Robert Stacy McCain has missed something important here:

Brooks, then, has accomplished the neat trick of denouncing Republicans for abandoning a conservative intellectual tradition to which Brooks himself has never belonged, dragooning Kirk and Weaver from the grave as posthumous allies of the apostle of “national greatness.”

As I have made clear, there are a lot of problems with Brooks’ last column, but this isn’t really one of them.  Brooks’ point in invoking Weaver and Kirk was simply that the conservative movement was in the first place a movement of scholars and intellectuals, and that conservatives seem today to be rather too willing to cheer on candidates who are not particularly interested in ideas or specialized knowledge.  For all the reasons McCain outlines, Brooks could not credibly connect his ideas to Weaver and Kirk, but I don’t think he is trying to do this, nor was he trying to adopt them as forerunners of “national greatness” conservatism.  Brooks and everyone else know that there is no common ground there.  He is trying to make an argument that the conservatives who are praising Palin, for example, because she has good instincts but lacks understanding of policy matters and seems to have no particular appreciation for ideas are ignoring an important part of their own tradition.  To put in Kirkian, or more accurately Newmanian, terms, conservatives now seem to have excessive admiration for the illative sense (i.e., intuition) at the expense of imagination, intellect and knowledge.  Had Brooks invoked Strauss and Voegelin, there would still be a legitimate point here, which McCain’s characteristic reverse classism helps to make all the more powerful. 

It is unfortunately rather typical that McCain would harp on the different educational backgrounds of Brooks, Weaver and Kirk, which does nothing so much as make Brooks’ point for him that conservatives have been “telling members of that [educated] class to go away.”  To listen to McCain, unless you come from a small or Southern town and go to state university there could be something wrong with you.  It’s true that Brooks went to U of C, which did not use to be a mark of shame on the right.  I grew up in Albuquerque and now go to the University of Chicago, and I agree with Brooks on almost nothing–what does that tell you?  McCain consistently confuses his disagreement with the policy views of Brooks or, say, Ross Douthat, with his contempt for people who went to Ivy League schools to the point where he thinks there are the same thing. 

Now that we are on the verge of an Obama victory, it has become a bit more common to deride the University and claim that Hyde Park is a fanatical left-wing preserve.  To the extent that selective schools are largely populated by left-leaning students, and to the extent that the “educated class” is now predominantly left-leaning, this reflects a consistent failure of conservatives to compete for these minds and it is a product of the unfortunately very common preference to deride and dismiss the few right-leaning people come out of these institutions as prima facie incorrigible sell-outs.  It does take a certain talent to alienate educated middle-class professionals from the party ostensibly dedicated to representing middle-class constituencies, but some combination of Republican incompetence in government and an apparent hostlity to the education these people have received have done quite a lot to bring this about. 

Don’t take Brooks’ word or my word for it–just look at the election results from increasingly Democratic-leaning suburban districts filled with professionals who have no confidence in a party that celebrates hostility to expertise.

The Fed, the Treasury and the SEC appear to be in a state of panic. A crisis mentality led the custodians of the U.S. capital markets publicly to jettison their lifelong commitments to the capital markets in favor of a series of short-term regulatory quick fixes. Even more troubling, for the past several months the doyens of U.S. fiscal and monetary policy have ignored the most fundamental principle of central banking, which is that the primary responsibility of central bankers is to promote stability and to maintain confidence in the capital markets. Our central bankers appear to have suddenly lost confidence both in their own abilities and in the standard tools of fiscal and monetary policy. ~Jonathan Macey

I agree entirely, and I have been saying much the same thing for the last three weeks:

The role the government and bailout supporters have played in exacerbating the real problems in credit markets and sapping market confidence with apocalyptic warnings will, I suspect, go down as one of the most dangerous episodes of hysterical overreaction in recent history.

