Still, who could help McCain beat back a populist conservative challenger? Sarah Palin. I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth. ~Bill Kristol

One of the amusing things about Palin supporters is that very few of them are prepared to accept that Palin and McCain represent the same part of the Republican Party. For the most part, the people who love Palin loathe McCain as all the things they oppose in the GOP. It as if they think her appearance on the national stage would have happened apart from him. It is as if they black out all of the occasions when she endorsed positions McCain held (as she had to do as his running mate) that they otherwise find unacceptable. If she is supposed to represent some great right-populist hope, he is the deal-brokering, bipartisan “moderate” Beltway denizen who assiduously cultivates the media, but the reality is that he chose her partly because she reminded him of his own combative, arrogant, egocentric style and his habit of breaking party ranks to aggrandize himself.

Were she to side openly with McCain in a primary against Hayworth, whose views match up a lot more closely with her supporters’ views, she would be seen as imitating McCain’s worst habits. She would be considered a worse sell-out than McCain. She would be doing exactly the opposite of what she did in NY-23. Her intervention may have failed to elect Hoffman, but rank-and-file conservatives generally loved her for it anyway. She would fritter all that away if she backed McCain. In exchange for the contempt and disaffection of the people who currently adore her, she would win the enduring affection of editors at The Weekly Standard. McCain seems to be satisfied with this, but I doubt it would be enough for Palin.

Perhaps Palin could come up with some tortured rationale that siding with the establishment-friendly incumbent would be the crazy “maverick” thing to do, much as she claimed that staying in office would be the easy way out and quitting would be the courageous, bold move, but she would destroy the foundation of rank-and-file conservatives’ love for her. Palin generated such excitement because she was perceived by conservatives to be very different from McCain. This was wrong in many ways, but this was the source of all those enthusiastic calls for Palin to head the ticket and it is the reason why most conservatives instinctively sided with her during the campaign and all the internal squabbles with McCain’s staff. If she intervenes on McCain’s behalf, especially if it seems likely that Hayworth would otherwise win the nomination, she will destroy the political persona she has been crafting for the last year and cut herself off from the base she has thus far managed to captivate.

I would note that, as Hounshell himself admits, not a single U.S. president has actually done more than mouth empty threats or apply mild, temporary, pressure on Israel over its settlements. All serious people may believe settlements are corrosive to peace, but those people do not include the current Prime Minister of Israel and the current U.S. administration (again, judge what they do, not what they say).

What Sarah Palin is saying has been U.S. policy in deed, if not in word, for decades. I see no reason to beat up on Palin over stating the obvious, not least because she will (thankfully) never be president. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete makes a fair point, which is why it is somewhat misleading to refer to Palin as being on the “lunatic fringe.” Lunatic? Maybe. But whatever else her views are, they are definitely not on the fringe. In practice, as Scoblete notes, it is the advocates of a settlement freeze who are on the margins and the supporters of continued settlement in the territories who actually make policy. This is the way it has been for decades. Of course Palin’s statements on the subject are formulaic and betray her ignorance of the “basic nuances of the conflict.” First of all, she is repeating what her advisors and allies have told her to say about these things, and she is keeping her lines as simple as possible. What matters to her hawkish allies and her loyal followers is not whether she understands the issue. For these people, understanding and nuance are obstacles to be overcome. What matters is whether she adopts the correct pose. In this case, she has to strike the pose of being unflinchingly, reflexively supportive of Israel, and so she takes a maximalist position that secures her reputation as reliably “pro-Israel.” It makes no difference if the maximalist position she takes is actually worse for Israel in the long term. She has established the appearance of respecting Israel’s “rights” to do whatever it wants in contrast to an administration that her backers believe has been “bullying” Israel.

As a matter of internal Republican Party and movement politics, what Hounshell describes as lunacy is the consensus view on the right. This is why Huckabee’s earlier dabbling with neo-transferism isn’t the least bit surprising. We should also be a bit wary of invoking the authority of “serious people.” I think it is true that informed people understand why continued expansion of settlements is detrimental to the long-term interests of all parties, but after the last decade of terrible foreign policy guidance by self-proclaimed “serious people” there is hardly anything more damning one can say about something than to say that “serious people” embrace it.

