Sean Trende looks at the possibility of a repeat of 1994 midterm elections in 2010. There are really two separate questions here: will the GOP be able to make a net gain of seats, and will it be able to win back one or both houses? The first is likely, and these first midterm losses pretty much always happen to the party that controls the White House. 2002 is the most notable exception to this pattern, and its position as the first post-9/11 election may make it a poor example for comparison. However, one of the reasons why the GOP benefited in 2002 was the extraordinarily high popularity of the President, which may work in a reduced way to the Democrats’ benefit next year if Obama continues to have approval ratings at or around 60%. In 1978, the GOP picked up three seats in the Senate and 15 in the House, and this seems like the right midterm election to use as a comparative example for the next year. It came in the middle of the term of the last Democratic President to win more than 50% of the vote in the wake of a Republican era riddled by scandal and tied to a President (Nixon) who was deeply unpopular, and followed four years after the 1974 post-Watergrate drubbing of the GOP in Congress. Indeed, anything less than 1978-level gains by the GOP and it will be reasonable to say that Republican leadership failed badly.

The second possibility of a full GOP comeback in one or both houses is much, much less likely. The sheer number of seats needed in both House and Senate suggests that winning back the majority in either would be extremely difficult. The make-up of the 2010 Senate elections once again works against Republicans. At least four incumbent Republicans are retiring, Judd Gregg’s term is up in New Hampshire (where Sununu lost last year), Specter is vulnerable and will face a strong primary challenge and a credible Democratic opponent should he still be re-nominated, and there are only three new Democratic Senators (Bennet, Burris and Gillibrand, all in office by appointment) where the GOP might manage to pick up seats. Almost every other Democratic incumbent, with the possible exception of Reid, is in a safe seat. The added trouble is that two of these most vulnerable Democrats are in safe Democratic seats (NY, IL), and were it not for Burris’ connections to Blagojevich it is unlikely that the seat would be within the Republicans’ reach at all. Meanwhile, Colorado has not voted for a Republican Senate candidate since 2002, and has since elected two Democrats. Dodd’s ethical woes may make his seat more vulnerable, but a Republican pick-up in Connecticut seems like a long-shot. Meanwhile, Ohio, Florida and Missouri all have open seats in states that have been trending Democratic. On the flip side, as Trende notes, because they are in the majority in both houses the Democrats have not had a wave of retirements opening up marginal districts to truly competitive races. The Republicans in Congress also continue to suffer from a destroyed reputation that will take longer than two years to repair. At the moment, another 1978 election would be a huge success for this rudderless party.

At some point, reproaching the mainstream conservative movement, criticizing its most popular writers and commentators, and expressing befuddlement at the political habits of millions of ordinary voters who sympathize with the movement all end up becoming stronger identifying characteristics than the alternate vision of conservatism the non-movement cons seek to promote. ~Jim Antle

Jim is right that these things tend to reinforce the isolation of the critics and ensure that mainstream conservatives become even more resistant to alternative visions, but at some point this becomes more of a problem for mainstream conservatives than it is for the critics. Paleo critics have no influence to speak of, and so they have nothing to lose by continuing to say what they think, and gradually many of the reformists are going to find themselves in a comparable position, but the message this will send is that mainstream conservatism cannot tolerate or handle serious dissent from either the right or from its left. The calcification of thought in the mainstream movement, the forming of cocoons within cocoons that we are seeing now, may mean that all kinds of critics fail to make any inroads. However, what this ultimately means is the ever-diminishing influence of the mainstream movement as it ceases to have any capacity for internal renewal or an ability to adapt. In the end, this works to the advantage of various alternative rights that currently do not receive much of a hearing, and in the interim it means that the mainstream movement will stumble along in confusion, bereft of ideas, as most reform proposals are met with scorn and ridicule.

