Last week, Michael Barone compared the GOP win in Massachusetts to the 1974 special election to fill Gerald Ford’s House seat in Michigan, which was at least an interesting comparison, but now he has concluded that this is another 1974. In January 1974, Nixon’s approval rating had fallen to 23%. By the time of the midterms, Ford’s approval was still 47% even after the pardon, but the damage to the party had been done. Lawbreaking, scandal, cover-up and disgrace dragged the GOP down. That is what the bottom falling out looks like. It should be pretty easy to remember what it looks like, because this is also what happened to Republicans in Congress for the last two elections.

This analysis of the relationship between presidential approval and midterm House losses is useful, but it can also be misleading. It includes the ’74 loss among those elections when presidential approval is under 50% when determining the average number of House seats lost. Technically, this is correct, because Ford was President by then, but the reason for the ’74 blowout was obviously the unpopularity of Nixon and the association of the party with Nixon. 1974 was also the sixth-year midterm election in the second term of a deeply unpopular President, which would seem to make it nothing like this upcoming midterms.

Even the GOP under a very unpopular Bush during the worst stage of a very unpopular war did not lose more than 30 seats in one cycle. Thanks to more precise methods of drawing up gerrymandered districts, incumbents have become harder to defeat over the last few decades. This is why the GOP didn’t lose more than 30 seats in either of the last two elections despite continuing to embrace one of the three most unpopular Presidents of the last century. 2006 wasn’t another 1974, either, and there were many more reasons to think that it would have been that bad for Republicans. So Barone’s comparison with 1974 seems wrong in several ways.

According to the RCP average, Obama’s rating is currently 48.7/46.8, which is higher than Reagan’s was at a comparable point. So how can Barone conclude that Obama’s party is about to experience a 1974-style repudiation? Judging from his earlier article, he has concluded that the Massachusetts election has great meaning:

The Republican victory in the current Democratic heartland of Massachusetts sends the message that Americans are repelled by Barack Obama’s big-government programs, backroom deals and oversolicitude for those who want to destroy us.

This is simply speculation. Not only does Barone present no evidence that this is why Massachusetts voters backed Brown, but there is good reason to think that the average Obama/Brown voter is not repelled by what Obama is doing. Of course, McCain/Brown voters are repelled, which is why they didn’t vote for Obama in the first place. Indeed, Obama voters who supported Brown may have cast their ballots without intending to send any message to Obama. According to that Post poll, he was not a factor in the decisions of half of Brown’s voters. To the extent that Obama/Brown voters were repelled, it seems to have been “dealmaking” and a lack of transparency that offended many of them. While the comparison with Ford’s House seat thirty-six years ago catches our attention, the reasons for the two losses are very different.

The GOP was voted out of power a little over three years ago, and it was battered again during a presidential election in which the opposing candidate won more than 50% of the vote. Is there any precedent for a party that has gone through two terrible elections, lost its majorities in both houses in one of them and then rallies to win back control of one or both houses in the third? There is one that I can find, and that was 1954, but the GOP majority going into those midterms was eight seats, not seventy-eight as the Democratic majority is today. Eisenhower managed to bring the GOP into the majority very briefly and by a narrow margin, so it only took a modest, normal midterm correction for the Democrats to win back the majority. For the same thing to happen this year, we would have to see an unprecedented swing in public sentiment towards the GOP after the public had barely finished punishing them.

Has a presidential party lost its majority two years after their President won with more than 50% of the vote? Again, the only example I can find is Eisenhower, who won a landslide victory that was just enough to create a slim Republican majority that vanished two years later. I cannot find any precedent for the immediate repudiation of a presidential party with such large majorities in the first term of a President who won the majority of the popular vote. It simply doesn’t happen. If the majorities were considerably smaller, Democratic loss of control might be conceivable, but they have too much of a cushion that they have built up over the last two cycles.

Update: Checking more closely, I see that there is another example of a President winning over 50% of the vote and then losing the House in the next election. The last time that happened was in 1910 when the Democrats took control of the House after Taft’s 1908 victory over Bryan. An important difference between now and then is that the Democrats were coming off of a number of electoral defeats dating back to 1900, and Republicans had held an uninterrupted majority in the House since 1894.

