Equally, “constructing” a “narrative” of Obama as a “lightweight celebrity” was a strategy that depended upon Obama showing himself to be nothing more than a lightweight celebrity candidate. But what if he showed more than that? What would the McCain campaign do then? In other words, McCain’s strategy depended upon Obama failing, not McCain succeeding. As such it was vulnerable. Indeed, it was predicated upon an analysis that was not the GOP’s to control. ~Alex Massie

This is an important point.  There is a basic rule in any competition, and elections are no different.  If you assume that all you really need do is show up and wait for the other side to fail, you will lose and probably quite embarrassingly at that.  McCain never made the case for himself, because he assumed that he would be the default winner once the public decided Obama was unprepared.  Whether or not Obama is unprepared by some standards is not the point.  Relative to McCain, he has shown himself to be fairly masterful while his opponent blunders and lurches.  Despite having every advantage in the political conditions this year, Obama has not taken those advantages for granted nearly as much as he could have done.  The post-nomination pandering and position-switching, all of which now seems to have been quite unnecessary, were part of a steady, cautious effort to appear cautious and steady, which gave calls for undefined change a reassuring rather than an unsettling quality and negated McCain’s efforts to portray him as reckless and unready.       

What is striking about McCain’s failure is how irrational it was to approach an election this way amid conditions that everyone acknowledged to be very good for Democrats.  It might make sense to coast along on biography and belittling your opponent’s readiness and depth in a year when you have the wind at your back, a coherent message and a party label that is not radioactive, but McCain had none of these advantages.  Gordon Brown, a similarly doomed political figure, also likes the refrain “it’s no time for a novice” as a dig against Cameron, but after years of failure by the experienced politicians you would naturally think this is precisely the time for some new blood.  McCain supporters are always dwelling on Obama’s inexperience.  This would be fair enough, but we see now that it isn’t very smart, because each time this charge is made people are reminded that he hasn’t been in Washington very long, to which the ordinary sane response is to say, “Excellent.”   

As for being ambushed, as Gerson puts it, no one put a gun to McCain’s head and demanded that he talk senselessly about earmark reform and the “surge” for half of the campaign.  No one forced him to have no message beyond calls for generic reform against stereotypical corruption.  The lack of policy detail, indeed lack of policy knowledge, the ad hoc, day-by-day planning, the utter disorganization in the campaign, the obsession with scoring tactical victories, and the endless sanctimony, all of which have crippled the McCain campaign’s ability to communicate a consistent, clear argument for his candidacy and build a successful “ground game,” are all reflections of who McCain is.  Let’s also remember that if McCain had been allowed his true desire, he apparently would have chosen Lieberman as a running mate, which would have been the single greatest act of political self-immolation ever.  When choosing Sarah Palin is the smart, safe alternative, there is something fundamentally screwy in the candidate’s ability to make decisions. 

Perhaps most remarkable about the attempt to potray Obama as a lightweight celebrity is how true of McCain that description now seems to be.

P.S.  As Mr. Massie noted, playing not to lose had worked for McCain in the primaries against other Republicans, which I think ought to lead us to render a pretty harsh assessment of the weakness of the GOP primary field.  McCain has demonstrated over the last almost two years that his main qualities are persistence and an ability to surprise.  Had his most capable opponent, Huckabee, ever had any resources, McCain would have lost, and had Romney been even remotely credible he would have wiped the floor with McCain.  As it was, McCain managed to hold off Huckabee, whose campaign structure was not so much disorganized as non-existent, and just barely edged out Romney and his millions in Florida.  Once he had a politically talented, reasonably well-informed and well-funded candidate, as he would have had in either eventual Democratic nominee, the writing was on the wall and McCain was definitely found wanting.

Did McCain suddenly become [bold mine-DL] a stumbling failure? ~Michael Gerson

Not at all.  He didn’t become anything that he hadn’t been for the months and years that he was campaigning before mid-September.  There was no strange transmutation after the financial crisis broke into open view.  He had been what he recently showed himself to be–Gerson’s phrase of “stumbling failure” is pretty close to right–but most were too enamored, too deferential or too sympathetic to mention it.  Give McCain a break–there may be other things at which he would have excelled, and there might be things he does very well, but demonstrating political leadership in the clutch isn’t one of them.  It is probably true that there was no chance for McCain once the crisis began.  Difficult conditions for a representative of the incumbent party became simply impossible.  That doesn’t mean that McCain has not steadily, daily contributed to his own defeat, because he clearly has.  If his response to the war in Georgia alarmed many of us, his response to the financial crisis was simply horrifying for almost everyone.  We are constantly told by certain pundits, including Gerson, that this is still a center-right country, but at the same time Gerson wants us to think that it should be to McCain’s credit that he was merely tied with someone widely considered a left-liberal inexperienced novice.  This story doesn’t hold up.  If McCain’s admirers are right about Obama’s inexperience and the public’s doubts about his leadership, what does it say about McCain that he could barely close the gap with his convention bounce and almost immediately fell behind again?

