Well, day one, you bring in everyone around that table, too, you bring in the congressional leadership, and, assuming that there will be, certainly, Democrats, at that table, that’s good, too, these are gonna be bipartisan approaches that must be taken, I have that executive experience also having formed a cabinet up there in Alaska that, you know, we’ve got independents and Democrats and Republicans whom I have appointed to our administrative positions to that, we have the best of ideas coming together in order to best serve the people. John McCain, too, he’s been known as the maverick to take on his own party when need be, to reach over the aisle and work with the other party also. Now, Barack Obama has not been able to do that, he’s gone with, what is it, 96 percent of the time with Democrat leadership. Not having that, I think, ability or willingness to work with the other side. So as an executive, we need to create that team that is full of good ideas and not let obsessive partisanship get in the way, as we start taking the measures to shore up our economy, which already Congress is working on with the rescue package, with some of the bailout packages, the provisions in there that can work, too, but it’s gonna take everybody working together. ~Sarah Palin

Got all that?  You need to have the people with the good ideas who will work with others–good call!  She is also in favor of some bailouts, but not those crazy Democratic bailouts:

But now that we’re hearing that the Democrats want an additional stimulus package or bailout package for what, hundreds of billions of dollars more, this is not a time to use the economic crisis as an excuse for reckless spending and for greater, bigger government and to move the private sector to the back burner and let government be assumed to be the be-all, end-all solution to the economic challenges that we have. That’s what’s scaring me now about hearing that the Democrats have an even greater economic bailout package, but we don’t know all the details of it yet and we’ll certainly pay close attention to it.

Yes, this crisis is not something to be used to promote bigger government!  Drawing a line in the sand!  Oh, wait:

Now, as for the economic bailout provisions and the measures that have already been taken, it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in playing an appropriate role to shore up the housing market to make sure that we’re thawing out some of the potentially frozen credit lines and credit markets, government did have to step in there.

Following up on an earlier question that misrepresented an NR article about Palin, Palin offered this remark:

You have that, that combination and I think that some in the media,maybe in The National Review [bold mine-DL], they don’t know what to make of that, they’re like, gee, she’s, you know, where’d she come from, surely, you know, it should be our job I think they assume is to, pick and, and be negative and, and find things to mock and, that’s just I guess part of the political game, I guess.

Not that we should expect Palin to know that some of her most die-hard, adoring fans are at National Review (that would require her either to read NR or be briefed about it at some point), but this exchange is a useful example of a pattern in Palin’s answers that doesn’t get mentioned all that often.  She will latch on to a certain phrase or a detail in something the questioner says and she will use it to elaborate on her response, even though in doing so it underscores how generic and largely meaningless her answer is.  Having been prompted to talk about something in The National Review, as the interviewer made a point of calling it, she came back to it later to fill out another answer, and unintentionally lumped in some of her strongest apologists with her worst critics.  It has ceased being funny and has just become sad.

Palin said later:

Thankfully, too, the American public is seeing clearer and clearer what the choices are in these tickets.

You betcha!

Having complained about the “ruralist” takeover of the Republican Party, Helen Rittelmeyer is not someone you would not immediately with praising “red state” culture, but then the way that she goes about it almost makes you wonder whether she is delivering a left-handed compliment in her response to this:

Let’s put aside the question of whether or not New Yorkers really question their moral assumptions (although if someone else wanted to take up this line of argument, I wouldn’t stop them) and simply look at the end result of this Blue State skepticism. Most of the time, it’s some variation on the harm principle under which the most important ethical question becomes “Does it increase everyone’s happiness?” What could be less sophisticated?

Contrast this with the moral decision-making of a Red Stater who has unquestioningly accepted a truckload of inherited traditions (the clod!). He has to weigh love of country against love for his brother serving in Iraq, not to mention Christian morality, which has a thing or two to say about war. Or he might have to consider family loyalty versus the desire to do something about his sister’s alcoholism. Or loyalty to his wife versus passionate love for another woman. Cheating songs are a sign of moral sophistication (insofar as they take seriously both the sacred vow and true love), and I dare you to name one Blue State genre of music that can boast as many cheating songs as country [bold mine-DL].

