Now, what about those whom Obama and his supporters vanquished? What the Republican party badly needs is a Night of the Long Knives [bold mine-DL].

The GOP has been laid low, thanks to politicians who swapped their principles for power and lost both. As the chief electoral vehicle for conservative and free-market ideas, the Republican party cannot regain America’s confidence –nor should it — until the guilty have been cast into the nearest volcano. ~Deroy Murdock

While not limited to its meaning as a reference to the bloody party purge in Germany in 1934, “Night of the Long Knives” is probably most closely associated in this country with that particular purge.  Unless that is the sort of association one wants to make (perhaps Murdock had the great political success of Harold Macmillan in mind?), perhaps that is not the best way to describe the start of the rebuilding process inside the GOP. 

As an anti-Bush, non-Republican, dissident conservative, I find that there is something superficially attractive about this idea.  Like the Tsarist in Darkness at Noon cheering intra-communist persecutions, I could take some satisfaction in watching Republicans turn on themselves in waves of self-destructive purges, but the history of the American right leads me to think that exactly the wrong sort of people would emerge as the purgers and the winners in this scenario.  Besides, I’m not sure that most Republicans and mainstream conservatives want to follow this line of thinking through to its logical conclusion.  After all, who gets to define who should be declared “guilty” and what are the criteria for “guilt”?  Do not be so ready to eliminate Danton, Robespierre, as it could lead to your doom as well.  Instead of learning the (obvious?) lesson from the last eight years that the GOP and movement have become too ideological, inflexible and hostile to dissent on major policy issues, as I proposed in my remarks at Yale on Saturday, there is an idea out there that if there were some more purges that would fix what’s ailing Republicans and conservatives.  If we took Murdock’s initial comments seriously, this would be the Dougherty Doctrine on crank.  

Taken to one extreme, anyone who voted for Bush is in some sense “guilty” for enabling the administration to do all of the things it has done, and even those who spoke out against policy X but otherwise argued for continued support of the administration in other areas share in some of the guilt.  Arguably, the hard-core party regulars, the ones who still approve of Mr. Bush and voted for McCain are in some ways the “guiltiest” of all, as they have apparently proven to be indifferent to all of the failures and blunders that Murdock considers absolutely unacceptable.  Inevitably, this sort of talk will lead to scapegoating one faction or one element in the party, and as usually happens in scapegoating the wrong people are going to receive most of the blame.  The trouble with political purges, besides the shameless opportunism and naked pursuit of power that they usually involve, is that the list of people who are selected for the volcano is drawn up entirely arbitrarily and what was once considered absolutely vital, team-player party loyalty becomes a cause for elimination.  Naturally, Murdock excludes from the list of Bush’s errors the war in Iraq, because there would scarcely be any mainstream conservatives left if all of the war supporters were to be held accountable for this greatest, most appalling and most politically costly error.  Including Iraq among the administration’s successes, as Murdock does, and putting the focus on spending and government expansion as the greatest sources of GOP woes, Murdock demonstrates the arbitrary, typically self-serving nature of political anathematisms.   

Of course, Murdock quickly shows that he is not all that serious in what he is saying.  Whom does Murdock nominate to be driven into outer darkness?  For the most part, failed former and current Congressional leaders and Karl Rove.  Having started with a zealous call for purification, Murdock ends up with a tame critique of a bunch of has-beens.  Denouncing Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich…in 2008–how very bold!  Hardly any of the people Murdock identifies by name matter (and, yes, that includes Gingrich), and even the current House and Senate GOP leaders are likely to be replaced, which makes calling for their ouster seem almost redundant.  Perhaps Murdock will next go out on a limb and say that Dick Cheney should not be the nominee in 2012. 

Apparently unaware of the odd contradiction of praising the pro-bailout GOP presidential ticket while damning the other bailout supporters, Murdock writes near the end:

John McCain and Sarah Palin campaigned energetically while advocating lower spending and tax cuts. Alas, the bailout fiasco cut them off at the knees.  They otherwise might have prevailed, and deserve praise for trying to do the right thing.