Ross:

But what was already an unprecedentedly dreadful climate for the Democrats is looking darker by the day. If unemployment is still around 10 percent this November, it’s difficult to see how they hold the House; if unemployment stays at 9 percent into 2012, it’s very difficult to see how Barack Obama wins re-election. I stand by my contention that ideology as well as the woeful economy is dragging the Democrats down, but there does come a point where only the economy matters: Obama could spend the next three years channeling Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Silent Cal, and he still isn’t going to get re-elected if 9 percent of the country is out of work.

Was it an “unprecedentedly dreadful climate”? Is it growing darker? 1982 provides a precedent of a similarly dreadful political climate for the presidential party, so the current climate is not unprecedented. The ’81-’82 recession was actually more severe and damaging to the administration than this recession has been, but Reagan survived it. During the tail end of the recession, Reagan’s approval slumped well below where Obama’s approval stands today. Indeed, if Obama’s approval ever dipped as low as Reagan’s 1982 numbers, there would be a great deal of caterwauling that his political career was over. Reagan’s political opposition in Congress was much greater, and he lacked the majorities in Congress that Obama enjoys. It is true that the last Democratic President to have similar majorities was Carter, but Carter came into office with majorities that were built on top of pre-existing Democratic majorities. Obama has come into office very soon after Democrats regained power in Congress after over a decade in the minority. That has to make some difference in how the public judges the two parties and their fitness for running branches of government.

Obviously much depends on whether or not unemployment remains as high as it is, but not only did Reagan recover from the setbacks in the ’82 midterms amid similarly high unemployment, but he went on to win one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history two years later. Regardless of economic conditions, I would be very wary of assuming that the public will act in a certain way over two years from now. Much will depend on the quality of the candidate the GOP nominates, and just as much will depend on the perceived economic improvement between now and then that the incumbent will claim as his own.

Unemployment is at 10% right now, and it is quite easy to see how Democrats hold the House. As satisfying as a protest vote against the majority party will be, it is very doubtful that the public is ready to trust the GOP with any sort of responsibility in the federal government after the hash they made of things during their time in power. So long as there is measurable improvement in economic indicators, the GOP ought to be worried that it has reached its peak ten months too early.

Right now, lockstep GOP opposition to the stimulus bill appears to be on the side of public opinion, but if there is anything that we have seen over the last few months it is that public opinion is easily changeable depending on circumstances. If the delayed 2010 spending reduces unemployment, even temporarily, the opponents of the bill will be left scrambling for cover. Suddenly most of the people who have already declared the bill to be a waste of money could turn on a dime and a decide that the money was well-spent after all. If the public is ultimately results-oriented, as we keep hearing, any positive change in economic conditions is going to work against the opposition strategy of rejecting everything.

Having considered the prospects of Republicans’ winning the majority of House seats, I noticed that there is some discussion of whether the GOP can win a Senate majority. Marc Ambinder writes:

Democrats might lose the seats formerly occupied by Biden (DE), Obama (IL), Reid (NV), and they’ve lost the Kennedy seat. Beyond these nifty talking points, though, there’s not much of a case to me made just yet that Republicans can win eight seats.

This sounds about right, though I think this gives Mark Kirk more of a chance in Illinois than he actually has. Giannoulias will probably win the Democratic nomination, and he stands a very good chance of holding that seat for the Democrats. For the GOP to win an outright majority, they need nine more seats and Lieberman or ten more seats. Ambinder is right that an eight-seat pick-up is implausible, and anything more than that is simply fantasy. To add nine, that would require not only picking up North Dakota, Delaware, Nevada, Illinois, Colorado, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, which is at least conceivable, but also picking up Connecticut and Indiana (or California). Barring some unforeseen catastrophe for which the administration is responsible, it is no great risk to say that this is never going to happen.

There are three midterm elections in the last sixty years in which the party not in control of the White House picked up 8+ Senate seats: 1958 (16), 1986 (8) and 1994 (8). Two of these are sixth-year midterm results, and so are not necessarily comparable to the middle of Obama’s first term. I have covered why this year is not like 1994 for the House, but even if the Senate elections somehow produced the same result as in ’94 the GOP could not regain control of the Senate. To argue that the GOP can win a Senate majority, one would have to argue that the ’10 midterms are going to be even worse for the presidential party than 1994 was.