A bit earlier, I had said:

I wonder why confidence might wane when all of the people who claim to know the most about what’s going on are declaring that the end is nigh.  Bailout supporters are doing their best to instill unreasoning fear in the minds of the public and their representatives to stampede them in the direction of taking action, but I would bet that this political panic is contributing directly to the general loss of confidence.  As the loss of confidence spreads because of alarmism, I can imagine that the political panic could lead to a worse financial panic than might otherwise be the case.

It is difficult to understand the mad sell-off of the last week except as a general panic stoked by those in positions of authority.  Many will point to the credit markets, but even here the tightening of credit has been at least partly a response to government promises of intervention.  Macey does not limit his criticisms to the actions of the last few months, but includes the mistakes of the Fed, Treasury and SEC dating back to the start of the year and earlier.  It is worth reading Macey’s entire article to understand how rushing on several occasions to do something in very ad hoc, arbitrary ways, which was supposed to be imperative for restoring confidence, has been undermining confidence by sending clear signals that the authorities believe the markets to be broken. 

Macey concludes:

Most of all, if the markets are to get back on track our regulators must put an immediate stop to their current practice of publicly demonizing the markets and work to restore confidence in the system.        

In what may be another signal that the troubled economy is forcing John McCain’s campaign to play electoral map defense, Sarah Palin has scheduled a bus tour for Sunday through West Virginia [bold mine-DL], a state that’s been leaning red throughout this presidential race. ~CNN Political Ticker

Obviously, if the campaign is trying to hold West Virginia, which should be far out of reach for Obama, the GOP ticket’s position is even worse than it appears.  In other Palin-related news that seems likely to spell doom for the McCain campaign, the investigation into her alleged abuse of power determined that she had, in fact, abused her power as governor.  The full report (.PDF) is here.  In addition, a FoxNews poll confirms that Palin has become a significant liability: 40% of independents are less likely to vote for McCain because of her versus 28% who were more likely.     

P.S.  As an aside, the public still opposes the bailout 53-34.

It’s a not bad read, though his arguments seem to boil down to hating Sarah Palin, not believing John McCain will balance the federal budget, and enjoying Obama’s books. ~Jim Antle

That’s not entirely fair to Buckley, who simply expressed profound embarrassment and perplexity concerning Palin, but it makes for a pretty good short description of the Obamacon argument: the Republicans are ridiculous, and at least Obama is intelligent, so that’s something.  Indeed, that might be the Obamacon bumper sticker slogan: “I’m voting for the intelligent one for a change.”  There is basically no positive case for Obama, because I don’t think a conservative can actually make one, except to say that he might do slightly less damage than another Republican. 

Buckley’s remarks on McCain are interesting in what they tell us about the pervasive nature of the McCain myth: McCain used to be authentic, you see, but now he is not (not true–he has always been the same person!); he showed tremendous bravery in backing the “surge” (not true–it was enormously popular among GOP regulars and primary voters!); McCain has changed (see the first point).  This is the sort of whinging justification Obama supporters on the right often have to make to save face, which further reinforces the old McCain myth: if only McCain had remained true to himself, I would have supported him, but now he has sacrificed his integrity!  What few seem willing to accept is that McCain has always been like this, and his past admirers have blinded themselves to his flaws because they found him useful or were swayed by his biography, and until very recently most have had no problem with McCain’s flaws.  Indeed, they seem incapable of admitting that McCain has any flaws of his own, but are insistent that whatever is wrong with him is the function of the pressures of the campaign. 

They have been wrong about him for a very long time and don’t want to admit that, so they make the less insulting choice of endorsing his opponent.  It is much more generous to McCain to pretend that the presidential campaign has somehow forced him to become someone he isn’t.  It is a compliment to say that one is endorsing Obama only because McCain has betrayed his true self.  None of this is true, and it reflects a remarkable deference to McCain even at this late stage of the game that so many people are saying it.  Of course, this myth also helps to excuse their support for McCain for so many years.