Moral philosophy is hard. If every ethical question could be boiled down to some hedonistic or utilitarian calculus (I’m looking at you, cultural libertarianism), it would be easy. Maybe Red Staters don’t respect Socrates as much as they should, but that doesn’t change the fact that, in a world where urbanity is synonymous with cultural liberalism, they’re the only side of the culture war that needs him.

If I read this right, Ms. Rittelmeyer is saying that it is lack of utilitarianism, competing obligations and an abundance of temptation that confer moral sophistication.  She has taken the social disorder and family instability that drives many lower-middle class people in “red states” towards the politics of order and stability and turned it into a kind of complex moral reasoning.  For the sake argument, assume that New Yorkers, Angelenos and Chicagoans and the rest do not question their moral assumptions–how many people ever really question their moral assumptions?  Having cross-cutting obligations and complicated relationships is not the same as reflecting upon the nature of justice and knowing oneself.  If it was absurd to say that an unexamined life was worth living, as the “red state” correspondent claimed, it is perhaps even more absurd to say that a complicated life full of conflicts is one that has been examined.  It is also not clear that all “blue staters” are simply utilitarians, but almost certainly have their own sets of conflicting obligations and their own “truckload of inherited traditions,” which may include utilitarian ethics and liberal politics.  Consider: she says that “red staters” have unquestioningly inherited their traditions, but she says this by way of illustrating how unquestioning “blue staters” are, so which is it?           

On the music question, I am no expert but it seems to me that hip-hop and R&B must have a large number of songs that address the question of infidelity, and if they do not compare to country songs in this respect they are probably close.  Are these “blue state” genres?  I am not sure that they are, since you can find listeners for them all along the old Route 66 corridor, but they seem to fit the bill.  Turning to film, we can find cautionary tales about infidelity set in metropolitan areas in the oeuvre of Michael Douglas, and I think if you turn to television you will find other forms of entertainment that have great fun mucking about in the swamp of moral turpitude and conflicting obligations (e.g., Nip/Tuck, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, etc.).  If these are the criteria for a culture that prizes self-knowledge, “blue” America is likely to meet them as well as “red,” but I think all of this misses something important. 

Worldliness and competing loyalties do not define moral sophistication, but simply define our condition in this world that all of us share.  Whatever moral sophistication we are going to find, it is not going to be found in questioning assumptions but in fulfilling our obligations.

Currently, 49% of voters express an unfavorable opinion of Palin, while 44% have a favorable view. In mid-September, favorable opinions of Palin outnumbered negative ones by 54% to 32%. Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 60% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% in mid-September [bold mine-DL]. ~Pew

The very high unfavorables among women do not surprise me that much.  From the beginning women have tended to be less favorably inclined to Palin than men, and Palin has done more than enough in the last two months to intensify that negative reaction.  Meanwhile, the overall Obama lead of 14 (among likely voters, mind you) is approximately at least twice of what the normal lead in the Pew poll has been all year and represents an increase of seven points among LVs since last week.

Joe Carter discusses the divide between “Joe Sixpacks” and “elites.”  He made this observation, which I think does get at the heart of the problem:

Consider foreign policy. For the JSPs, the opinion of a twenty-something Army Sergeant who just got back from patrolling the streets of Baghdad carries more weight than the twenty-something Harvard grad who writes for The American Prospect or The Weekly Standard.

That’s right, which doesn’t say much for the “JSP” perspective in this case.  The “elites” in this case are trying to have broader perspective and are attempting to think strategically and not tactically.  That is, they are attempting to make arguments about policy.  They may be good arguments, they may be terrible, but they are arguments that are necessarily more abstract and also wider in focus.  The danger of abstraction is that it can lead to utopian programs or theoretical constructs that bear no relationship to the real world, which result in destructive and coercive policies (see Iraq, war in).  Abstraction is unavoidable, however, if we are going to be able to think about large-scale problems in a coherent way.  