Yes, there is a certain justice that Frum is now being cast out by many of the people in whose name he denounced paleos, but mainstream conservatism’s habit of casting people out can work, to the extent that it works at all, only when its support in the country is growing and the political fortunes of the right are in the ascendant. At the present moment, it is a luxury they cannot afford, but the habits remain unchanged. Amid an already-shrinking coalition, of which the Obamacons were one notable symptom, persuasion and speaking to those outside the movement have become subjects for mockery, while repeating worn-out slogans and pointing to “the blueprint” of past victories have become all the rage. In the short and perhaps medium term, the critics may lose these debates as a practical matter, but it is mainstream conservatives who are depriving themselves of ideas that could revive their movement.

Best of all from the paleo/”post-paleo”/alternative right perspective, there is no danger that anyone in the mainstream movement will heed this warning because it comes from me, one of those “radicals,” so there is little chance that mainstream conservatives will learn any lessons from the last two or three decades that would enable them to adapt to the present. That may hasten the day when the people the mainstream movement has ill-served for so many decades will begin seeking out alternatives once they finally tire of following the enablers of the party of immigration, imperialism and insolvency.

Jim Antle says that there is no point in pondering what might have happened under a McCain administration, and he may be right. I think it does provide some perspective and offers a useful check on the impulse to shout “socialism!” at every turn, but it is not all that important. On a related McCain matter, what might be worth discussing a bit more is why the Republican leadership continues to believe that it has found a winning strategy by embracing some of the wackier McCain ideas from the election campaign.

For instance, why aren’t more conservatives challenging the increasingly ludicrous direction the House leadership is taking by imitating the McCain campaign’s pitiful grasp on economic policy? Confronted with financial crisis and recession, McCain wanted to impose a spending freeze, and Boehner and Cantor are urging the same thing. Republicans would have been even more likely to support a spending freeze had McCain been elected, but they are actually framing their opposition to the administration’s domestic agenda around such a non-starter of an idea that they cribbed from McCain’s campaign. Of all the times to urge a spending freeze, the GOP has chosen to call for it now?

How is this anything other than disastrous for the party’s ability to resist the administration’s plans for health care or cap-and-trade? If the important thing now is to oppose Obama’s bad policies, the GOP might be well-served by breaking out of their weird post-election habit of closely imitating their losing presidential candidate and endorsing some of his worst ideas. If railing against wasteful spending and calling for spending freezes made any sense and appealed to voters as a remedy for economic problems, McCain might not have lost. Does it make any sense, then, to frame the core of the opposition to the President around such a politically and economically bad idea? What the counterfactual President McCain might have done may not be important, but what the McCainified GOP is doing certainly is, and unless they want to endure a four-year replay of last year’s presidential debates the party leaders need to stop doing what they’re doing.

Update: As Antle reports, the “spending freeze” being proposed isn’t a complete spending freeze at all. It is a relatively minor reduction of the omnibus bill’s cost by holding discretionary spending at last year’s levels. So from the perspective of fiscal responsibility, it barely makes a dent, while also managing to convey the symbolism that the GOP is clueless on economic policy. It’s very much like when several governors refused to take 1% of the allotted stimulus money, and so managed to get themselves dubbed anti-stimulus governors. I’m glad to acknowledge that I overreacted to the proposal, but I had assumed that it was what they were calling it. Even so, you can bet that the details are going to be lost on the average voter.

It seems to me that implicit in a lot of conservative criticism of the stimulus bill, the mortgage plan, and Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme, among other things, must be the odd notion that things would have been very different had McCain won the election. While we can be sure that McCain the crazed earmark-hunter would still be with us (no doubt keeping us safe from volcano monitoring and gang tatoo removal), let us recall that McCain supported cap-and-trade (even if he didn’t necessarily understand what he was talking about when he said so), proposed an insane mortgage bailout plan that pretty much everyone hated, backed TARP and differed from Obama on taxes largely in that he refused to raise any rates. In the end, the main difference turns out to be a disagreement about whether to return the top rate to its Clinton-era level or not. I guess that is a bit more than a dime’s worth of difference, but it isn’t much. Of course, this is why so many Republicans were relieved that McCain lost, because had he won they would have ended up backing a whole host of policies that they are currently denouncing as disastrous. At the same time, we would have had an old, irritable President prone to fits of bellicosity in international affairs and moral grandstanding about any issue he doesn’t understand, and behind him would have been an unqualified VP. However bad things are, remember that they could have been far, far worse.

