Ross remains convinced that Biden’s remarks were a gaffe and a very bad one at that:

He specifically highlighted Obama’s youth as a reason to expect a “generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy,” and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy – whose perceived inexperience (and poor initial impression on the world stage) was supposedly one of the contributing factors in the Russian decision to send missiles to Cuba. It’s true that all Presidents should expect to get their mettle tested in their first year in office, and it’s true that John McCain’s years working on foreign-policy issues in Washington won’t exempt him from that rule. And maybe that’s what Biden meant to say. But the words he actually uttered seemed intended to cite his running mate’s youth and relative inexperience as a reason why Obama, in particular, would be likely to face an international crisis in his first six months.

I will grant that Biden wasn’t making a generic statement that Presidents often face international challenges early in their first year, but was making the (overconfident?) claim that because Obama is about to be elected we can expect President Obama to face such a challenge.  This still seems unremarkable considering the instability in a number of regions where Washington either does or claims to have an interest.  He also said that Obama is 47 years old (this is true) and brilliant (many people would agree), so Biden probably thought the latter was reassuring to anyone concerned about Obama’s inexperience.  Before that, though, he compared him to Kennedy.  The Kennedy comparison is where things get tricky.  It’s a bit like comparing Bush to Truman in that the comparison is either a gross insult or a huge compliment depending on your opinion of Truman. 

If you believe the hype about Truman, it means that Bush will one day be regarded as a wise and far-seeing President who laid the foundations for the prosecution of the so-called Long War, or if you judge Truman primarily on his generally poor decisions in office you will regard Bush as Trumanesque in the worst sense, a failure and an embarrassment.  In this case, I expect that Biden embraces the mythology about President Kennedy as much as most Democrats, so that when he compares Obama to Kennedy he likely does not have the failed summit in Vienna or the Bay of Pigs in mind, and he is probably not thinking of how the Vienna summit and failed Cuba attack directly invited and led to the Missile Crisis.  In this mythology that Biden is repeating, “the world” just decided to test Kennedy, as if his actions had nothing to do with bringing on that test. 

The funny thing about this mini-controversy is that McCain has reacted with incredulity that Biden would have said this and seems horrified that this has not become a bigger problem for Obama.  In McCain’s eyes, Obama is the erratic, inconsistent one, so why would you want him to be President at a time of crisis?  Of course, that’s the central argument of McCain’s entire campaign: he is the steady, experienced hand who will pilot the ship safely through the storm.  The trouble is that he has repeatedly shown that this isn’t true.  McCain can insist all he likes that his election will not invite international challenges, but the far more troubling thing about McCain is that fewer and fewer people trust him to respond responsibly if those challenges were to arise.  Had Biden said these things two months ago, they might have had some impact.  However, after having compared the responses of the two men over the last two or three months to at least a couple major crises, a majority would probably prefer a President who will be challenged and proves to be better-suited to that challenge than a President who is able to get by on bluster and reputation for a year or two but is completely unsuited to leading in a crisis when it comes.  Of course, none of that guarantees that Obama will be successful, but there is more reason to think that of him than about his opponent, and one way to make that contrast without attacking McCain by name is to remind his audience that the world is volatile and dangerous.  

The interesting thing about what Biden said is that it reinforced the contrast between the two candidates in a way that undermines McCain’s central argument, because only McCain’s loyal partisans now believe him to be the safe pick who could offer reassuring, stable leadership.  This reminds me of one of the striking things about Obama’s selection of Biden and Obama’s campaign for the last year and a half: Obama has made the Democratic ticket the ticket focused on foreign policy and national security to a much greater degree than past tickets, and he has campaigned throughout the cycle on the assumption that foreign policy is actually one of his strengths despite his lack of experience.  Whether he meant to or not, Biden has done something unusual for a Democrat in emphasizing the dangers and potential threats in the world, which reflects a similar sort of confidence that the Democratic ticket is simply better when it comes to foreign policy. 