Unless we’re discussing the tactical situation in Baghdad or Iraq as a whole, it’s not at all clear that the opinion of the sergeant is necessarily more useful or valid when determining what our Iraq policy ought to be.  The two don’t have to be in opposition, and ought to be complementary.  There’s no question that people with first-hand experience of a war zone have extensive practical knowledge and understand the way things really are, at least in the areas where they’ve been, so they have knowledge that others do not have and cannot readily acquire.  There is no guarantee, however, that this perspective is a better basis for setting policy.  Policymakers, journalists and pundits cannot and must not be oblivious to that first-hand experience, but that experience cannot be the only or main basis for policymaking and debate. 

Ideally, “elites” are supposed to have some historical perspective and understanding of geopolitical realities concerning the place in question.  One of the great problems with most of our “elites” is that they are often scarcely better acquainted with history or international politics than the average American, and often what they do know comes from cookie-cutter progressive interpretations that celebrate freedom’s triumphal march through time.  So they are reduced to relying on oversimplified interpretations of the history of a conflict and what Kennan correctly diagnosed as the moralistic-legalistic impulse.  These simplified, moralistic interpretations are the bane of sound foreign policy, but our “elites” have them in abundance. 

The war in Georgia stands out as a good example of how “elite” foreign policy consensus relied on such an interpretation when it determined that Russia was the “aggressor” or, if there was some recognition of the Georgian role in escalating the conflict, there was at least the certainty that U.S. policy towards Georgia should not change in the slightest.  Common sense would come in very handy as a check on “elite” pretensions in this case (common sense would make us ask why it matters to us whether Russia wields influence in the north Caucasus), but, of course, the public is even more readily misled about conflicts in obscure parts of the world about which they know little or nothing.  If we have bad “elites,” we don’t seem to have enough citizens capable of recognizing and articulating why they are bad, and so instead we get generalized rhetoric against any and all “elites.”  The “JSPs” would have a point if they were to say that many “elites” don’t know nearly as much about the rest of the world as they claim to know, but for them to make this critique they would need to know enough about the rest of the world to recognize how paltry “elite” knowledge often can be.    

Honestly, it seems to me that “JSPs” would be even more inclined to regard someone who went to a Great Books liberal arts college such as St. John’s, several of whose graduates I have known over the years, as having received an utterly impractical and “useless” education, even if it is one more grounded in classics of the Western canon than the education offered at certain elite universities.  In a strict sense, as a way to train for a job a St. John’s education is rather impractical, but then those who go to St. John’s assume that education is a matter of cultivating and enriching the mind and honing the ability to think and make arguments rather than providing job training.  If we were to include St. John’s alumni among the Joe Sixpacks of the world, I think that we are defining “elite” extremely narrowly, but perhaps Mr. Carter does not mean to imply this.

Carter continues:

The JSPs don’t believe that the guy from Harvard is any smarter — or, for that matter, better educated — than someone who went to State U.

This is a healthy skeptical view, but it can be taken too far.  It is really the question of the quality of the education that matters most.  On average, as these things are measured, students who attend elite universities do tend to be smarter, but that does not necessarily tell you anything about the quality of education or the quality of the graduates.  Neither does it guarantee at all that the ideas held by these graduates are good ones.  Capable students can come away from public universities or less-prestigious colleges with a better education, and university prestige can be used to exaggerate the quality of education on offer, but to some extent if JSPs believe that there are no qualitative differences between all of the students of different kinds of universities they are indulging a sentimental egalitarianism.