But none of that changes the fact that there is something typically psychologistic and so ultimately very superficial about Brooks’s analysis: a more sophisticated and urbane Republican Party would certainly do better among the “educated class”, as would one that approached matters with a great deal more intellectual seriousness. ~John Schwenkler

Brooks’ analysis is an applied form of the Dougherty Doctrine: the GOP would be better off if it were more like me; it’s failing because it’s like you.  Brooks’ reference to the “urbane” candidates in the primaries (i.e., Giuliani, Romney and McCain) was instructive for its lack of realism and its terrible judgement.  The Terrible Trio, as I once dubbed this awful threesome, represented everything that was wrong with the modern Republican Party: nasty authoritarianism, shilling for corporate interests and endless jingoism.  Each one combined some measure of these things: Romney called for “doubling” Gitmo–whatever that meant–and Giuliani embraced any and every new conflict on the horizon, while McCain was glad to accept new government surveillance powers and pro-corporate trade and economic policies.   Think of everything that went wrong with the Bush administration, and then consider these three candidates–it becomes clear that any one of them promised to perpetuate at least some part of the abuses of the Bush Era: Giuliani was going to spy on you or lock you up without charges; Romney was going to shortchange and defraud you; McCain was likely to start another war.  Leave aside for the moment their problems with social conservatives and their personal flaws–these were, are, horrible representatives of the right.  That at least two of the three had a plausible path to the nomination makes a mockery of complaints that “urbane” candidates cannot flourish in the modern GOP.  One might fairly ask why any party would want to be “urbane” if it includes accepting the policy priorities of such people, but it is undeniable that the party tolerates, promotes and rewards them at the highest levels.  For the most part, conservatives go along with this, sometimes enthusiastically and sometimes not. 

When presented with a candidate who actually represented the core constituencies of the party in terms of geographic origin, socioeconomic background and level of education (i.e., Huckabee), there was an unparalleled collective freakout among conservative activists and elites.  So it is not entirely credible when I see complaints from “urbane” conservatives that they are somehow underrepresented or neglected in modern Republican politics–were it not for their entirely outsized, overbearing influence, Giuliani and Romney would have been dismissed almost as soon as they announced their candidacies.  It is worth bearing in mind how much worse a Giuliani or Romney would have done had he been the nominee; it is worth considering that someone like Huckabee might have actually done much, much better than McCain is doing, and not only because he is a more naturally talented politician.  It may have been inevitable that the GOP was doomed to lose this election, and lose it badly, and there is some justice in that, but it is not at all obvious that the GOP is going to fail because it was insufficiently “urbane.”         

As John reminds us, and as I suggested earlier this week, the GOP has come to its current straits to a large extent because it heeded Brooks’ advice–or the advice of those who shared Brooks’ views–on what its priorities and policies should be.  The deeper problem that the GOP and conservatives alike have is that even if the Bush administration had been a paragon of excellence and competence (ha!), educated professionals and working-class Americans would have been drifting away from them in any case.  Cultural and demographic changes have also been working to undermine Republican political strength, and the response to these trends have been schizophrenic at best because there is basic disagreement inside the coalition about the identity of the party and the direction of conservatism.  Meanwhile, having defined many academic and professional fields as bastions of liberalism, conservatives have ceded an entire generation almost uncontested.  Conservatives are now paying the price for more or less writing off an entire generation by eschewing the work of education and building up the culture they want in favor of political activism. 

Obviously, a badly managed war and a general culture of cronyism and incompetence have persuaded managers and professionals that the supposed party of grown-ups has lost its way, but even without these things members of the New Class were never going to feel immediately at home in a party that relied heavily on social conservative votes and religious rhetoric.  When confronted with secular conservative complaints about the undue influence of religious conservatives, I have often been inclined to ridicule or belittle their concerns, because I am a religious conservative who sees no such influence and would be glad to see much more genuine religious conservatism guiding the right, but as I step back I begin to understand that their complaints were veiled pleas for acceptance.  As I have watched Palinites enthuse about their Joan of Arc, it has occurred to me that they want nothing more than validation for their way of life; criticism of Palin wounds them because they think it is a judgement on how they live.  Likewise, secular conservatives wish to be accepted and validated by their religious confreres.  Even Andrew’s often overwrought and ultimately misguided complaints about so-called “Christianism” are at bottom arguments in favor of the proposition that is is possible to be conservative but critical of religion in politics.  These complaints then morph and mutate into absolute affirmations (in Palin’s case) or negations (in the secular conservatives’ case) that try to force people to make false choices: either you uncritically endorse everything about Palin, or you hate small-town, religious people; either you reject religious conservatism in politics, or you endorse the reign of “fundamentalist” loonies.  Palinites feed off of secular conservatives’ disdain as proof that their stark opposition between true believers and godless elites is correct, and the secular conservatives find the Palinite mania to be proof that their fear of the role of religion in politics was entirely justified. 