There is a problem in hiding behind policy consensus and dismissing those outside it as an irrelevant fringe, and this is that the consensus gets important things wrong with remarkable frequency. Hawkish interventionists were able to create the (false) impression that 9/11 happened because America was too wedded to geopolitical stability and was too willing to tolerate authoritarian governments in the Near East, and then the lazy establishment consensus allowed itself to be dragged along with them to support an unnecessary and disastrous war. Establishment consensus views on Iraq and its weapon programs were wrong; consensus support for the bombardment of Lebanon and the Gaza operation was also wrong; the “serious” bipartisan consensus in favor of NATO expansion has been disastrously wrong. The trouble with Palin’s views on settlements and Israel-Palestine is not that they are on the fringe, but that they are as deeply misinformed about political realities in the region as so many of the consensus views mentioned above. As with all of those, it is the ill-informed and ideologically-driven position that prevails when it comes to policy decisions.

After reading some of the thingsPalinites have been writing this week, I am tempted to say that they are “objectively” pro-Obama inasmuch as they are doing their very best to make Obama’s re-election secure. It’s tempting, but it wouldn’t be entirely fair. What is a bit sad is simply how out of it Palinites are. R.S. McCain imagines that Palin is extremely popular. This is true only among a shrinking number of Republicans. Douglas thinks that Palin is powerful because she has become a favorite pinata of the left. In fact, she has very little power outside the conservative cocoon where she receives so much praise and deference. As her favorability ratings show, the intense and concentrated opposition to her has helped turn most of the public against her; Palin has managed to do the rest all by herself. That is evidence of her political weakness. She certainly generates a remarkable degree of irrational loathing, but then she also generates irrational and excessive admiration that makes her supporters believe absurd things about her and her political potential.

What McCain misses in his article is that liberal journalists actually take great delight in the Palin phenomenon. Yes, of course, they don’t want to see her in power, but I think they do want to see her prosper and thrive as the face of the Republican Party. An American right led by or identified with Palin is one that they can very easily ridicule and discredit, and at the same time they can be confident that a Palinized GOP poses no threat to anything they value. Palin is not going to bring the party out of the minority, and were she to lead the party it would more or less guarantee continued Democratic ascendancy for many years to come. Her content-free pseudo-populism ensures that the legitimate political concerns of her constituency remain irrelevant to real policy debates. Media outlets also thrive on controversy and conflict, both real and manufactured, and Palin continues to give them plenty of opportunities for both.

One of the lessons we were supposed to have learned from the off-year elections, and one that I think is correct, is that the public craves competent leadership and that it penalizes any party that fails to deliver it. 2006 and 2008 were repudiations of the GOP because of the war in Iraq and the financial crisis, but more broadly these elections were the public’s demands that the government be ably and competently administered. If McCain ever had a chance of winning, his erratic and confused response to the financial crisis destroyed it, and between his selection of Palin and his insane response to the war in Georgia he drove away many others who simply could not trust someone with such poor judgment with such great power. The elections earlier this month were much the same in that they were protests against Democratic failure to govern well. The Palinites propose to rally behind someone who has no particularly impressive record of accomplishments, who abandoned the highest executive office she has held before completing one term, and who seems to have no great expertise behind her. In other words, Palinites are telling the public that they have no interest in providing competent leadership, and they expect the public to respond favorably to this. Following one of the worst Presidencies in postwar history, one that was marked by incompetence and ideological demagoguery, the Palinites believe that the country is desperately seeking to relive that experience under an even less-experienced, less well-informed, more malleable Western governor.

Update: Rod has written a review of Palin’s book. As he says in a post at his blog, “There is nothing to her.”

Reihan:

Yet the fact that Matt [Continetti] isn’t unremittingly hostile to Palin is reason enough for many readers to reflexively dismiss his arguments.

I find this pretty depressing, albeit pretty predictable. What’s worse is that this contributes to a tit-for-tat culture that is the enemy of thoughtful, reasoned discussion.

One thing that moves me to dismiss his arguments for Palin is his insistence that she in some way represents a tradition of Democratic populism exemplified by Jackson and Bryan when she has no claim to such a tradition, especially when she seems to have no sympathy for such a tradition once she is in the national spotlight. Another is the idea that she can appeal to independent voters to revitalize her political career when, as Brendan Nyhan noted, the vast majority of independents believes she is unfit for presidential responsibilities and just 28% believe her to be qualified.

Everything she has done since arriving on the national stage has involved steadily distancing herself from her short record as governor. Reihan has already given up on her as a viable political leader, and I’m not surprised. Reihan is a smart writer interested in policy ideas and their application in reforming government, and there would not be much call for that in Palin’s GOP. Continetti has embarked on a project of rehabilitating the national political fortunes of someone who dropped out of elective office in her own state mostly because she could not put up with the tactics of her opposition and the scrutiny of the media. Why should we take such a project seriously? If arguments in support of Palin’s political future don’t deserve to be dismissed pretty quickly, no argument ever should be.