Ross:

And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I’d be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back.

In fairness to the denouncers, there is a certain satisfaction in the knowledge, or at least the assumption, that you have held out despite everything and remained on board the ship to the very last.  I have had plenty to say against party loyalty, but there is a kind of mad integrity in the reflexive partisan who will back his party no matter how sorry or ridiculous the candidates and no matter how vapid the message.  It doesn’t make any sense, but then it’s not supposed to make sense.  Of course Ross is right that conservatives should be more interested in making converts than finding heretics.  The bit about finding heretics rather than making converts used to be the accusation conservatives hurled against the left, and it was always something of an exaggeration (there has long been something of a fortress mentality among conservatives that lets you forget that two-fifths of the public even now identify by that label), but now it has been completely reversed.  Perhaps this is simply what happens as coalitions fragment and political alignments are in flux, but it seems to me that this is not inevitable. 

For a long time, conservatives have been blinded by optimism, and I think many of them began to expect success to follow success.  In the future, many of his former supporters may look back at Bush’s re-election and see it as the greatest disaster to befall their cause in a generation, and not simply because he presided over so many debacles in his second term but because his winning re-election taught them to expect victory when there was no good reason to expect it.  In their expectation of success, conservatives have tended to become complacent, to congratulate one another and to preach to the crowd–this is the cocoon effect Ross has criticized before–and to react with bewilderment and disbelief to any setbacks.  Many conservatives have mistaken optimism, which masks weakness, for confidence, which reflects strength.  In politics as in everything else, confidence is attractive, while the arrogant presumption that comes from optimism commands deference only so long as you and your allies wield power.  Once you are dethroned, you cannot command much respect at all.  I think this is why the Republican ticket seems particularly sad this time around, because the nominees practice the sort of bluffing and blustering that once carried the field and now just seem exhausted.

What is instructive about all this is what it tells us about loyalty.  For the denouncers, loyalism ultimately seems to mean keeping your mouth shut, ignoring reality and not breaking ranks.  In another era, these would be the legitimists who would have defended the rights of an imbecile heir rather than a competent claimant on the throne.  What we see is that it is not loyalty that is being defended, but rather conformity.  The loyalist is bound by devotion, and the conformist by fear, usually fear of an enemy or opponent.  We see the former when people rally to a monarch or leader they genuinely admire, and we see the latter in support for a dictator as the lesser of two evils.

Seeing as how I didn’t think there was much to Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Obama, I can’t say much for his claim that he had offered a “reasoned argument for the opposition.”  This is not intended to knock Buckley.  As I have said time and again, I don’t think anyone on the right can make a satisfying, reasoned argument for backing Obama except that he isn’t the other guy, which is as true today as it ever was.  You can find legions who can make extremely compelling conservative anti-McCain arguments, but Buckley didn’t much of an anti-McCain case, either.  So this isn’t exactly a classic NR purge, but it seems to me that this would have been one of those moments when NR might have refused his resignation as unnecessary.  At the very least, it might have given that old refrain of “we’re conservatives, not Republicans” a bit more credibility. 

Then again, it’s understandable up to a point.  If you believe, as most NR contributors seem to believe, that Obama is absolutely unacceptable and tied to all sorts of villains, you might find a voting preference for Obama to be equally unacceptable.  One interesting thing that did jump out at me was Buckley’s references to the reader mail he received that talked of his “betrayal” of the conservative movement.  To which he has responded, more or less, “There’s a conservative movement?  Really?  Who are they?”  In his words:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.  