Ah, yes, the “bailout fiasco”–that would be the fiasco in which McCain and Palin supported the bailout, breaking with grassroots conservatives and a majority of House Republicans.  The very support for the bailout that makes McConnell, Boehner, Blunt, et al. “guilty” apparently should have no effect on McCain or Palin.  They deserve praise for “trying to do the right thing,” when, in fact, they did what Murdock regards as very much the wrong thing.

Jim Antle makes some good points in response to my remarks on Kmiec, and Ross still views Kmiec’s arguments with “contempt,” and both use a similar hypothetical case to explain what is wrong with Kmiec’s arguments.  This is the hypothetical boiled down to its essentials: imagine how antiwar Americans would view a prominent antiwar figure if he actively pushed for McCain’s election as the more antiwar alternative of the two major candidates, and then you’ll understand why pro-lifers have such a low opinion of Prof. Kmiec, who did make a pro-life case for Obama more or less the central part of his argument. 

Now we know that some significant percentage of people who oppose the war voted for McCain in the primaries and in the general election.  This has always baffled me, but this is what they did, just as millions of (nominally?) pro-life Democrats and independents lined up behind Obama.  Indeed, for McCain to receive 46% of the vote, he must have received millions of votes from war opponents.  Evidently, they are either not very interested in ending the war or they actually do believe that McCain would be better able to bring it to some kind of successful, or at least non-calamitous, conclusion.  For the most part, when these millions vote in what seems to antiwar activists and bloggers to be the objectively wrong way we put it down to a combination of partisanship and ignorance, but I don’t think we expend a lot of energy denouncing them.  However, if a prominent antiwar activist or politician crossed party lines to endorse McCain and made some “only McCain can end the war” argument, he probably would be ridiculed in the same way.  Here’s the interesting question: should he be ridiculed in such a fashion? 

Obviously, I think the logic of the “only Nixon” argument is deeply flawed, since it puts the hard-liners who have often been wrong on policy in the past in charge of reforming the policy, but it does seem to have some grounding in political reality.  Politicians who are perceived to “lack credibility” on national security according to conventional definitions (i.e., they have been reluctant to support starting and continuing at least one war) do have a harder time making significant changes in policy, while those who supposedly have credibility (i.e., they are warmongers) can bring along other members of their party to support a significant change more effectively if they are interested in making that change.  Following the bizarre “only Nixon” logic, Obama would have unimpeachable pro-choice credentials that would make it politically feasible for him to pursue a pro-life direction, but there is clearly no reason to expect him to be willing do that. 

Of course, it’s that willingness to change policy that makes all the difference, which is why it seems so far-fetched to expect that President McCain would withdraw from Iraq or President Obama would adopt pro-life Democratic proposals.  To believe this about McCain, you would have to ignore that his hawkishness is just about the only thing that kept his partisans behind him as it was.  To believe this about Obama, you have to imagine that he will suddenly acquire enthusiasm for challenging entrenched feminist and pro-choice interest groups when he has never shown much desire to challenge entrenched groups in his party or outside of it.  Put another way, I can imagine a pro-life case being made for a pro-choice Democratic politician that might be minimally credible if that politician had demonstrated in his record some consistent effort at collaborating with pro-lifers in his party.  When such a politician is no longer a creature of myth, perhaps we will hear that argument, but it is fair to say that Obama does not and never has fit the description.        

Kmiec’s critique of the GOP was more wide-ranging than simply making a pro-life case from the beginning (which was complicated by the reality that the candidate he had supported in the primaries, Romney, did not hold many of the same views), but as the election wore on he did tend to focus more on abortion to the exclusion of other issues, giving the impression that he was claiming that single-issue pro-life voters ought to prefer Obama.  In other words, one major problem was that Kmiec attempted to do too much.  He ended up not only offering an argument for why a pro-life Catholic conservative could permit himself to support Obama in spite of Obama’s atrocious record on abortion on account of Obama’s other positions on Iraq and torture, which might have been a somewhat more defensible position, but strained (and, frankly, failed) to show that Obama would be more receptive to pro-life Democratic ideas and would be interested in reducing the number of abortions.  Indeed, at one point he went so far as to praise the purported minimalism of Souter and Breyer–that was obviously never going to persuade pro-life conservatives, but then I suppose he was not trying to persuade them so much as he was trying to make Obama seem reasonable and pragmatic.  He might have done better simply to say that Obama is reasonable and pragmatic, which even many of his critics would be willing to grant after a fashion. 