I would have thought that anyone interested in promoting reasoned, thoughtful discussion would shudder at the thought of a Republican Party led and defined by Sarah Palin, whose national political career has been one episode of inflammatory, uninformed agitation after another. That is the kind of party and the kind of conservatism Continetti is working to create. Fortunately, his preferred candidate is so politically radioactive to most of the country that it will never take hold.

Walter Shapiro makes a good observation that the GOP’s winner-take-all primary system improves the chances for a Palin nomination bid. There could be just enough true believers to push her over the edge in the early contests, at which point it would become increasingly difficult for rivals to catch up. After all, McCain benefited from a divided field and gained a prohibitive lead in the delegate count without ever winning more than 45% of the vote in any contested state. At first glance, this seems possible, but it isn’t going to work out this way.

There are a few reasons why this scenario for a Palin nomination is still extremely unlikely. The first is funding. If Palin is in so many ways a less serious candidate than Dan Quayle, it is worth remembering that Dan Quayle’s extremely brief flirtation with presidential politics in 1999 ended because he could not find enough people interested in backing him financially. When there was already more or less an establishment candidate in Bush, no national political figure other than McCain attempted to oppose him, and McCain’s insurgency that year collapsed quickly enough. It seems to me that Romney is shaping up to be the prohibitive favorite and heir-apparent, just as McCain effectively was going in to the primary contests. Aside from his own money, Romney is an effective fundraiser, and he has the experience and the connections from the last presidential run to make it more difficult for any other contenders to gets funds and endorsements. Republican primary voting does not reward insurgent candidates. Barring some unforeseen implosion, Romney will begin as the frontrunner and likely remain in that position. Any contest between Romney, the competent, wonkish technocrat, and Palin, who is the opposite of all these things, would result in a win for Romney.

Huckabee showed last year how far a charismatic politician benefiting from favorable media coverage could take a campaign that had little money and a small staff, but these were important factors in falling short almost everywhere outside the South. No doubt Palin could inspire a lot of people to volunteer on her behalf, much as Huckabee did, but that will not be sufficient. Palin is not going to have the favorable media coverage that Huckabee did, in part because she is not as good at handling the media. Where Huckabee used charm, she takes an entirely adversarial approach. Another problem for Palin is that Romney stands to consolidate movement conservative and moderate Republican support, as he will become the natural candidate for secular and non-evangelical voters, and she will be left fighting with Huckabee, Pawlenty and others over the voters who remain. A split field and winner-take-all system may work to Romney’s benefit just as they propelled McCain to the nomination last year. If she were to run, she would most likely become one of the also-ran, second-tier candidates.

Finally, losing VP candidates very rarely win the presidential nomination later on, and only once before has a losing VP candidate made it to the White House, so there is no reason why anyone would want to rally behind the losing VP candidate from a previous cycle. Even if Obama ends up having a lousy first term and has poor approval ratings, ousting an incumbent President is very difficult. When it is finally faced with the choice, the GOP is not going to make Palin its standard-bearer in the campaign to defeat Obama’s re-election bid.

Pawlenty may not be the next Romney, but John Thune might be. David Brooks was waxing panegyrical in his column on Thune today, and one thing he focused on was Thune’s alleged love of all things small and local:

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations [bold mine-DL]. His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban[bold mine-DL].

Of course, that celebration was nowhere to be found when it came time to vote on the financial sector bailout last year. Like three-quarters of the Senate and, eventually, a majority of the House, he went for “the big and urban.” Thune voted for the bill, and even had the nerve to pat himself on the back for doing the politically dangerous thing. In fact, TARP was unnecessary, it was a dangerous grant of power to the executive branch, and it represented a gigantic swindle of the public for the benefit of financial institutions. Thune went along with most of the Senate in backing it. It’s true that Thune’s populism isn’t angry–it’s phony and opportunistic. He should do very well for himself in a party that rewards and admires politicians for just this sort of occasional, unreliable pseudo-populism.

Thune now hides behind the claim that he was misled when he cast his vote to grant the executive unaccountable power to use TARP funds however it saw fit. This is what every member of Congress who took the wrong position on a major vote tends to say nowadays when he had to answer for it later: the White House tricked me! Nothing inspires confidence in someone’s leadership abilities like the admission that he was easily fooled into making terrible mistakes. It’s a great campaign slogan: I’m so gullible, I even followed the Bush administration’s lead. I seem to remember that line of argument not working out very well for leading Democrats who voted for the war authorization in 2002.

