The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos envision. ~E.D. Kain

It’s true that idealism would be quite heavily burdened by idealism, but if we set this odd statement aside I’m still not sure what Kain means. Politics is not a time-machine, nor is anything else, and no one is more keenly aware of the impossibilities of undoing the effects of past changes than the people who lament so much of what has been lost. Central to most traditionalist critiques is the insistence that everything comes with some sacrifice, and that, as I believe Prof. Deneen said at Yale last fall, whenever something appears something else disappears. The two main questions we keep asking are: “Is this the world we want to have?” and “Is X worth the cost?” Typically, our answers are no to both, and because we say no we are said to be doing nothing more than pining for a lost past. It’s as if someone threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, and then mocked you for your “idealistic” concern for the baby or, better yet, your nostalgic attachment to the bathwater as if the baby had never existed. This would be a mildly amusing diversionary tactic, if it weren’t so painfully obvious that we are almost always talking about the present predicament and what we owe to those who will live in the future. The strangest thing about the remark quoted above is that Kain knows all this.

Ortega y Gasset said, “The inability to keep the past alive is the truly reactionary feature.” (That is, the true reactionary–in a negative sense–is the one who treats the past as if it is completely dead and cut off from us.) Nothing here below lasts forever, every thing eventually wears out and breaks (unless it is repaired and restored), and everyone dies. Where some of us think that this truth should inspire fidelity, respect and mourning for what has passed, the general attitude today about practically every change seems to be one of celebration and satisfaction. No modern, much less post-modern, person can ever re-enter a world as if the last five hundred (or however many) years never occurred, and were anyone somehow able to do so he would be very confused and disoriented when he arrived.

Instead of silly idealism, Kain refers us to Phillip Blond’s Red Toryproposals, which are challenging and exciting and every bit as “idealistic” as any decentralist and traditionalist arguments here in America, paleo or not, and they are just about as likely to be adopted, which is to say not very likely. I mean, doesn’t Blond know that politics is not a time-machine? It is never going to take us back to the economically decentralized world Blond envisions. What could he possibly be thinking with all of his localist nostalgia and Post Office romanticism? So there!

That is what I might say to Blond if I wanted to dismiss everything he says and avoid seeing the bankruptcy of the vision of globalization he is criticizing, or if I wanted to use him as a foil for my own argument, as if it were somehow discrediting that he had been making these same “idealistic” arguments for years or decades before they became suddenly fashionable. In a pinch, I could also just turn off my brain and call him a socialist, but that is something better left to others. However, I agree with him on almost everything he has been saying over the last few months, so why would I do that?

Blond discusses local finance and subsidiarity at length in both his Prospect piece and his op-ed for The Guardian. Over the last thirty years, you could count on maybe one hand the American journals and institutions on the right that discussed subsidiarity, distributism, and their foundations in Catholic social doctrine, and you could count on probably one or two fingers the journals that discussed and embraced them as something other than historical curiosities and funny details in the life of Chesterton and Belloc. One of these has been, of course, Chronicles, but it is “paleoconservative” and so we can supposedly write it off just like that. This is now the term applied to most anyonewho argues for ethical restraint, conservation, social solidarity, respect for and loyalty to place and sane foreign policy, which is not a bad summary of what paleoconservatives believe, but it is just as often applied to people who would never use it to describe themselves as a way of belittling and marginalizing their very relevant and challenging arguments. There’s no reason that someone couldn’t dismiss Blond in exactly the same way (“he’s a crazy Red Tory!”), and that would be a shame, because Blond is making a lot of sense.

Blond writes:

However the global trade in credit and finance became one vast private sector monopoly where all market tiers were abolished in favour of a single homogenous conduit down which all credit and capital flowed. The trouble is that as soon as the world’s supply of asset-leveraged credit was threatened by a group of people being unable to pay their debts, the entire system shut down and the present meltdown began. In point of fact it looks as though the path to globalisation merely exchanged one form of state-engendered national monopoly for an international private monopoly founded on extreme speculation [bold mine-DL].