Rasmussen’s latest Virginia poll should put an end to any doubts about the outcome we are going to see in a couple of weeks.  Obama has a 10-point overall lead in the Old Dominion, which has not voted Democratic for President since 1964.  Pfotenhauer’s “real” Virginia is getting smaller all the time.  His Democratic support in the state has always been much stronger than it has been in some of the old Border states, but now it is at an enviable 96%.  More important, he leads among independents by 16.  He enjoys a large advantage in fav ratings (64%) over McCain (53%) among independents.  Obama is winning men by three and women by 15.  He barely edges out McCain among married respondents, but then racks up a 39-point lead among singles.  Perhaps we should call it the non-marriage gap instead.  

Even 11% of Republicans and 19% of conservatives back Obama.  Perhaps Ken Adelman (yes, that Ken Adelman) speaks for some of them:

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

What is most telling about this sizeable lead in Virginia is that Obama does not need Virginia to win.  So long as he takes Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico and holds the Kerry states, he could lose every other toss-up state and still prevail.  McCain must come back, in some cases very dramatically, in all of them.  McCain’s task is virtually impossible.  Perhaps the campaign knows and accepts this, which is why Palin was on SNL over the weekend being made to serve as something of a prop in her own mocking. 

Obviously, if the voting nationwide is anything like this we can expect a result similar to that of ’96.  I will readily admit that I didn’t think this would happen as recently as six weeks ago, and kept expecting Obama to implode or lose ground, and in this I was quite wrong. 

Update: CNN reports that McCain is giving up on Colorado, and New Mexico and Iowa are essentially out of reach.  The campaign’s focus on Pennsylvania is, it seems to me, not nearly enough in light of the numbers from Virginia and Missouri.  Even if they could win it, which seems unlikely, Pennsylvania wouldn’t get them enough votes on its own unless they could hold all of the toss-ups.

Speaking of people who probably cannot understand Powell’s endorsement, Ralph Peters offers us this gem:

Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror.

Projected it to whom?  When was all this pandering?  What has he actually done that would lead any observer–even one who wrongly defines opposition to illegal surveillance powers as evidence of “weakness”–to come to this conclusion?  Peters continues:

The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan – and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.

Suppose that the Pakistanis do think this.  Maybe some of them do.  Why would they think this, and more important why should Americans assume that this is the correct reading?  There are two unstated assumptions in this claim: 1) that McCain or someone pursuing an alternative course of action would not lose Afghanistan, meaning that this would only happen on Obama’s watch, and 2) that Obama’s position on Afghanistan/Pakistan is somehow not as equally hawkish as the current administration’s.  Arguably, this more hawkish position might very well lead to disaster in Pakistan or end up undermining the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but if that is the case our current policy is equally misguided and yet comes in for no criticism.

He goes on:

In the Middle East, Obama’s election would be read as the end of staunch US support for Israel.

Maybe, if everyone in the region is as clueless as Obama’s domestic critics (this would be difficult), but why exactly would that be the case?  Again, what has Obama said or done that would give anyone this impression?  This is the flip side of the equally implausible “Obama’s election will cause Muslims everywhere to love the U.S. government”–a view foolishly promoted by his own supporters–and it is no more likely to be proven correct.  Both misreadings rely on the idea that Middle Eastern governments and publics base their hostility/lack of hostility to the United States on superficial, symbolic things rather than actual U.S. policies.  If only we change the appearance or the name of the President, everyone will respond accordingly!  This is completely and in all ways wrong.

Peters prophesies some more:

Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel.

Perhaps, perhaps not.  If this happens, Obama will support Israel just as full-throatedly and unequivocally as he did in 2006 during the last war.  Who knows–he could very well back Israeli actions with direct U.S. military support, depending on the circumstances.  It is amazing to me that virtually no one in either party ever talks about Obama’s support for Israeli actions in the Second Lebanon War.  He was not alone in this, of course, as this was the default, almost universal position for members of Congress, but there is no question that it was his position.  I suppose it is more convenient for certain antiwar progressives and Obama’s Republican critics alike to ignore this evidence that their hopes/fears concerning Obama are false.