In his policy arguments regarding Obama and abortion, I think Kmiec was wrong, because I don’t think a positive conservative case on policy can be made for Obama, and certainly not when it comes to abortion.  Still, it is remarkable that while most Obamacons are chastised for not using policy arguments in favor of the candidate they are endorsing, relying instead as they do on claims about his temperament, judgement and intelligence, Kmiec seems to be singled out for special derision because he did at least attempt to provide a substantive argument for his choice.  In my view, all conservative policy arguments for Obama are fundamentally flawed.  Obamacons are prone to accept Obama’s nods to the right at face value, failing to see that these are head fakes designed to throw the opposition off balance.  It is this basic (mistaken) willingness to give Obama the benefit of the doubt that makes one an Obamacon in the first place.  When pro-life Obamacons hear him say that there is a moral dimension to abortion, they feel reassured that he is not cavalier about the issue, but they do not notice how utterly incompatible his fully pro-abortion record is with this supposed seriousness.  That said, is Kmiec’s position any more genuinely contemptible than the unfounded libertarian expectation that Obama will respect civil liberties and constitutional limits on the executive or the rather fanciful progressive (and sometime conservative) hope that Obama is not every bit as hawkish on, say, Iran as he claims to be?  The problem seems to be that Kmiec went to the trouble of providing an argument for his endorsement that did not fall back on vague and fairly subjective assessments of a politician’s character. 

If the main complaint is that he has misrepresented Obama’s record and provided an unduly optimistic assessment of what pro-lifers should expect from him, he is in the same boat with every person, conservative or otherwise, who has made unfounded and baseless claims that Obama’s nomination and election somehow represent a break with Democratic identity politics, or that he will not support race-based affirmation, or that he will fight teachers’ unions on merit pay.  There is some rhetorical nod to which believers in all of these propositions can point, and they all misrepresent what Obama actually believes because this is exactly what Obama’s rhetorical nods were designed to encourage them to do.  The serious mistake all these people have made is not that they have run with these rhetorical nods to create elaborate, implausible arguments presenting Obama as a very different kind of Democrat, but that they are willing to be bought off by empty lip service from another politician.  It is as if someone took Mr. Bush seriously when he said that he believes going to war is always a last resort when the evidence clearly shows otherwise.                

Why spend all this time and energy considering Kmiec’s case?  For the same reason that I think other Obamacon defections need to be understood more than they need to be denounced: virtually every conservative endorsement of Obama is rooted in some failure of the GOP and/or the conservative movement, and Kmiec’s is no different.  Endorsing Obama is a protest, an extreme protest perhaps, but a protest all the same against the failures of the GOP.  In addition to his other objections, his argument for Obama is an expression of his loss of confidence in the pro-life political strategy of the last thirty years with its nearly monomaniacal focus on Court appointments.  Arguably, this strategy has been shown to be bankrupt ever since Casey, but pro-lifers have not given up on it.  Recognizing the bankruptcy of this approach, Kmiec proposed an alternative, and I agree that the alternative wasn’t appealing, but pro-life conservatives would benefit from considering how futile and bankrupt this strategy has been that it could not retain the support of Prof. Kmiec.

After nearly thirty years of support, what do pro-lifers have to show for their continued support for the GOP?  Not very much.  Does it make sense to back the other party, where there is even less chance of pro-life concerns being taken seriously?  No, not really.  Then again, how else do pro-lifers practically express their frustration with what seems to be a futile, fruitless political strategy?  It is true that they could stay home or vote third party, and obviously no one compels pro-lifers tobe a public advocate for a pro-choice candidate.  Even so, if the GOP deserves to be held accountable for contradicting the principles and betraying the interests of core constituencies in other areas, does it not also deserve to be held accountable for its absolute failure to do anything for one of its largest, most loyal constituencies for at least the last twelve years?  For almost the entire period that the GOP was in the majority in Congress, and during the whole of unified government under Mr. Bush pro-lifers received next to nothing in terms of action on their behalf (and, no, I don’t think the Court appointments count for very much, especially when the second had to be extracted from Mr. Bush with great difficulty).  On ESCR, McCain was indistinguishable from Obama, and, as Jim correctly notes, both were to the left of a Bush administration position that was already offensive to many pro-lifers.  As unpersuasive as Kmiec’s arguments were, the particularly strong derision heaped on Kmiec will make the GOP leadership think that it needs to be only slightly less objectionable than the opposition to garner pro-lifers’ unswerving support and ensure their willingness to enforce futile party loyalty against dissenters.  Apparently, the leadership will be right in thinking this, which all but guarantees that pro-lifers will continue to be taken for granted, their priorities ignored and their issues paid ever-decreasing lip service in some future Republican administration many years from now.