It is always interesting to me how the people who write these sorts of letters are moved to anger when this or that pundit voices a dissenting view because they are so concerned about treachery, but when the President or other leaders of their preferred party enact plainly anti-conservative policies they are not seen as having betrayed anything.  Even if there is some consistency in the responses, it is almost as if the so-called betrayal of the pundit or writer is considered to be just as bad as that of the politician, when the failures of the latter are usually far more consequential and more deserving of scorn than anything any one writer has to say.  I suppose the point is really this: on the day when Mr. Bush hands in his resignation letter and apologizes for his myriad failures, perhaps then people can talk seriously about Chris Buckley’s “betrayal” of the movement that helped empower Mr. Bush.

Turning to a very important subject, Peter Suderman discusses the vital cocktail party sell-out question:

The cocktail party criticism has never made much sense to me. For one thing, it misunderstands the nature of DC networking, which is based on prestige far more than on one’s particular political opinions. There may be a handful of exceptions, but in general, switching one’s view on a particular policy or candidate isn’t likely to get you a truckload of invites to swanky society soirees.

I must confess that I have made the remark in one or two conversations about fashionable drinks parties as a half-joking explanation for why some conservatives take the views they do, but I have admit that this is a silly thing to say (and it was silly when McCain said it of Palin’s conservative critics).  It is certainly the sort of thing that seems most plausible to those who spend the least time in Washington, and therefore sounds least credible when uttered by Washington politicians.  Almost as silly as the cocktail party criticism is the entire genre of Strange New Respect polemics that are to policy views what the “cocktail party” argument is to politics.  (Actually, they’re really two sides of the same coin.)  We are all familiar with the Strange New Respect idea, which is that such-and-such Republican or conservative does not espouse a dissenting view from the majority of his peers because he thinks this view is true, but rather because he receives praise from the other “side” and he becomes very keen to win applause from people with whom he otherwise has nothing in common.  The one case where this might be true is that of politicians, who have real incentives to engage in opportunistic breaks with their party to curry favor with media outlets, but once you move beyond elected officials the advantages of criticizing one’s own “side” are non-existent and the costs multiply quickly.  The pressure to conform is very strong, and this is confirmed by the existence of the Strange New Respect and “cocktail party” stigmas, which are some of the mechanisms for maintaining that conformity.  These methods are used to isolate dissenters by claiming, or simply hinting, that their integrity has been compromised and that their opinions should not be trusted. 

It also matters how you break with your party or political confreres.  No one makes these claims about Tom Tancredo or Ron Paul.

Via Conor, I see that Hunter Baker seems to have been drinking McCain’s favorite flavor:

If anyone in the senate has shown an ability to pass legislation, it is John McCain.

Though McCain is politically dead, the myth of McCain lives on.  As many observers noted during McCain’s self-important suspension, dropping in at the last minute to claim credit for legislation that had been hammered out by his colleagues is what McCain has done for most of his Senate career.  His “ability to pass legislation” is the ability to latch himself opportunisitcally onto major legislation as a co-sponsor, let others negotiate the specifics and then mug for the cameras after the bill passes.  It’s an ability of sorts, I grant you, but hardly one that should make us take his grandstanding over the bailout seriously.  This is what he tried (and failed) to do with the immigration legislation last year, provoking his memorable clash with Sen. Cornyn, and it is what he hoped to do with the bailout.

Then Baker gets really carried away:

Were we to have a hall of fame for senators, McCain would be in it on the basis of his accomplishments.

What accomplishments?  He has been a named co-sponsor for one high-profile bill that became law in the last eight years, but aside from McCain-Feingold, the (failed) McCain-Kennedy bill and the (failed) McCain-Lieberman bill can his admirers name all these accomplishments that rank him among the greatest Senators of all time?  I am doubtful.  Then again, who cares?  He’s got experience!  This is one of the things that has puzzled me the most about McCain backers who attack Obama for not having done anything in Washington–their candidate has been there six times as long and has scarcely accomplished much more.     

Baker asks:

Is it so strange for such a person to feel he needs to actually do his day job during a time of trouble?

What was stopping him from doing his job?  Was there anything that he ended up doing that he could not have done without declaring that he has suspended his campaign?  It was over a week and a half from the time Lehman declared bankruptcy until McCain’s “necessary” suspension and his antics about the presidential debate.  He didn’t feel compelled to do his day job until a few days before the first debate, at which point it became imperative.  The reasons seem clear: for the first week of the crisis, he was not yet sinking so dramatically in opinion polls and his running mate’s catastrophically bad interview had not yet aired.  Only as he saw his campaign unraveling did he decide he needed to jump-start it with another stunt, except that this time it didn’t work.