This is virtually incomprehensible to the GOP candidates and their supporters, who keep assuming that this is a major liability for Obama.  In a lot of the news and blog reaction to this story, you can see many journalists and liberal bloggers getting back into the “defensive crouch,” as if to say, “Don’t talk about foreign threats, you idiot!  We always lose when we talk about that!  Don’t remind people how inexperienced Obama is!”  Perhaps in a very different world, they might have a point, but this mini-controversy is electorally much less important than it might otherwise be because national security voters make up a much smaller portion of the electorate than those voting on economic issues.  Most of the national security voters had already reflexively aligned themselves with McCain long ago (which I suspect is a function of how many Republicans place national security as their top priority, rather than being a result of any obvious McCain edge on this subject), so it’s not as if Biden is going to drive away any votes by saying this.  Even Rasmussen’s latest finding, which does show that 59% are concerned about a crisis early in an Obama Presidency, shows that the public is evenly divided on who can be trusted more in an international crisis: 49% say McCain and 48% say Obama.  If it were at all obvious that McCain is better-suited to handling international crises, the numbers would not be that close and then Biden’s remarks might have been significant enough to be worth spending all this time discussing.

As governor, how do you deal with them? Do you think they all should be deported?
There is no way that in the US we would roundup every illegal immigrant -there are about 12 million of the illegal immigrants- not only economically is that just an impossibility but that’s not a humane way anyway to deal with the issue that we face with illegal immigration.

Do you then favor an amnesty for the 12 or 13 million undocumented immigrants?
No, I do not. I do not. Not total amnesty. You know, people have got to follow the rules. They’ve got to follow the bar, and we have got to make sure that there is equal opportunity and those who are here legally should be first in line for services being provided and those opportunities that this great  country provides. 

To clarify, so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?
I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. It is so important that yes, people follow the rules so that people can be treated equally and fairly in this country. ~Univision

Via Robert Stacy McCain

So people should follow the rules, unless they don’t, in which case they will become citizens…but it’s not amnesty!  That’s probably as concise a summary of McCain’s dishonest position on immigration as anyone could manage, so give Palin some credit for that.  I have given up trying to understand what Palinites see in their favorite candidate.  If this does not drive home how malleable and unacquainted with the relevant policy options she is, I’m not sure what would.

The conservative movement at the time was disillusioned, and fearful that they’d need “time in the wilderness” in order to rethink and reform itself. Reagan was viewed as a mixed success at best — really! [bold mine-DL] The book’s third chapter is titled “The Failure of the Reagan Gambit,” and it details all the ways in which Reagan, the supposed small-government hero, disappointed conservatives by failing to reduce the size of federal government. Frum’s criticisms of Reagan aren’t quite as harsh as current complaints about Bush II, but they’re eerily similar. ~Peter Suderman

Peter’s own description of Reagan as the “supposed small-government hero” is telling, because it shows the degree to which we have reconciled ourselves to the reality that Reagan the Goldwaterite got lost along the way or perhaps was never as intent on shrinking the size of the federal government as many of his supporters hoped.  Reagan was a mixed success, which was a lot better than some of the failures and complete wrecks that have followed since, but I think this is even more readily apparent to us today than it was in the ’90s when the Reagan mythology was already being constructed.  The power of that mythology and the Reagan nostalgia that has gripped the GOP and conservatives since his passing have served to discourage reflection and self-criticism, as if all we needed to do was to get right with Reagan and then all would be well.  To a large extent, that ignored the extent to which Reagan the President had not been right with the Reagan the Myth.  

As with Bush, one of the main things conservatives could look back on with satisfaction was the reduction in income taxes, which was obviously much more dramatic and significant under Reagan.  In foreign affairs, it was truly a mixed bag, and this would be true regardless of which side of the debate you were on: nuclear arms reductions went along with needless deployments, questionable backing of guerrilla forces in various flashpoints around the globe and rather dodgy arms deals took place alongside some important public diplomacy and covert support for dissidents.  On immigration, Reagan signed off on a disastrous amnesty that Bush was not able to repeat; in this one respect, Reagan was demonstrably worse than Bush.  That being said, Reagan left office as a popular President presiding over generally good economic times who quickly became a widely-respected former President, and most of the conservative discontent in the early ’90s was focused on his rather squishier successor in the midst of an economic downturn.  Things are clearly much worse for the GOP and conservatives today than they were in 1992.  Management, competence, responsibility–all of these words that might have once been associated with the GOP no longer are, and Republicans find themselves largely discredited in the eyes of the majority in both foreign affairs and economic policy. 