Yes, it is anti-Palin conservatives who have been drinking the Kool-Aid.  That’s it.  Let’s just pretend the last two months of pathetic excuse-making for Palin’s embarrassing failures never happened, and furthermore let’s pretend that everything we know about her does not show that she is uninterested in policy details and largely uninformed about the world beyond our shores.  I could imagine people making excuses for her alleged geographical ignorance (a claim that was always likely to be false) because conservative pundits repeatedly made excuses for her demonstrations of ignorance.  They seemed excited by how much she didn’t know.  Can’t define the Bush Doctrine?  The pundits had a ready-made answer, “Who can define it?  It is a mysterious, changing thing that no one truly understands.”  Can’t name a Court ruling other than Roe she disagrees with?  No problem–evade the relevant issue and talk about how stupid Biden is!  The rule was simple: the deeper the confusion and cluelessness, the more zealous the defense.  I don’t much care for lectures about “drinking the Kool-Aid” from members of the personality cult. 

On the same topic, Kathleen Parker writes in the Slate forum I mentioned below:

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party’s own educated members. The movement created by that superelite, but never elitist, William F. Buckley Jr. was handed over to Joe Six-Pack. Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor.

The Republican Party’s Baghdad Bobism with regard to Palin, a denial so pernicious that party operatives were willing to let her sit a heartbeat away from the presidency in a time of war and financial collapse, revealed what really ails the party. The “P Factor” isn’t a single person but a sickness that will have to be acknowledged and cured—Republicans will be reciting their newly tailored principles only to themselves.

Update: James Joyner has likewise been accused of mindless anti-Palinism by the same critics for having stated the blindingly obvious.  Alex Knapp has more.

It is probably too late tonight to be starting a post on something this contentious, but now that I have started I suppose I should make a few points about dispute between Ross and Doug Kmiec brewing in the Slate forum on the future of the GOP.  This topic is relevant to what Ross and I were speaking about at Yale on Saturday at a very fine ISI conference on the future of American conservatism.  From time to time, I have been known to let my frustration get the better of me in blogging, to put it mildly, so I can hardly chide Ross for his expressions of frustration with Prof. Kmiec’s advocacy for Obama.  Like Ross, I find Obama’s record on abortion abhorrent (indeed, I am told that I am a theocrat on this question), and I am still unsure why Prof. Kmiec does not find it to be so, but he is hardly the first or only Obamacon who has misread Obama’s professorial style, accommodationist rhetoric and personal decency as the promise of something more.  At one point, I was as frustrated with what I considered standard Obamacon blindness to the reality of his views on civil liberties and foreign policy as Ross seems to be with Prof. Kmiec’s pro-Obama arguments concerning abortion, but the more I pondered the question the more it seemed to me that the GOP and mainstream conservatism must have suffered such a profound loss of credibility with so many serious people for a reason.  Understanding that reason may be a great deal more useful to the right than anything Prof. Kmiec has done on Obama’s behalf.   

As an antiwar conservative, I view phrases such as “useful idiot” with a certain ambivalence, as this phrase and others like it have been thrown at the antiwar right more than a few times to make scurrilous charges against us.  There has also been a tendency in certain pro-life circles in recent years to ridicule antiwar pro-life Catholics for daring to be more scrupulous concerning just war theory than their peers.  Prof. Kmiec clearly has lost confidence in the GOP, and for good reason.  The war and the torture regime, to name two things that have evidently deeply disturbed him and pushed him in the direction he has taken, were enabled not by his sort of so-called “useful idiots,” but rather by many stalwart, Republican pro-lifers who railed against abortion in one breath and in the next defended the degradation of human beings in the name of necessity.  That still does not make his argument for Obama persuasive, but I can understand why a serious pro-life Christian would very much want to find some way to break with the GOP decisively because of his convictions and not in spite of them.  Obviously, I do not see supporting the other major party as an option for conservatives, which is why I voted for Chuck Baldwin, but if the ruling party has proved itself not just unworthy but antithetical to one’s principles and it needs to be held accountable this option becomes possible.  