We may be faced with another false choice between embracing conservatives’ cultural populism and having respect for ideas, and it is vital that we find some way of holding the two in tension.

Stunned by this report that Shadegg could lose his AZ-03 seat, I was momentarily tempted to agree with Ross when he wrote:

And while it would be nice, as Daniel suggests, to decouple the fortunes of the House and Senate GOP from the fortunes of the McCain campaign, I don’t think that’s going to happen: This is a national election, and I suspect that House and Senate candidates will only rise in the polls if the national ticket is rising in the polls.

On the face of it, a Shadegg loss in deepest “red” Arizona would suggest a kind of annihilation of the Republican Party that no one has been imagining, and it would seem to confirm Ross’ observation that Republicans will all sink or swim together, but I have a slightly off-the-wall interpretation that might make the “decoupling” position look more credible.  Shadegg’s difficulties are almost certainly related to his flip on the bailout, which he voted against the first time and then backed on the second vote.  We may end up seeing a number of otherwise safe-seat Republican members who are going to face an unusually difficult race for re-election because they went along with the leadership in backing the bailout either the first or the second time.  If voters are going to punish them for the bailout, there is not much that can be done for them now.  Nonetheless, that suggests that the House GOP’s best chance to escape being pulled down by McCain’s defeat is to run away from him, their own leadership and everything remotely connected to the national party.  Bizarrely, the NRCC has been trying to nationalize races all year long by talking about Obama and Pelosi when the path to surviving the profound anti-GOP mood in the country is to make every contested race as localized as possible.  Tying the fortunes of the Congressional GOP and McCain together does just the opposite. 

Anti-bailout Republicans are best positioned to pull this off, as they already demonstrated their opposition to the administration, McCain and Boehner, but it may still be possible for many House members to put distance between themselves and the increasingly ridiculous McCain campaign.  The Senate candidates are in a more difficult position if they are about to be swamped by another Democratic wave.  In any case, I think we are seeing the possibility of a slight change in the dynamic that has prevailed all year: instead of McCain running better than the Congressional Republicans because of his alleged “maverick” status, they may have a chance of running ahead of McCain by running from him and his irrelevant campaign focused on Ayers and the like.  They could say, “Unlike that clueless McCain, we’re here to work for you and address your economic concerns.”  Better yet, they will just pretend that McCain doesn’t exist.  So my original argument remains the same: the emphasis ought to be on limiting Democratic gains rather than wasting time backing a McCain campaign that is already going down to defeat.  The alternative, it seems to me, is to exacerbate what were already going to be bad House and Senate losses and watch McCain lose by almost two hundred electoral votes.