It is here that a financial variant of subsidiarity could have kicked in and avoided both statist inertia and the casino of monopoly capitalism. For why can we not have a subsidiarity of capital? Surely the task now is to avoid the cartels of both market and state and create a genuinely autonomous range of intermediate associations that can hold intermediate amounts of capital that we need to have loans and a life [bold mine-DL]. Why should the house or flat that you or I buy in Clacton or Cardiff be securitised and risked at the highest level of the market? Far better to have a local system of credit that is attuned to the local economy, so that ability to pay and the asset value of what is purchased are both more acutely aligned to the local economic base.

As some of us noticed during the inane “debate” over the bailout last fall, local and regional banks had by and large not fallen prey to the overleveraging that was destroying many of the major financial institutions, they complained that their irresponsible, larger competitors were being rescued from their own mistakes, and they wanted no part of the bailout because they didn’t need it. Of course, the idea that we should (gasp) interfere in The Market to build up a system of local and tiered finance rather than an overly concentrated, globalized one would be met with the same dismissive response, “Don’t you know that times have changed?” George Grant observed a long time ago that if small-government conservatives in America succeeded in shrinking the federal government and restoring state sovereignty, this would clear the way for domination by corporate oligarchy unless it was accompanied by economic decentralization. Of course, anytime someone suggests creating a more decentralized economy, he is dubbed a socialist who wants to meddle with the glorious Market, as if the current predicament resulted from anything other than collusion between centralized power and concentrated wealth. This is the false choice that defenders of the status quo love to present as a way to paralyze and halt any attempt at making sane reforms, and it is enormously helpful to them to write off as “idealists” those few who have been arguing for political and economic decentralization for decades. Since we are not going back to “an agrarian society or a totally localized economy,” and since we all know this, why are we spending any time successfully demolishing strawmen that represent the views of virtually no one alive today?

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

Rod recommended this David Klinghoffer post, which points us to the latter’s column in The Jerusalem Post that makes the following argument:

Elementally, there are two different personality types here. Where you come down reveals a lot not just about your politics – though political views flow from it – but about the orientation of your soul.

Zero-sum personalities often resent the rich and the gifted and may succumb to a temptation to punish them. Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments are a frequent consequence. Ex-nihilo personalities have no reason to resent Jews or Israel.

A nation populated by ex-nihilo types would see Israel as the embodiment of virtues its own citizens deem crucial to their happiness and prosperity. For America, abandoning Israel would mean rejecting values that have been key to our identity as a powerhouse of creative and commercial leadership. In simple terms, it’s bad for business [bold mine-DL].

That is the Israel test, in which Americans have a greater stake in choosing rightly than we do in any calculus based on the questionable premise that the United States must have a democratic ally precisely in the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

You start to see why Israel divides free-market America from socialist Western Europe [bold mine-DL], and pro-business, anti-tax conservatives from those left-liberals, including some Jews, who would use government power to press the “rich” further and further to support the rest of us.

No, actually, I don’t, because the thesis of The Israel Test makes no sense. Let’s think about this. If we believe Gilder, the author of The Israel Test, secular sympathy for a socialist state increases in proportion to one’s hostility to redistributive and socialist views. This is an outlandish effort to impose unbearably great significance on a single state, which isn’t doing the state or its citizens any favors, and it doesn’t even remotely match up to the contours of political divisions over Israel here or anywhere in the West. It cannot begin to account for small-government conservatives who don’t like foreign aid and entangling alliances, it leaves no room for liberal hawks who want universal health care, and of course it cannot make sense of progressives and realists who are critical of Israel in the context of ongoing, ultimately unconditional support. The list could go on.

Armenian immigrants are on average quite successful in commerce wherever they live, but almost the exact opposite coalition of political forces sympathizes with Armenians today as embraces a fervently and conventionally “pro-Israel” view. Would anyone seriously argue that it is “bad for business” or a rejection of “values that have been key to our identity as a powerhouse of creative and commercial leadership” if Washington continues to side with Ankara and Baku rather than Yerevan over every issue? Indeed, many people in the energy sector would argue that going against Baku and favoring Yerevan would be bad for our actual oil business. Even the strained, overdone strategic argument for the alliance with Israel has some semblance of truth to it; The Israel Test as presented here seems to have little or none. Even the rather exaggerated “civilizational” argument for Israel has some basis in reality.