Of course, the point opponents kept making was that there was no guarantee that the executive would use the money for the stated reason for the TARP. In fact, it has never been used for its original toxic-asset-buying purpose, because the government has never developed and likely never could have developed a mechanism for determing the price of these opaque assets. That doesn’t mean that the stated reason was a good one, and it does not mean that the program would have worked had they attempted to use it for its intended purpose, but the grant of power to the Treasury that Thune supported could have been used in any number of ways, which was why the sheer unaccountability and lack of oversight for the program were reasons enough to oppose it. Now that the public is sick of the bailouts, Thune has discovered that he, too, dislikes collusion between government and financial institutions, and in this he is just like Romney.

An October Gallup poll put Ms. Palin’s favorable number at 40%, her lowest rating to date. In a November Gallup survey, 63% of all voters said they wouldn’t seriously consider supporting her for the presidency.

Yet Ms. Palin isn’t as unpopular as John Edwards, and she has a higher approval rating than Nancy Pelosi. ~Matthew Continetti

And people tell me that I’m a bad salesman! I can see it now: Vote Palin in ’12, because at least she isn’t Nancy Pelosi. What can it mean to say that someone isn’t as unpopular as a man who cheated on his dying wife? She probably isn’t as unpopular as Mark Sanford, either. That doesn’t make her a viable national candidate. The best part is when Continetti cites her net negative approval ratings among independents and then claims that this is what gives her a chance in national politics.

It’s not really Continetti’s fault that his case for Palin is so terrible. Yes, he has chosen for some bizarre reason to become the leading professional shill for a no-hoper ex-politician whom most Americans don’t like, but he’s doing his best to put a positive spin on simply atrocious polling numbers. If 63% of all voters wouldn’t even seriously consider Palin for President, how much less support would she actually get when it came time to vote?

The problem with Continetti’s “solution” for Palin is that she has no interest in abandoning her pseudo-populist politics of cultural resentment and returning to her less combative reformer persona. The pseudo-populism is what made her a movement conservative folk hero, this is what generated the intense backlash against her, and this is what won her a big book deal. The things that made her appealing to Alaskan voters cut against the grain of the movement and the party. She once prided herself on challenging and going against her party, but this is exactly why activists hated John McCain. Her idea of being anti-establishment in Alaska meant hiking taxes on oil companies, which would be completely unacceptable to movement and party activists if she tried it on a national level.

“Romneyesque,” as an epithet, conveys a willingness to abandon one’s core convictions — in Romney’s case, temperance and modesty on social issues — in order to pander. ~Mark Ambinder

This may be how many people use it, but what it really conveys is not so much a willingness to abandon core convictions as it is the daily reminder in deeds and words that the person has no real, permanent core convictions at all. What separates Romney from most pandering pols is the man’s gall. Specifically, it was the sheer gall of Romney’s sudden and complete transformation from being more pro-choice than Ted Kennedy to claiming that he was a devoted pro-lifer. In a matter of a few years, Romney went from telling us how deeply, personally affected he was by the death of a close relative who died in a botched abortion, which was why he would always and forever support legal abortion, to adopting as close to the opposite position as he possibly could. The only thing that really changed was that he wanted to be elected to the Senate and then as governor in Massachusetts when he told the first story, and then he started setting his sights higher and had to abandon that story.

Romneyites have never tired of arguing that people change their minds, and this is true, but how is it that Romney lived his entire life right up until he began preliminary organizing for the 2008 Republican primaries as a dedicated pro-choice Republican and only then, in 2005, had a revelation that all life is sacred and should be protected by law? I suppose there is a cynical answer that it doesn’t matter if the change was completely opportunistic so long as he sticks to his new position. But there is something that makes Romney less trustworthy than most, and this is the earnestness with which he embraces his new positions, as if he thinks he has outsmarted his audience and made us forget that he believed the opposite just five seconds before. Romney is probably the only politician who could make me have respect for Rudy Giuliani by comparison. Giuliani at least believes what he believes and isn’t interested in changing that for a few votes.

In fact, Ambinder is far too kind to Romney. Perhaps he doesn’t recall all of the shape-shifting changes our protean candidate made, but Romney “reinvented” himself on many more things than just the hot-button social issues, and the changes were substantive and not merely superficial shifts in “tone.” McCain had great fun with this from time to time, calling him the “candidate of change” and joking about Romney shooting at Guatemalans on his lawn. This pointed to the absurdity of Romney’s boast of being a “lifetime member of the NRA” despite having used a gun perhaps twice in his life, once to shoot at “varmints” on his property, and despite being a strong supporter for gun control in the ’90s. It also reminded the audience that Romney, who at that point was posing as a more-restrictionist-than-thou anti-immigration candidate, had previously endorsed amnesty and had employed illegal immigrants on his property.

