One response to the ridiculous cover of the latest issue of The Weekly Standard should be digust for the shameless adaptation of an iconic image from the Tiananmen Square massacre for the purposes of shilling for an awful candidate in a democratic election, but it seems to me that this might take TWS‘ democracy-promoting ideology and its alleged support for democratic dissidents far more seriously than they deserve.  Of course it should go without saying that it is ludicrous and obnoxious to portray the frontrunner in a reasonably free and open election in the role of the Chinese military squashing the democracy activists of 1989, but then I expect that there is a nontrivial percentage of McCain supporters who think that the comparison is quite apt.   

McCain is not standing alone in the path of a tank; he is not a valiant martyr to the rights of conscience and political expression.  He is likely to be the runner-up in a large-scale contest for supreme power, and he will lose because most people in this country do not trust him or any other member of his party with that kind of power any longer.  The perversity of comparing a man of his wealth and power, who seeks even more power, to a lone dissident engaged in futile resistance against overwhelming force is amazing.  This certainly says something about that magazine’s respect for real dissidents in systems where contested and competitive elections essentially free of political violence are not possible.  An example of real political dissent and courage is appropriated here for McCain to provide some lustre to the fading reputation of a dangerous and misguided politician.

This may be a redundant thing to say, but Cathy Young is wrong in her attack on Glenn Greenwald.  Greenwald replies here and makes most of the necessary points, but I would add a couple observations.  No one who followed the domestic political scene in August and afterwards could have missed that McCain took great satisfaction in laying the blame for the entire conflict at Moscow’s door.  “We are all Georgians now,” he insisted, because he took it as a given that Georgia was entirely innocent and played the role of hapless victim.  The Russian response to Georgian provocation, which even I said at the time was excessive, was entirely predictable ever since the recognition of Kosovo independence and the promise of NATO membership to Georgia earlier this year, which are the issues that have so far gone unmentioned in this latest argument*.  No doubt Young’s abiding concern for international law and state sovereignty inspired her to make impassioned complaints about the illegal partition of Serbia, right?  Oh, right, I forgot, these things only matter when they are being undermined by non-allied foreign governments.  Of course, it is directly because of a lack of Western respect for international norms and the sovereignty of other states (some of which also just happen to be aligned with Russia) that Georgia has suffered Russian incursions.  First occupying and then recognizing Kosovo provided the pretext and precedent for Moscow’s response to Georgian provocation.  The Russians at least went through the legal formality of granting passports to the Ossetian and Abkhaz population; our government slices and dices other countries while using far more abstract and incredible justifications.  It is impossible to separate the promise of NATO membership from what Saakashvili did.  Even if Washington warned him against provocative action, the promise of NATO membership encouraged reckless action on the assumption that the West would come to Georgia’s aid if necessary, and the perceived threat of NATO expansion inevitably made Georgia the target of Russian ire.

Obama’s initial suggestion that both sides should show restraint and that both sides shared responsibility was ridiculed on the right and continues to be used in the election campaign that Obama was “wrong about Russia” because he did not immediately begin spouting Georgian government press releases.  In McCain’s hard-line, pro-Georgian interpretation there was nothing dangerous or provocative about what the Georgian government had been doing before August or in what it did in early August, because he accepts Saakashvili’s irredentist program of restoring Georgian control over the separatist regions.  In the debates he complained that people in Tskhinvali thought of Putin as their President in 2006, as if that political reality were somehow irrelevant to the final settlement of the separatist disputes!  Unfortunately, Obama early on felt some compulsion to move closer and closer to McCain’s interpretation of what happened in August, and this was presumably so he would not appear “weak” on Russia and provide McCain with a line of attack.  Obama’s shift from his relatively sensible immediate response to the standard party line reminds us that there is an obvious party line to which most politicians feel obliged to subscribe, and according to the most melodramatic version of that line Georgia is playing the of the heroic democracy a la Czechoslovakia, c. 1938 being gutted by an expansionist power.  As for Palin, she asserted that the Russians had acted without being provoked because that was what the McCain campaign told her to say about the conflict and because this is entirely consistent with the foreign policy biases of McCain’s advisors.   