Rich Lowry is dreaming of another 1994. No doubt the announcement of another Democratic retirement in AR-01 is encouraging this kind of thinking, but the number of House Democratic retirements (now at 12) is not yet even remotely close to the number of 1994 retirements. There were 28 House Democratic retirements before those midterms, and these open seats accounted for more than half of the GOP’s gains that year. To be generous, let’s assume that the GOP can once again gain twice as many seats as there are Democratic retirements. That would mean Democratic losses of 24 seats, which would be a significant GOP gain and comparable to the ’82 losses for Republicans, but it would fall far short of winning the majority. The ’82 comparison seems reasonable, but it may be a stretch when we consider that Reagan’s average approval rating throughout 1982 was noticeably lower than Obama’s rating is today.

Even Obama’s overall approval rating is misleading in a way. As Alex Massie observed a few days ago, Obama’s approval is actually very positive in every region of the country except the South:

According to one recent poll the President is popular in most of the country. In the north-east, more than 80% of voters approve of his performance. In the midwest 62% of voters have a favourable view of Obama and so do 59% of voters in the west. Only the south bucks this trend. There, 67% of the electorate has an unfavourable view of the President.

Obviously, the South is a large region and makes up a significant part of the national population, so poor ratings in the South are far from irrelevant, but the number of vulnerable Democratic seats put in jeopardy by high disapproval ratings there is actually not very great. There are 12 vulnerable Southern seats currently held by Democrats, and only five of these are open seats. If we add in Southern Democratic seats rated as “likely Democratic” to this list, that adds just nine more.

Lowry:

The ’94 GOP sweep was possible because so many Democrats held naturally Republican ground, particularly in the South.

What Lowry does not take into account is that the current Republican House membership is built around the gains made in 1994. Much of the “naturally Republican ground” that the GOP gained in 1994 has remained solidly Republican ground ever since with few exceptions. There are simply far fewer Democratic seats in the South to be taken away, and many of those that remain are not going to fall as easily. 1994 saw Southern voters casting their Congressional ballots for the party they had been backing at the presidential level for decades. This is what solidified the so-called “Southern captivity” of the GOP. It is reasonable to expect that the GOP will pick off some of the few remaining Democratic seats in the region, but they have already consolidated control over so many of the South’s districts that there is not much more room to improve. What distinguishes this from Democratic success in 2006 picking off Republicans in New York, Pennsylvania and New England is that Democrats were positioned to expand their majority in every region of the country. If that poll is accurate, Obama is not unpopular in the rest of the country, which distinctly limits the GOP’s chances of adding to their numbers in the House.

Lowry also discusses 1994 without paying any attention to the presidential election that preceded it. After all, 1994 was not exactly a repeat of 1966. The GOP was not rebounding from a devastating blowout, but was benefiting from a number of factors that we have not seen since then. Clinton had won just a plurality of the popular vote two years earlier, an odd independent candidate had wrapped up a fifth of the vote that was disgusted with both parties, and the election was overwhelmingly driven by the public’s disaffection with the incumbent Bush. Southern voters swung to the GOP, where they have remained since then, and evangelical turnout increased to the level where it has stayed for 16 years. Added to this, depressed Democratic turnout and organization created by dissatisfaction with the failure of health care and the passage of NAFTA compounded these difficult conditions to create a once-in-a-generation result.

Another key, obvious difference with 1994 is that the Democrats have just won the last two cycles, which were repudiations of Bush and the Republican Party. Parties that have been roundly rejected by the public in two straight elections do not come roaring back to huge gains in both houses in the third cycle. Of course the opposition party will make gains in the midterms this year, because opposition parties almost always do, but talk of regaining the majority is ridiculous. Before 1994, Republicans had not made gains of 20+ seats in midterm House elections since 1966, and Democrats had become the seemingly permanent majority party in the House. Few could remember the last time the Republicans had been in the majority, and they had been there so briefly that there wasn’t much to remember anyway. Today, the memory is all too fresh, it is very negative, and it hasn’t faded nearly as much as party leaders need for a quick turnaround. The last time the GOP was in opposition to a Democratic President elected with more than 50% of the vote, they gained 15 House seats in 1978.