Conor comments on Pat Buchanan’s latest:

It’s hard for me to imagine paleo-conservatives and neo-conservatives in the same party four years from now.

We’re in the same party?  That comes as news to me.  Of course, as I said the other day, it seems possible that neoconservatives will gravitate toward supporting an Obama administration that will prove to be every bit as activist and interventionist as Obama’s earliest policy addresses suggested that it would be.  Just as many Obamacons moved to Obama in the hopes of discrediting the neocons, they will probably be alienated from a President Obama who, while not advised by neoconservatives, nonetheless has many of the same objectives and has no intention of changing most U.S. policies abroad.  It might be difficult for some after having tried to portray Obama as a McGovernite, but they’ll manage.    Republican politicians, on the other hand, may become less eager to embark on foreign adventures and make new commitments around the world after having been burned by the fires of the “global democratic revolution” Mr. Bush tried to spark, so more paleocons may find the GOP barely tolerable once more if traditional realists enjoy a brief revival.  Without the steady tug of party/tribal loyalty, the GOP’s Jacksonians may rediscover hostility to needless deployments and unnecessary wars, which will, of course, evaporate the moment a future President from their own party declares an unnecessary war to be necessary.

P.S.  To help resolve Philip Klein’s puzzlement, the reason many so-called hostile critics of Israel “are looking forward to Obama’s policies in the Middle East” is one of the following: either they either don’t know what his policies are and are projecting their own desires onto him, or they know what his stated positions are and have gone into complete denial.  My guess is that most Obama backers who expect significant change in foreign policy are engaged in wishful thinking rather than willful denial, but it could be some of both.

An important part of the life of any tribe is its mythology, which is why self-described members of a political tribe are usually so keen to defend their myths from being debunked by skeptics.  Casting doubt on these myths is seen as something that only an outsider would do, so whenever a putative member of the tribe questions a certain myth he necessarily risks being considered as an outsider and being accordingly ostracized.  For example, Helen Rittelmeyer holds fast to the myth that the GOP is the more conservative party in the United States, for which there is vanishingly small evidence these days, and she finds Conor Friedersdorf’s lack of faith disturbing.  To the extent that membership in a political tribe is premised not on policy issues but on the acceptance of shared heroes and narratives, political tribalism requires a certain abdication of critical thought and an indifference to history.  The difficulties this creates for self-criticism and self-correction are obvious, but one of the reasons why political tribes insist on maintaining their myths is the same reason why any group does this, which is to give their allegiances greater meaning than they would otherwise possess.  Another reason why political myths are so powerful and enduring is that they help to justify past actions that cannot really be justified and to cover over present actions that need to be forgotten. 

Thus Lincoln “saved the Union,” when in reality he destroyed the Union and replaced it with something else, but the reality is too terrible and cannot be defended without endorsing a radicalism his admirers usually do not want to endorse.  WWI, which was a bloody catastrophe from beginning to end, was fought, according to the propagandists, for the rights of small nations and to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it actually resulted in the ruin of many small nations and had nothing to do with protecting democracy.  According to another popular myth, Reagan “won the Cold War,” the clearest example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in modern history.  Of course, those most interested to promote this myth are among those who most bitterly opposed Reagan’s engagement and negotiations with the Soviets at the time–to credit Reagan with this accomplishment is to align themselves with him despite their previous opposition and to appropriate him for their own purposes later on.  This is just one part of the Reagan myth, which has been built up and expanded over the last two decades as Americans on the right have become disgusted with Reagan’s heirs: they glorify Reagan in the past for much the same reason many glorify Palin today, which is their disgust with the last twenty years of Republican leadership.  They can find something admirable only in the past or in very new figures.  This is why I think there has been such powerful resistance to questioning the myth of Palin the champion of reform, because looking too closely at her record (or lack of a record) exposes the mythologizing for what it is.

Conor Friedersdorf notes the unseemly exploitation of terrorism for political purposes:

But the McCain campaign has exploited the fact that Bill Ayers was a terrorist to imply that their opponent is sympathetic to our enemies in the War on Terror, a campaign tactic so irresponsible that even GOP partisans should forcefully denounce it, and for a reason that hasn’t anything to do with fairness.
 

This is hardly the first time that we have seen critics of the “war on terror” and other government policies tarred as little more than traitors and enemies.  In his despicable article denouncing several paleoconservatives and other antiwar figures, Frum memorably said:

Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business.