Russophobes never seem to understand that Westerners who object to their distortions and misrepresentations are not apologizing for the Russian government, nor do they approve of Russia’s internal or external policies, but they do object to having our policy debate defined by propaganda and simplistic morality plays about “democratically-elected governments” being set upon by “revanchist” Russians.  As Greenwald says:

Every time the major party candidates now mention Russia/Georgia — including in the debates — there is full, unequivocal agreement on everything, all premised on the comic-book, Good v. Evil narrative that Georgia is our stalwart democratic ally which, through no fault of their own, was victimized by an expansionist, war-seeking Russia, and we owe them our full protection and unwavering support.  There is never a word of criticism toward Georgia or an acknowledgment of the role it played in provoking the conflict, in starting the war.   That is the truth that cannot be spoken. 

On those rare occasions when it is ever spoken, it has to be hedged about with so many caveats about Moscow’s general perfidy that it loses all of its rhetorical and political force, and if it does not have all those caveats it is denounced as nothing more than an apology for Putin.  This obviously undermines the quality of foreign policy debate in this country, as even those who know better avoid speaking out against the absurd establishment policies (in this case, reflexive support for Georgia and its entry into NATO) so that they avoid being ostracized as defenders of foreign authoritarian governments.  In the end, that is the purpose of the near-universal condemnation of “Russian aggression” by our political class–to force objections to the dangerous and misguided policies that helped to bring about the war in Georgia to the margins of the debate and to make open criticism of an irrationally close attachment to a north Caucasus state much more politically perilous for anyone in the government.    

*For the record, I think the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is a blunder by Moscow and very undesirable for the same reasons that I thought recognition of Kosovo was terrible.  No final settlement can be reached over these areas if Georgia has not negotiated the terms of their autonomy or independence, just as the situation in Kosovo will never be stable unless Serbia was involved in negotiations to settle its status.  Let this be a reminder to those who think that our government can abuse and partition small countries on the other side of the world without consequences: other powers will presume to be able to do the same thing to their neighbors and will from time to time act just as our government has acted.

Peter Suderman discusses the lack of self-criticism on the right:

But still, the problem is real: the mechanisms for acceptable self-criticism on the right aren’t very good, especially in election years. Any institution, even very good ones, that dedicates itself to simple self-preservation without the added step of self-monitoring is bound to face corruption, disarray, and discontent.

This is one reason why I find the Republican and mainstream conservative turn in the last month or so to little more than excuse-making to be rather troubling, because it repeats the same errors that were made before and after the 2006 election.  The GOP lesson from the ’06 defeat was apparently nothing more than this: we really need to get a handle on earmarks!  After the election this time we are likely to hear about how the right should have combated voter fraud more assiduously. 

On the financial crisis, we hear endlessly from most voices on the right about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which did contribute to the larger problem by securitizing mortgage loans, which created a market for banks to pass off loans of all kinds and the attendant risk to someone else, but we hear nothing about active Republican complicity in promoting “the ownership society,” nor is there very much serious criticism of Greenspan and the cult of Greenspan that was bipartisan but strongest among Republicans.  Because McCain reflexively, more or less randomly targeted the SEC for criticism early on, party regulars seem to feel compelled to ignore the SEC’s failures.  There is some awareness of the significant problem created by FASB Rule 157, and there have been calls to change the rule, but this cannot have a prominent place in most conservative discussions of the current crisis because it cannot readily be pinned on Democrats.  To listen to mainstream conservative responses to the crisis, you might think that Mitt Romney’s convention speech was repeating on a loop, as you would never know that Republicans and their appointees were in charge of the relevant institutions and agencies responsible for the appropriate oversight up through the start of 2007.  There is very little willingness to accept responsibility at any level.   

We see this same refusal to take responsibility in criticism of media bias and the preoccupation with charges of voter fraud.  If public opinion of Palin has soured, it is because of unfair and unbalanced media coverage; it cannot be because she is not prepared.  To entertain the possibility she is unprepared, or to say positively that she is not suited to the job she is seeking, is to be considered a rat-fink and a turncoat and proof that you are a snooty elitist with no connection to the real America we keep hearing about.  Many seem to find it hard to believe that Obama could have such massive small-donor fundraising and massive voter registration, so there must be wrongdoing.  I don’t rule out that there might be some wrongdoing, but we are beginning to hear warnings about stolen elections, as if the projections of an almost 200 electoral vote margin in Obama’s favor did not indicate a huge shift in voting patterns and the absurdity of talking about stealing the election.  To say that many mainstream conservatives are beginning to sound a bit conspiratorial and paranoid is to put a positive spin on things.  Media bias obviously exists, as it has in every previous cycle for decades, and it is more intense this time, but it is not as if media bias is what is causing the enormous drag on the Republican ticket and Republicans in Congress. 

