Here is a RedState post (“The Seven Reasons McCain-Palin Are A Lock To Win”) that will serve as a valuable artifact of the political and intellectual cocoon of the modern GOP and mainstream conservatism.  In years to come, when strategists and pundits try to understand what happened in this election, this might serve as a key text demonstrating core Republican disbelief that they could lose. 

It may interest you to know (on the day that Gov. Crist had to extend voting hours to accommodate the waves of early voters) that there is an egregious campaign of voter suppression, and I suppose it must be a conspiracy so vast that I and many other conservative bloggers have unwittingly contributed to it by acknowledging reality days and weeks ago:

The first and foremost reason McCain-Palin will win is the absolute arrogance, elitism, condescending, patronizing and in-your-face voter suppression campaign – don’t vote for McCain, he can not win — being conducted by the national media on Senator Obama’s behalf.

Now think about this for a moment.  When the author says that there is a “voter suppression campaign,” he means that the national media are reporting poll numbers and Electoral College projections accurately and then drawing more or less rational conclusions from the information they have reported.  For fun, let’s grant this point–there is a vast campaign to “suppress” the vote, but we are then told that the vote-suppressing is going to lead to McCain-Palin victory by way of causing a backlash.  If that’s true, shouldn’t McCain supporters want the media to be even more biased and unfair in the closing days?  After all, as his media coverage has gotten worse and more hostile McCain’s numbers have been soaring.  Oh, wait, maybe that’s not right. 

The other reasons why McCain-Palin is a “lock” (note that he doesn’t even hedge his bets with a lot of conditional statements about what still could happen) are: 1) the Gallup poll after Labor Day as reliable predictor (which means we should ignore all the polls since then); 2) the “predictor states” of Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee (never mind that Obama is probably going to win one and possibly two of these); 3) Farrakhan and Jackson’s remarks about Obama are scaring away elderly Jewish voters (never mind that Obama’s support among Jewish voters is at 74%); 4) Disaffected female Clinton supporters will re-emerge and shock all of us (Pew has Democratic support for McCain at a whopping 7%, and his support from women is 34%); 5) Unstable economic situation means voters will turn away from the young, inexperienced candidate (even though economic woes clearly work in Obama’s favor); 6) Bradley Effect! (non-existent!).

Ross agrees with part of John’s Culture11 argument that Iraq is central to the GOP’s woes, but concludes:

But in this particular election cycle, I actually think the McCain camp’s broad approach to the issue – emphasize the successes of the Surge, criticize Obama for opposing it, promise to leave Iraq with honor, and downplay the question of whether we should have invaded in the first place – has been pretty much the best possible tack a GOP candidate could take.

It is difficult to disentangle the possible alternatives for the GOP this year from the reality that a majority of Republicans still think invading Iraq was the right thing to do and don’t want to withdraw and the related matter that realist Republicans need not–and did not–apply for the presidential nomination.  On this latter point, it is also important to emphasize that even if realist Republicans had been inclined to run for the nomination they are all pro-war anyway, which points to a deeper problem in the party.  In other words, even if we could imagine a scenario in which the GOP nominates an openly antiwar candidate as a way of neutralizing the clear Democratic advantage on this issue, we run up against the rather harsh political reality that there were probably not enough Republican voters who could have propelled such a candidate to the nomination, and the even harsher reality that this nominee would have had difficulty uniting the other two-thirds of the party behind him.  In addition to the limited support within the party, a realist antiwar candidate would have to contend with the problem that antiwar voters in the GOP primaries split their votes among various pro-war candidates indiscriminately, so that even in a very divided field the antiwar candidate could not have counted on winning with a plurality made up of antiwar voters.