A lot of ink has been spilled since 9/11 trying to argue that bin Laden doesn’t really care about Palestine. But that’s always been silly — nobody knows what he “really” cares about, and it doesn’t especially matter since he talks about it a lot and presents it as a major part of his case against the United States. An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement surely would not convince bin Laden or al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements to give up their jihad — but it would take away one of their most potent arguments, and one of the few that actually resonates with mass publics. ~Marc Lynch

Via Andrew

One of the reasons there has been a consistent effort to deny that Bin Laden has any “real” interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that such an interest, sincere or not, suggests jihadist groups are fueled by U.S. and allied policies, or at least that they successfully exploit U.S. and allied policies for propaganda purposes. Washington would then be faced with at least one of two unpalatable truths. Either our policies are correct and necessary, but strategically disastrous in their effects on Arab and Muslim public opinion and jihadist recruiting, or they are and incorrect and unnecessary while also being strategically disastrous. Washington would then have to decide if it wants to live with perpetual, low-level conflict occasionally exploding into major military campaigns every decade, or if it wants to make enough policy changes (and push our allies to make similar changes) to reduce that conflict to a bare minimum.

For most of the last decade, our preference in and out of government has been to deny that U.S. and allied policies had anything to do with jihadist attacks and their ability to recruit and win sympathizers. This acknowledgement would be to “blame the victim,” so that even if it were the correct analysis it was politically incorrect to say it out loud. Instead we have been treated to a whole host of explanations for why jihadist violence exists and why it tends to be directed at the U.S. and our allies. The lamest of these has been rather popular, namely the claim that “they hate us for our freedom,” or modernity or secularism or whatever it is that the person making the argument finds worthwhile about the West and sees lacking in Muslim countries. Then, of course, there is the trusty appeal to the enemy’s insanity. Unlike us, they are not really rational, and so their actions cannot be explained by referring to anything so mundane and normal as political grievances.

Finally, there is the religious essentialist argument that jihadism is what Islam requires at its core, and therefore there is no way to weaken it without some dramatic transformation of the entire religion. This last argument has won more sympathizers because the people trying to challenge it inevitably go to the opposite extreme and simply ignore or dismiss past Islamic conquests as having nothing to do with Islam. If the essentialist argument really held up, however, Algerians would still be attacking France, Central Asian Muslims would still be warring against the Russians, and Saudis would have been attacking American targets long before the 1990s. We do see cases where separatist movements involving Muslim populations’ breaking away from non-Muslim states become intertwined with and dependent on jihadist groups, because these are the groups providing assistance and because they lend an extra religious and ideological veneer to the conflict that wins the separatists more sympathy abroad. As a general rule, when the cause of the political grievances has disappeared, violent resistance also disappears.

Anti-jihadists like to invoke one or more of these arguments. I am reminded again of a quote from George Kennan in which he described the flaws of the popular anticommunism of his day. His words apply to popular anti-jihadism almost perfectly:

They distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal. They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat. They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago [bold mine-DL]….And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.

Even when anti-jihadists are willing to acknowledge that Al Qaeda uses the grievances of Muslim populations in Iraq or Palestine for propaganda purposes, they will usually hold that changing policy or addressing those grievances to minimize the effectiveness of the propaganda is a form of capitulation. We are supposed to be engaged in “global counterinsurgency,” but we must take little or no account of the stated motivations of jihadists and the reasons why many millions more sympathize with their immediate goals while often deploring the means they use.

The Palestinian cause generates remarkable reactions in Western anti-jihadists. For most of them, it is an article of faith that Palestinians, or at least the organized factions that speak for them, are just about as bad and hostile to “the West” as Al Qaeda itself, and so there is no point in attempting to make any deal with them. As far as they are concerned, the correct response is to back Israeli policies to the hilt, and to throw up as many obstacles to anyone here at home who would attempt to use U.S. influence to change those policies. The Bush-era habit of lumping together every Islamic revolutionary, militant and terrorist group under some catch-all term of “Islamofascism” made it easier to lump all these causes together, which is oddly enough exactly what jihadists would like, and once they were lumped together they could be that much more easily demonized together.

On the whole, it seems that the more sympathetic to or at least understanding of Palestinian grievances a Western observer is, the less willing he is to endorse standard anti-jihadist arguments. Likewise, the more one agrees with anti-jihadist arguments, the more reflexively hostile to Palestinian grievances one tends to be. When most Western anti-jihadists hear that Bin Laden has tied the Christmas bomber attack to the cause of Palestine and specifically to the treatment of Gaza, or when they learn that the bomber who killed the seven CIA operatives claimed that the Gaza operation early last year had driven him to jihadism, the conclusion they draw is not that there was and is something wrong with U.S. and Israeli policies with respect to Palestinians. There is no sudden revelation that the inexcusable blockade of Gaza is politically unwise as well as morally wrong.