The public mood soured on the President’s party a long time ago because of the GOP’s failures over the last several years, and so long as Republicans do not want to accept their share of responsibility for the financial crisis that is destroying them, among other things, they will not understand why most of the public has turned against them.  If they do not understand this, they will not be able to make the needed corrections, and so this playing at being the victim of menacing and unjust forces is simply delaying the needed reassessment and reform that will have to come if the public is ever going to put their trust in Republicans again.  While some have proposed that a devastating defeat for the GOP is necessary to teach the party needed lessons, there is no reason to believe from what I am seeing right now that there is much of an inclination to learn.

Palin’s beauty is not a political deficit, so why does Kathleen Parker assert that because Palin is beautiful, she is to be presumed unqualified? It’s envy, motivated by the same sour-grapes psychology that caused so many Republican pundits to dismiss Romney as “superficial” and “slick.” ~Robert Stacy McCain

That isn’t what Parker said.  For the record, I don’t think Parker’s argument in her latest column holds up very well, since the idea that McCain made the poor decision to select Palin because she was attractive assumes that McCain normally makes good decisions when not influenced by this kind of thing.  But Parker’s argument is not what R.S. McCain claims.  She doesn’t say that Palin is to be presumed unqualified because she is attractive, but that Palin is objectively unqualified for the job she is seeking (Parker and others have already made their case about this before) and so there must be some reason why McCain made such a phenomenally bad selection.  Parker goes awry in two ways here: she assumes that McCain was fully informed about Palin’s qualifications or lack thereof and chose her anyway, when we are pretty sure that this isn’t true, and she does not take into consideration that McCain may make irrational and poor decisions for entirely different reasons.  In its way, Parker’s column is giving John McCain the benefit of the doubt and giving him more credit for good judgement than he probably deserves by treating his mistake as a result of Palin’s appearance. 

As for Romney, he was considered superficial and slick because he seemed to have no core political beliefs that he would not abandon at the drop of a hat if there was some advantage in it.  He had looks and competence, but he seemed to have absolutely no shame when it came to reinventing his public persona into whatever he thought a given audience wanted.   

Four months ago, I said of House GOP prospects:

We are probably looking at another year of a net gain of 30 seats for Democrats, and perhaps more than that depending on how the public mood changes over the summer with gas prices continuing to rise. 

In light of the financial crisis, McCain’s worsening numbers and intense anti-GOP sentiment, it seems that my guess of a 30-seat loss was probably far too conservative.  We are now looking at losses in many districts that were once considered Republican-leaning or even safe.  Losses are more likely to be in the neighborhood of 40-48 seats thanks in part to erosion of Republican support in such reliably safe seats as NM-02 and Michelle Bachmann’s self-immolation.  Disaster scenarios might involve net losses of 70, but that is not all that likely. 

Regardless, if Virgil Goode, the representative in my old stomping grounds of Prince Edward County in Virginia, is considered vulnerable, the GOP is in truly desperate straits.  It’s strange to think that Goode only ten years ago starting making his journey from being a Democrat to independent to Republican, only to find himself on the verge of being thrown out for identifying with that party.  If anything, from what I understand this new Politico story is understating the extent of Republican problems.  This does not begin to address the difficulties that some ostensibly favored Californiaand Arizona Republicans are facing.  Lungren, once considered the rising star of the California GOP not that long ago, may not be re-elected in CA-03; Rohrabacher, a fixture of the California right, is also vulnerable in CA-46.  Obviously, the possibility of Shadegg’s defeat in “reddest” Arizona is startling.  Even the few pick-up opportunities in districts lost in ’06 because of scandal will barely offset the huge losses that are coming.  The Senate elections are looking similarly bleak, but will probably result in no more than a net gain of eight seats in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, New Hampshire, Alaska, Oregon, Minnesota and North Carolina.  My guess is that Wicker, Chambliss and McConnell squeak out victories despite their many difficulties, but not by much.  The disaster scenario entails all eleven vulnerable seats flipping.  This would mark something as close to total repudiation of a major party as any we have seen in two consecutive postwar election cycles.

