For the record, I wouldn’t go as far as David Brooks did in calling Sarah Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”  Besides being unfair to her, that seems a bit rich from someone who cheered on almost every single misguided and terrible policy of the Bush administration, which has been the metastasizing cancer in the Republican body for years.   However, I do not understand the idea that there has been no conservative critique of her record.  I have said on more than one occasion that I assumed conservatives did not approve of windfall profits taxes, net increases in spending or leaving behind enormous amounts of debt.  If that has changed for the sake of this one campaign and candidate, I did not get the memo from the Central Committee that so many others seem to have received. 

Palin supported tax increases on oil companies, which ultimately impose costs on consumers, so that she can give away more money in Alaska and buy her extraordinarily high levels of support.  While I do not consider earmarks to be the grave evil that the McCain/Palin ticket claim them to be, Alaska under Palin remains the leading recipient of per capita federal earmark funding.  She embraced the bridge boondoggle until it became politically radioactive, and now she pretends that she was its mortal foe.  She left Wasilla under a mountain of debt, and also bungled the management of purchasing the land where the athletic facility was to be built so badly that it has imposed additional costs on Wasilla.  Spending has skyrocketed under her administration.  Now for good measure she has demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of many major national and international issues, which drives home how unprepared she is, but would anyone on the right honestly look at her record as an executive before this and say, “Yes, this is the sort of thing I want to see at the federal level”?  If conservatives don’t care about this, I suppose that’s their business, but can we stop pretending that this critique is based purely on whether or not she has done well in a couple of interviews?  Whether judged “superficially” or on substance, there is not much there that conservatives can find that is very encouraging. 

Her critics have been studying the details of her record for over a month.  Have her supporters made anything like the same kind of effort, or are they, like Obama fans, simply caught up in the enthusiasm?

I did not watch the debate live, and I’m glad that I didn’t bother liveblogging it.  It wouldn’t have been hard to rearrange the text from my post on the first debate and pretend that I had covered the second one, so mind-numbingly similar were they.  Everyone seems to agree that Obama prevailed, or at best McCain did not and so changed nothing about the overall direction of the race.  Some of McCain’s supporters lamented that their candidate did not hit Obama on his associations, while more of his critics noticed that McCain was remarkably gutless to “raise questions” about Obama’s character and his associations on the trail over the weekend and then avoid talking about them on national television in front of Obama.  Instead of demonstrating some kind of admirable restraint, refusing to talk about these associations at the debate just drives home how little stock McCain actually puts in their importance.  As pure political calculation, this was probably right (Obama is viewed favorably, and persuadable voters don’t like personal attacks on the candidates they like), which is important in what it says about the McCain campaign’s idiotic preoccupation with obviously ineffective tactics.  I’ll come back to that in a moment. 

First a few words about the bizarre debate over what happened to the “real” McCain, which becomes more relevant as McCain has started asking, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”  Even among McCain critics, there are some who still insist on coming up with excuses for the former media darling, and they echo the excuses journalists have made for McCain for years: sure, he’s lying about this or that, but he’s clearly uncomfortable doing it, which proves that he’s actually a good guy.  More recently, McCain has seemed angrier and grumpier than usual, prompting the same excuses: he doesn’t enjoy doing this kind of campaigning, and it shows, which somehow makes it better.  This has been the strange ethical standard applied to McCain for as long as I can remember.  According to this odd view, if someone is not very proficient at lying and smearing his opponents and gives the impression that even he knows what he’s saying is nonsense, that somehow proves that he is honest and decent at heart.  The correct view is exactly the opposite–if McCain knows the truth, doesn’t really believe what he’s saying and tells lies unconvincingly, that is evidence of the far deeper corruption of the man.  Instead of being badly misguided or misinformed, he willfully says things that he knows have no merit or that he knows are unworthy of anyone in his position.  In short, being a bad smear artist does not make someone ethical or honorable; it makes him unethical and incompetent.       