On the contrary, the support Bin Laden expresses for the Palestinian cause makes that cause seem to most Western anti-jihadists to be that much more indistinguishable from Al Qaeda’s goals and therefore that much more antithetical to Western interests. This might very well be another purpose in Bin Laden’s exploitation of Palestinian grievances: to harden Western audiences against Palestinian claims even more by linking his cause to Palestine, which will make Americans in particular less interested in supporting an administration that tries to exert pressure in support of a peace settlement. Bin Laden would like to appropriate the Palestinian cause, which Palestinians definitely do not want, and most Western anti-jihadists would like nothing more than to let him have it. So while Lynch is right that resolving this conflict would deprive jihadists of one of their great sources of effective propaganda, our own anti-jihadists will do their utmost to thwart all efforts to that end.

Eric Cantor, the Republican leader, told me yesterday that he assumed they would assume the majority in November. ~Mark Shields

If there is one thing from the last week that should deeply discourage Republicans, it is the realization that for all of the real successes in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, their party in Congress is still led by the same people who presided over two very large consecutive electoral defeats, most of those leaders were complicit in the bailouts their constituents hate, and these leaders continue to have no correct understanding of why they were voted out of the majority. That doesn’t mean that voters know or care about Boehner, Cantor, McConnell and Kyl themselves. Voters never knew or cared about Pelosi and Reid, either, and campaigns that tried to drag down effective Democratic candidates by attaching them to their leadership never worked. That said, party leaders in Congress are not irrelevant when the party is in the minority.

These are the people who are the functioning political leadership of the GOP, and they have been unusually unsuccessful in repairing the image of their party, crafting anything resembling a coherent opposition agenda and providing the public with any reason to believe that they would handle another turn in the majority with any competence. On top of it, if Cantor is any indication, they seem to be no better at analyzing the national political landscape. If Cantor actually assumes that the GOP will win back the House in November, he is engaged in wishful thinking or has simply spent too much time listening to flattering, unrealistic claims made by other Republicans.

Republicans would need to gain 40 seats to win the majority again, and that will give them the bare minimum of 218. At most, they might realistically net 13-16, and that is assuming that things continue to go their way. Even if every seat listed as “lean Democratic” by CQPolitics today fell to a Republican candidate, and the GOP won all other vulnerable Democratic seats, that would be only a net of 37. That would be a significant and remarkable gain and larger than the Democratic pick-up in 2006, but that is as high as the GOP wave can possibly crest. In the last 36 34 years, Presidents with approval ratings above 40% do not normally lose 30+ seats in the House. 1994 is the one exception, and that result was greatly aided by the huge number of retirements of members of the majority in that year. At the moment, Republican House retirements still outnumber Democratic retirements.

If Cantor automatically assumes that the GOP will do better than this in one cycle, he is dreaming and complacent. That tells me that the GOP simply expects victory to happen, which makes it more likely that they are going to be unprepared to fight the election effectively and they will end up being badly disappointed.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration judged incorrectly that Iran was on the verge of revolution and decided that dealing directly with Tehran would provide a lifeline to an evil government soon to be swept away by history’s tide. A valuable opportunity to limit Iran’s nuclear program may have been lost as a result. ~Richard Haass

Haass then proceeds to use the rest of his article to argue that we should now do exactly the same thing that failed so miserably under the previous administration. He argues this on the questionable assumption that Iran is on the verge of revolution and he seems to think that dealing directly with Tehran will provide a lifeline to an evil government soon to be swept away by history’s tide. Granted, there is more reason now to think that Iran’s government is threatened by internal opposition than there was seven or eight years ago, but there is little reason to expect that the current regime is going to fall to its internal opposition.

What Haass’ article reminds us is that predictions of major political upheaval in Iran are becoming very much like the consistently wrong string of warnings that Iran is just a few years away from a nuclear weapon. An Iranian bomb is always just over the horizon, and it has been just over the horizon for almost twenty years. It seems that the next Iranian revolution is also always just around the corner, and this always seems to be an excuse for delaying diplomatic engagement that ought to have started years ago. Obviously, opponents of meaningful engagement exploit prospects for internal political change Iran to kill off a policy option they reject anyway. That’s to be expected. What doesn’t make sense is why so many supporters of engagement have begun abandoning a policy that was scarcely tried and has been given no time to work.