Going after moderates, independents, and all these yokels [bold mine-DL] is not the blueprint.  The blueprint’s there, 1994, taking back the House, the blueprint’s there.  Why are these people ignoring it? ~Rush Limbaugh

That’s odd.  I had thought that Limbaugh et al. were going to be the tribunes of the yokels against their urbane detractors, but apparently yokels are now all of those people who are not registered Republicans.  It’s a funny thing, that 1994 election victory–how did it happen?  I suspect it may be yokel-related.  In 1992, the Republicans won 46% of the independent vote (24% of the electorate), but won 56% in 1994.  That looks good at first, but who really needs them?  They’re just a bunch of yokels.  The 1994 blueprint involved to a large extent winning back independents who had drifted to the Democrats, but why try to appeal to these people?  I mean, when you’ve got a rock-solid 35% of the electorate, you can do anything, right?

The last two months have been instructive about what many people on the right choose to call elitism and populism.  We have learned that expecting public officials to answer questions from the press on a regular basis is a function of media elitism; a candidate’s lack of transparency and availability for press conferences is proof of populist disdain for elites.  Fortunately, it has been made clear that a supporter of the bailout and a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants is the populist firebrand, while opponents of both who point out her utterly conventional establishment views are deeply out of touch with “the base” whom she somehow champions.  When a politician abuses her office and violates state ethics rules, that is evidently just another example of sticking it to the system, while attempting to hold her accountable for her misleading and false statements about her record is proof that we dastardly elitists are deeply out of touch.  So according to these standards, populism is unreflecting attachment to the status quo wrapped in secrecy and misrepresentations, and elitism is defined by efforts to hold politicians accountable to their constituents and to demand that they serve the interests of those constituents.  No wonder people hate those lousy elitists.

If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?

My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians. ~Daniel Henninger

Clearly Henninger is doing his best to weight the comparison in Palin’s favor by loading up his list with a lot of incompetent, unpopular or controversial politicians, but there is obviously someone from that list that I think a vast majority would rather have as President than Palin.  Not to push the Huckabee vs. Palin argument too much in one week, but can Henninger be serious when he says he would rather have Palin as President instead of Huckabee during an international crisis?  Let me put that another way, since I doubt anyone can seriously believe that: does Henninger really want to go on record espousing such a ridiculous view?

If there is one thing more annoying than bien-pensant condescension, it is the even more condescending orthodoxy of anti-bien-pensant pundits who reflexively adopt a position because it is fashionably unfashionable and then congratulate themselves for their independence of mind.  “Other pundits dislike Palin and think she is unprepared?  I’ll show them how trendy and eccentric I can be–I’ll say that she is even more qualified and superior.  I’ll even say that I want her to be President in a crisis situation–that’ll show ’em!”  Like bien-pensant opinion, the anti-bien-pensant view is utterly conventional, but wants credit for challenging the prevailing wisdom simply because it is the prevailing wisdom.  Instead of either of these dead-end, knee-jerk responses, we might analyze the subject on the merits and formulate some kind of an argument one way or the other.      

You can agree with Huckabee or disagree with him over what he said in his Foreign Affairs essay and during his campaign, but it’s undeniable that he already possesses a far better understanding of the relevant issues right now and has articulated them publicly.  I don’t know whether anyone advised him on the Pakistan section of his essay, and there are things to which I would object in that section, but it gives a serious and intelligent assessment of what the situation was there at the time.  Henninger doesn’t care about any of that.  Once again, knowledge and preparation count for nothing–being “grounded” is what counts.  Arguably, Huckabee is just as grounded as Palin, so that ought to negate even this advantage, but what is telling here is that Henninger has absolutely nothing else to say on her behalf.  The brevity and emptiness of his argument for her is a stronger indictment of her readiness than anything her critics could say.     

Henninger goes on:

If he had picked any of the plain-vanilla men on his veep short list — Pawlenty, Sanford, Romney or Lieberman — they’d have won approval from the media’s college of cardinals, and killed his campaign [bold mine-DL].

This gives Pawlenty far too little credit, and it conflates several candidates as if they were all equally desirable or undesirable running mates.  Lieberman would have added nothing and lost McCain a lot, though there would have been a brief media extravaganza questioning whether McCain had actually gone mad or was simply pretending, and Romney would have satisfied many movement elites and guaranteed that evangelical turnout would be very poor, but Pawlenty and Sanford would have been creditable additions to the ticket.  Could any VP selection have saved McCain from his own failures during the financial crisis?  Probably not.  Could any VP selection have honed a coherent message for a message-free campaign?  That’s doubtful.  Would Pawlenty have given him a far more effective surrogate and policy-oriented running mate who could make a persuasive case for the campaign’s proposals?  Absolutely.  What Pawlenty lacks in the ability to excite, he makes up for in what he knows and his ability to argue for his views; there is an added bonus–he already has well-formed views on a variety of subjects.  Pawlenty was the anti-Palin in a lot of ways and he has much of the same cultural populist appeal that has won Palin so many fans. 

