents will declare that he has led us all astray. Perhaps he has, but would you trust his reflexive, automatic critics to tell you the truth? Having derided him for his inability to set priorities, they will attack him for having made the most important part of his domestic agenda into the top priority for the moment.

Of course, had Obama gone to Indonesia and Australia, we would have heard about the “post-American” President indifferent to the troubles of his countrymen. His opponents would say that he was eagerly looking for a new occasion to criticize the United States. We know we would have heard this because we already heard it when he went to Copenhagen to make an appeal to Chicago’s Olympic bid (“why is he neglecting the people’s business?”), and then when that bid failed (as anyone paying any attention knew it would) he was blamed for the supposed national humiliation this involved. Never mind that these would be many of the same people who insisted during his intense year of foreign policy engagement and foreign travel thathe did not care very much about foreign policy and wasn’t interested in it. A few seconds before his critics said that, they claimed that he was preoccupied with traveling abroad and engaging in his so-called “apology tour,” which incidentally never took place. These people are utterly shameless.

Blumenthal’s post is almost the distilled essence of the nonsense I’m describing, complete with whining about the inadequacy of Pentagon funding. That would be the same funding that has been steadily increasing since Obama took office and which was exempted from the announced spending freeze.

This year Obama has handed Republicans a one-item Contract with America, an item a majority of the public supports–opposition to, and therefore repeal of, Obamacare. ~Bill Kristol

Well, it is easier to remember than having to recite the different items House Republicans pledged to vote on once they were in the majority. It might be worth noting at this point that a very small percentage of the electorate was even aware of the Contract in 1994, and it mattered to even fewer voters. Official mythology notwithstanding, the Contract with America was not a major factor in the election outcome sixteen years ago. Much of it involved transparency and eliminating waste, which are were all very well and good but which also had almost nothing to do with Republican success in that election.

Proposing the repeal of a major piece of domestic legislation would probably have a much bigger impact one way or the other. The mistake Kristol makes here is that he takes the topline result showing such-and-such a percentage is opposed to the Senate bill, and then he simply declares that this is a pro-repeal constituency. What we find when we look more closely at recent polling on the subject is that there is no majority, much less an overwhelming one, that would want to return to the status quo. After all, that is what a repeal movement would have to be working towards. According to the last NBC/WSJ poll conducted earlier this month, 48% said that “Barack Obama’s health care plan” was a “bad idea” and just 36% said it was a “good idea.” In the same poll, 46% said that it would still be better to pass the current plan and only 45% wanted to keep things as they are.

The electoral implications are murky at best. 34% of respondents would be less likely to vote for a representative if he voted with the GOP against the bill, and 31% would be more likely, but 37% would be more likely to vote for a pro-repeal candidate as opposeds to the 33% who would be less likely. So voting against the bill in Congress may be a net negative for actual members of Congress, but campaigning for repeal seems to offer a small advantage. There does not seem to be much obvious advantage one way or the other. What we see here is that dedicated, ideological partisans are going to vote the way we would expect them to vote, and a large portion of the electorate claims to be unmoved by a politician’s position on the health care bill.

If the bill failed to pass, 47% said that Congress should immediately resume work on health care legislation, and 23% favored doing this within the next couple of years. What Republicans might profitably do is to try to claim to be the party in favor of reforming a bill that contains one or more items that many people dislike. This lacks the grandiosity and drama of pushing for total repeal, but it would make it possible for them to channel the unpopularity of certain elements in the bill into support for altering the legislation.

The reality is that the constituency for repeal makes up something like 25-30% of the electorate. These are the people who for various reasons think it is simply unnecessary or wrong for the government to intervene any more than it already does in the health care market. These are the people who think that there should be no health care legislation. By and large, they are rank-and-file Republicans and the core of the party’s base. They are used to being whipped up in opposition to an entire program, piece of legislation or judicial ruling and promised abolition, repeal or overturning. The party never delivers on these things. For one thing, it doesn’t have to, because the mere promise that it will pursue them later keeps the voters coming back. Second, the party sees no advantage in identifying itself completely with its most ideological supporters, who have already proven that they will never abandon it no matter what it does. Finally, there is too much risk of alienating the rest of the public in the process.

After years and decades working to build a substantial Republican majority in both houses, most of these voters typically get little or nothing for all of their time and work, because the party does not actually represent the concrete interests of most of its voters, and then the discredited leadership that has misled them for years issues a rallying cry to give Republicans more power yet again. Frankly, health care repeal is another one of these political fantasies Republican and conservative leaders use to keep their supporters engaged and intent on turning out to vote. “Just keep voting Republican, and any day now we will repeal that awful health care bill…” Obviously, the party will have an incentive to reap the electoral rewards of whipping up the base while putting off repeal for as long as possible. Proposing repeal without delivering it will keep the party’s supporters angry and mobilized, and the repeated disappointment of their expectations will actually lock them into supporting the GOP ever more reliably. In the meantime, the rest of the electorate adjusts and accommodates itself to the new entitlement, and repeal goes in a fairly short time from being a far-fetched but practical position to something that no elected representative from a competitive district would ever advocate.