It is fair to say that Republicans–and conservatives–have not faced a situation like this one since the eve of the 1964 landslide loss.  While the result will not be that lopsided, this will probably be the second-worst defeat of a Republican presidential ticket since WWII, and it will be the first time in over a century that Republicans are not going to win an open presidential election.  Unlike Goldwater 1964, however, McCain has no coherent message and leaves no legacy to be seized on later.  There are times when parties lose elections badly but find a coherent set of arguments that can make them competitive soon thereafter, and then there is the case of the Tories after 1997 as they stumbled and bumbled from one leader to the next as obsessed with Europe as McCain and the rest of the GOP leadership have been obsessed with earmarks.  The GOP’s alienation of the rising cohort of 18-29 year olds, which it was always going to have difficulty with because of demographic and cultural changes within that cohort, is going to reverberate for decades to come, even though it is the youngest voters who have the greatest incentives to respond to a new agenda of entitlement reform and fiscal responsibility.  The GOP is going to find itself increasingly saddled with ageing Boomer voters who will reject the kind of policy innovation that is needed to offer a coherent alternative.

Miss Noonan’s unconscious fear may be that it will be precisely Mrs. Palin (and others like her) who will be among the leaders of the about to be re-born conservative movement. ~Tony Blankley

I think the fear is quite conscious.  She is explicit about her desire that Palin not be in such a leadership position.  In my view, this fear is unnecessary for some of the reasons I have given below, but there is no question that critics of Palin have various reasons to dread Palin becoming one of the leaders of the zombified re-born conservative movement.  Some of this has to do with weariness with or lack of interest in culture war issues (I would say this describes Frum’s reaction), some of it is opportunistic at this late stage in the game, some of it is a deep aversion to anything that resembles uninformed populism (that’s Brooks’ reason), some of it is stylistic (professional writers cannot take much satisfaction when a public figure so badly butchers the language), but a large part of the hostile reception of Palin by Palin’s critics on the right is a genuine objection to an unqualified candidate unprepared for the post she seeks.  While her critics may have engaged in some self-serving rhetorical overkill, as I think Brooks certainly has, and even though most or all of them raised no such objections to Mr. Bush, they do seem to have learned something from the experience of the Bush administration in that they have concluded that “good instincts,” folksiness and ignorance are not what is needed. 

In the end, the selection of Palin was not only a desperate and cynical move designed mainly to mobilize core constituencies, but her candidacy quickly turned into nothing more than a vehicle for riling up the remaining true believers who still approve of Mr. Bush’s job performance.  If recognizing this obvious truth makes one a “me-too” conservative, you’re going to find a lot of people clamoring to acquire that designation.  Obama endorsers are a somewhat different story, as they are trying to jump on the popular bandwagon, but rather than wailing about the perfidy of the defectors and demanding to know what side people are on one might want to consider what it is about one’s own side that seems to have become so radioactive.  It’s all very well to say that the critics and defectors are rats deserting a sinking ship, but instead of worrying about that one might spend a bit more time considering how the ship came to be in this situation.  When in an imploding political system or an imploding political movement, it is usually more important to change conditions inside to keep people from fleeing than to wish them all good riddance while building higher walls.

There seems to be an emerging consensus that Biden said something that was both obviously true and supposedly very politically damaging when he warned/predicted/promised that there would be a serious international testing of Obama once he becomes President.  Via Ben Smith, Biden said:

It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.” 