Obviously, once a die-hard war supporter such as McCain became the nominee, repudiating the war was not credible.  Before that, the antiwar position had only one champion in Ron Paul, who was sufficiently radical in his critique of U.S. foreign and domestic policy that he was never going to be able to assemble a broad base of support within the post-Bush party.  No other antiwar politicians seriously considered a presidential run, because there were no other antiwar Republicans in federal elective office outside the House except for Lincoln Chafee and only a few within the House.  There were no antiwar governors, so far as I know, or if there were they did not volunteer this information to the public.  The media frenzy around Hagel’s procedural and tactical disagreements with the administration was evidence of how the most minimal deviations from the administration line came to be treated as evidence of antiwar Republicanism for lack of having many actual antiwar Republicans.  In the end, even Hagel’s minor deviations were considered so disqualifying that his presidential run flopped before it began. 

There were so few antiwar politicians in the Congressional GOP and none among Republican governors because most of the rank-and-file remained supportive of the war, and party and movement activists made any attempt to change course in Iraq grounds for being purged and punished.  It is because of this structural bias against antiwar politicians that there were no other antiwar candidates and so a vanishingly small chance of an antiwar candidate mounting a presidential run and an even smaller chance of one winning the nomination.  This bias actually became stronger in the wake of the ’06 defeat as a few of the original war opponents in the House Republican caucus lost their bids for re-election and as the “surge” became the only important test for party loyalty.  So as a matter of practical politics, Ross may be right that the GOP had to obsess about the “surge” and demagogue Obama’s withdrawal plan, which helps drive home how debilitating lockstep support for the war has been and how much it crippled the GOP’s chances of responding to the public’s obvious repudiation of the war.  Iraq destroyed the GOP and badly damaged its credibility on national security in the eyes of a majority of the public, but the continuing Republican support for the war and support for making the pro-war position the one absolute litmus test did even more damage by making the GOP incapable of adapting to the shift in public opinion between 2004 and 2006.  The surviving House members are probably going to conclude that their position on Iraq needs no examination, just as they concluded after 2006, and as the GOP’s numbers in the House and Senate dwindle even more there are going to be fewer and fewer elected Republicans who do not come from safe seats and deeply “red” states, which probably means that there will be even less interest in re-examining the Iraq debacle.

Add to this the blunt fact that the GOP probably can’t afford to lose racist white voters, especially in the South (you think a Jindal – Obama race wouldn’t invite a conservative, white, third-party candidacy?), and I think Jindal’s chance of being the nominee in 2012 is, despite his obvious talents, pretty close to nil. The GOP isn’t going to be looking for its own Obama; it’s going to be looking for an anti-Obama. ~Chris Orr

As I argued some time ago, never underestimate the Republican desire to get on the high horse of anti-racism and egalitarianism, to say nothing of the even greater desire to demonstrate that they are in no way racist.  This is the “defensive crouch” for Republicans, which has led them time and again in the last twenty years to nominate the “inclusive” moderates who engage in various minority outreach efforts to no avail.  The Palin pander to women failed magnificently, but the failure of most of the other panders over the years has not discredited these attempts inside the GOP.  The inevitable next step will be to nominate a non-white candidate.     

This is partly opportunistic, but it is also partly very serious.  The small cottage industry out there cataloguing the “real racism” of liberals represents a genuine conviction in the modern GOP that they are the only true defenders of color-blind equality.  The Republican obsession with Jeremiah Wright cannot be understood apart from this “fight the real racists!” mentality.  The enthusiastic reception of Palin and the sudden willingness to label any criticism of her as sexism and elitism reflects a similar impulse to out-egalitarian the egalitarians.  This is opportunistic insofar as it is aimed at confusing conventional definitions and throwing the opponent off guard (“we’re the real feminists, so there!”), but it is quite serious in that it reflects a widely-held Republican belief that their agenda and their party represent “empowerment” for women and minorities. 