James Joyner provides another explanation why opposition to this bill is not going to translate into a straightforward repeal movement:

[T]he problem for a Repeal movement is that the anti-HCR coalition is one of exceedingly strange bedfellows, ranging from principled opposition to further government involvement in the system, Progressives who insist on the public option, fair-minded types who don’t like the parliamentary tricks involved, and those who intensely dislike one or more parts of the current proposal. Once a bill is passed, many of those people will either melt away or start work on further socializing our health care system.

Meanwhile, many of the problems the bill could create are pushed off into the future by several years by design. Several popular changes are front-loaded and take effect as soon as the bill is signed into law. Discontent with the bill will come later as all of its measures take effect after the repeal strategy has been tried and found electorally lacking.

This is what allows historic legislation to become historic — it achieves broad support, is passed without parliamentary tricks, and becomes the broadly accepted law of the land. Tomorrow’s vote — even if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi squeezes out 216 Democrats to pass the legislation — will not be historic. It will not “end” a century-long struggle over health care. The issue will be revisited in November 2010 and in the next Congress and in November 2012.

And I predict the great majority of what passes tomorrow — if it does, and that’s by no means a given — will never become settled law or public policy. Instead, its passage will intensify a great debate over the size and scope of government that could well result in public policy, in health care and other areas, moving, in the coming years, in the opposite direction. ~Bill Kristol

One might note at this point that Kristol has an unusually bad record of predicting things, and he has probably just added to his already extensive list of wrong guesses. One of the major problems we face as a nation is the complete inability to dismantle an entitlement once it is established. Every entitlement typically creates a constituency that benefits from it and is forever dedicated to its defense. The most electorally significant resistance to the current legislation has come from Medicare loyalists who wish to preserve it just as it is, and it may be that even this is not enough. While Republicans have been able to tap into the fear that Medicare will have to be cut, a repeal effort will tap into a much smaller electoral base that never wanted health care legislation of any kind passed.

A better argument against comparing the health care bill with the Civil Rights Act is that from a liberal perspective the latter was the correction of a systematic injustice being done to a large number of citizens. As its supporters saw it, it was an attempt to secure civil rights that these citizens should have had all along. While some progressives may see health care in similar terms, there really is a major difference in legislating to end state-sanctioned denial or curtailment of civil rights for some citizens and creating federal legislation that effectively grants a right that a large portion of the country doesn’t think exists for anyone.

Large-scale change naturally provokes anxiety, uncertainty, fear and resistance, which is inevitable and as it should be. It does not follow that the later backlash against large-scale change will be great enough to undo the change. The Medicare prescription drug benefit was not passed by large margins in the House, and its eventual passage was the product of some significant arm-twisting, maneuvering and vote-buying. It was also unfunded and therefore incredibly fiscally irresponsible! It was phenomenally bad policy! That doesn’t mean that there has been a groundswell of outraged voters ready to support its repeal. As far as I know, no one on the mainstream right, least of all the editor of the magazine that once championed big-government conservatism, has even proposed repealing it. After all, it is their monstrosity. It has become part of the structure of our unsustainable, disastrous entitlement system, and no politician with any self-preservation instinct would so much as suggest eliminating a benefit that millions of likely voters enjoy receiving.

Kristol’s discussion of the Civil Rights Act is quite amusing. He mentions that it received substantial support from both parties, but seems disinclined to acknowledge the ideological diversity that used to exist in both major parties. To oversimplify a bit, conservative and Southern Democrats and some conservative Republicans voted against the Act, while Northern liberals and moderate-to-progressive Republicans voted for it. There were significantly more of the latter. Obviously, there was enormous dissatisfaction with the passage of the Act among Southern Democrats and many conservatives generally, and this led to a significant flight of Southern Democrats to the GOP banner, at least as far as presidential elections were concerned, that was followed in the last twenty years by a movement of Southern Democrats towards Republican candidates for Congress as well. There was tremendous backlash to and resistance against the Act and its implementation. Everyone knows this. Despite the backlash and resistance, there has been no successful movement for its repeal. Indeed, were such a movement ever to emerge we can be fairly sure that Bill Kristol and his allies would be among the first to condemn it. Since the above-mentioned realignment, the parties have tended to become much more ideologically uniform, which has made debates over large-scale social legislation into much more straightforwardly partisan struggles. One could no more have broad bipartisan support for major pieces of legislation today than one could summon up the old traditions of Congressional comity and bipartisan cooperation. These were products of an era when ideological and partisan lines matched up much less frequently.