This surrender-to-the-enemy meme has been entirely false, which doesn’t stop these people from repeating it time after time.  The people who make these charges seem to believe them, however, and they justify themselves by defining whatever policies they don’t support as appeasement or the equivalent of surrender.  By definition, disagreeing with them becomes proof of wanting to surrender, no matter how irresponsible and genuinely damaging to the national interest the policies they advocate may be.  Having framed their opponents as no better than abettors of the enemy, they are then bewildered when someone says that they have questioned anyone’s patriotism. 

When Romney suspended his campaign in February, he said that he was doing it to avoid facilitating surrender to terrorism, which, it almost went without saying, he believed would be the result of a Democratic victory.  This has been a consistent theme of pro-war arguments for the last two years once large numbers of people began seriously considering withdrawal from Iraq as a viable alternative.  During this long campaign, Obama’s critics have repeatedly pushed the idea that he is somehow sympathetic to anti-Israel terrorists, and some on the right have dwelled on the so-called Hamas “endorsement” as if it meant something.  In the earlier version of the association game, Obama’s critics obsessed about peripheral advisors’ views on Israel.  Before we heard about Obama as the “pal of terrorists,” we were lectured frequently about how significant and terrible it was that Robert Malley had a small, informal role in the campaign, which simply had to mean that Obama favored talking to Hamas despite his stated opposition to this very thing.      

So talk of Obama “palling around with terrorists” is not exactly a new attack, nor is it a function of a flailing, losing campaign.Unfortunately, this is all rather commonplace.  Palin has misrepresented Obama’s views about tactics in the Afghan war in an effort to portray Obama as reflexively anti-military and, by extension, more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own soldiers.  She has shown that she regards the problem of civilian casualties from allied airstrikes in Afghanistan to be unimportant, even though these airstrikes have gradually been undermining local support for the NATO mission and have prompted public apologies from no less than the Secretary of Defense.  Just as they have demagogued the fear of terrorism to push for surveillance powers and invasions, many Republicans seem to treat our ongoing wars as little more than campaign props and they seem to have no qualms about demagoguing reasonable criticisms of current tactics as a way to impute disloyalty or lack of patriotism to their opponents.  

Conor is right that these attacks breed cynicism and make the public less likely to heed warnings about genuine threats, but he might also stress that this sheer lack of seriousness from those who, like McCain, talk about the “transcendent challenge” of Islamic extremism tells us something about how much they have exaggerated the nature of the threat as part of exploiting fear of it to acquire power.  It is a measure of how little the alarmists believe their own dire claims about the scope of the threat from jihadism that they are so willing to play political games with invocations of terrorism.  If Conor is expecting Republican partisans to denounce such tactics, which seem to be SOP for so many, he may be waiting for quite a while.

My paleoconservative friends, obsessed with battling neoconservatives over Iraq, apparently failed to notice that a substantial share of Iraq hawks parted ways with the Bush administration on immigration. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin — this just begins the list of those broke ranks over the Bush/McCain open-borders policy.

With Bush gone, McCain defeated, and President Obama inheriting the Commander-in-Chief role, foreign-policy disagreements among conservatives will fade in significance after this election. In seeking a path back to a Republican majority, domestic issues will dominate the debate, and immigration will almost certainly be one of the most important [bold mine-DL]. (For instance, Obama and his allies are likely to insist on a national health-care policy covering illegals.) Open-borders Republicans like Brooks will therefore be increasingly isolated from the GOP mainstream during the Obama administration. ~Robert Stacy McCain

McCain is responding to Dan McCarthy’s post on the main blog, and has a long reflection on the future of the GOP and conservatism that is worth reading.  He is, however, quite wrong when he says that foreign policy differences will fade in significance in the coming years.  To the extent that Obama is relatively hawkish on most things except Iraq, which Republican hawks deny for electoral reasons now but will rediscover once he is in power, we will see exactly the same splits between the hawks who side with the Obama administration’s interventions in (name a few countries where we have no business being) and the conservatives who do not believe these interventions to be in the national interest.  It will be very much like what we saw in the 1990s.  Mainstream, “responsible” and “realist” conservatives and Republicans will support Obama’s actions, and a significant but largely uninfluential minority on the right will protest against them.  All of the bogus arguments war supporters have trotted out for years to justify the Iraq debacle will be turned around on them, and most of them will end up backing the next intervention to halt a “genocide,” “liberate” another country or stop weapons proliferation.  They will delight in the frustration of the antiwar left and praise the bipartisan consensus in favor of American hegemony.      