Peters keeps hallucinating:

Russia’s new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided.

This is highly unlikely to happen.  Unlike the short, swift incursion into Georgia, “gobbling up” Ukraine or even lending support to Crimean separatists would be a much larger, riskier and potentially more disastrous proposition for Russia.  Give Peters propaganda points for denouncing Timoshenko, once the socialist beehive-bedooed hero of American interventionists everywhere when she was on the Orange Revolution bandwagon, for charting a moderately less anti-Moscow path.  More to the point, were this to happen, there is every reason to think that Obama and Joe “Expand NATO to the Pacific” Biden would respond to it just as counterproductively than Mr. Bush would were he still in office.  How’s that for a vote of confidence? 

Peters continues:

Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country’s hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he’ll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism.

Well, I suppose he will, and he will keep failing as he has been failing for the last several years.  Meanwhile, Chavez’s own weakness at home makes him increasingly irrelevant. 

This one takes the cake for its silliness:

Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country’s dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.

The Bolivian government is a democratic government in all its demagogic socialist glory.  What Peters is accusing Obama of doing before the fact is failing to intervene against the democratically-elected government of Bolivia (to use the phrasing that pan-Kartvelian pundits prefer) in the domestic political affairs of an extremely poor, strategically insignificant country.  In other words, he says that Obama will be a responsible President who won’t waste American resources on sideshow internal conflicts where U.S. interests are scarcely involved.  Peters really has him on the ropes now!

Peters just keeps on making things up (why stop at this point?):

An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies [the Kurds] between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.

Abandon them to whom?  What is he talking about?  Incidentally, I wonder what the Indians think of being written off as less than a true ally of the United States.  I guess that nuclear deal was all a figment of our collective imagination. 

Peters again:

Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression – and outright murder – of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.

And how that would be a change from how things are now exactly?  On the contrary, if Obama is even remotely serious in what he was saying about Burma and Zimbabwe in his Berlin speech we should be more concerned that Obama will start doing all kinds of things in this area and adding to our already excessively long list of commitments.

Obviously, there is no substance to Peters’ criticisms of Obama, but what is worrisome is that Obama, already perfectly hawkish and interventionist on his own, will feel compelled to take even harder lines and be even more confrontational than he would otherwise be in order to demonstrate that he is not the weak, accommodating President that Peters et al. are making him out to be.  Having learned nothing from the Bush years, these critics may box Obama in and lead him to take positions that are more aggressive even than those of Mr. Bush to secure his “credibility” on national security.  If Obama simply ignores these critics and pulls back from more hard-line stances when appropriate, then he may still be wrong on many things but he will have earned some genuine credibility.

The Powell endorsement isn’t all that surprising, and like most endorsements it will have no meaningful electoral effect (especially in an election that is almost certainly over), but it is worth considering for what it says about Obama, Powell and the GOP’s encouragement of media adulation over Powell over the years.  As James says, Powell is actually a very conventional figure, and he is also very much an establishmentarian.  Even in his call for a “transformational figure,” he is expressing an establishmentarian hope not so much of transformation but of restoration of establishment credibility. Obama is consensus-oriented and accommodating enough to entrenched interests that he offers the best chance of repairing some of the damage that national political institutions and officials, including Powell himself, have done.  If Obama represents the “sanctification of the status quo,” Powell is one of many establishment figures hoping to participate in that so-called sanctification.   

Powell is a good representative of the moderate-to-liberal Republican Obama voter, and almost the only thing in terms of policy separating him from the Gilchrests and Chafees is that he was a prominent war supporter.  That’s a very significant difference, but it is much more muted now.  Otherwise, he fits the profile of a moderate Republican foreign policy “realist” pushed away by the aggressive posture of McCain and his advisors and the social moderate alienated by social conservatism and vulgar Americanism.  Many of the same social issues that mobilize most rank-and-file conservatives and which acquired such importance in the presentation of Palin as VP nominee are the very issues that have always made Powell an odd fit with the modern GOP and were at the heart of intra-conservative strife over his possible (but never terribly likely) ’96 run.  So long as Powell stayed out of domestic politics, the GOP encouraged the media’s creation of Powell as the personification of officially approved, “respectable” Republicanism.  For his admirers in the press, Powell was Giuliani without the authoritarian impulses and cruelty; for many conservatives, Powell and, at least until this decade, his Doctrine were examples of the GOP’s credibility on national security. 