Observers on the left don’t believe this for a minute, so they find it hard to believe that Jindal would be embraced by the rank-and-file, but this is actually an important part of the GOP’s understanding of itself.  This is particularly true among Republican elites, and as we have seen over the last eight years the rank-and-file will mostly go along with whatever their elites tell them is the new party line.  Besides, supporting Jindal won’t be much of a stretch for most people.  Ideological heterodoxy has not been a problem for him, his positions have been consistent and very much to the liking of conservatives, and any trouble he will have on account of his religion will be much more manageable than the resistance that Romney had among evangelicals and Huckabee had among non-evangelicals.  If some have pulled back from Huckabee and Palin because of the role of identity politics in their candidacies, they will celebrate Jindal as the supposed negation of identity politics (even though his Catholicism and social conservatism are essential to his appeal).  In Jindal you have someone conservatives of almost all stripes find to be genuinely attractive and exciting, which cannot be said about any of the ’08 also-rans and many of the other possible ’12 candidates, and also someone who will provide Republicans considerable cover from accusations of racism as they mount another campaign against Obama.  I hadn’t been thinking of it along these lines until I read Orr’s post, but I now see why Jindal should be considered a strong, perhaps leading, contender for the nomination if he chooses to run.

Though rarely explicit (and certainly not exclusive) a large portion of the GOP’s closing argument this cycle has been to stoke white, working class fear and suspicion of the Other. The dark-skinned man with the foreign-sounding name may be a Muslim, or a socialist, or a friend of terrorists, or a racial huckster, or a fake U.S. citizen, or some other vague kind of “radical.” You may never be sure which he is (maybe all of the above), but in your gut you simply don’t “know” him the way you know the other candidates. This is not, to put it mildly, a message likely to benefit Bobby Jindal. ~Chris Orr

I agree with Ross that this is completely wrong.  As with so many of the controversies of this year, the increasingly negative Republican reaction to Obama from the start of the year until now has been tied directly to the growing perception that Obama was insufficiently Americanist such that he has been regularly described as someone who does not believe in American exceptionalism.  The idea that he does not believe in American exceptionalism happens to be as false as it is widespread, as any brief survey of Obama’s public remarks would make clear.  (What Americanists on the right forget is that American exceptionalism survives because it is a widely shared, albeit misguided, idea that has adherents across the political spectrum.)  Even all of the rumors and chain e-mails that cast doubt on Obama’s background were aimed at denying or questioning his Americanness because there was a presumption that an antiwar left-liberal Democrat (a veritable neo-McGovernite in the fantasies of some Republicans) was not Americanist enough or at all and it is this supposed lack of Americanism that makes Republicans revile him as much as they do.  As a source of anti-Obama sentiment, this has always been more important than his left-leaning politics or any specific part of his domestic agenda.  To some extent, it is not possible to disentangle Obama’s heritage, his particular experience of liberal Protestantism and his politics, but for the most part what has troubled Republicans, or at least what Republicans have focused on, is mainly the anti-Americanism of his past associates.  Even in the last sputtering gasps of the McCain campaign, the socialist charge is one last attempt to link Obama to an ideology that has often been defined as a foreign import.   

Now let’s turn to Jindal.  The response to him on the right today and in the future would naturally be entirely different.  It is worth remembering that some members of the Louisiana Democratic Party made a lame attempt to use Jindal’s given name, Piyush, to make him seem foreign and unfamiliar to Louisiana voters.  This attempt failed, and it is unlikely that Jindal would face this kind of attack were he to run in presidential primaries in the future.  At first glance, you might think that Jindal’s conversion to Catholicism and Obama’s to Protestantism could conjure up similar concerns about previous beliefs and upbringing, but in case this needs to be spelled out Jindal is doubly immunized against the sort of absurd attacks that have been used against Obama: converting from Hinduism to Catholicism provides him with all of the advantages of being recognized as a fellow Christian and there are also no real lingering doubts about his previous religion.  Most Americans may know little about that religion, but they hardly ever associate it with violence and as far as they are concerned it poses absolutely no threat to them.  As the child of immigrants, Jindal might seem to be at a similar disadvantage as Obama, and perhaps even at more of a disadvantage because both of his parents are from India, but his is the conventional story of assimilation and success that most Republicans respond to quite favorably.  It is hard to remember now, but mainstream conservatives were at one time practically falling over themselves in their admiration of Obama’s personal story as a testament to America as the land of opportunity.  This was quickly replaced by fear and loathing once they were convinced that he was a patriot of an unrealized, ideal America rather than America “as it exists.”  There will be the same gushing enthusiasm for Jindal’s success story, but instead of this being replaced by the fear that Palin expressed when she said that Obama does not see America the same way she and her audience see America, Jindal will receive the added boost from the recognition that he does see America the same way Palin and her audience do.   