At first glance, this seems wholly unremarkable, as there are several places around the world where such a crisis might occur (e.g., Pakistan, Iraq, etc.), and several others where an opportunistic foreign government or terrorist group might think it has a window of opportunity to take advantage of the transfer of power (e.g., North Korea, FARC in Colombia, etc.). New administrations in the recent past have had to face serious crises within the first six to twelve months of taking office.  Within three months of becoming President, Mr. Bush had been faced with a serious international incident with the Chinese, and by the end of the year the administration was responding to the 9/11 attacks and organizing the military and diplomatic response.  Obviously, the massive security failures that made the 9/11 attacks possible do not inspire confidence in government competence generally, but it is unremarkable to say that there will be a crisis or even a “generated crisis.”  What is a “generated crisis” after all if not another regime or group trying to take advantage of what it sees as an opportunity to gain one of its objectives?

So why is this supposed to be something Biden shouldn’t say?  From what I have seen, Biden’s remarks are supposed to be damaging because they focus the public’s mind on national security, which is still officially McCain’s preferred ground, and because this is supposed to sow doubts in the minds of voters about whether Obama is, in fact, a safe choice and someone capable of handling such a crisis.  This is an odd thing to worry about, since his relatively more measured, sane responses to both the war in Georgia and the financial crisis and his successful handling of foreign policy questions in the debates seem to have removed the doubts from most persuadable voters, while McCain’s bellicose response to Russian actions and his ridiculous flailing in September made clear to most people why they don’t want McCain leading the response in any crisis, generated or not.  So Biden’s gaffe seems “epic” to those who thought that the “surge” was a winning issue for McCain, but not to anyone else.  

Another way of interpreting the remarks is to imagine what might have happened if they had been uttered in a parallel universe.  Here’s Ambinder:

If the economy weren’t collapsing, if Barack Obama’s national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then one can envision a scenario where Biden’s comments would be given a gloss a la Gerald Ford’s freeing Eastern Europe.

So…in a world where everything is different from the real world, Biden’s comments might have caused the Obama campaign a lot of grief.  Possibly.  But why should it matter in electoral terms in this world?   

What is remarkable about what Biden was saying as he addressed a crowd of Seattle Obama fans is that he was telling a progressive crowd bluntly that a President Obama is probably going to use military force in the early months in response to a crisis or foreign conflict.  Biden was telling them that it is going to seem completely unnecessary and contrary to everything Obama voters think they are getting when they elect him.  What could he have meant when he says that the administration is going to need the help of these Seattle progressives (and others like them) “in the community”?  My guess is that he was saying that all of the antiwar progressives who have flocked to Obama are going to be deeply disillusioned by Obama’s response to said crisis and there is a danger that the administration will become politically isolated as Obama’s core supporters lose confidence in him at a supposedly critical juncture. 

Ambinder’s comparison with Ford’s blunder is worth considering a little bit more.  The trouble with Ford’s statement about Soviet control of eastern Europe was that it a) was wrong and b) seemed to confirm the worst interpretations of the administration’s actions at the Helsinki Conference.  It wasn’t just that Ford slipped up and said the wrong thing, but he vigorously defended his claim in his answer to the follow-up question, as if he believed seriously that the Soviets did not dominate their satellites in Europe.  Of course, Ford was attempting to defend the Accords’ language about state sovereignty and territorial integrity and make it seem as if detente did not essentially cede to the Soviets their control over their sphere of influence, when that was, of course, the de facto state of affairs.  The purpose of detente policy was to reduce U.S.-Soviet tensions, which the Helsinki Accords did help in doing, but the trouble that Ford had here was that he was defending quite vehemently a polite diplomatic fiction that everyone knew to be largely meaningless in reality.  Indeed, Ford’s blunder is almost the exact opposite of what Biden has said–Ford blundered politically by maintaining a (necessary?) diplomatic fiction, while Biden rather undiplomatically stated the obvious reality.

Speaking of Palin, her numbers have plummeted in our poll. For the first time, she has a net-negative fav/unfav rating (38%-47%), the only principal to carry that distinction. What’s more, 55% think she’s unqualified to serve as president if the need arises, which is a troublesome number given McCain’s age. ~First Read

It’s strange to think that it was just a little more than two weeks ago that there was still some reason to question the claim that Palin was a very unpopular figure.  Now we see that she has become exactly that.  Then again, the last two weeks have been marked by some of Palin’s most polarizing and inflammatory statements.  As I had guessed earlier in the month, Palin’s role as the attack dog of the campaign was sure to drive up her negatives. 