Now one of their military media darlings has abandoned their other military media darling at the last moment, simultaneously endorsing the (mostly accurate) narrative of a GOP consumed by triviality and bitterness and implying that the party has ceased to be credible on national security, so Republicans are understandably annoyed.  That Powell himself was instrumental in making the GOP less credible on national security is conveniently ignored by all sides.  Indeed, one might wonder why Obama would want an endorsement from Powell, who receives the same kind of curious treatment that McCain has received for most of his career until very recently: yes, he misled the public at a crucial time, and it’s true that he failed to voice the doubts about the war that he had strongly enough, but what really matters is that he had doubts.  Just as McCain’s discomfort telling the whoppers that he nonetheless goes on telling proves that he is somehow a great leader, Powell’s private, unexpressed doubts that might have helped avoid calamity if they had been expressed absolve him of everything he did.     

One reason why some Republicans are insisting that the endorsement was primarily a matter of racial solidarity is that it helps to avoid Powell’s critiques of the campaign and of the party, even when those critiques might be refuted.  It is easier and therefore better at this point in the campaign to dismiss it by saying, “Race is all that matters here.”  It might be that for some Republicans it is genuinely inconceivable that a retired general and former diplomat would throw his support to Obama, as these are the same people who have tried to make Obama out to be a neo-McGovernite peacenik, but it should probably tell them something about where they have gone wrong that Obama keeps racking up such endorsements.  Having invested so much in Obama-as-radical-maniac, Republicans are missing the temperamental similarities between Obama and Powell.  Likewise, Obama’s admirers are probably consciously ignoring those same similarities to the extent that they imply that Obama, like Powell, will go along with prevailing wisdom and establishment consensus, because that is not what they expect from Obama.  Republicans also seem to think that the phrase, “the Surge is working! the Surge is working!” is a mantra straight out of Oz that will magically transport them back to the salad days of 2002, so they remain baffled by the idea that Obama’s fairly modest withdrawal plan might be appealing to someone like Powell.  The inability, or the simple refusal, to admit that the Iraq war was a costly, disastrous mistake has been dragging down the GOP for the last three years, so there’s no reason anything would change now.   

Domestically, there’s nothing remarkable about Powell’s opposition to more conservative justices on the Court–on several of the litmus test questions, Powell does not agree and never has agreed with conservative concerns.  This is not of the same kind as the pro-lifer’s negative argument for not backing McCain (he might not appoint conservative justices and wouldn’t be able to get them confirmed by a Democratic majority Senate even if he did).  This is an expression of a genuine preference for the sort of appointments that Obama would make.  Again, this sounds unbelievable to many on the right, who conclude that Powell couldn’t possibly believe that, as if it were impossible for a social moderate to find the preoccupation with overturning Roe to be unsatisfying.  Of course, either anti-McCain pro-lifers are right or Powell is, since part of his resistance to McCain is premised on the assumption that conservative justices are guaranteed after a McCain victory.

Do I really sound like this?  Hearing my voice on recordings never ceases to surprise me.  Watch my bloggingheads conversation with Eli Lake here.