Those who have seen excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic remarks will be familiar with the main outlines of his column today.  First, Brooks’ column and his “fatal cancer” remarks from earlier in the month have to be understood in terms of his long-standing crusade against populism, which he despises as both a style and as a matter of policy.  These are the “nihilists” he denounced earlier this month for opposing an absolutely indefensible bailout (which now appears all the more indefensible for its inadequacy and its outrageous nature).  It should go without saying that after the last few years of technocrats and experts getting so many things so magnificently wrong that this is an unusually poor time to declare the return of a technocratic establishment and the bankruptcy of populism, but this gets at the main problem of populism that is defined as little more than a style or a reflex rather than a more or less coherent set of policies.  The basic truth behind the populist skepticism of experts, or at least self-declared, well-placed experts, is that there is no accountability for most of them, which consequently results in the sort of long-term poor performance that a lack of accountability will create.  To the degree that failed or compromised oversight was responsible for much of this calamity–in Congress, at the SEC and elsewhere in government–the basic populist demand for oversight and accountability seems more important than ever.  The glorification of Palin’s lack of policy knowledge in some quarters should not excuse the failures of all those people in positions of authority and power who should have understood the situation and did not.  Here’s the thing–it helps the establishment remain unaccountable if it can label as populist any politician that uses lifestyle and cultural cues as a substitute for policy arguments.  As I hope to explain, Palin’s lack of policy knowledge is clear evidence that she is not just a bad populist, but rather not a populist in any meaningful sense at all.       

Even in his digs against Mr. Bush’s visceral decisionmaking, his prizing of instincts over intellect, Brooks feels compelled to attack such “populist excesses” as “the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism.”  The latter would come as news to those of us who are usually branded as “isolationist,” since it has never been clear when this “excess” was threatening to dominate anything.  Certainly no one looking back on the Republican Party of the last eight or ten years could have perceived an excess of isolationism.  Indeed, I think most people would be hard-pressed today to understand why a rather more “isolationist,” or rather America First, foreign policy would be either dangerous or excessive.  Certainly a foreign policy that recognizes the limits of American power and does not try to overreach with ludicrous security pledges and declarations of Sakartvelian solidarity seems much more appropriate to our present predicament.  

It is also remarkable that Brooks complains in the same column that the GOP does nothing for working-class Americans and nonetheless attacks the “populist excess” of opposition to mass immigration, when the failure of immigration enforcement and border security and the travesty of immigration “reform” championed by the Bush administration and columnists such as Brooks are directly antithetical to the interests of working-class Americans.  The alienation of the GOP leadership from its constituents over immigration demonstrates how empty and meaningless Mr. Bush’s quasi-populist poses have always been.  Palin does represent a continuation down the path charted by Mr. Bush, which is the substitution of symbolic lifestyle politics for policies that will serve the constituencies that support the party.  In our debased political discourse, what Palin does on the stump is defined as populism.  Meanwhile, she serves as the running mate for an establishment fixture who has opposed every so-called “populist excess” that would have served his constituents and the national interest.  Everyone criticizes or praises Palin’s “populism” in terms that stress the absolute absence of policy substance, but this is rather like saying that you can have religion without worship or science without knowledge. 

Populism without policy substance is almost entirely worthless; it is not really populism.  To reduce populism to a style or a reflex, one in which intellect and knowledge are derided, is the most vicious anti-populist trick, because it associates advocating policies that benefit the commonwealth and the broad mass of the people with ignorance and visceral reactions.  It leaves the people exposed to whatever abusive policies members of the political class see fit to impose.  It allows progressive globalists of both parties to flatter themselves that the policies they prefer, those that happen to serve a few entrenched interests at the expense of the many, are also the best informed and held by the best educated.  The derision heaped on populism, which Palin makes so easy when she is identified wrongly as a populist, is another way of evading accountability for the misguided policies favored by all those who seem to regard representative government itself as a kind of populist excess.  Naturally, these are also the same people who seem to be most serious about duplicating the “successes” of our managerial democracy around the world.

Rod also has a long post on the question of class warfare and anti-intellectualism on the right that is worth reading.

Helen Rittelmeyer has offered an answer to thecriticisms of her earlier argument with an interesting post.  The most important part of the post seemed to be this:

The moral here is that some people think that keeping any and all disagreement on the table deepens friendship; I think that’s true for most kinds of disagreement (my friends are the ones I trust to slap me in the face when I need it, for instance), but in cases like my friend’s hypothetical, it cheapens it. Friendship, like loyalty, entails responsibilities, and you need to know what you’re getting into when you start calling yourself a friend. Or a conservative. 