Haass represents something no less frustrating than the hawks who exploit internal dissension to push hard-line policies. Haass is one of many advocates of engagement who have lost all confidence in a policy option that they endorsed when Iran was a brutal, authoritarian state with a thin veneer of quasi-democratic practices. Its internal repression and violence did not deter them then, because they concluded that there was little that could be done about this and it was not directly relevant to the most contentious security issues. Since the crackdown after June 12, Iran continues to be a brutal, authoritarian state, but now it no longer wears that thin veneer, and all of a sudden some supporters of engagement cannot call for regime change quickly enough.

Fundamental Iranian state interests have not changed in the last seven months, nor has the compelling logic of engagement with Tehran become any less so. In 2008, the bankruptcy of demonizing and isolating Iran was obvious, and it was associated with a deeply unpopular administration, and so for a time it became unfashionable. For all of six months, engagement was trendy when Obama was widely liked and the policy involved sending Nowruz messages and doing nothing meaningful. It has taken much less time for pro-Green advocacy to displace engagement as the preferred fashion. Incredibly, the impulse to isolate Iran has regained much of its former strength despite its record of abject failure. Politically, pro-Green sympathizers are making it much easier for hawks to advance measures designed to isolate and punish Iran, because they are resisting the one alternative course of action that will avoid the imposition of more sanctions or military action. Sanctions will, of course, mainly harm the Green movement and do nothing to change regime behavior, and scrapping engagement will ensure that Washington continues to have zero influence over what Tehran does inside or outside of the country.

Moreover, if regime change becomes the stated goal of U.S. policy, it seems probable that the Green movement will be split over how to respond to this, and whatever strength that it does have will be diminished. After all, if it is true that the Green movement is divided, and if it is true that it is principally a civil rights movement rather than the beginning of a revolution, a policy of regime change that is tied directly to support for the Green movement will risk dividing dissidents against one another and staking out a position far more radical than what most members of the movement would or could support.

Hooman Majd’s very smart article is a good resource for thinking about all of this. Of the movement, he writes:

However, the radical elements claiming to be a part of the green movement only speak for a small minority of Iranians. The majority still want peaceful reform of the system and not necessarily a wholesale revolution, bloody or otherwise. That’s why, in the most recent Ashura demonstrations, for example, large groups of peaceful marchers actually prevented some of the movement’s radicalized elements from beating or attacking security forces. Although accurate polling information is not available, based on what we hear and see of the leaders of the green movement and many of its supporters, radicalization is still limited to a minority of protesters.

The green movement’s leaders recognize that any radicalization on their part will only bring down the state’s iron fist. They are also cautious because they know that if movement leaders call for regime change rather than reform and adherence to the Constitution, they will only have proven the government’s assertion that the movement’s goal all along has been to topple the system [bold mine-DL].

This is the problem with projecting what many Westerners want (i.e., the collapse of the current Iranian government) onto what the Green movement is capable of or even trying to achieve. Majd’s comparison with U.S. civil rights protests in the 1960s is instructive. Foreign support was not crucial to the success of the civil rights movement, and had there been significant material and other foreign aid it would have been a major, probably fatal, liability to the movement’s credibility. We can take the comparison one more step and recognize that the success of a domestic civil rights movement does not have to lead to the collapse of the existing system. In other words, even if the movement prevails as a civil rights movement, it is not going to result in the kind of political transformation that Westerners are expecting it to produce.

Majd states that “neither side is looking to reform the regime into oblivion,” and he holds out the possibility that some compromise could conceivably be struck this year. That might be unduly optimistic, but if there any truth to it the things Haass is advocating could very easily destroy any willingness inside the regime to compromise. Majd also made another valuable observation: “Lacking relations with Iran, Obama can do little to help the green movement, but plenty to hurt it.” Isolating Iran and engaging in anti-regime agitation have left the U.S. in a position where it can affect little or nothing inside Iran. Instead of using the Green movement as an excuse to repeat the errors of the past, Washington might begin to work towards normalization of relations first, and then our government might acquire some real clout that could work to the benefit of Iranian dissidents and might eventually lead to some sort of understanding on proliferation and terrorism.