Presumably, all talk of Palin ’12 will cease, and Republicans should certainly hope that it ceases.  Palin will go back to Alaska with both a poor national reputation among much of the public and a lack of support from the GOP establishment, which makes her an unlikely heir apparent.  The old rationale used to quiet establishmentarian complaints was that she was an exciting, popular figure who would buoy the campaign, and for about the first week this was true, but now that claim does not have enough credibility. 

She still has intense support from rank-and-file partisans, and there is going to be a temptation to run to the opposite extreme after failing with McCain.  The failure of the campaign is likely to be misread as proof that it was McCain the deviationist could not articulate a coherent alternative to Obama, and so there will be a strong temptation to pursue an intensified base mobilization strategy in the next several cycles.  There will be strong resistance to the idea that ’06 and ’08 represented the decisive failure of that approach, and so it may be tried again.  This will be a misinterpretation because McCain’s inability to articulate a coherent message is the result of McCain’s own lack of policy knowledge and visceral policymaking style.  Just as the campaign was primarily defined by biography and character, its failures were to a large extent the result of McCain’s personality and character flaws.    

It seems to me that Huckabee now starts to look much better to the conservative elites who were ridiculing him as Huckleberry just half a year ago; he becomes the relatively safe governing choice who can also generate tremendous grassroots enthusiasm.  Many of his former critics may come to recognize the missed opportunity of running with Huckabee’s pseudo-populism on economics this year, and going forward he may be able to develop a policy agenda that is not limited to praising the wonders of the Fair Tax.  Not having been a critic of Palin, Huckabee will not have alienated her supporters, and he will probably carefully avoid doing so over the next few years in the same way that he stayed on good terms with McCain voters.  Provided that he never, ever again tells the ridiculous story about how foreign wars make it possible for children to have schooldesks, and provided that he could get someone to give him some money, he could become the presumptive frontrunner.  Having spoken out against the bailout early on, he will be well-positioned to satisfy libertarians and populists alike.  Given the deterioration of the McCain campaign since it went to war with journalists, the value of favorable free media coverage, which Huckabee was able to attract so effectively during the primaries, cannot be underestimated.

Ross asks:

Another thing on this subject – is opposition to wealth-spreading in principle really now a litmus test for being a conservative? I thought that being on the right meant that you wanted a welfare state that’s small in size and limited in scope – that’s what I signed up for, at least – and the most just and reasonable way to shrink and/or restrain the American welfare state that I can see is to make it more redistributive, rather than less so.

I suppose a friendly way to reply to this would be to say that someone who wants a welfare state that’s “small in size and limited in scope” is on the right, but that is not why he would be identified as being on the right, except by comparison to those who want universal entitlements and who speak of government support in terms of rights.  Nonetheless, Ross’ frustration with McCain’s schizophrenic hatred of socialism (or as McCain has been quoted as saying: “we loves redistribution of wealth, we hates it!”) is understandable.  As I noted before, labeling Obama as the wealth-spreading candidate is not only politically stupid, but philosophically misguided as well.  It used to be that conservatives believed and could articulate the belief that market economies were on the whole better at allocating resources and equitably distributing wealth than economies subject to a great deal of state intervention.  The time was when broad and even distribution of wealth was a Jeffersonian and conservative goal to provide for a broad class of property-holders as the basis for social and political stability.  It was not a description of a left-wing or welfarist plot.  So much for that.      

The bailout was redistributive, McCain’s crazy mortgage bailout pander (which is essentially a gift to lenders) is redistributive, and federal subsidies are classic examples of redistributing wealth, and McCain supports at least two of those three, but when Obama proposes tax credits for low and middle-income taxpayers (even if this results in additional subsidies) that is suddenly unacceptable socialism for McCain.  It’s true that these subsidies are going to be funded out of general revenues, but McCain and a lot of his supporters do not oppose these things in principle.  So what McCain and his supporters have been saying as they parse Obama’s supposed “tax cut for 95%” is the following politically savvy message: “If you are working-class or middle-class and did what you were supposed to do, you’re not going to get back any more of your money from the state, but if you are a financial institution that made bad loans or bought up mortgage-backed securities all the people who played by the rules are going to help you out.”  Solidarity for financiers is not exactly a compelling message.  What is even more incredible is that McCain and Palin have the gall to portray themselves as the ones who want to put the government back “on the side of the people.”     