Andrew makes a number of good points in this post, but I think it misses the point of the argument in favor of Freeman’s appointment to say this:

Obama was not elected to continue the policies toward Israel of George W. Bush.

This is a tricky statement. Regardless of what some of Obama’s voters believe he may or may not do with respect to Israel and Palestine, Obama very clearly campaigned on positions that were essentially indistinguishable from second-term Bush administration policy, and as far as setting policy goes continuity is going to be far greater than change. It has been one of the great misreadings of Obama to expect (or fear) something else from him on this subject. One of the reasons why the reaction to Freeman’s appointment is increasingly unserious on the merits is that Freeman is not going to be in a position to set policy or alter policy, so his views of Israel one way or the other are of secondary importance. However, proponents of changing U.S. policy towards greater “even-handedness” or making any significant changes at all should expect to be disappointed even more than before, as the appointment of Freeman will have political consequences for the administration that will limits its ability to maneuver on the things that matter to these people.

Perversely, those most likely to benefit from all of this are the defenders of the status quo, which is why most of his critics come from this camp and it is naturally why they are stirring up controversy about the appointment. The controversy itself, largely baseless as it is, imposes costs on the administration that help keep the status quo intact. Even if Freeman remains in the appointment, the administration will be forced to yield elsewhere to avoid creating a “pattern” of allegedly “anti-Israel” moves. Of course, this has been the purpose of trying to paint Obama as “weak” on Israel all along–to box him in and hamper him from making even those modest diplomatic moves that he has said he supports making.

Bearing that in mind, it is telling that Freeman’s views on Israel were the views that the critics initially focused on, only then moving on to question his other views and connections, because it is primarily these views that make Freeman objectionable to most of his critics. That means that it is because of these views, which are going to be basically irrelevant to the appointed position, that he is being hounded, while anything else about him and his career is being used in an effort to stop his appointment. Whether or not Obama continues Bush-era policies, that is something that he, Gen. Jones and Secretary Clinton will be determining. Freeman will not be in a position to do anything about that. Whether that comes as a relief or as a disappointment, that is the reality.

If Freeman is right for the job as an intelligence analyst, as the DNI believes him to be, and the IG investigation finds no conflicts of interest, his particular views on this subject should not be a bar to serving in the appointed position.

P.S. Jeffrey Goldberg allows that Freeman “is not making policy,” but concludes:

I get the sense that some of Freeman’s defenders want to see him in government not because he’s a professional contrarian but precisely because he’s viscerally anti-Israel.

After putting in the usual caveats that charges of Freeman’s “visceral anti-Israel” views are excessive in themselves, it may be that some of his defenders are defending him for this reason, and it is possible that some are defending him more or less automatically just because of who his crtics are, but speaking for myself I regard it as something close to madness to rule out qualified professionals because they fail to meet a political litmus test that does not have any real bearing on the positions they are going to fill. (Imagine for a moment the absurdity of denying someone this position for holding radically libertarian views on the drug war, or for holding distasteful-but-conventional pro-Turkish views on the Armenian genocide–these things are related to U.S. policy overseas and are controversial, but have no connection to intelligence analysis.) On the flip side, it seems clear that almost everyone who has a problem with his appointment is uninterested in his professional qualifications and wants his appointment stopped almost entirely because of his views on this subject. If these views are irrelevant in determining whether he is qualified for the post (and he has no conflicts of interest), that should put an end to the controversy.

Update: Apparently missing the irony of his own words, here is a priceless quote from Chait:

The problem with making arguments primarily about motives is that it creates a stupid and poisonous public dialogue.