The second part of Klinghoffer’s column does have some interesting reflections on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, but it seems to me where the earlier part of the column went badly awry and where Gilder apparently also erred was in the conflation of the divine act of creation with human creativity and ingenuity. The latter imitates the former, but it is not the same kind of act. Properly speaking, there are no “ex nihilo personalities,” because people cannot create ex nihilo. As the old joke has it, God tells the scientist to make his own dirt before he can use it to create life.

This Yglesias post on the FPI conference on Afghanistan reminds me that Robert Stacy McCain was completely wrong when he made this prediction. My response back in October holds up pretty well, and we’re just getting started with this administration:

He is, however, quite wrong when he says that foreign policy differences will fade in significance in the coming years. To the extent that Obama is relatively hawkish on most things except Iraq, which Republican hawks deny for electoral reasons now but will rediscover once he is in power, we will see exactly the same splits between the hawks who side with the Obama administration’s interventions in (name a few countries where we have no business being) and the conservatives who do not believe these interventions to be in the national interest. It will be very much like what we saw in the 1990s. Mainstream, “responsible” and “realist” conservatives and Republicans will support Obama’s actions, and a significant but largely uninfluential minority on the right will protest against them. All of the bogus arguments war supporters have trotted out for years to justify the Iraq debacle will be turned around on them, and most of them will end up backing the next intervention to halt a “genocide,” “liberate” another country or stop weapons proliferation. They will delight in the frustration of the antiwar left and praise the bipartisan consensus in favor of American hegemony.

I would like to be able to say that this is a result of my far-seeing powers of prediction and insight, but anyone who followed my election predictions know that I have no such powers. It was fairly simple to make this claim seven months ago, and it could have been made long before that, because on policy substance it has been clear for a very long time that neoconservatives were largely pleased with Obama’s foreign policy views. Once you set aside election-year hackery and partisan spin, neoconservatives have never made a secret of their sympathy for Obama’s interventionist vision. It was also obvious that neoconservatives would make this move, because, as Yglesias says, this is more or less exactly how they responded to Clinton’s activist foreign policy. This suits liberal hawks and the center-left of the foreign policy world just fine, because neoconservatives are ultimately the ones they are willing to do business with and they regard the mass of Jacksonian nationalists and non-interventionists on the right and the anti-imperialists on the left as the far worse alternative.

Bullet dodged, John! The Cutler trade to Chicago is depressing news for me as a Denver fan (remember, I may have grown up in New Mexico, but I was born in Denver), but it can only be good news for Bears fans, who have been waiting for a first-class quarterback longer than I have been alive. Now they have one. Meanwhile, the Jets management can ponder their perpetual second-rate status after they cut the best quarterback they had in the last 30 years to hire a has-been as a one-year replacement.

Following John’s heroic lead, we here at Eunomia (both Caleb d’Anvers and I) are trying to do our part to reduce the global menace of blogospheric emissions. While Eunomia continued to have unsustainable levels of production in March, there are reasons to hope that April will see clear reductions as part of the collective effort to avert the consequences of our current posting crisis.

P.S. And, yes, Jim, I think we all got it.

Thomas Ricks has taken up the thankless task of arguing with contributors at First Things about the immorality of the war in Iraq, and here I should note with appreciation that he has linked to one of my old disputes with another war supporter writing at First Things. Ricks has taken the (unremarkable) position that the continuing presence of American forces in Iraq is immoral. I call this an unremarkable position because the injustice of aggressive war seems obvious to me, and inasmuch as the continuing military presence in Iraq is the result and continuation of that aggression then it, too, is immoral.

Ricks has been slightly diverted by the question of the war’s false premises. While I would say that there is ample reason to doubt that the war met tests of just cause and right intention, it is important to distinguish between administration claims that turned out to be false and claims that they made with certainty when they possessed no sure knowledge at all. In the case of the latter, such as when the Vice President asserted that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, or when Mr. Bush stated that intelligence “leaves no doubt” Iraq possessed WMDs, these were dishonest claims. There was no evidence of the former, and a great deal of doubt about the latter. To say that they exaggerated but did not “lie” is to engage in spin: an exaggeration is a kind of falsehood, and not a trivial matter when it serves as part of a rationale for war. Manipulation of facts and the telling of half-truths are hardly laudable things, but somehow we are supposed to believe that if a charge was not created out of whole cloth that it was therefore made honestly and in good faith. It is not nearly that simple.

