The top candidates to become Israel’s next prime minister vowed on Sunday to topple Hamas in the Gaza Strip and officials authorized strikes on a wider range of Islamist targets after a six-month-old truce ended in violence.

——-

Underscoring the military challenge facing Israel in the densely-populated Gaza Strip, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said even an incursion involving two-to-three divisions, or more than 20,000 troops, may not be enough to stop rocket fire.

Government ministers promising to topple Hamas “do not know what they are talking about,” Barak said. ~Reuters

This was an older article from mid-December, but it seemed worth commenting on now. Just about every observer, whether supportive of the strikes or not, seems to accept that toppling Hamas is either impossible or undesirable or both. It appears that it will be the stated policy of the Israeli government to pursue that goal regardless of which party controls the coalition government after February’s elections, which means that either Livni or Netanyahu will come to power with a pledge to do something that cannot be done or should not be done. Barak’s remarks suggest that, if it is possible, it would be extremely difficult and costly to do, and it seems clear that there would be no other force capable of replacing Hamas once it has been overthrown. A Mediterranean Somalia would be a likely result, which would almost certainly worsen Israeli security and make it extremely difficult to establish order in Gaza. So both party leaders are promising a massive military campaign to destroy Hamas and to return to the occupation of Gaza under even more chaotic conditions than there were three years ago, and the Defense Minister was essentially saying that both of them are clueless.

I take the point that the siege of Gaza is driven by an angry Israeli public that does not want to supply a territory from which they are being attacked. That’s understandable, but it is short-sighted. This anger seems to be blinding the public to the realities Barak is describing. If there were any reason to think that the strikes on Hamas were to be paired with a later lifting of the siege, I might be able to see some long-term rationale for them, but at present the only likelihood of any military success in Gaza relies on perpetuating and intensifying the siege for a long time to come, which is sure to be a long-term political loser for Israel.

From the first post that I mentioned earlier, Freddie said:

This is the Israeli discussion in American mainstream media. One side speaks cautiously, quietly, with constant provisos and caveats. That side takes pains to distance themselves from the enemies of Israel, makes no bones about their moral condemnation of the terrible actions of Hamas and Hezbollah. One side takes all necessary care in discussing with nuance, with discrimination. The other unapologetically and openly justifies the killing of people they admit are innocent. And yet it is the latter group who is the mainstream, the latter group who holds the benefit of the conventional wisdom, the latter group who demands apology and retreat from the former. It’s a strange place, for our national conversation, and a sad one.

I agree with Freddie that the current state of the debate, such as it is, is both strange and sad, but it occurs to me that one reason why the debate is so lopsided is that the simplistic and moralistic tone of the one side is so much more easily digestible and acceptable to more people. Start with our general lack of interest in the rest of the world, add in our characteristic impatience with complex and tragic conflicts and then compound all of that with the legalistic-moralistic strain in our political culture that demands that we reduce complex and tragic conflicts to simple morality plays in which policy is defined as a campaign against evil, and you can see quickly enough why the uncompromising, unapologetic side prevails. The side that hedges its arguments with caveats comes across as less certain, and it cannot boil down its arguments into readily-memorized and repeated slogans that pundits, journalists and everyone else can learn and reuse to sound informed. Of course, those who tend to hedge their arguments with caveats do not want to make arguments that can be boiled down into slogans, because they find such arguments to be deeply flawed, but that is almost beside the point. It is somewhat misleading to speak of two sides to the “debate,” as if they were in any way comparable, when there is no obvious alternative and opposed camp to the consensus view, but merely different shades of the consensus for the most part, and even then the slightly different shades can elicit the most powerful hatred. What is most remarkable is that even most marginal voices in the “debate” will go to great lengths to demonstrate that their views are not really threatening or hostile to the consensus, not really, and that it is permissible to let them into the conversation. It doesn’t always work–Walt and Mearsheimer jumped through any number of hoops to stress their fidelity to the consensus and they were still damned for their efforts.

There is, of course, a matter of media bias and educational conditioning that make the public far more receptive to one side of the argument, which reinforces the impression that the stifling virtual unanimity in the “debate” is somehow a natural expression of popular attitudes, giving rise to the myth that Americans overwhelmingly support Israel. In reality, an overwhelming majority preferred it if we did not take sides in this conflict. Another reason the “debate” is so one-sided, or to be more precise why there is no real debate at all, is that what are deemed “pro-Israel” arguments are taken as expressions of the default, self-evident position and no one will be paid any attention who does not first acknowledge his acceptance of that position. Obviously there is no meaningfully “pro-Palestinian” side to the debate, except insofar as skeptics and dissenters are deemed objectively pro-Palestinian by those who hold the consensus view. To the extent that there is another side, and not merely a slightly different take on the consensus, it is made up of people who think that America should be neutral or uninvolved and people who think we should be “even-handed” in our dealings with both nations.