Of course, it could be that health care legislation will not create a big enough entitlement that benefits enough people to secure it against the inevitable backlash, and it could impose enough costs on other blocs of voters that they would react strongly against it and support a repeal movement. However, whether or not this will happen is tied up with the substance and effects of the legislation, which Kristol does not bother to discuss at all. He is concerned entirely with process and the size of the majorities in Congress that support the bill. These tell us nothing about the nature or extent of the political backlash to the legislation, and they also tell us nothing about the effectiveness of that backlash in repealing the measures contained in the legislation.

There will be little or no blogging until at least Sunday, as I will be traveling to a conference today and will be attending panels for the rest of the week.

Matt Steinglass at Democracy in America makes a good contribution to the debate over Iraq war movies:

No doubt there were many supporters of America’s war in Vietnam who found the 1974 documentary masterpiece “Hearts and Minds” unwatchable left-wing propaganda, who hated “M*A*S*H” and “Apocalypse Now”.

This is related to what I was saying in twoprevious posts. It is unlikely that making films about highly controversial, polarizing wars is going to be anything other than polarizing for both supporters and opponents of the war. It is even more unlikely that there are going to be filmmakers interested in making a film about a war they opposed in such a way that it treats architects of the war sympathetically. If the war in question is still going on, and the war’s loudest supporters are engaging in a lot of triumphalist rhetoric about how they were right all along, that is hardly the time when one can expect antiwar filmmakers to investigate the complex motivations of the war’s architects.

There are some brilliant war movies and brilliant movies set during wartime that are heavily politicized and one-sided in their treatment of the war. Some of the best war movies are not at all sympathetic to the war they are depicting or the leaders responsible for the war. These movies nonetheless explore the humanity of the characters, usually the soldiers fighting in the war, extremely well. Grand Illusion and All Quiet on the Western Front are obvious choices, but for me the finest war movie, and my favorite film of all time, has to be Breaker Morant.

Breaker Morant is not entirely an anti-British movie, but it is directed by Bruce Beresford, an Australian director whose work conveys his anger at what the Empire required of and did to Australians (see also Gallipoli). Despite being set during a completely unjust, imperialist war against the Afrikaner republics, it does not try to valorize the Boers. Indeed, it works very hard at avoiding valorization of any kind. Breaker Morant certainly makes no pretense that the conquest of the republics was anything other than a seizure of land and resources, and near the end Harry Morant pronounced the entire enterprise a “bad cause.” It presents Lord Kitchener as no more and no less than what he was: a British imperialist and military officer who put the concerns of high politics above ethical considerations. The film portrays very powerfully how men in the ranks will be used and cast aside as it suits the government they serve, and it shows how there will often be no accountability for higher-ups for the excesses dictated by the policies ordinary soldiers are forced to carry out. There is certainly no clean divide between good and evil in the way it depicts the war, but it doesn’t pretend that the war was anything other than a destructive and wasteful disaster that didn’t have to happen.

Last week I observed that Obama’s real political problem was not the alienation of white men and white independents as some accounts would have it, but rather the disaffection of core Democratic constituencies, which now give Obama dramatically lower approval ratings than they gave him electoral support. Perhaps the administration saw the same thing and went ahead with a final push for health care legislation on the gamble that this would do more to energize their own people than it would provoke resistance. Perhaps if Congress does produce some bill in the near future that gamble will pay off, but in the meantime Obama continues losing ground with self-described liberals.

In 2008, according to CNN’s exit polling 89% of liberals voted for Obama, and now just 73% approve. 67% of those who rarely or never attend church voted for Obama, and now just 52% approve. According to Gallup, conservative approval continues to be higher (27%) than Obama’s share of the conservative vote (20%), and moderate support remains fairly steady. Obama has lost a little ground with Republicans in recent weeks, but this comes entirely from liberal and moderate Republicans (down five points from last week), and the 12% approval is higher than Obama’s share of the Republican vote (9%). His overall approval among Democrats has remained steady over the last couple of months because approval gains among conservative Democrats (up eight points to 75%) keep offsetting losses among liberal Democrats (down five points to 84% this week).

Even when we look at results from the crosstabs of a late February Rasmussen poll of likely voters, we find the same thing. Conservative likely voters are no more inclined to approve of Obama (19%) than conservatives were inclined to vote for him (20%), but he receives just 82% from liberal likely voters, (vs. 89%) 54% from 18-29 year old LVs (vs. 66%), 51% from women LVs (vs. 56%), and 80% from Democrat LVs (vs. 89%). It is difficult to look at this data and conclude that Obama’s political problem has been his lack of “centrism.”