If I find Obama’s position on abortion to be be as disrespectful and hostile to human dignity as the right’s torture apologists, indeed more so, which therefore makes him unacceptable in my eyes, it is not so outlandish or bizarre to imagine that there are pro-lifers who understandably feel the same revulsion for the party that created the torture regime.  It is not so strange when these pro-lifers act to hold that party accountable.  Does that vindicate Prof. Kmiec’s arguments for Obama concerning abortion?  No, but it does put them in perspective.          

In fairness to Prof. Kmiec, I wouldn’t be surprised that he has his own share of frustrations with the way he has been summarily dismissed and belittled over the last several months.  Of all the Obama supporters on the right, Prof. Kmiec seems to have been on the receiving end of focused, fairly personal criticism to a degree that few others experienced.  From my perspective, his pro-Obama arguments are not persuasive, and I havesaidsomany times, but then I do not find libertarian or antiwar arguments for Obama persuasive, either, because they consistently side-step the man’s record and actual policy views to tell us about other things–his temperament, his intellect, his purported respect for the other side, etc.  Perhaps they are right about these other things, and perhaps these other things will counterbalance what we find in his record and platform (and what we find there is terrible), but that requires a degree of trust that most of us on the right simply do not have and cannot quite understand.  Indeed, to lose trust in Republican leaders almost requires distrusting leaders in both parties, and one should not trust in princes in any case.  However, if you have to choose between the party that offers cynical lip service and one that openly disagrees with you and offers the opportunity of holding the former party accountable, it is not necessarily clear which party actually offers more.  Of course, there is scarcely any substantive common ground possible between left and right on abortion under the current regime, but this is the flip side of the frequently substance-free nature of conservative endorsements of Obama: the Republicans have failed so badly to deliver in so many areas that even pro-lifers who can realistically expect nothing but the worst from Obama support him all the same.      

I return again to my remarks from last week:

Far more important in the aftermath than coming up with new and amusing ways to mock the Obama endorsers is an effort to understand and remedy the profound failures that made this phenomenon possible before a major realignment does occur. 

Unlike Ross, I am extremely skeptical that pro-lifers have had anything to show for their support for the GOP and I doubt that they ever will have anything to show for it, except for small changes at the margins and empty praise for a culture of life that in many other respects Republican policies in recent years have done more to mock than uphold.  Perpetually deferred promises cannot sustain political loyalty forever.

The news that Israeli Foreign Minister and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni has warned that negotiating with Iran would signal “weakness” is unfortunate for a couple of reasons, but it may not be as significant as the report makes it out to be.  Livni may be stating her real position here, in which case there is going to be much greater political pressure on the Obama administration at home not to undermine or go against Livni’s government in the event that she becomes prime minister after elections in February.  Her timing is also not very good (not that she would be concerned about how her remarks fit into Obama’s transition process), since it comes on the heels of the Russian announcement of the intention to deploy missiles to Kaliningrad, which is being interpreted in establishment circles as evidence of the first foreign challenge to the incoming administration.  Never mind that the Russians are primarily responding to foolish Bush administration actions.  Livni’s remarks are  going to lend support to opponents of Obama’s proposal to enter into negotiations with Iran and Syria, who will start stitching together a pattern of foreign states’ actions and allied skepticism of his proposals to show that Obama’s plans are impractical, dangerous and so on.  Numerous Post editorials will lay out how Obama must adapt to reality and will have to abandon this cornerstone of what some of his backers have dubbed the Obama Doctrine.  Presumably, Obama will simply ignore all of this as he should, but it still presents something of a problem. 