In addition to a lack of organization, there is simply nowhere near the same intensity and emotion among proponents of “even-handedness” and non-intervention, because we are not so much driving a particular agenda as we are opposed to a policy that favors one side or one that entangles us in conflicts in which we have no real interest. As this sentence suggests, there is considerable lack of agreement among dissenters from the consensus, as proponents of “even-handedness” want greater, but different engagement, and non-interventionists mainly want disengagement from the conflict.

As in most other foreign policy debates, the view that commands mainstream credibility perpetuates its hold over the designation mainstream and can keep any alternative views safely marginalized simply by pointing out their marginal (and therefore “extreme”)status. As in most other foreign policy “debates,” the proponents of specific actions tend to win, because they are able or are allowed to set the terms of debate and define their opponents as merely negative and reactive, and they are usually able to load up their arguments with heavy-handed moralizing that puts their opponents on the defensive. Once you have to start your argument by saying, “Well, of course I am opposed to suicide bombing,” as a practical matter it doesn’t really matter what else you have to say. That is the point of framing the debate with moralistic rhetoric that inevitably privileges the preferred side in the conflict. All of this increases my skepticism about the possibility of persuasion and the importance of merit in arguments, as the latter seems to have little or no bearing on what view prevails.

At the risk of becoming unduly preoccupied with the conflict in Gaza upon returning to blogging, I thought I might add a few remarks to the conversation that Freddie started with this post. Conor referred to the post in passing while responding to an earlier Joe Carter post, which prompted Carter’s reply, and the original post led Max to criticize Freddie’s moral certitude. John Schwenkler (from atop his new Culture11 perch) answered some of Carter’s remarks with a defense of naivete, but as I will lay out in a moment I don’t think naivete enters into it at all. Max and Carter’s responses are particularly striking, since they take the same argument to be an example of moral certitude and relativism respectively. Specifically, Carter objects to Freddie when the latter says this:

Firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel is a putrid crime. Shelling Palestinian civilians is no less. What’s the difference, for our purposes?

In fact, what Carter objects to here is not really moral relativism (which would not permit such full-throated condemnations of these acts as crimes), but, as he says elsewhere in the post, moral equivalence. However, it is not clear to me that Freddie is claiming moral equivalence between the two belligerents here. He does not say that the intentions of the actors on both sides are the same and morally equal. Freddie is condemning the practice of indiscriminate warfare in all cases, and he is asking, reasonably enough, what the difference is between different examples of such warfare. As it happens, I think there is a difference, but not nearly as great a difference as Carter holds.

If Max finds Freddie’s remarks all together too theoretical and frustrating, I find the constant recourse by defenders of Israeli (or, for that matter, American) military actions to the good intentions of one side to be even more so. When you endorse indiscriminate warfare, as Freddie correctly says, you are effectively endorsing the consequences of that warfare. Indiscriminate warfare as such is wrong. To admit that both sides engage in indiscriminate warfare, but then protest that one side doesn’t really mean to injure or kill civilians is not persuasive. Regardless of whether one side “means” or “intends” to do this or not, it is doing it. This truth does not make the IDF morally equivalent to Hamas, and I don’t know of anyone in this conversation who makes such a claim, but it does mean that the Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli strikes are of equal worth in our moral reasoning to the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets. This is what I was talking about two years ago when I referred to a “necessary moral equivalence” concerning the war in Lebanon.

The war in Lebanon again seems useful as a comparative example. Two years ago, we heard many of the same arguments, albeit with more references to human shields last time than this time. Despite the fact that the far greater proportion of fatalities in Lebanon was made up of civilians, the appeal to good intentions was among the most frequently made. In other words, even when the indiscriminate nature of the campaign was unmistakable and undeniable, indiscriminate warfare was somehow justified by intending to do the right thing. Certainly, in judging the severity of crimes intention is a relevant and important factor. Deliberately killing the innocent and non-combatants is significantly different from doing so unintentionally. There is a moral difference between indiscriminate firing that kills civilians by accident and indiscriminate firing that is undertaken with the specific goal in mind of killing civilians, but both are still crimes. Freddie here is not showing moral naivete, but has instead pushed through the sentimentality that tempts us to make excuses for the crimes of one side in a conflict. In doing so, he has perhaps not stressed enough the distinctions between the different kinds of crimes, but I suspect this is mainly because he wants to make a strong claim that neither side is exempt from moral standards.