The different treatment seems somewhat arbitrary, and up to a point it is, but it turns in an important way on how Jindal’s reformism is viewed when compared to Obama’s rhetoric of change.  Jindal’s agenda is interpreted on the right as essentially the repair of existing institutions, because his Americanism is not doubted because he does not subscribe to (and most important he is not portrayed as subscribing to) anti-American views.  The assumption that Obama is insufficiently Americanist derives largely from those associations the GOP has flogged so futilely this year.  This kind of attack would have been deployed against any Democratic nominee, and this kind of attack would pretty much never be used against a fellow Republican unless a candidate were to go out on a limb and, say, oppose an ongoing war or in some other way fundamentally question the morality or wisdom of government policy overseas.  Jindal has not done and is not going to do that, so it is rather unlikely that he will have to contend with anything like the smears and falsehoods that have been used against Obama.  If he runs into a serious problem in the early caucuses and primaries, it is more likely to be the product of anti-Catholicism among some conservative Protestants that undermined Sam Brownback’s efforts to cultivate social conservative support this time around.

Earlier today I was trying to put together a post on the problems in this J.P. Freire response to R.S. McCain and Ross, but the sheer number of misconceptions that needed to be set right before proceeding to more interesting questions made the exercise seem a bit futile.  The short, short version is that “reformists” are not really moderate Republicans (as Ross has noted in a follow-up post), and McCain has not been advancing a coherent message because he has been ignoring the “reformists,” which is why so many “reformists” are particularly outspoken about the failures of the McCain campaign, of which the Palin selection is one.  

The back-and-forth over writing off “moderates” (broadly defined in this discussion as anyone not Right with Limbaugh and Palin*) has a somewhat surreal quality to it.  On the mainstream conservative side, it involves denouncing the people jumping ship for getting out while the getting is good while simultaneously saying, “We won’t tolerate those sorts of people on our sinking ship, and it is our sinking ship.  Leave us to drown in peace!”  This has the perverse effect of essentially letting former cheerleaders of the Bush administration (Brooks, Noonan, Frum, et al.) off the hook for the wreckage of the ship for which they bear some responsibility, while many of the relatively more anti-Bush mainstream conservatives** are lashing themselves to the deck and making other past cheerleaders of the Bush administration (Limbaugh and the like) into their figureheads and making the imperturbable 24% who still approve of Bush’s job performance the font of wisdom.  Having defended and enabled Mr. Bush for years, many of the recent ship-jumpers and critics of Palin finally declared that enough was enough, while some conservatives who have had more problems with the administration have decided that what is needed is more party loyalty and sycophancy focused now on Palin instead of Bush.  When it is pointed out that this is self-defeating and actually makes more “purist” conservative arguments more politically irrelevant than ever, there is a flood of anathemas. 

The Tory example over the last eleven years is instructive for how “purists” should not respond to electoral defeat.  The Cameroons are now well-regarded because they have happened to be in the right position to take advantage of Labour’s implosion and Gordon Brown’s failures, but the only reason why Cameron’s self-described “liberal conservatism” gained purchase was that those inclined to keep the old Thatcherite fires burning showed absolutely no imagination in adapting to the changes in British society and were consumed by ultimately fruitless quarrels over Europe.  In retrospect, the Euroskeptic hostility to Brussels, with which I have a a lot of sympathy, was about as much of an electoral winner as McCain’s obsession with the “surge.”  In many respects, the Cameroons are simply imitation Blairites and flourish in a culture that is noticeably different from our own and so they offer a rather dubious model for American conservative self-renewal, but unlike previous leaders Cameron has put forward something approaching a positive agenda and as a result his “liberal conservatism” has prevailed because it had no viable competition.  The “reformists” already have an enormous head start on most of the “purists” on the right, as they were aware that the GOP was in trouble years before it became apparent in the electoral defeats of ’06 and this year, and they have put together some kind of positive agenda that will eventually fill the vacuum if “purists” cannot creatively apply their support for small government and fiscal restraint to changed circumstances and rediscover a dedication to constitutionalism and prudent foreign policy. 