The ’90s offer a good model for what is going to happen among conservatives during the next few years, as that was the only post-Cold War period under a Democratic President so far, and so we can already tell what the main lines of opposition to Obama will be: 1) he is not hawkish enough; 2) his interventions are too often related to conflicts that have no direct connection to U.S. interests; 3) he is associated with dubious characters and abuses his power.  After years of describing the Iranian regime as a dire threat that must be stopped, hawks on the right are not going to discover prudence and the limits of American power when President Obama announces that military action has become the only remaining option.  On the other hand, if Obama does not pursue such a course of action you can be sure that these same hawks will likewise be ready to frame the Obama administration as being far too weak and too unwilling to project power.  Non-interventionists and more serious realists would oppose a strike on Iran and would cheer an Obama administration that avoided war.  After declaring Russia to be a resurgent menace, Republican hawks are not going to become skeptics of NATO expansion and provocative anti-Russian moves.  Should Obama be persuaded that bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be folly, expect these hawks to exploit this to show that Obama is willing to “sacrifice” fledgling democracies to Moscow.  Again, non-interventionists and serious realists would be staunchly opposed to expansion and would cheer administration opposition to it.  These divisions will persist and will likely harden, because these differences are not incidental or based solely on views about the invasion of Iraq, but go to the heart of what each camp believes the U.S. government should be doing overseas. 

Certain things will be different from the ’90s, as they would have to be.  First, Obama is genuinely more liberal than Clinton ever was, but he will be presiding over an economic downturn during at least the first two years of his administration instead of the beginning of a recovery, and this could undermine support for an ambitious domestic agenda very easily.  Fiscal and economic realities will constrain his priorities in ways that they did not limit Clinton, but because of these realities his domestic agenda may end up being fairly modest.  To the extent that the misleading claim that the current predicament has demonstrated the flaws of deregulation becomes the conventional wisdom, we are likely to see a large number of conservatives go along with this.  As unpopular as the bailout was, expect to see a split between rank-and-file constituents and conservative elites over this and any additional measures taken by the government in response to the financial crisis.  The base will rail against the expansion of government and betrayal of principle, and the elites will counsel pragmatism.  As is almost always the case, the elites will ultimately prevail and the base will sullenly go along as they always do in the end. 

Immigration policy probably will be one area where most conservatives will agree to some extent, but it may not matter.  On account of the significant reliance on Blue Dogs in the House, it may not be possible for Democratic leaders to push for an immigration bill with any greater success in the future than they did in the past.  Unlike with the bailout, the Speaker will probably not be able to blackmail and bludgeon the minority leadership into capitulating, and Pelosi will have serious problems with defections from conservative Democrats and other freshmen members in competitive districts.  During difficult economic times, it will be especially hard to sell the public on anything remotely resembling an amnesty.  We should also expect divisions among conservatives between supporters of guest-worker programs and thoroughgoing restrictionists.  There will still be a significant number of conservative pundits who will insist that the GOP cannot afford to alienate anyone, and so they will argue against taking up anything resembling a restrictionist position. 

There will be the ritual flagellation from mainstream conservatives, who will be decrying the alleged role of xenophobia and nativism in the ’08 election.  Never mind that there won’t be much evidence for this.  Like the myth that Prop. 187 alienated Hispanics from the GOP in California, this will be widely accepted and propagated as the “smart” interpretation of what ails the GOP.  Instead of concluding that the GOP needs to start actually serving the interests of its constituents, the “smart” conservatives will discover that the party has become too anti-urban and insist that it needs to reach out beyond its suburban and rural core, and they will use Palin as proof of the electoral weakness that comes from relying solely on the base.  For good measure, the knives will be out for social conservatives, just as many tried to make them the scapegoats for the ’06 defeat.

As the election campaign has already shown, the most powerful, widespread opposition to Obama from the right centers around his identity, his associations and what these are supposed to tell us about him.  We can expect constant obsession with Obama’s biography and associations to preoccupy most mainstream conservatives for the next four years, so that the names Raila Odinga and Tony Rezko will become for another rising generation of conservatives what Paula Jones and Mochtar Riady were to mine, which is to say they will become the distractions that will consume most of Obama’s critics and keep them from focusing on more serious problems with his administration (whatever those might turn out to be).