Those on the left in America who want Obama to focus early on Israel and Palestine are probably not going to want to see a major disagreement between Obama and Livni.  Livni would be, if victorious next year, the leader of the only viable coalition that would plausibly be willing to negotiate with the Palestinians.  However, there is some reason to think that Livni’s framing of negotiation as a signal of weakness–a somewhat odd position for a Kadima foreign minister to take–is a necessary electoral maneuver to deflect the inevitable attacks from Netanyahu.  She might not be as opposed to talks as strongly as these remarks indicate.

Since at least one commenter has asked about this specifically, here are a few thoughts about what Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as his White House chief of staff means.  First, it apparently means that many Obama supporters are going to freak out over an important, but not major appointment, or they are going to find themselves very disappointed to discover that Obama is, in fact, a Chicago politician who is interested in pushing his agenda rather than being the national psychotherapist they seem interested in finding.  (Just wait until he names Lugar or Hagel to his Cabinet–then we’ll see some more justified panic from the left.)  From what I think I know about Emanuel, he is one of the DLC-type “centrist” hawkish Democrats who emerged during the Clinton years, he was a masterful organizer of the DCCC’s campaign in 2006 as he maximized Democratic gains in a favorable year, and he is as aggressive as Obama is calm.  Rolling Stone’s 2005 profile gives you some idea of what you can expect from him:

For years, Emanuel was the political brains of Bill Clinton’s White House. Intense to the point of ferocity, he was known for taking on the most daunting tasks — the ones no one else wanted — and pulling off the seemingly impossible, from banning assault weapons to beating back the Republican-led impeachment. “Clinton loved Rahm,” recalls one staffer, “because he knew that if he asked Rahm to do something, he would move Heaven and Earth — not necessarily in that order — to get it done.”

One thing we can take away from this is that Obama’s White House is going to be run competently, and staff, appointments and policy proposals are going to be handled effectively.  Obama will still be patient and deliberative before moving, but when he does move having Emanuel as his chief of staff suggests that they will move quickly and aggressively to advance their agenda.  Pelosi’s loss is definitely Obama’s gain, and evidently Emanuel concluded that he could be more effective and influential as chief of staff.  Of course, it will help Obama enormously to have both a veteran of a previous administration and a former member of the House leadership working at his side.  For whatever it’s worth, according to the profile, Emanuel has had a good relationship with the netroots.  This is obviously an important progresssive constituency that Obama has not cultivated as much as they would have liked, preferring to create his own parallel grassroots movement, so I would expect the typical Kossack reaction to this selection to be mostly positive.

Jeffrey Goldberg makes the point that this should quash all fears that Obama is not sufficiently “pro-Israel.”   For the same reason, those expecting some significant break with set policy on Israel and Palestine are going to be less than thrilled.   

Steve Clemons makes some interesting observations on the potential significance of this for Obama’s foreign policy:

My greatest fear about Emanuel is that he might perpetuate a “false choice” orientation towards Israel in Middle East affairs that he’s going to have to compensate for and get under control. There are no rational alternatives in the Middle East than actually delivering on a Palestinian state and finally putting the Middle East peace business out of business.

Emanuel needs to prove his judiciousness by not preempting serious progress in Israel/Palestine affairs and not encouraging Barack Obama to make the mistake of trying to define his presidency by exploiting some national security conflict. There are downsides to the JFK comparison.

Of course, if Obama is already heading in these directions, Emanuel’s encouragement or lack of it won’t make much difference.

I also noticed this in the Emanuel profile:

His younger brother, Ari, is a Hollywood talent agent who served as the inspiration for Ari Gold, the fast-talking agent played by Jeremy Piven on HBO’s hit series Entourage.

Update: John Boehner seems intent on reminding people why he should not be minority leader:

This is an ironic choice for a president-elect who has promised to change Washington, make politics more civil, and govern from the center [bold mine-DL].

I guess you have to use the spin you have, but this is weak.  Of course, one reason for selecting Emanuel is that Obama is probably going to set an agenda that is much more “centrist” and incrementalist and therefore more disappointing to progressives.  It is also therefore much more threatening to the Republicans, because they will have a harder time peeling away Blue Dog Democrats on major pieces of legislation.