So I take it that Robert Stacy McCain is unhappy about something.  Offhand, as a sometimes “splenetic conservative” myself, I would suggest that perpetuating internecine feuds along class, educational and generational lines is not going to accomplish anything.  It seems to me that when conservatives are already largely outnumbered among Millennials and post-graduate degree-holders and are becoming more so among college-educated people, and when the GOP is steadily losing the upper-middle class in general, lecturing, or rather berating, “arrogant” young educated professionals is a good way to drive away members of the rising generations even more quickly.  This claim seems particularly hard to credit:

Nothing has corrupted the conservative movement more than this tendency to grab super-bright 20-somethings right out of elite universities and elevate them to positions in the commentariat before they’ve passed any markers of adulthood other than graduating school.

Really?  Was this more corrupting than reflexive obeisance to whatever ill-considered Republican policy was being pushed by the leadership or administration at the time?  More corrupting than the decision of many middle-aged pols and party strategists that the only hope for the future was to push for immigration liberalization?  More corrupting than the near-universal embrace of an unnecessary war by movement leaders?  More corrupting than the numerous apologies written on behalf of the administration’s torture regime?  More corrupting than endorsing every executive power grab and new surveillance powers?  I could go on, but I think you get the point.  I suppose there could be some problem in promoting young graduates too quickly, but had the movement not been doing this I’m pretty sure it would have suffered from much of the same corruption.    

The signals in recent years have been quite clear: if you are privileged or capable enough to go to elite universities for your education and you are at all right-leaning in your views, you will have to apologize for your education or conceal it for the rest of your life to make yourself acceptable to many of your confreres on the right.  Furthermore, should you hold any seemingly or genuinely heterodox views, these will be attributed to your toffy background, which will then be invoked as sufficient reason to ignore you entirely.  At the same time, should you exhibit any behavior or preferences that mark you as “crunchy” or otherwise critical of the culture of acquisition and consumption, you will presumed guilty of one kind of deviationism or another, and obviously if you express opposition to needless wars, abuses of power and trampling on civil liberties you will be presumed to be a left-wing wolf in conservative sheep’s clothing.  These have been the messages sent to the different kinds of dissident and heterodox conservatives over the last six or eight years, and they are not exactly deepening any loyalties.       

Continuing in this fashion portends a future consumed by grievances and cultural cues in which both “defenders of elites” and their critics tell self-reinforcing congratulatory tales to themselves about their superior understanding of reality.  The former will cheer their defense of high standards and wonkery, and the latter will celebrate their Middle American ordinariness and jeer at the poncy gits in the Northeast.  I know this is where this will go because it is already happening.  “Eat your own” is never exactly a winning strategy, but it is an absolutely crazy one when the reason for doing so seems to be based to a significant degree in lifestyle politics and cultural resentments.  In place of one conservative cocoon, there will simply be two, and they will take pride in their lack of understanding of what goes on inside the other one. 

It’s true that Sarah Palin on her own is not the problem, nor is she really at the heart of all this, but neither is she the solution.  Her policy advisors could, I suppose, all be self-taught and homeschooled for their whole lives, but she would still need to be acquainted with the details of major policies sooner rather than later.  Presumably, one would want her advisors to be among the best at what they do regardless of where they come from, and surely it is in that sense that Ross means elites in this post.  Her nomination has become the occasion to express many simmering resentments on all sides, and this entire controversy echoes to some extent the responses provoked by Huckabee’s candidacy, and so she has been treated as the embodiment of whatever the critic or admirer thinks is wrong/right with conservatism.  What all of this back-and-forth avoids is a real debate over policy priorities and what kind of policies conservatives should support.  Ultimately, that reinforces the status quo and works to the detriment of populist conservatives, since it leaves the latter with the undesirable rhetorical framing that understanding policy is less important than life experience. 

Update: McCain responds in another update to his original post, fixating on the remark about “crunchy” conservatism above.  I did not have his criticism of Rod’s book in mind, which I had forgotten about until he mentioned it, but was using the criticism of “crunchy” cons as closet socialists/fascists/whatever as another example of the impulse to hurl abuse at other conservatives without much reason.  McCain says:

Conservatism is a philosophy of government, not a matter of lifestyle preferences.