Henninger complains some more:

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko’s bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Henninger sounds like Michelle Obama complaining about people raising the bar, except that in this case the bar was never raised and the goalposts were never moved.  So now we come back to the gut-level connection.  The very thing that Huckabee did so well during the primaries, but which most conservatve elites (probably including Henninger) found unsatisfying.  Having deemed Huckabee not well-versed enough in policy, which was apparently a fair criticism ten months ago but is now a “cheap shot,” many Palinites are now persuaded that Palin, who knows even less than Huckabee did when he started and much less than he does now, is ready to lead in a crisis.  Of course, it is the ability to do both things at some minimal level of competence that make for successful candidates.  Those who can’t strike the right balance between demagoguery connecting with voters and wonkery usually end up as also-rans.  Obama has been described as having a deficit in both areas at different times (at one time, he was all style and rhetoric, and at another time he was the aloof professor giving dry lectures*), and actually had a surplus in both relative to his competition.  In the end, McCain is paying the price for having a candidacy driven almost entirely by biography and character, and he has been chaotically playing catch-up on the policy side to no avail.  All gut-level connection all the time is not enough.  “Good instincts” are not enough.

*There were kernels of truth to these descriptions of Obama (i.e., he did engage in airy rhetoric, he was sometimes aloof and professorial), but they went awry when they were exaggerated to define the entire man.

Conor responds to Ledeen:

It isn’t healthy when you’re country is fighting a war, and the bulk of the population can forget about it entirely, though it is costing them blood, treasure and foregone opportunities to make us safer from other threats. But isn’t it a bit odd to say the media aren’t reporting on Iraq because “it’s good for Bush” when in fact the Iraq War is a winning issue for Democrats?

This is related to what I said below.  One of the things that I found a bit baffling about McCain’s ability to keep the race competitive for as long as he did was that the public had overwhelmingly rejected continuing the Iraq war in 2006, yet McCain made the “surge” one of the central planks of his campaign.  Indeed, McCain made a point of bragging about his desire to keep the war going as long as necessary and he kept reminding voters that if Obama had had his way the war would already be over by now.  He didn’t put it that way, but that was the message he was delivering.  It is pretty rare when your opponent makes it one of his main preoccupations to remind voters that you share their view on a major policy question.  This was a colossal blunder on McCain’s part, but it is the kind of blunder that a candidate will inevitably make when he and all of his supporters keep insisting that Iraq is a winning issue for them when the exact opposite is true.  No doubt many of them believe it, just as they genuinely believe that McCain is much better prepared to be President–that’s why they’re McCain supporters.  (There has to be some reason for it, I suppose.)  But the certainty that Iraq and the “surge” are winning issues is just like the certainty that Palin is and will continue to be a sensational, popular national candidate or the certainty that Joe the Plumber/”spread the wealth” are a killer combination or the certainty that more aggressively tying Obama to past associates will bring him down: the people who already believe this seem to assume that a majority of the public will respond to each of these things more or less as they do, and they begin to interpret everything from media coverage to campaign tactics to daily events accordingly.

John Schwenkler has doubts about Huckabee’s ability to forge a libertarian-populist alliance in the future, and I have to acknowledge that aside from his opposition to the bailout there is not necessarily that much that would unite them around such a candidate.  Economic conservatives–many of the same people who backed Romney, the candidate of universal health care and proposed subsidies for the auto industry–will keep whining objecting that Huckabee raised taxes as governor.  This has not seemed to bother them about Palin, but no matter.  They will say that Huckabee was very much a pro-amnesty governor, and only very recently came around to a more restrictionist position, which is perfectly true.  Palin, meanwhile, essentially backs amnesty at present, but worse than that she doesn’t really seem to know what the relevant issues are except for what McCain’s people have told her.  Arguably, neither one is going to be a frontrunner in the future, it is possible that neither one is going to run, and there are almost certainly preferable alternatives who have none of the baggage that Huckabee and Palin have, but of the two candidates who have genuinely excited the social and cultural conservatives who make up the overwhelming majority of the rank-and-file of the Republican Party Huckabee has more to offer.  Unless, that is, Jeb Bush decides that he’s going to run, at which point the primaries will be over almost before they begin.