More important than the dishonesty of officials in government, however, was the cause in whose service these claims were made. Because the administration described the war as “pre-emptive,” when it was at best a preventive war against a future, allegedly “growing” threat, there has long been a diversionary pro-war argument about the possible merits of pre-emptive war against imminent threats. Engaging that argument is to end up going round in circles and has led some antiwar arguments into blind alleys, because what the Bush Doctrine set forth in 2002 proposed and what the administration did was not actually pre-emption against an existing, immediate threat, but was aimed at probable or possible threats. When administration defenders said that the administration had never spoken of imminent threats, this was narrowly true in that the administration had actually argued for going to war on a much flimsier, much less defensible basis than this.

Of course, if it is true that the concept of preventive war is not to be found in the Catechism, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, said at the time, preventive war of the kind proposed and executed by the last administration is simply unthinkable if we take the standards of just war theory seriously. No wrong was being remedied, because none had yet been committed or even immediately threatened against us. If the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated, as it says in the Catechism, preventive war must necessarily fail the test of proportionality because the “evil to be eliminated” was merely potential and not yet real, while the evils produced by the war have been all too real. If “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain,” preventive war fails yet another test because the damage has not yet been inflicted and is not about to be, but theoretically might be at some point in the future. The damage is neither lasting nor grave, because it has not yet occurred, and it is anything but certain. Most obvious of all, all other means could not have been exhausted, because preventive war necessarily involves making war something other than a last resort.

As I have noted before, though, there are two camps that invoke just war theory: those who seek to find loopholes in it that permit wars as often as possible, and those who seek to use it as a barrier for the prevention of unnecessary wars and the preservation of greater tranquility and peace. As the restoration of peace is the proper end of any war, it seems to me impossible to make a credible argument that starting a preventive war is anything other than unjust and immoral. It is difficult to say that the evils arising from that war and the continuation of the military presence remaining in the country following the invasion are not also unjust and immoral.

Ricks has made the additional claim that leaving Iraq now would be immoral, and this is not a view that can be dismissed easily. Our government invaded without just cause, which I hasten to add we would not have had even if Iraq had possessed the weapons it was accused of having (see the above points on preventive war), and this does impose an obligation to repair the damage unleashed by our invasion. Indeed, it seems to me that the second part of Ricks’ view derives from the first part. It is an acceptance of moral responsibility for the wrong done to the Iraqis that Pavlischek seems incapable of acknowledging was done to them. I agree with Ricks that we do owe the Iraqis a debt for the destruction caused and unleashed by the invasion, and where we would probably differ is in gauging how effectively we can repay that debt by remaining in the country even for the next few years.

As the NY-20 special election remains undecided and will be determined by absentee ballots, the GOP has fallen short yet again in another special election in a district that should be favorable to it. Even if Tedisco squeaks out a win, the NRCC has to spin the result to make this look like anything other than a very weak showing, and so far the initial Republican claims reek of desperation. From Politico:

NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) was reduced to noting that the tight race itself was an accomplishment.

“For the first time in a long time, a Republican candidate went toe to toe with a Democrat in a hard-fought battle over independent voters,” said Sessions. “This was hardly a common phenomenon in 2008, particularly in the Northeast.”

This is like a general who has abandoned entire provinces taking satisfaction that one stronghold has not been captured–yet. “Yes, gentlemen, we have been completely routed throughout the region, but we put up a lot of resistance at this single outpost, which is more than you could say for our other numerous defeats.” As it was a special election, the “hard-fought battle over independent voters” was actually much more like an effort to mobilize core supporters and partisans. Given the low turnout (approximately half of what it was in November), the GOP’s advantage in registration and their almost 2-to-1 spending edge ought to have put Tedisco over the top. Perhaps they will narrowly win, but not with anything like the kind of definitive protest vote against the administration that the NRCC needed to produce. The Republicans managed to take someone who was well-regarded locally and tarnish him with close association with national Republican leaders, which in turn succeeds in tarnishing the national party image even more as incompetent and out-of-touch.