Still, as her former running mate would say, the fundamentals of Sarah Palin are strong. Her conservative detractors—Colin Powell, David Brooks, and Christopher Buckley among them—were put off not by her personality but rather her lack of knowledge about certain national and foreign-policy issues. Such deficiencies can be addressed easily [bold mine-DL]. ~Chris Beam

This is a claim I keep seeing repeated again and again to bolster the claim that Palin will be back.  New reports from inside the McCain campaign put this in a rather harsh perspective, since they suggest that the deficiencies are so great that if they are to be addressed at all it will not be easy. 

Carl Cameron reports:

There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability to be a running mate, a Vice President, and a heartbeat away from the Presidency.  We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA….We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent….a whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability….[She] was particularly angry about how the Katie Couric interview went.  She didn’t accept preparation for that interview, and aides say that was part of the problem.    

Obviously, we should take what disgruntled McCain staffers dish to reporters with a grain of salt.  They have an agenda, and part of it is to make her look even worse than she already does to deflect some of the criticism away from McCain.  The claim that she didn’t know Africa was a continent is the sort of thing that almost sounds as if it belongs to a caricature of a person who knows nothing, but it seems remotely possible that it is true.  Americans’ knowledge of world geography is notoriously poor, which does not excuse it in this case if true, but neither is it all that far-fetched.  The troubling thing is that I get the sinking feeling that a lot of people who want her to become the future of the party couldn’t care less about this.  I can almost hear some dedicated pundits rehearsing the next defense, “Well, how many people understand that Africa is a continent?  Do we expect our elected officials to understand the conventions originally invented by ancient geographers?  Besides, technically, Africa is attached to the landmass of Asia and so you can see why she might have been hesitant to identify it that way.”  A more aggressive defense might say, “Who cares about Africa?  Palin is interested in helping this country.”  The claim about NAFTA seems hard to believe–how could a governor of Alaska not know which countries were involved in this agreement?  Then again, this tends to confirm everything we have come to know about her lack of interest in policy details.  These claims about her are so bizarre and yet specific that it is hard to dismiss them outright.    

Still, the report that she refused to prepare for the Couric interview makes everything quite clear.  She wasn’t overwhelmed with scripted answers and talking points that they had been forcing on her–she was genuinely at a loss for coherent answers because she had not even attempted to prepare for the questions she would be asked, and so she tried to bluster her way through to rather calamitous results.  Far from being a distorted or misleading image of what Palin knew on her own, that may have been the clearest picture of her understanding of the issues that we had in the last two months.  In the last few days, I have seen remarks to the effect that “anti-Palin” conservatives are going to end up feeling foolish in the future for having doubted her qualifications, but with every passing day and each new revelation I am even more convinced that everyone who criticized her fairly on her record and statements will have no reason to feel that way. 

Update: In a newNYT story, the claim about the interview is qualified here by an anonymous McCain advisor:

Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. “She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”   

I’m not sure that this helps Palin that much, but it does complicate the picture a little.

Of course, it’s not the level of spending that gets the most attention; it’s the manner in which the spending is allocated. The proliferation of earmarks is largely a product of the Gingrich-DeLay years, and it’s no surprise that some of the most ardent practitioners were earmarked by the voters for retirement yesterday. Few Americans will take seriously Republican speeches on limited government if we Republicans can’t wean ourselves from this insidious practice. But if we can go clean, it will offer a stark contrast to the Democrats, who, after two years in training, already have their own earmark favor factory running at full tilt. ~Rep. Jeff Flake

The frustrating thing about this earmark obsession is that Flake is reliably right on spending and I have nothing particularly against Flake, and I understand the impulse to give one’s own priorities more attention when talking about what needs to be done, but how on earth can you come away from the last two consecutive electoral defeats for the GOP and conclude that earmarks and spending are the main problems?  In fairness to Flake, that’s not the entirety of his argument (he gives a nod to rolling back intervention in the financial sector), but glaringly absent is any mention of foreign affairs or national security, immigration policy or trade policy.  It’s not that Flake has taken a mistaken position on any of them–they are simply not included in the discussion.  It is as if the last two years never happened and Republicans are still confident, just as they were in 2006, that “excessive and wasteful spending” did them in.