Yes, a stupid and poisonous public dialogue that has been fashioned and maintained by many of the people who have been preoccupied with criticizing Freeman’s appointment. For many years realists and non-interventionists have railed against the tactics used by so-called “idealists” during debates in the past, making exactly the same argument about how impugning the motives of antiwar critics, or critics of Israel or critics of U.S. foreign policy generally distorted and ruined the quality of debate. In return, we were treated to various insults, of which anti-Semite and apologist for depotism were some of the more pleasant ones. Now that some realists are making the basically accurate assessment that Freeman’s views on Israel are the main reason for the outrage over his appointment, we are supposed to believe that these realists are engaging in the same sort of tactics. This is false. For one thing, it is not as if it has somehow become a liability or an insult in American politics to observe that someone is strongly “pro-Israel.” What is so amusing about this complaint is that the entire campaign against Freeman is based on the assumption that he cannot be trusted as an intelligence analyst because of his political views and his connections to an allied state, which is not the sort of precedent these critics should want to set.

Second Update: It should go without saying that Michael Moynihan should not be attacking anyone for making poor assessments about Iraq, or perhaps he thinks that Iraq has not suffered from a humanitarian disaster in the last six years? It is also worth noting that the quote from Freeman he is criticizing expresses the view (i.e., “Iraqis Shias are not Iranian surrogates”) that the former administration and most pro-war supporters held from 2002 until mid-2006 when the reality of sectarian warfare and expanding Iranian influence became impossible to deny. This was a view they emphasized constantly to justify our ongoing support for a sectarian Shi’ite government. For any war supporter to hold this quote against Freeman is simply an amazing display of hypocrisy. Moynihan also misses that this quote directly undermines the argument that Freeman is essentially a paid-for Saudi stooge. If he were, he would take every opportunity to exaggerate Iranian power to bolster the importance of supporting the Saudis, and he would not dismiss fears of Iranian influence in a Shi’ite-dominated Iraq.

Third Update: As usual, Max Socol has an interesting, judicious take on the controversy.

Fourth Update: James Fallows has two posts on Freeman and China. Here is Fallows in the second post:

To put a brake on the momentum, and to give a chance for deliberation about a man’s reputation and a president’s ability to get the range of advice he wants, I think it is worth reinforcing the idea that the people who know Freeman and China policy best think the complaints about him on this front are a crock.

John McCormack is outraged by the double standard applied to meaningless goodwill gesture gaffes:

Can you imagine if this had happened in Bush administration?

Can anyone imagine the Bush administration attempting to defrost relations with Russia by making goodwill gestures? Of course you can’t, because for most of the time they were either in denial that relations were declining or they blamed Moscow for everything. Had they ever made such an attempt, they might have been forgiven if the prop being used as part of the gesture had the wrong word on it. Even if the prop was hokey, this entire “reset button” approach is welcome. I am concerned that it seems a bit too glib, as if the last decade or two of provocative policies can simply be erased from memory by hitting a button, but the direction for the moment is encouraging.

But very recently I met with a friend who had worked years ago with Freeman — on China, not the Middle East — and was upset about what he called the “self-lobotimization” of US foreign policy that the campaign to discredit Freeman represented. As I’ve looked into it, I’ve come to agree.

His first point was that Freeman was being proposed for a post within the president’s discretionary appointment power, like one of his White House aides, and therefore didn’t have to reflect the Senate’s sense of who should be in the job. The more important point, he said, was that Freeman’s longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was exactly what a president needed from the person in this job.

A president’s Secretary of State had to represent the country’s policies soberly and predictably around the world. His National Security Advisor had to coordinate and evenhandedly present the views of the various agencies. His White House press secretary had to take great care in expressing the official line to the world’s media each day. His Director of National Intelligence had to give him the most sober and responsible precis of what was known and unknown about potential threats.