While I might join with James in saying that political alliances are no more like friendships than they are like familial relations, I think that kind of reply would not do justice to Ms. Rittelmeyer’s view.  Let us take the comparison to friendship as the appropriate one for the sake of argument, and consider what that might mean.  The emphasis on loyalty is also very important, but if anything I think Ms. Rittelmeyer does not emphasize the importance of loyalty nearly enough.  That is, she seems to apply it only to one side, as if the voters were vassals who owed service to their lieges but expected–and received–nothing in return.  Loyalty is supposed to be reciprocal, which I think includes an important distinction from the merely contractual arrangement that she has imagined that Conor, Andrew and I endorse.  As I said about party loyalty in a different context:

Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation.  It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions. 

Thinking of this relationship in terms of friendship, wouldn’t we agree that a friend who deceives you, abuses your trust, betrays you, cheats you or in some other way defrauds you for his own advantage is not much of a friend?  I don’t know whether the others would put it this way, but I would.  There is room in a friendship for disagreements and even blunders–there would have to be–but there are limits that friends do not cross.  Forgiveness is possible in friendship, but even among friends it is not infinite.  If I took party leaders as my friends, that would be a mistake, but worse still would be the error of continuing to reward them with my friendship after they had already shown that their purpose in cultivating the relationship was essentially exploitative and self-interested. 

That said, suppose that I continued to offer these politicians my loyalty by supporting them every step of the way no matter what.  If they were in error, would it not be more important to challenge them over their errors in an attempt to help them correct their mistakes?  If you judge that someone to whom you owe loyalty has made a grave error (as Conor has determined concerning the Palin selection), do you not then owe it to him to say so with whatever means you have available to you?  There does seem to be an assumption here that the critic and the dissenter are the ones acting disloyally by speaking out, when there is a powerful case that those who remain silent and enable self-destructive behavior are the ones not fulfilling their obligations.  Even as they are not living up to their responsibilities, the enablers are assuming responsibility for the calamities that befall the people they neglected to warn.

Ross:

Out-of-power parties often benefit dramatically from bad times in America: The GOP did in the late 1970s, and the Democrats have over the last four years. But the pattern of American history suggests that bad times are the exception rather than rule – and unless James Howard Kunstler’s prophecies come true, a party that goes deep into the wilderness and waits for a crisis to bring it back to power stands a good chance of waiting for a long time.  (And yes, that’s a case for disaffected conservatives of all stripes – those who still have a stake in the GOP, that is; not the Larisonians of the world – swallowing hard and voting for McCain.)

After the last few electoral cycles, and in the face of depleted American power and a remarkable financial shock that remind us how transitory worldly glory is, I turn more and more to the basic lesson of Geoffrey Parker’s Success Is Never Final.  Parker is an historian of seventeenth-century Europe, and he has written on the history of the Thirty Years’ War and the Spanish Monarchy’s futile decades-long efforts to crush the Dutch.  The cover of Success Is Never Final is a copy of Velazquez’s striking portrayal of the Dutch surrender at Breda in 1625, which represented something of the zenith of Spanish power in the Low Countries after decades of desultory warring against the United Provinces.  The point of using Breda as the symbol of Spanish success is that Breda fell to the Dutch again twelve years later: Breda is emblematic of a more general failure of Spanish arms in the middle of the century and the gradual decline of the Spanish Monarchy as a continental power.  The lesson of the book, as the title suggests, is that victories are ephemeral and the seeds of later defeat are being sown in the midst of what everyone regards as progress and success.   