After Gilchrest lost his bid for re-nomination, I noted that the Club for Growth’s efforts to defeat the moderate Republican had probably helped ensure that the seat would be won in November by the Democrats, and it is now quite possible that the Democratic candidate will win there.  Andy Harris may come back from his small deficit from absentee voting, but the idea of purging a reliably electable moderate in a closely-divided district during a very poor election cycle for Republicans was asking for trouble.  On the whole, in recent elections the only thing that the Club for Growth seems to be very good at growing is the Democratic majority in Congress.

NBC-WSJ GOP pollster Neil Newhouse did a post-election survey last night, and here’s what he found: Just 12% of those surveyed believed Palin should be the GOP’s new leader; instead 29% of voters said Romney, followed by 20% who say Huckabee. Among GOPers, it was Romney 33%, Huckabee 20% and Palin 18%. ~FirstRead

Via Andrew

This suggests that Palin’s tremendous popularity within the GOP does not translate into support for her as the default party leader, which is an example of some understanding of political realities among Republican voters.  If all those named in this survey choose to run, it also could portend another very divided primary field where the next Republican nominee will end up winning most of the delegates by ekeing out 32-35% of the vote in state after state.  This is similar to what happened after the ’92 loss.  Few, if any, seriously backed Quayle as the heir apparent, and Pat Buchanan had loyal supporters but was obviosly loathed by the party establishment (Huckabee seems to fit this role best), which meant that the party relied on its trusty “it’s his turn” method of selecting an establishment candidate.  McCain was considered the frontrunner in 2007 for the same reason–he had been the runner-up in 2000, and he was due–and as it worked out he survived the challenges of various younger line-jumpers and outsiders.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Republicans rarely reward line-jumpers and outsiders.  A candidacy like that of Obama has not yet proved successful in the GOP, and by this I mean having the candidacy of a fairly young challenger lead to general election victory.  The last three Democratic Presidents (including the President-elect) have been long-shot outsiders of one kind or another, and arguably every non-incumbent postwar Democratic nominee has followed this pattern.  As significant as Goldwater’s nomination was, it was a fluke of sorts in the postwar era and the only one of its kind on the Republican side.  Perhaps the ’64 result convinced party leaders that they should never try anything like that again.  As we all know, Reagan had paid his dues in 1976, and was rewarded with the ’80 nomination, after losing in ’80 Bush waited his turn until ’88, and Dole had served his time and was eventually rewarded in ’96.  If the Republicans keep up this tradition, Romney would seem to be the logical successor, even though he would almost certainly be a poor nominee. 

However, McCain’s loss and the deep misgivings about his candidacy among many GOP primary voters may have changed things.  Under the old pattern, and based on the survey data above, Romney would be considered the party leader (even though he technically finished third, not second, during the primaries) and probably will be treated as such by a lot of people on the right.  Then again, McCain’s defeat may have made the old pattern seem foolish, so there could be much more resistance to anointing Romney as the heir apparent than there has been in the past.  This would normally be where I launch into my usual anti-Romney argument, but I think having mainstream conservatives and party leaders rallying behind a candidate as terrible as Romney will create the perfect opportunity for a line-jumping, perhaps even populist candidate.  As I discuss in a new article for Takimag, what we learned from the 2008 election was the powerful establishment hostility to anything resembling grassroots, populist conservatism and also the strong desire among the party’s core constituencies for a candidate who represents them:

Regardless of how one views Sarah Palin herself, the phenomenon of enthusiasm for Palin, like the grassroots mobilization for Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul we saw in the primaries, shows the powerful hunger in Middle America for someone to speak for them and defend their interests.  Except perhaps on immigration, institutional conservatism and elected representatives in the Republican Party have largely failed to do this.  During the primaries, institutional conservatism was content to foist two rebranded Northeastern liberal Republicans on conservatives as their champions while denigrating the two candidates with the strongest grassroots support. As the enthusiasm for candidates as different as Huckabee and Paul shows, Christian conservatives and libertarians are looking for representation. These voters are not going to find it in a mainstream movement that loathes Huckabee and Paul, nor will they find what they seek among the “reformists,” so their support is up for grabs.    

To the extent that Palin is, as Daniel Koffler astutely observes, “the reductio ad absurdum of some of those [putatively conservative] intellectuals’ efforts to manipulate the conservative base to advance their foreign policy agenda,” she is not necessarily the one best-suited to seize the opportunity presented by another episode of the establishment rallying to Romney.