For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask “What if everybody’s wrong?”, to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as “groupthink.” ~James Fallows

This is similar to my original thoughts on the controversy. Self-lobotomization is what we seem to do best when it comes to foreign policy. Obviously, what the IG investigation of Freeman’s ties determines will be decisive. If the investigation finds that he has serious conflicts of interest because of his connections to the Chinese oil firm and the MEPC, the appointment should not go forward, but if not he seems well-suited to the position to which he is being appointed.

The final point about Freeman’s willingness to break with groupthink is the crucial point, which is why this sort of complaint is so idiotic. The charge of “politicizing intelligence” was that intelligence analysts were pressured by policymakers to interpret evidence in a way that fit the policy that had already been set. One of the problems with the use of intelligence before the war was that intelligence analysts interpreted what they found according to the false consensus that Iraq still possessed WMDs and WMD programs, and that the administration applied pressure to make sure that they did so. In other words, if you wanted someone who was very unlikely to fall in line with some new, politically convenient consensus about, say, Iran’s nuclear program, you might want to appoint someone like Freeman to run the NIC.

After reading Ross’ final post on the Limbaugh debate, I was reminded of Reihan’s distinction between “true believers” and “evangelizers.” There is an idea that I have seen floating around in this debate that Limbaugh and his fellow radio hosts are somehow representative of “the grassroots” and are caught up in a fight with “elites,” but this is wrong. It may be that the “grassroots” like certain kinds of elites–the kinds that pander to them and flatter them–but that does not make those elites part of the “grassroots.” Reihan’s distinction is useful in that it identifies the debate as one over which direction conservatives should focus their efforts. The debate is fundamentally one between different sets of movement elites who are either oriented inwards or outwards. The former keep asserting that “this is a center-right country” and insist that nothing has happened that redoubled, intensified loyalty to principles cannot cure. The latter are much less unified in their assessment of what went wrong and what needs fixing, but they are in agreement that repeating cliches and slogans that were created thirty years ago (or more) fixes nothing and will persuade no one not already convinced.

What is so frustrating and ruinous about the pro-Limbaugh side of this debate is that it automatically cedes all serious work on policy to those who are already inclined towards a moderate and meliorist agenda, because the mainstream pro-Limbaugh side assumes, or is willing to tolerate the idea, that no work really needs to be done. Reflecting this lack of imagination, the entire post-election strategy has been that the GOP was shellacked twice because it lacked spending discipline, which is simply an unfounded myth that conservatives and party members keep telling themselves to explain the repudiation of the party over Iraq and the economy. Like the near-unanimous backing of the “surge” on the right in 2007, there has been no willingness among the “true believers” to understand the messages the public (or reality) actually did send, and so there continues to be no understanding of what is in need of correction. Inexplicably, when it comes to Iraq the idea that the “surge” was successful remains the prevailing and popular one on the right, when the truth is verydifferent. There seems to have been no fundamental re-examination of anything related to national security and foreign policy, and this is a blind spot that afflicts reform conservatives and their more conventional counterparts. However, this lack of re-examination on foreign policy is mirrored in conservative economics, where the goal seems to be to stand pat on tax, trade and monetary policy.

On a related note, it might be worth thinking about why language normally reserved for the sociology of religion is being applied to describe what is overwhelmingly a narrowly political movement. Reihan is hardly the first or only one to do this, but it is worth calling to our attention when you have Limbaugh stating, “Conservativism is what it is and it is forever.” As Rod asked at the time: “Do they really believe politics is dogmatic religion?” In fact, they probably don’t, but in Limbaugh’s case he is speaking about a political persuasion in a quasi-religious idiom that ideologues over the centuries have used. The “cause” becomes something like a substitute religion, in this case complete with its own half-baked doctrines derived from Whig myths and Enlightenment-era fantasies that is then dubbed a “philosophy,” when it is true enough that it does not deserve the name. Like any ideologue, Limbaugh latches on to a few readily-digestible, repeatable slogans or words and deploys them as and when needed. As Kirk and many others have attested, principles are not ideology, but in the substitution of ideology for principles, which is what Limbaugh does, he and others like him are doing far more damage to any sort of sane conservative politics in this country than the occasional pundit or wonk who argues for particular policy proposals. So Limbaugh alone is not the problem, but he is a significant part of the current problem.