What McCain may be missing here is that much of the hostility to the “crunchy” con view was a rabid defense of individualism and an angry resentment at anyone trying to “interfere” with self-indulgent habits.  The people who made an idol out of any and all lifestyle preferences as equally valid choices and viewed criticism of bad habits as unforgiveable meddling were the opponents of “crunchy” conservatism.  Ironically, the so-called countercultural voices appealed to authority and tradition, while the defenders of the status quo were reduced to saying something like, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”  “Crunchy” cons and their sympathizers made the mistake of attempting to apply ethical and moral standards in everyday life, which was regularly misunderstood as “politicizing” private life because the critics had an impoverished understanding of politics as only those things pertaining to the state and an almost equally impoverished understanding of culture as mostly those things pertaining to sexuality.    

Conservatism includes within it a philosophy of government, but that is not all it is.  It is surely also a vision of social and moral order, or to the extent that it is a political persuasion it includes within the definition of politics much more than questions of administration and legislation.  We would agree that conservatism is not a matter of “lifestyle preferences”–which is why, among other things, conservatives should not be falling over themselves in adulation over Palin’s preference for hunting and the like–but it seems as if we will have to continue disagreeing on other things.  Most important, we disagree whether a conservatism of place and virtue, which is what I understand traditional conservatism to be, can coexist with the culture of acquisition and consumption.  Conservatism as I understand it calls for restraint and prudence, both of which are discouraged in such a culture, and it assumes the existence of a common good that necessarily involves certain limits on economic behavior, which will either be imposed from within by discipline and self-control or they will eventually be imposed from without.  I would go so far as to say that economic liberty and moral restraint rise and fall together, and as the latter weakens public regulation of economic life is bound to become more severe.   

McCain concludes:

Conservatism isn’t about buying organic groceries at Whole Foods or sitting around quoting Russell Kirk, it’s about constitutional government.

I would agree that conservatism is not defined by buying organic groceries at Whole Foods, but that would have a lot to do with the problems with what Pollan has called Big Organic, but I would reject the idea that what and how we eat has nothing to do with a vision of good order.  I would say that without the cultural moorings of restraint and self-control that are reflected in our habits, constitutional government isn’t possible.  As we have been seeing, the consequences of the culture of acquisition and consumption reveal tremendous dependency, both political and economic, and lead to terrible distortions of the constitutional system.  If quoting Russell Kirk might revive some understanding of these basic truths, it could be a worthwhile thing for conservatives to be doing.

Yet conventional wisdom is often wrong. For a start, as any property analyst can attest, it tends to be self-affirming. The media has leapt on recent polls that show Mr Obama with double-digit margins. But until Friday, when the conservative Drudge Report led on the much narrower two-point lead that Gallup gave Mr Obama, those polls that have not hinted at a landslide have been downplayed. And there have been quite a few.  

The RealClear Politics website’s average of polls, which gives Mr Obama a lead of 6.8 per cent over Mr McCain, offers a better guide to the situation.  It compares to John Kerry’s lead just a few weeks before he lost the 2004 election to Mr Bush. ~Edward Luce

Having been duly chastened about poll averages in the past, I probably ought to say nothing about this one way or the other, but there is a very simple point to be made here.  At a comparable time in the ’04 election, the same RCP average showedMr. Bush ahead by approximately 2 points, which was fairly close to the final result.  It is true that there were some pollsters, most notably Zogby, who were declaring a massive Kerry victory up through the night of the election, but they were spectacularly wrong and were not representative of what the most reliable polls showed.  Those who expect Obama to win with an Electoral College margin similar to that of Clinton ’96 and a comparable 5-6 point lead in the national popular vote seem to have more evidence on their side.  (Fivethirtyeight.com currently projects Obama winning 51.8-46.5 with 347 electoral votes.)  Could that lead widen to become a proper double-digit landslide?  Perhaps, but it seems more likely that the gap will narrow slightly and we will still see Obama winning the vast majority of electoral votes.