It is significant, and depressing, that the main battles of the current conservative pundit war seems to be focused around Sarah Palin and her critics and not around the Iraq war and the attendant loss of mainstream conservative credibility on foreign policy.  That almost all of the people involved in the pundit war over the campaign and Palin are more or less in fundamental agreement about Iraq and the “surge” and seem to be largely in agreement about U.S. policies overseas is an impressive testament to the staying power of Bushism.  It is also telling that virtually no one on either the so-called “populist” or “elitist” side of the current debate’s divide seems to have many doubts about the desirability of globalist trade policy.  These are areas of policy where even most of the people calling for conservative self-criticism are more or less glad to fall in line, and yet these are probably the two major areas of policy where party leadership and movement activists are most out of step with the majority of the public.  It is not a coincidence that the two candidates in the primaries who represented or just seemed to represent significant breaks with party orthodoxy on these two things, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, were treated with the greatest opposition and scorn by party leaders and movement activists, while the one genuine protectionist in the primaries, Duncan Hunter, was simply ignored.              

*This “moderate” category, of course, ultimately runs the gamut from Brooks to, well, me, and it seems to be united by some level of awareness of political realities regardless of how different “moderates” respond to those realities.  There is really very little else that ties these people together. 

**By “anti-Bush” here, I mean that they did at least break with the administration on immigration and the bailout.

As of this writing, Barack Obama is not polling consistently above 50 percent in a number of electoral-vote-rich swing states, including Ohio and Florida. He should be worried. ~Bill Greener

Yes, he is, and no, he shouldn’t.  There are two problems with Greener’s argument.  First, it doesn’t matter whether Obama polls above 50% in Florida and Ohio, because he has been consistently polling above 50% in Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico.  With these states and all of the Kerry states, where he leads comfortably, Obama can and will win even if he loses all the other toss-ups (and it is unlikely that he’s going to lose Virginia or Nevada).  McCain’s grand prize of Pennsylvania seems to be out of reach, as Obama’s average lead in the state is 11 points.  At present, we are seeing Florida and Ohio trend towards Obama, but even if they do not flip to the Democrats Obama can win.  As it is, Obama’s RCP average in Ohio is at 49.9, and in Florida it is 47.8.  It’s conceivable that McCain can rally to hold these two states, but that will almost certainly have no effect on the ultimate outcome.  At this point the GOP is in the position of an outmatched team that is just playing for pride against a far superior opponent that has the game wrapped up; the best that they can hope for is to narrow the margin of victory and put in a respectable final effort. 

The other, related problem with Greener’s argument is that the undecided voters don’t matter, either, because Obama is far enough ahead in enough states that all undecided voters could break for McCain (who also technically represents the incumbent in this scenario, not the challenger) and still not put him over the top.  The problems with Greener’s argument are plain to me because I was arguing much the same thing for much of this year, and it has become clear that I did not take into account the possibility that Obama would poach enough voters from the Bush coalition to make what probably are McCain-friendly undecided voters more or less irrelevant to the outcome.  Even if you accept that undecided voters are more likely to break for McCain, which sounds plausible but may not be correct, there is no realistic scenario given the information we have right now in which they will propel McCain to victory.

Greener then goes on to make somewhat strained claims about 2006 elections that purportedly show the “undecided” voter’s bias against black candidates.  It seems to me that there is a combination of factors at work in these cases.  Take the Ohio governor’s race.  Strickland outperformed his polling, and Blackwell underperformed his, or more precisely polls that did not force respondents to declare which way they were leaning underestimated Strickland’s support and overestimated Blackwell’s.  But what Greener actually manages to show is that undecideds in Ohio and Maryland broke for the candidate representing the challenger party and against representatives of the incumbent party: late-deciding voters went against the known quantity and chose the new face, which would seem to undermine Greener’s larger argument. 