Bizarrely, rather than focus the attack on Obama’s proposed new entitlement spending or Obama’s raising of the payroll tax cap, McCain and his allies have spent the last week obsessing over the proposed tax credits/subsidies, which also go to those who don’t pay income tax.  It’s not as if McCain opposes redistribution as such, but he does seem to be very much opposed to any kind of relief for most responsible taxpayers.

One of the things that stood out in Brooks’ last column was his remark about the habitat of Patio Man, which included “the converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe,” which caught my attention since most of the area between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is fifty-odd miles of sagebrush desert and wilderness that I have traversed by car more times than I care to remember.  It’s true that our northern villages/suburbs cut down on some of that distance, and there is always Bernalillo in between them, but Albuquerque and Santa Fe are a “converging megalopolis” in the same way that Oklahoma City and Tulsa have become a massive conurbation or in the same way that we are seeing the emergence of the Birmingham-Tuscaloosa metro area.  Albuquerque and Santa Fe are the two largest cities in the state, and there is a fair number of commuters between the two places, but they are as non-converging a pair of cities as you could want.

Helen Rittelmeyer responds with a good post elaborating on her earlier argument, and I have to say that I agree entirely with the following:

My “Red Socrates” thesis depends on the claim that cultural libertarianism is ill-equipped to make sense of a tragic universe. Tragedy involves looking at human suffering and saying that it was not only unavoidable but, more importantly, in some sense just and proper. Loyalties come into conflict and people get hurt, but that’s what’s supposed to happen when loyalties conflict!

I would say more than this.  Cultural libertarianism is not only ill-equipped to make sense of tragic universe, but it assumes that a tragic universe–one affected by the consequences of the Fall–does not exist or if cultural libertarians accept that it exists they assume that virtually all troubles can be resolved or at least ameliorated.  I detect an adapted version of Delsol’s Icarus Fallen argument that cultural libertarianism, like liberalism, is intent on trying to eliminate structural realities and burdens in our earthly life that cannot–and more to the point should not–be eliminated.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that cultural libertarianism simply seeks to avoid or ignore these realities.  We cannot escape these realities, and we can at best divert them into new and potentially more dangerous forms, which Delsol dubs black markets.

What do Ken Adelman, Chris Buckley and Boris Johnson have in common?  They have all offered fairly unpersuasive endorsements for Obama that are really just indictments of McCain’s (and Bush’s) failures.  The Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden reasonably enough calls the Lord Mayor’s endorsement “silly,” but it seems to me that this may be the great Obamacon strength.  For months I have been railing against Obamacons with arguments that Obama is not who they think he is, that he is going to disappoint them, that his foreign policy and national security views are in most respects indistinguishable from the mainstream GOP that they dislike, which has made the crucial and fatal mistake of taking seriously their position as a pro-Obama position.  I kept saying, “The only conservative argument for Obama is that he is not McCain,” but I failed to see the implications of my own observation.  Conservative endorsements of Obama must necessarily be rather silly, because these endorsements have never been statements about Obama’s readiness but have been pointed statements about how unfit for the Presidency McCain is.  The endorser has to go through the motions of saying something positive about Obama, and so he says things that do not sound very compelling, because Obama is almost beside the point.  It is the act of endorsing Obama, or rather refusing to endorse McCain, that matters.  The sillier, the less persuasive the endorsement is, the more powerful its ridicule of McCain.  It is as if to say, “I can’t think of any really good reasons to vote for this other candidate, but you are an absolute joke and so I am compelled to go with your opponent and I will come up with some pretext for it before Election Day.”  Obamacons cannot be defeated or refuted by their critics because their arguments have never needed to make sense; all that has been required is that they find some way to not support McCain, and very few people are going to fault them for that.