Honestly, I don’t understand the electoral strategy over the last couple of cycles. Instead of localizing all of the House races and focusing on the virtues of their own candidates, national Republicans have repeatedly, unsuccessfully tried to link everyone from Jim Webb to Heath Shuler to Travis Childers with liberal wine-and-cheesers from San Francisco and, of course, with Nancy Pelosi. This was never a credible line of attack, and in pretty much every case it backfired. I sometimes wonder whether these folks ever leave Washington and its vicinity, outside of which most people don’t know much about Pelosi if they know anything at all. Nonetheless, time and again they try to paint Blue Dog recruits as Pelosi’s lapdogs, as if this has any significance for people in the rest of the country.

What is absolutely amazing about the outcome last night is that Murphy declared his opposition to the death penalty, even in cases of terrorist attacks, and he may have won anyway. It is possible that his victory, like Cazayoux’s in Louisiana, will be short-lived and will be reversed in 2010 because of this and similar issues. Murphy’s stance on this is fairly left-leaning for someone who wants to join the Blue Dog caucus, but instead of becoming a huge liability it barely registered. It barely registered despite an NRCC ad highlighting this position. Four years ago, to say nothing of seven years ago, he could not have survived politically had he taken the same position. One of the interesting things about this race, then, is the degree to which economic issues have completely overwhelmed the old politics of national security and terrorism on which the GOP relied since ’02, and they have done so even in one of the more culturally conservative districts in that part of the country.

Indeed, as was apparent today, the latest “conspiracy” is rather mainstream stuff, like supporting Obama’s Af-Pak policy, and it enjoys healthy bipartisan support — just as Clinton’s Balkans wars did, and yes, just as Iraq did initially. Criticizing these policies is fair. But those criticisms should be aimed at a broad swath of the foreign policy establishment, on both sides of the aisle, not just at the neo-cons. ~Christian Brose

It’s a deal. No doubt when critics focus on the failures of the majority of the foreign policy establishment, they will be treated as worthy adversaries in policy debate and not dismissed as unpatriotic and anti-American goons. Isn’t that right? Somehow, I doubt it.

Criticizing Iraq policy became broadly acceptable among the foreign policy establishment once the neocons could be made into the sole villains of the piece, which was useful for deflecting the responsibility of various other hawks and internationalists. In some ways, the latter were more responsible for plunging us into the disaster by creating a respectable and broad consensus in favor of an unjustified, unnecessary war of aggression. That doesn’t mean that neoconservatives weren’t actually responsible for a great deal of harm, for which they still refuse to take responsibility, but it does mean that they became convenient scapegoats for less fanatical, more “pragmatic” types who changed their views on the war in the last four or five years. Neocons take the brunt of criticism because they were the first to call for the war and are among the last to continue to defend the indefensible, but I am more than happy to hold accountable all of the people who have blundered so horribly. There’s no need to wait–I have started doing this already. These people are blundering again in endorsing Obama’s misdirected nation-building scheme in Afghanistan, just as many of them blundered in supporting or later embracing the “surge”* as something other than a delaying tactic that addressed none of the fundamental political problems in Iraq. I fully expect them to be just as wrong this time as they have been wrong in the past. I also fully expect them to hide behind their near-unanimity as a shield against this criticism, because this is what they always do.

* The “surge” failed, and its failurewasforeseenfromthe beginning.

European nations have already shown little stomach for a tough line on Russian bullying of Ukraine and Georgia. ~Ida Garibaldi

Whenever I read lines like this, I wonder what the author could possibly mean. European nations have little stomach for backing irrational policies for which they alone will have to pay the price? Yes, this is true. They have little stomach for backing unnecessary expansions of a defunct Alliance into countries that for most of the modern period were part of Russian territory? They are guilty as charged. Europeans are not interested in jeopardizing their own access to energy for the sake of unrealistic fantasies of a North Atlantic alliance that borders on the eastern shores of the Black Sea? No doubt. They are unwilling to put their necks on the line for the nationalist aspirations of a hot-headed demagogue who likes provoking one of the major nuclear powers on the planet? That is surprising.

Taking a “tough line” could have real consequences for Europeans in ways that simply don’t apply to America. It is always a good idea to remember this, and it would quite useful to understand that continued pressure for NATO expansion into these countries could provoke the Russian use of energy as leverage. For the most part, Russian “bullying” of Ukraine with respect to energy has been a matter of cutting subsidies for Ukraine, which means that Ukrainians are finally starting to pay something closer to the market price for a commodity they are used to getting for very low prices. Naturally, having become accustomed to cheaper prices, Ukraine has fought such moves, which has led to occasional interruptions in supply. How this is solely or primarily Russia’s fault must continue to elude us.