As I said many times two years ago, it is the friends of Israel who have the most reason to hold the Israeli government to a high standard, just as it is important for friends and citizens of the United States to hold our government to a high standard, and this means holding those governments accountable when they commit excesses and crimes. Those most inclined to defend a government’s actions will focus on the good intentions of members of the government at the expense of the practical effects of its policies, which allows the government to persist in folly and remain blind to the problems it is creating for itself in the future. It is ultimately a disservice to the people whom they want to support.

Update: Freddie has another post remarking on the argument from good intentions and the utterly lopsided coverage and commentary on the conflict.

Andrew pointed out this post by Gershom Gorenberg, who explains the ruinous dynamic behind the events we are now seeing:

Israelis don’t see the effects of the siege in Gaza, or the way it was maintained during the six-month “calm.” Israeli journalists have a far easier time covering Mumbai than covering Gaza. What Israelis saw during the “calm” were Palestinian violations. Israel claimed that Hamas wasn’t keeping the agreement. That was true. It was also true that the Israeli government continued hoping, against all evidence, that the siege would provoke popular uprising against Hamas rule. Hamas regarded the calm as a failure in relieving siege conditions [bold mine-DL].

When the six months ended, Hamas decided that those Israelis would only understand force. To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail – especially to an angry man. With a little careful thinking, anyone on the Hamas side could have figured out that no Israeli politician wanted to agree to reduce the siege in response to rocket fire. That would be giving in.

For most Americans, the siege conditions do not enter into their thinking about this conflict at all. For many, perhaps most, Americans, the conflict is summed up quite simply: Hamas launches rockets, Israel retaliates; Israel wants peace, Hamas doesn’t. Nothing elseneeds to be considered.

Already a fairly poor, miserable place, Gaza became more so after it was punished for Hamas’ victory and then even more when its fuel supply was cut off, which has hardly weakened the appeal of the most radical anti-Israel views. Gorenberg’s post began with an account of the injuries and fatalities suffered by Gazans who were creating makeshift heating sources to cope with the fuel shortage. It has never been clear to me what political theory people use when they speculate that depriving a population of basic supplies will provoke dramatic political change for the better. Grinding a people down does not cause them to see the bankruptcy of their own leadership, but causes them to cling to it all the more as their last resort. Ousting a ruling party or faction is usually a luxury that besieged people do not have, as siege conditions tend to strengthen the grip of those who already hold power. Radicalized populations often possess a siege mentality already, but this is even more true when they are essentially cut off from the outside world.

Many Americans–and perhaps many members of the Israeli government–seem to take their understanding of political revolution from Stargate or something else equally fanciful, according to which oppressed and miserable people will rise up against their own leadership without training, arms, organization or coherent agenda and they will succeed because they mean well (or because the outcome is deemed desirable by outsiders). What all of these people never seem to understand is that the population will not blame their leadership for the poor conditions, regardless of the leadership’s myriad flaws, but will readily fall prey to whatever demagoguery the leadership engages in to pin the blame on outside forces that are trying to destroy them. If the population is already intensely nationalistic in its attitudes after decades of occupation, this demagoguery will be extraordinarily successful, and all of the blame and anger will be directed outward at the government or indeed at the entire nation that they hold responsible for creating the poor conditions.

The same logic that drives people to support irrational sanctions regimes against various nasty regimes has been at work in justifying the wrongful treatment of the population of Gaza over the past two years. Sanctions and economic isolation have one universal, reliable effect–they cause the people who are adversely affected by the isolation to rally to their local leadership, to reward a politics of confrontation and defiance and to become even more radicalized and hostile to the government imposing the sanctions than they were before. If a majority of Gazans backed Hamas last year, do you suppose that many of them are now having second thoughts? It would hardly be surprising if those who did not support Hamas will rally to them, at least temporarily, in the wake of the strikes of the past week. In his earlier post, Max said, “Popular support for Hamas is widespread, and attacks by Israel are not going to shore up what is already well established.” There is almost never any political leadership that is so strong and backed by such loyal supporters that it cannot become stronger and its supporters more intensely loyal. As others have noted in recent days, Hamas’ popularity was waning prior to this week (which is still a far cry from a popular uprising against them), and this conflict has provided it with conditions that are ideally suited to its fanatical guerrilla and terrorist nature.