Romney had begun his career far to the left of McCain, and campaigned against McCain by painting him as the unacceptable squish. Romney had raised fees as governor, but then portrayed himself as the most zealous tax-cutter you had ever met. He had signed universal health care in Massachusetts, but then he turned into an anti-government crusader. In the ’90s he wanted nothing to do with Reagan or his legacy, because these were radioactive in Massachusetts, and then suddenly every third word out of his mouth was Reagan’s name. If he didn’t change some positions, that was because he did not need to. He remained a staunch free trader, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he became a protectionist overnight if he thought it would help him win some elections.

Most of Ambinder’s post is actually a discussion of Pawlenty and the danger that he is becoming like Romney. The truth is that Pawlenty isn’t slick or charismatic enough to pull off Romney’s multiple metamorphoses.

Lately I have been writing fairly often in defense of Trita Parsi and NIAC, so I was bothered when I saw allegations of legal violations by the organization. Then I read the report and found that there wasn’t much to it. The allegations are a slightly more elaborate version of the attacks various writers have been making against Parsi and NIAC in recent weeks, but there seems to be little to support these charges. Probably the most damning evidence, such as it is, comes in this section of the story:

However, in a July 2008 memo obtained by The Times, Mr. Disney quoted the Lobbying Disclosure Act – a law that says even the preparation of materials aimed at influencing legislation or policy must be disclosed to the public – and said he and a colleague should register as lobbyists.

“Under this expansive view of ‘lobbying,’ I find it hard to believe Emily, and I devote less than 20 percent of our time to lobbying activity. I believe we fall under this definition of ‘lobbyist,’ ” he wrote, referring to NIAC’s legislative director at the time, Emily Blout.

The tax code allows nonprofits to devote less than 20 percent of their activities to lobbying if they declare the activity in a special section on their taxes. NIAC’s latest tax form shows that the group has declared that it spends none of its time lobbying.

When asked about his policy director’s memo, Mr. Parsi said that Mr. Disney is not a lawyer and that when he wrote the memo, he was new to the organization.

When reached Thursday for the story, Mr. Disney said, “You are using an e-mail from very early in my time at NIAC to demonstrate that the organization is not following the rules. When I wrote the e-mail in question, I was a 22 year old with no legal education, but was asked to research and give an opinion about a complex legal matter.

“The opinion I expressed in the email was erroneous, and has since been clarified by legal professionals who have found NIAC is in full compliance with the law[bold mine-DL]. The practice of using out of context and partial e-mails is poor journalism; and it is one of the reasons Americans are losing faith in the media.”

Lake does not produce anything that clearly puts NIAC in violation of any laws. Everyone who seems to be in a position to judge such matters appears to have concluded that there are no violations. Indeed, the documents used as sources for the article come from the defendant in a defamation suit that NIAC initiated against him because he made this same claim of lobbying for Tehran. It would be very strange behavior for an organization engaged in lobbying for Tehran to invite legal scrutiny of whether or not it was lobbying for Tehran. So the story doesn’t really show that NIAC lobbies for the Iranian government, and it doesn’t really show any evidence of lawbreaking, but other than that it’s definitely “groundbreaking.”

Update: NIAC’s official response to the Times’ story is here. I found this part quite illuminating:

Mr. Lake has selectively focused on emails and documents that fit with his pre-determined verdict against NIAC. Though the basis of Lake’s article is misinformation about NIAC provided by Hassan Dai, Lake did not ask a single question about our lawsuit, why it was filed, our understanding of Dai’s political motivations and Dai’s connections to the Iranian terrorist organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq [bold mine-DL]. NIAC encouraged Lake to investigate the evidence of Dai’s role in the Mujahedin-e Khalq [bold mine-DL]. However, Lake declined to investigate his own sources.

Indeed, Lake made a passing reference to some of NIAC’s critics being accused of supporting Mujahideen-e-Khalq, but left out the crucial information that the defendant in the defamation suit may have connections to that group, which is still listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization. So what we seem to have is a possible sympathizer with an anti-Tehran terrorist organization accusing a legitimate advocacy group of working on behalf of Tehran, and The Washington Times is trying to lend credibility to the accuser.

My new column for The Week is now up.