There is somecommentary today telling everyone to invest the outcome of the NY-20 special election with very little significance. That’s reasonable up to a point, as all special elections are quirky, not necessarily representative of broader trends and often turn on the qualities of the candidates, but then the same can be said for a lot of House races. Depending on the cycle, House elections can be won on national themes, or elections turn on local issues in ways that defy patterns. It is natural for both sides to lower expectations in a close race, and the GOP candidate is so intent on lowering expectations that he has apparently already filed a motion to challenge the outcome after internal polling confirmed earlier Siena polling that the Democrat, Scott Murphy, was pulling ahead.

Taken in isolation, this outcome wouldn’t matter much. But if Murphy does win it will mean that an out-of-state transplant made up a 20-point deficit against a fixture of regional politics in less than six weeks, and he will have done it in a district where Republicans enjoy a registration advantage of many tens of thousands (71,000 to be exact, which is approximately 25% of the size of the 2008 turnout). When Ogonowski lost a special election for MA-05 in a landslide, there were more than a few Republicans who went wild at how well he had done in a House special election in deep-blue Massachusetts. In that case, Ogonowski’s smaller-than-expected margin of defeat was supposed to signal a Republican resurgence in 2008 (which did not happen), which was never very credible, but are we really supposed to believe that a Democratic win in a traditionally Republican district in a special election doesn’t say something significant about the political fortunes of the GOP? When Gillibrand won in 2006, it could be written off as part of a wave and a reaction against Sweeney’s scandals, and when Gillibrand was re-elected and Obama carried the district it could be written off to some extent as part of another wave and a reaction against the financial crisis and recession, but if the Democrats hold the seat for the third time that begins to suggest a pattern. It may mean that the GOP’s strongholds in the hinterlands of the Northeast, already disappearing in New Hampshire, are also eroding in upstate New York.

What one doesn’t normally see is nonpartisan observers going to great lengths to deny the race’s significance, but this is what Charlie Cook does. However, he does this in a very odd way. This is how he starts his summary:

This is a historically Republican area that has become problematic for the GOP in recent years. President Obama’s popularity — he carried the district by 3 points — is helping to offset some of the longstanding GOP leanings. There is an experienced and established Republican against a Democratic newcomer to the area. Both sides have spent generously, though not at the break-the-bank levels of last year’s special elections.

Mind you, the NRCC has spent more, and independent Republican PACs have spent more than their counterparts, and the DCCC has not made that big of a push because of its existing debt problems in ’08. The Republicans have had the advantage of the well-known, experienced candidate, and the district is so traditionally Republican, as Cook himself points out, that it never voted for Roosevelt for statewide or national office and went for Bush both times. There are other districts like that somewhere in the country, in rural Idaho and parts of Utah maybe. If you wanted to make the argument that the outcome of this election isn’t very important, highlighting its strong Republican history and leanings isn’t the best way to go about it. In essence, what Cook is saying is that NY-20 used to be reliably Republican, and between the backlash against the GOP and Obama’s election this has been changing. How can we not see another Republican defeat in NY-20 as evidence of something more than a quirky special election outcome?

Update: John Cole and DougJ at Balloon Juice have more. I agree that the closing of the gap between Tedisco and Murphy was the result of increasing name recognition for Murphy, who was bound to start pretty far behind as a newcomer. It was ironically the national Republicans’ anti-Murphy ad campaign that helped improve Murphy’s name recognition so dramatically. One thing I neglected to mention in this post was that Michael Steele may not last very long as RNC Chairman if Tedisco loses. This will be somewhat unfair for Steele, as it is the NRCC that screwed up the campaign so badly. By all rights, Rep. Pete “Taliban as Model for Insurgency” Sessions, who runs the NRCC, is the one who should have to pay the price for a Tedisco loss. I would add as a final note that the NRCC managed to take a candidate who had all the local advantages that Travis Childers had as a Democrat in MS-01, and they managed to turn Tedisco into a generic Republican who will probably end up losing.

Second Update: With all precincts reporting, Murphy has an extremely slender lead of 65 votes that is almost sure to be eliminated by absentee ballots. The GOP may end up dodging a bullet on this one.