It is instructive to compare the 2006 Ohio Senate race’s polling to the final result to see how much greater Sherrod Brown’s final result was than pre-election polling.  What I think you will find is that Sherrod Brown outperformed his polling as much as, if not more than, Strickland.  One reason for this is probably stronger Democratic and Democratic-voting independent turnout in the ’06 elections.  DeWine had some advantage as an incumbent Senator despite low approval ratings, while Blackwell was running in an open election as a member of a deeply unpopular state administration.  So Blackwell was part of and therefore associated with the Taft administration, even though he was personally not implicated in any of the corruption tainting the governor, and he was running against a popular economic populist who was able to make inroads in southeastern Ohio because of his roots in that part of the state.

Robert Stacy McCain strikes again:

In other words, Rush’s 20 million listeners are what’s wrong with the Republican Party. If only they’d listen to these young Harvard graduates who know everything . . .

That isn’t what Ross said, as Ross was arguing against the obviously ridiculous claim from Limbaugh that it is somehow undesirable to win over independent and moderate voters during election campaigns.  As McCain might say, even a Harvard graduate can see the flaw in this view. 

However, in point of fact, yes, that audience is part of what’s wrong with the Republican Party.  Part of what has been wrong with the GOP is that its rank-and-file members take their political advice and insights from radio entertainers who seem to understand little about political reality and even less about policy, and who substitute bluster for understanding.  When they are confronted with an administration that does much the same, they have seemed only too willing to buy into the bluster.  They remain steadfastly loyal to a failed President and his indefensible decisions, and they break with him only when he supports measures that are absolutely intolerable and even then they do this only when the President is profoundly unpopular and no longer very influential.  This audience may have the right views about many things, but in practice that translates into reliable loyalty to a party that virtually never serves their interests, which enables the politicians who support all of the intolerable policies that they themselves reject. 

The “young Harvard graduates” and the like may not have the right answers, and indeed I think they don’t have most of the right answers, but they at least recognize that there is something deeply awry on the American right that isn’t going to be fixed by repeating worn-out mantras and slapping oneself on the back.  The Limbaugh approach recommended to his audience (which hasn’t been20 million-strong in years) is that Republicans and conservatives have made no mistakes and need to learn nothing, except that they were not hard-core and true-believing enough according to whatever caricature of conservatism Limbaugh claims to represent, which actually might not be so very conservative after all.  Being far to the right of Limbaugh, even I can recognize the absurdity of the argument that Republicans do not need to expand their coalition beyond core constituencies.  Of course, it is only absurd if you assume that they want to win elections.

This brings me to another point.  Mr. McCain would like to buy Jim Nuzzo, a Bush White House aide, a drink for his promised defenestration of anti-Palin conservatives.  Very good.  On the verge of one of the more impressive electoral defeats in the last thirty years, members of the Bush administration have the gall to threaten other people on the right with exclusion from the ever-shrinking numbers of the GOP for the crime of having come to the conclusion that Palin is not the answer to what ails the right.  Even though she is an embodiment of exactly the sort of Republican self-congratulation that will not win elections, she has somehow become the symbol of the future.  How you respond to Palin has become a litmus test to determine whether you are worthy and have a future on the right, which is another way of saying that the right won’t have much of a future if it makes Palin loyalty tests mandatory.  Many thousands of people, and perhaps many more, who are sympathetic to a center-right agenda will gladly, enthusiastically fail such a ridiculous test.

Lost, I also like Lost. ~John McCain in an interview with Radar magazine

This explains so much.  Now we have found the real reason why McCain’s campaign has been an interminable series of twists and turns that promises some payoff but always leads nowhere. 

Via Michael Crowley

The impact of the financial crisis on the American presidential election has somewhat obscured the most important reason why the prospect of an Obama presidency is giving so many people nightmares.  This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west. ~Melanie Phillips

Translation: there are people who are baselessly afraid about caricatures of an Obama administration that they have invented, and their dangerous fearmongering about the present international scene has made them lose all sense of perspective such that they think their world is about to be destroyed. 