Few could be less qualified to interpret the public’s disaffected mood than Harold Ford, the would-be Senator from Merrill Lynch, so naturally The Wall Street Journal has given him a platform to do just that. After all, who better to interpret the message of populist discontent than an investment banker whose acquaintance with the people he wants to represent extends to seeing them on the ground as his company executive’s helicopter flies overhead?

Peter Beinart has already leveled a devastating critique against Ford’s potential primary challenge to the appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand:

He knows nothing about New York. What he knows about is the American overclass, a large chunk of which happens to reside in the Empire State. His campaign is the brainchild, in large measure, of rich donors who went searching for someone to run against interim Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. His economic agenda consists of defending Washington’s bailout of Wall Street, proposing a large corporate tax cut, and opposing caps on executive pay.

Nothing could be more at odds with the public mood and more removed from the dissatisfaction voters expressed last Tuesday than Ford’s agenda of keeping Washington safe for Wall Street. Some of Ford’s proposals might have arguments in their favor, but taken all together and combined with his last-minute parachuting into New York politics they represent a blatant insult to the voters. Even a majority of Scott Brown’s voters believe that Democratic economic policy is oriented towards helping Wall Street, and this is clearly not viewed favorably. It is not as if Democrats in Washington need another member of Congress who is quite eager to make government policy even more agreeable to his banking and investment colleagues. It is particularly rich that he now presents himself as someone who will be an “independent” representative of his constituents, when his entire agenda and the backing for his candidacy show that he has no capacity for independence at all.

What could be more unlike Brown’s candidacy than a carpetbagger backed by wealthy interests who is coming in to oust a New York-born politician from his own party? Who is more poorly positioned to connect with voters dissatisfied and distrustful of major institutions than a member of the distrusted financial industry who thinks that his own, newly-adopted city is just another part of “flyover country”? Democrats may have laughed at Brown’s slogan that he lives in Wrentham and drives a truck, but clearly it resonated to some extent with voters. Just imagine how negatively voters will respond to Ford, the limousine “centrist” who eats at luxury hotels when he happens to be in town.

There is a pattern I have noticed in much of the commentary on Obama’s foreign policy: what Obama says in his speeches is taken as definitive and meaningful for understanding his “doctrine” or real purpose, and then his deeds are interpreted so that they fit into the meaning that interpreters give to his words. There is an odd unwillingness to judge the statements against what Obama has actually done or not done. Thus you can have both Kagan and Hachigian asserting in different ways that Obama intends to manage American decline from its status of global primacy. Kagan thinks this is a disaster, Hachigian thinks it is a correct departure from the failed “primacy strategy” of his predecessor, but both mistake Obama’s efforts aimed at perpetuating and preserving U.S. primacy for something else.

Kagan and Hachigian rely on some of the same Obama phrases to support their incorrect analysis. Hachigian cites a larger portion of Obama’s remarks, which he first gave at Cairo and has since repeated elsewhere:

[G]iven our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game — progress must be shared.

As Scoblete says, this is part of the effort to “make American primacy more palatable to the rest of the world.” I said something similar just after the Cairo speech:

For a president who claims to prize empathy, he certainly failed to put himself in the other’s shoes when he composed that line. It should be obvious that many in his target audience see the present world order as the elevation of America and its allies over them. Indeed, many of the more accommodating, diplomatic parts of the president’s speech can easily be read as attempts to reconcile his audience to this unwelcome arrangement.

Kagan leans more heavily on Obama’s “zero-sum” remark, and he has written countless op-eds and articles detailing why he finds this intolerable. Doesn’t Obama know that states have divergent, sometimes conflicting interests? Like the sentence that preceded that one, we cannot take the apparent rejection of a “zero-sum game” in international affairs at face value. On most if not all policies, the practice of U.S. foreign policy has scarcely changed, and there is still the same presumption that Washington’s definition of U.S. interests matches up very closely what the interests of all other nations. There is still the same idea buried deep down that Washington is doing other states favors by meddling in their affairs, dictating terms to them and making demands that their governments do as Washington says.

What Kagan omits in his complaint is that the last two administrations blithely assumed that they were not elevating America over the rest of the world (they were providing “leadership”!), and they also assumed that they were pursuing policies that served the interests of all. Antiterrorism, nuclear proliferation and democracy promotion have been the triad of issues that Clinton, Bush and Obama all agree on in principle, and all of them take for granted that the first two are global threats that require coordinated international responses. Where Obama differs from them, or where Clinton and Obama differ from Bush, is in the execution. Moreover, all of them believe, or claim to believe, that American “leadership” is necessary to address every global issue of importance, which means that they understand the exercise of U.S. primacy as something that benefits the entire world.