In one sense, this is common sense and perfectly obvious, but this basic lesson seems to get away from people, especially in election years.  As November approaches, memories seem to get very short.  Where just a few years before there was loose talk of thirty-year dominance of the Presidency on the model of the early 20th century GOP, there is now the fear of a long sojourn out of power.  To avoid this, disaffected conservatives are supposed to “come home,” but in November just as in 2006 it will not matter whether McCain succeeds in retaining the GOP core.  Every tactic McCain has employed has been part of a strategy to retain and mobilize that core, and it will not succeed, because this reflects a complete lack of comprehension about why the GOP is in its current predicament.  Republicans and conservatives generally rallied to the flag with almost the same reflexive loyalty in 2006 as they had done in previous elections, and the GOP was still routed because previously GOP-leaning independents fled the party in droves and the left was better mobilized and organized.  The Palin selection and the enthusiastic reaction to it have been disheartening because they suggest that conservatives will continue to bind themselves closely to the GOP and its obsession with short-term objectives. 

There may be a few more defections from the GOP on the right this year, but not that many.  What seems certain is that, except for a shrinking, irreducible core of right-leaning independents, everyone who is not a registered Republican will be backing any candidate that is not McCain.  What conservatives who want to remain politically engaged with the party that has failed them time after time (the non-Larisonians, if you like) need to do is make whatever efforts they can to limit losses in Congressional elections this year.  Strategists need to assume a McCain defeat, which seems increasingly likely, and get into a position that will make the 2010 midterms somewhat competitive.  Objective economic conditions seem likely to worsen in the coming year, and there is every reason to think that unified Democratic government will overreach as unified governments tend to do.  If McCain were somehow to prevail on 4 November, the calamity that would befall the Congressional GOP in 2010 would great and would help to erase all political gains of the previous sixteen years.  Those conservatives who do not want to be consigned to the wilderness for the next decade or two need to think about the long-term consequences of a McCain victory, which would be disastrous for conservatives both in policy and political terms in the next several electoral cycles.  If his insane mortgage-bailout-in-every-pot plan doesn’t persuade people of that, perhaps the prospect of being the minority party for the next twenty years will.

Daniel Nichanian describes the candidates’ positions on Armenian genocide recognition and relations with Armenia, which are remarkable for how genuinely different they are.  McCain has been a consistent foe of recognition and has tended, like the Bush administration, to tilt towards Azerbaijan.  In contrast, Obama has been a supporter of recognition and better relations with Yerevan.  To some extent this is a function of the much weaker sympathies on the right for the Armenian Diaspora and their concerns, and this is then complicated by traditional pro-Turkish and anti-Russian attitudes, both of which McCain has in abundance.  The Turkish-Israeli alliance provides an additional source of political pressure on politicians in Washington.  Less remarked on during the war in Georgia was the fact that Armenia, partly by inclination and party out of necessity, is Russia’s closest ally in the Caucasus and also heavily dependent on Russia for its trade and energy supplies.  “Pro-Israel” supporters of the Turkish alliance and those with obsessive hostility for Russia are not likely to be good friends of Armenia, and so it has been ever since Armenian independence.  For all of the exaggerated talk about how influential Armenian-American lobbying groups are supposed to be, they are regularly outmatched by even more powerful and entrenched interests. 

The reason that the recognition resolution was not successful last year will be the same reason why Obama will unfortunately end up capitulating to Ankara’s threats.  Until all or nearly all American forces are out of Iraq, Ankara will be able to continue using its bases and supply routes as leverage to force the next administration to kill the resolution yet again, and once again many supporters of recognition will change their positions rather than be portrayed as having cast a vote that allegedly jeopardizes a military mission.  Whether or not Obama genuinely believes recognition is appropriate and necessary, I’m sorry to say that I don’t see how it is politically possible for him to be able to maintain some reduced force in Iraq and also dare the Turks to cut off the northern supply routes. 

Because he will be coming into office with the (undeserved) reputation of being too dovish, and because of his truly short time in office at the federal level, it would be incredible and entirely out of character for a new President Obama to risk starting off his administration with a move that will alienate Turkey.  I find the idea of being blackmailed by an “ally” in such a fashion to be disgusting, as I said earlier this year on this blog and in my column, and I would support Obama if he pressed ahead with genocide recognition, but for all the reasons I laid out earlier this week about how Obama operates I think we all know that this is not going to happen.  It would be genuinely impressive if he proved me wrong on this point.