Let’s take this step by step.  Obama does not propose to weaken American defenses or reduce expenditures on defense, but rather proposes to increase them.  He does propose some gradual reduction in troop levels in Iraq with the aim of ending a war that has done more to emasculate American defenses and undermine American security than any other policy of at least the last decade.  International peril is not at unprecedented levels.  There have been any number of times before, during and after WWII when international peril has been much, much greater, so claims of unprecedented peril are just simply false.  Short of a full-scale nuclear exchange with the Russians, which is not at all likely, the West is not going to be destroyed by anyone, unless we do it to ourselves through more senseless conflicts, mismanagement and excess.  There are serious threats and some real enemies, but none of our real enemies possesses the ability to destroy us.  Get a grip. 

The danger of an Obama Presidency is almost exactly the opposite of what Phillips fears, and this is that he proves to be far too conventional and willing to go along with misguided establishment views on Iran, Russia and any number of other parts of the world, and that he is far too willing to use force when it is not needed in pursuit of objectives that have nothing do with the American interest.  One of the problems with the increasingly outlandish warnings about Obama the super-dove is that, in addition to being laughably false, it makes it even harder to organize resistance to the Obama administration when it finally does try to embark on some foolish foreign adventure.  In the post-Cold War era in which every administration has ordered at least one new major military intervention and usually more than one, this seems to be not a question of if but of when and where.  The people worried about the second coming of Carter ought instead of be more concerned about an administration more like LBJ’s, in which we would all probably agree that an excess of hawkishness rather than the lack of it was the central flaw.  

P.S.  I would add that Jim Lobe’s report on Obama adviors’ views on Iran, taken in conjunction with Biden’s warnings to that Seattle progressive fundraiser about a coming international crisis, points toward the kind of scenario that I proposed earlier in the week.

“I’m gonna test them,” Republican John McCain said at a campaign rally in New Mexico this morning. “They’re not gonna test me.” ~The Swamp

If you take McCain at his word, this means that he is going to cause an international crisis in the first six months of his administration, which is exactly what everyone who opposes McCain fears and it is one reason why Obama is going to win in a week and a half.  No matter who is elected, there may be a crisis, and either one of them might perform terribly, but McCain distinguishes himself as the candidate who will almost certainly get us into a new crisis and who reassures fewer and fewer people that he can lead in a crisis. 

The notable thing about all of this talk of testing and being tested is that we are apparently on the verge of a global recession, or something close to it, oil prices are slumping and the usual suspects on Rick Santorum’s Enemies List (i.e., Venezuela, Iran, Russia) are suffering the consequences of significant declines in oil revenues.  Nothing has shown more clearly just how ephemeral the purported threats from so many of these petro-states have always been: the petro-states’ strength has risen and fallen in direct proportion to the strength of the global economy, and as the latter weakens they are harmed in some ways even more than anyone else because their wealth is largely based on exporting petroleum.  This serves as yet another reason why rhetoric about dependence on “foreign oil” is so misleading–the exporter nations often have much more to lose than the consumer nations because they usually do not have sufficiently diversified, productive economies apart from their oil and gas industries.  The dependence is mutual, and the exporters have the most leverage, such as it is, during economic booms when our economy and the economies of the industrialized world are faring much better. 

Venezuela and Iran were never great threats when oil was over $120 a barrel, and now that is close to half that they are even less threatening.  Their growing internal economic woes, which are going to become even more acute as the global economy slows down, are going to expose their regimes to increasing pressure from their populations, who are going to be even less interested in any foreign adventurism and posturing of their leaders, which makes it much less likely that these regimes are going to “test” anyone.  That would not stop a McCain administration from demagoguing and exaggerating the threat from any one of these regimes out of ideological fervor, and indeed McCain himself is all but promising that he will precipitate an international incident if he is elected.  Once again the McCain campaign does not understand that talk of international conflict and crisis does not work to its advantage, but simply reminds a majority of all the things they dislike about McCain and the modern GOP.