On the main blog, Philip Giraldi has asked why, given the likely counterproductive nature of Israel’s strikes in Gaza, Israel’s government would go ahead with the planned campaign to destroy Hamas’ infrastructure. There do not seem to be other objectives or grand plans in motion. This is, let us remember, the Olmert government, which has raised incompetence and poor judgement to new heights. We might speculate that there is some hidden, cunning design in all of this, but there is probably no more forethought and cunning involved here than there was in the failure of the current administration to prepare adequately for Phase IV of the initial Iraq campaign. As it was in Lebanon two yeas ago, the answer is miscalculation. The assumption two years ago was that the air campaign against Hizbullah–another long-planned operation waiting for a pretext or provocation–would be decisive and would destroy a significant part of Hizbullah’s military capacity. This proved to be completely wrong on both counts: the war ended in stalemate, it counterproductively turned almost the entire world against Israel after Israel had won almost universal sympathy and support for a limited retaliatory strike, and Hizbullah grew relatively stronger politically despite sustaining considerable losses in the fighting.

Even a more narrow, partisan electoral calculation (i.e., boosting Kadima before the election) does not seem to make sense in this case, as the Gaza operation will tend to remind the public of the Olmert government’s greatest failure, which was the war in Lebanon. If the idea is to redeem Olmert’s government for its failure in Lebanon, attacking a densely-packed urban area seems a strange way to do it, since this is much the same blunder, both political and moral, that the government made in devastating Beirut. The Gaza operation seems to be all together too similar to the war in Lebanon in its evidently open-ended nature, its consequences and its unobtainable objectives, which will tend to discredit Olmert and Kadima even more than Lebanon already did. If it was Olmert’s desire to sabotage his party and successor in the election, he might very well do something like what he is doing now. Unlike two years ago, Livni will not be able to distance herself from the decisions Olmert has made. Supposing that this is a last-ditch effort to play the security card ahead of next year’s elections is a bit like imagining Mr. Bush launching another preventive, unnecessary war in the hopes of boosting flagging GOP political fortunes. Besides being implausible, the attempt would have the opposite effect.

Update: Here is a smart dissent from my post. Max believes I am misreading the Israeli political scene, which could well be true, and he thinks I am relying too much on the comparison with the 2006 war in Lebanon. Regarding the latter, I think the comparison with the war in Lebanon may not be that helpful with respect to military matters, where the differences are real and significant, but it works best in connection with the Israeli political scene. Then as now the Israeli public at first was united completely behind the government’s actions, but then gradually came to realize that the government could not achieve the objectives it had set out and had mismanaged things rather badly. Watching the Israeli public sour on Olmert’s war two years ago was a bit like watching the gradual American disillusionment with Iraq on fast-forward–most people get behind a campaign when they think it will be easy and believe it to be going well (it also helps if they are angry), and then a lot of them turn against the government that took the country into the campaign when things become more difficult.

Depending on how long the Gaza operation lasts, I think we are likely to see a similar souring and a similarly strong political backlash against Olmert and Kadima to the one that sent his approval ratings sinking into single digits. Two years ago, there was a similarly broad consensus across the political spectrum in Israel that the war against Hizbullah was righteous; the trouble was that Olmert waged a war against all of Lebanon. Justified as a targeted, limited action in response to provocation, it expanded far beyond that. Olmert will gain politically from this to the extent that most Israelis do not distinguish between Hamas and the Palestinian population of Gaza and to the extent that their attitude toward Palestinians is fundamentally different from their attitude toward their northern neighbors, but to blur this distinction and wage indiscriminate and disproportinate war against the Palestinian population in general as well as Hamas undermines one of the basic reasons why Kadima exists as a separate party. Even if there is some short-term political gain for Kadima out of this, which I doubt, the strikes will ultimately be damaging to Kadima’s political identity.

My apologies for having fallen off the map for the last few weeks. I am back in Chicago in time for the new year, and I will resume regular blogging in the near future. Over the break I had the opportunity to read some very interesting books, including Sidney Griffith’s The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, which is a very good, brief survey of Christian intellectual culture under Islamic rule up through the 13th century, and I may have some remarks on them in the coming days. No doubt there will be plenty to add about the ongoing fighting in Gaza, Blagojevich’s madness and other matters.

My best, belated Christmas wishes to all our Western friends and Orthodox brethren on the New Calendar, and a happy new year to you all.