James Matthew Wilson on immigration.

Mark Shiffman on property.

Caleb Stegall on Kansas and the Populists.

The retort that Frum was unsuccessfully trying to make is that demagoguery, which is what Rush Limbaugh, Levin, and their ilk regularly engage in, is a sorry substitute for leadership. And, while that may very well be true, wonkery is an even more sorry substitute for leadership. The people don’t want nuance, substance, or even good ideas. They want something they can easily understand in sound-byte form, something that resonates with their simple, innate notions of justice, something they can repeat around the water cooler and feel good about. That’s something that writerly, intellectual types all too frequently miss. And, I hasten to add, it’s exactly what Barack Obama has been able to provide for the Democrats. ~Damir Marusic

I think Damir gets things precisely wrong here. How many times since Obama’s address to Congress have you seen a progressive expressing his satisfaction that the President was speaking to his audience as adults, speaking in full, complex sentences and not insulting their intelligence? I submit that this is not just the conceit of writerly, intellectual progressives, but also reflects something real in Obama’s oratory and hits upon something important about what the public wants from politicians. Obama’s speeches since August have been notable for how forgettable they have been, but this has not been to his disadvantage. It is difficult to think of a line from his convention speech, his Inaugural or the address to Congress that anyone would repeat at a water cooler the following day, but all three of these were reasonably substantive speeches as these things go and all three were fairly well-received. Style, presentation and image may be what matter most for most voters, but incorporating substantive policy in speeches is part of the presentation and improves a politician’s public image, if only because media reports provide favorable coverage (or do not deride the effort as ridiculous) to speakers who put on a display of a certain sort of calm and seriousness.

Most of the voting public may not be deeply engaged in issues qua issues and are not interested very much in the details, but that just confirms that style, presentation and image matter that much more, which makes the demagoguery of radio hosts that much more of a liability for a party and movement deep in the doldrums. Pure wonkery won’t get you very far, but effective orators who can lace their speeches with meaningful references to policy matters outclass their competition. Talented politicians who can combine the two, as Clinton did and Obama does, are formidable opponents, and to compete with them you need something better than a demagogue.

Almost as if he wanted to test the proposition, Jindal gave a response speech that was more or less universally regarded as terrible not simply in its delivery but also in its repetition of boilerplate and its use of more memorable but effectively meaningless phrases (“the American people can do anything!”). Naturally, radio demagogues liked what they heard, because it was the sort of speech they would have given. I would add that the McCain/Palin campaign strategy was an enormous bet that “the people don’t want nuance, substance, or even good ideas,” and they did their best to eliminate all of these things from their campaign. They lost that bet.

Wonks and pundits cannot fill the leadership vacuum that the demagogues are effectively occupying, but demagoguery isn’t going to be able to do anything except rally the rank and file. There is a place for this sort of rallying, and it is unrealistic to expect entertainment created for mass consumption is ever going to provide the sort of complex and qualified arguments that will satisfy wonks, but it cannot become the main form of conservative argument. For one thing, so much of it is not argument, but instead is frequently a series of assertions that make sense only to those who are already in agreement.

Indeed, it is because electoral politics turns not primarily on policy substance, but instead has so much to do with identity and the kind of people with whom voters want to identify that appearances and image matter so much. The argument being made by certain wonks and pundits that the demagogues’ newfound preeminence is bad for the GOP and conservatism is on the whole quite valid. That does not mean that the wonks and pundits can fill the gap, but that they are right that it is crucial–if one wants to build a serious opposition to this administration–that the demagogues not be permitted to take up a central, starring role.