The belief in Pax Americana was very real to Obama’s predecessors, as it is real for him, and this belief easily reconciles the perpetuation of U.S. primacy (or hegemony) with a conviction that nations have shared interests and should be engaged in cooperative action. Pax Americana is supposed to make competition between states, especially security competition, unnecessary and redundant. The frightening thing about hegemonists is that many of them sincerely think they are doing right by the world, and they are especially certain that they are helping those nations that their policies torment. For believers in Pax Americana, the only time when there are “zero-sum games” is when other states resist the supposedly benevolent intervention of the U.S.

Of course, Iran stands out as proof that Obama still makes policy on the assumption that there are “zero-sum” scenarios: Washington insists that Iran abandon nuclear ambitions and that it submit its nuclear program to rigorous oversight, and Iran must either accede to the demands or be punished. Obama has indeed given engagement with Iran a bad name, because Obama’s engagement pursuing the same unrealistic nonproliferation goal while offering Iran nothing in the process. Obama justified using a diplomatic approach as an effort to exhaust other options before inevitably penalizing Iran.

Methods, style and rhetoric may differ at times, but the real test is what Obama and his administration do. By this measure, they appear to be working to preserve U.S. primacy, and this involves conserving resources rather than recklessly expending them on matters of no importance. We will see whether Obama will choose to continue trying to preserve U.S. primacy or gamble it away in a fruitless, unnecessary confrontation with Iran.

According to the new Washington Post poll of Massachusetts voters, between approximately one-third and one-half of Brown’s voters claimed that neither Obama (52%) nor the Democratic agenda (29%) in Washington was a factor in their vote. The difference in opposition to Obama among Brown voters (43%) and opposition to the Democratic agenda (65%) is fairly remarkable, as if one could cast a vote to convey displeasure with the agenda without also sending a message of opposition to Obama. Inexplicably, a small percentage of Brown voters (4 and 5% respectively) said that they were voting for Brown to express support for Obama or the Democratic agenda. We also find that 29% of Brown’s voters had voted for Obama, and 33% still approve of Obama’s job performance. 24% of Brown voters are enthusiastic or satisfied with administration policies! They have a funny way of showing it.

It is clear that two-thirds of Brown’s voters wished to express their opposition to the Democrats’ agenda, which is to say that pretty much everyone who did not vote for Obama in 2008 does not support Obama’s agenda and wanted to express their opposition to it. I think we knew that before Tuesday. Over a third of Brown’s voters (37%) were dissatisfied or even angry with Congressional Republican policies, which is what you might expect when almost that many of Brown’s voters approve of Obama’s performance and the Congressional GOP is dedicated to thwarting Obama in everything he does.

Looking at what Brown’s voters want him to do with respect to health care, we see that they are divided right down the middle: 50% (47% strongly) do want Brown to work to halt Democratic health care efforts, and 48% (40% strongly) want him to work with Democrats to make changes to their proposals. Half of Brown’s voters want him to sink Obama’s agenda, full stop, and approximately half of them want him to collaborate with Democrats. That is what we might call a mixed message. Looking at Brown voters’ opposition to the health care bill itself, we see that two-thirds of them strongly oppose the bill, which is consistent with what we saw earlier, 14% “somewhat oppose” it and 13% actually support it. 26% of Brown voters believe government should be doing more “to solve problems.” 51% of Brown voters support MassCare. Perhaps most amusing, 52% of Brown voters approved of Ted Kennedy’s job performance.

So what we have here is a significant bloc of Brown voters, at least 24% of them, who approve of Obama, support his policies, and want more activist government, and some of them even support the bill Brown has promised to kill. On one level, it makes perfect sense that these people voted for Brown, because Obama and the Democratic agenda were apparently not factors in deciding how to vote. If they weren’t factors, Brown must have won their votes for some other reason. On another level, it seems bizarre and difficult to fathom that they would vote for someone campaigning on the promise to stop the policies and administration that they support. Perhaps had they been able to know how their votes would be interpreted, or rather misinterpreted, they might have voted differently, and Brown would have been limited to his core of McCain voters.