Thinking more on pragmatism, it occurs to me that the thing that a lot of people mean when they say they are non-ideological, or when they are classified, like so many undecided voters, as “results-oriented” and interested in “problem-solving,” is that they wish to appear reasonable and capable of making compromises with their opponents. Those who are moral absolutists of different political stripes are seen as unreasonable because there are things on which they will not, cannot, compromise. It seems to me that moral absolutists are often confused with ideologues, while the latter frequently prattle about morality and yet never seem troubled by the use of plainly immoral means to achieve their goals. As I suggested below, those who adopt the pragmatist label are very often ideologues of exactly this stripe. This is related indirectly to the discussion of outrage from yesterday.

Ideologues tend to traffick more in outrage, or rather in what we have come to recognize as manufactured outrage, because an important key to any ideology’s victory is to arouse the crowd’s passions and get them to stop thinking critically or to stop thinking at all. Outrage is the heart of propaganda, and one of the main purposes of propaganda is to deflect attention away from the flaws in one’s own system and focus entirely on the crimes, sometimes exaggerated, of another regime. For any ideology to endure for very long, it needs to cover itself in the legitimacy of morality and reasonableness, and outrage at wrongdoing abroad is useful for mobilizing political support for the ideology and identifying it with moral righteousness. To be pragmatic in our political culture, then, is to be willing to compromise on such moral absolutes as part of the “righteous” struggle against evil abroad, while draping oneself in moralistic rhetoric and being willing to use force against those who have been sufficiently demonized as embodiments of evil.

It’s all very well to insist that Obama be as forthcoming and transparent as possible concerning any connection between himself and his staff and the Blagojevich matter. Transparent, open government was an important part of what Obama promised as a candidate, and he should be held to his pledges. Even so, am I the only one who finds it absolutely crazy that anyone is this concerned about Obama’s answers on Blagojevich when we have just had a Senate report released that confirms that the highest levels of the current administration were implicated in and responsible for serious violations of the law? This is the sort of thing that some people have insisted not be investigated and prosecuted during the next administration’s tenure for various unpersuasive reasons, and not least because of the concern that it would appear to be a partisan witch-hunt. Obviously, we are not concerned about such appearances in Blagojevich’s case, because we think it important to enforce the law here, so why not enforce it when the crimes involved are far more serious and there are far greater breaches of the public trust? We are watching a strange spectacle, in which the entire country fixates on egregious corruption of one prominent public official while appearing to be largely indifferent to the systemic corruption and illegality of the highest officers in the executive branch of the federal government relating to matters of national security and prisoner abuse. To answer Prof. Cole, there is nothing mystifying in the timing of the report’s release–Congress’ desire to bury this issue and avoid doing the hard things necessary to defend the rule of law is evidently very strong.

There has been an interestingconversation about pragmatism and “ideology” going on, which began with Glenn Greenwald’s criticism of the way pragmatism and competence are invoked as if they can be defined apart from a particular set of political principles. I should state at the beginning that I think it contributes to a significant misunderstanding if we equate principles with ideology. If ideology is typically a “highly elastic rationale for action,” as Bacevich has defined it, and if it is fundamentally at odds with the complexity and variety of the world, an ideologue does not have a firm set of principles that guide his actions, but instead has a particular goal, whether utopian or not, that justifies taking more or less any action that he believes will bring him closer to reaching it. Insofar as ideology must be not just non-empirical, but anti-empirical, progress towards the goal is for the ideologue simply a matter of time and determination; experience cannot show the ideologue that the goal itself is unobtainable or impossible, or even that failure in pursuit of the goal has occurred. It is in this way that we should understand ideology, rather than broadly including under that label all sets of beliefs.

Of course, using it as Greenwald does, it is correct to say that we define “what works” based on a whole host of assumptions about what ought to be done and the vision that we have for why we are doing whatever it is we are doing. If we think of it this way, it is impossible to describe “what works” without first laying out an argument explaining why we are trying to make the attempt in the first place. Being able to do something effectively may be entirely undesirable if the thing in question is unjust, exploitative or corrupt. Shakedown artists and war criminals may be very pragmatic and effective in doing all of the wrong things. In our political discourse, politicians refer to pragmatism because they take it as a given that the matters of ought and why need no explanation; at best, they will use slogans and buzzwords to address those matters. This is why the bulk of our “debates” is taken up by arguing over narrow differences of means to pursue the same questionable ends, because most politicians have no interest and no incentive to inquire into whether such-and-such a thing ought to be done or question the reason why it is being done.

Think of it another way: a man of political principles is concerned with using both the right means for the right ends and is willing to let experience inform his assumptions, while the ideologue is indifferent to the means used and willfully ignorant of experience that challenges his assumptions. Any opposition between pragmatism and ideology also seems to me to be misleading from the beginning because what passes for “pragmatism” in government represents adherence to a particular reigning ideology. There might conceivably be some genuine empirically-oriented, sane pragmatism that does not fit this definition, but this is not the pragmatism the political class invokes and it is not the one we are discussing. When a given politician announces his interest in “what works,” we might reasonably interpret this as a statement that he does not intend to overturn established consensus and accepts the constraints and assumptions of the reigning ideology, which broadly speaking means state capitalism at home and hegemonism abroad.

Professing pragmatism is to say that you do not intend to attempt significant change in the structures or practices of government. In the context of this so-called pragmatic “center,” what we might call left and right-leaning instincts are usually a matter of emphasis and style. The “center” defines itself as non-ideological, and insists on identifying anything outside of the narrow band of the consensus as ideological, when this is not the case. This is how “centrists” can wink and nod at torture and support illegal surveillance and aggressive warfare while successfully defining opponents of the same as an ideological “fringe,” and it is how violating other states’ sovereignty and trashing constitutional protections are the serious, responsible positions that only “extremists” would question: whichever positions are taken up by “centrists” (i.e., those who enforce the consensus) are automatically defined as the pragmatic, non-ideological, problem-solving positions.

While the Blagosphere has been almost entirely consumed with our governor’s corruption and the state fair auction-like atmosphere that surrounded the Senate seat appointment, some bloggers on the left have begun noticing that reporting and commentary have tried to make the Blagojevich scandals into a serious problem for Obama, despite the evidence that shows Blagojevich to be deeply hostile to the President-elect and shows the latter to be uninvolved in any of the governor’s (alleged) crimes. One reason why this is happening is that a lot of journalists and pundits have become bored with the transition. It’s been going reasonably well, and it has been run so competently and with such an obvious emphasis on establishment-friendly appointments and merit (at least as merit is conventionally defined by that establishment) that most observers have been hungry for something else to talk about, and what better than a scandal involving all of the themes of the “old” politics, complete with bribery and shakedowns? You already have the makings of an overreaching and misleading narrative: “old Illinois politics mars transition period for Obama.”

On top of all of this, there is the problem that most people, especially journalists and pundits and even more particularly pundits on the right, seem to go through extreme mood swings when they talk and think about Obama. This is the tendency to swing between treating him, in John Kass’ memorable phrase, as the Mr. Tumnus of politics to regarding him as the canny Chicago pol, the Obama David Brooks referred to as “Fast Eddie,” or in other cases going between debating ridiculously whether he is more Maoist than Stalinist and then rejoicing childishly over the “centrism” of his appointments. In the mainstream media, it has gone from early adulation over the promised reform and transformation of Washington (whence the Messiah Watch) to a desire to play up conflict between Obama and the left, and now this latter theme has been partially replaced by the “Blagojevich taint” narrative.

Having finally recognized that Obama is a savvy political operator who is interested in effective government to pursue what are still broadly progressive goals, and having started to grasp that Obama is not a neo-McGovernite radical dove but is actually rather hawkish and establishmentarian in his instincts, the next thing for journalists and pundits to fixate on would have to be ethics and the political career in Illinois that virtually everyone ignored while they, again mostly in the mainstream press and on the right, were obsessing over his religious or tangential associations. Here we see the collective disbelief that a savvy Chicago pol could be at once more or less indifferent to the corruption of the machine politics around him (a guy who “won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers,” as Kass put it over six months ago), while nonetheless being free from any personal involvement in that corruption. People have a hard time making sense of a politician who can appear as the friend of the Hyde Park Independents and the Daley machine when each connection suits him, because it isn’t supposed to work that way.

Obama never transcends categories, as some people seemed to hope he could at one time, but he isn’t easily pigeonholed into any category, either, because he is very, very adaptable (which his admirers call “pragmatism”!). Just as they misjudged his political know-how because of his high-flown rhetoric, and just as they misjudged his foreign policy because of his opposition to the Iraq war, they are going to misjudge him again and try to tie him to Illinois corruption or claim that this reflects poorly on him or “taints” the incoming administration. Those who say this will be proven wrong again, and much to the frustration of his critics and enemies Obama will keep evading the categories and labels people try to stick to him and will separate himself from any associate, no matter how close or distant, the moment that associate becomes a liability.