The reason why McCain was smart, if gutless, to avoid talking about Obama’s associations last night is that he and his advisors seem finally to have recognized that invoking Ayers is not an effective tactic.  This is remarkable because this tactic is incredibly popular among people on the right who think that talking endlessly about the “surge” is a good idea, and McCain still doesn’t understand that the “surge,” like his obsession with earmarks, means little to most voters who want out of Iraq anyway.  Even though there is little or no evidence that his obsession with the “surge” works with the general electorate at all, McCain has continued to invoke it every chance he gets.  Just as he does not understand that the “surge” represented a change in tactics (it is not a strategy!), he has never grasped that the tactic of hitting Obama on his opposition to the “surge” was achieving nothing.  Until last night, it seemed as if his campaign was going to make the same mistake in making Ayers a centerpiece of the last few weeks, when Ayers, like the “surge,” is something that excites and mobilizies only core supporters and no one else. 

Naturally, many of those core supporters are upset that he did not launch the attacks that they think are so powerful, but what they might consider is that the fact that McCain deliberately avoided using them should tell you something about how truly weak they are.  After all, McCain has shown he has no compunctions about smearing Obama and lying about the records of his opponents; McCain wants to win, and he clearly despises Obama.  So if attacking Obama on his associations was an effective tactic, McCain would have done it with the same gusto he showed when belittling Obama’s alleged lack of understanding of foreign affairs.  That does not seem to be the lesson that many of his supporters are going to take away from last night.  Instead, they are going to adopt something like Vietnam revisionism in which they express certainty that their candidate could have won if he’d just been willing to do whatever was necessary.

As many authoritative economists are desperately trying to explain amid all the confusion, the culprit was a system geared toward loaning money to people who were not in a position to pay it back. Two policies underpinned that system: easy money by the Federal Reserve and the government-induced lowering of standards for approving loan requests.

—–

The fact that, as Sebastian Mallaby pointed out in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, “lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part” also belies the notion that deregulation was the culprit. The real purchasers were U.S. investment banks regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. commercial banks regulated by the Fed, and European banks that are among the most regulated in the world. ~Alvaro Vargas Llosa

It is therefore all the more depressing that Obama has chosen to denounce generic deregulation as the main culprit, while McCain has opted, as usual, for uninformed moralizing against private sector corruption.  Of course, if I were the nominee of the party that championed the mortgage lenders or the nominee who loved Greenspan so much that he wanted to keep him as Chairman even after he died (notice that McCain doesn’t tell that joke anymore), I would probably try to find something else to talk about. 

The trouble arose because of the effective collusion between government agencies and investment banks on the one hand (allowing the latter to become horribly overleveraged), and because of large-scale government involvement in the housing market through the government-backed mortgage lenders and loose monetary policy on the other.  The latter made possible the creation of the housing bubble, while the extraordinary risk-taking that the government backing of the lenders permitted helped make the bubble larger than it would have otherwise been and ensured that it would collapse more violently.  The past two administrations and both parties share in the responsibility for this, and the bipartisan cult of Greenspan has much to answer for as well, but it is also perfectly fair to place the bulk of responsibility on the people who were in the majority and in control of the White House as the problems were growing and being exacerbated by many of the policies that they supported.  Now to solve the problems created by past intervention and collusion, they offer more intervention and collusion.

Even though all of this will amount to little more than a sideshow, the return of Ayers as the center of a minor campaign controversy baffles me for some of the same reasons why the Wright controversy early in the year baffled me.  None of this stuff was a secret, and anyone paying the slightest attention would have already encountered the whole story.  If you think membership on the same board constitutes some close working relationship between the two, you have already been scandalized; if you think it is a pretty minor connection, you just find rehashing it one more time to be a waste of time. 

What few people seem to take away from the limited Obama-Ayers connection is that, just as he did with Wright and Trinity United and just as he has done with everyone who has become an embarrassment to him, he dropped Ayers like a hot rock the minute it became necessary.  The liability of having dealings with Ayers in practical terms exists only if voters believe that Obama somehow shares Ayers’ radical politics, just as the real liability of the Wright connection existed only if people came to believe that he actually shared Wright’s most incendiary views.  Few people seriously claim that, Obama explicitly denies it, and I’m not sure that the people who claim it really believe it.  This is why I don’t understand the Obama campaign’s concerted effort to pretend that Obama and Ayers didn’t know each other or that Obama knew nothing of Ayers’ past crimes–this is like saying, “I knew nothing about this irrelevant information.”  If it’s irrelevant, which it basically is, why act as if it matters whether he knew about it or not?  The reality that Obama abandoned many of these associates and allies directly contadicts the fear that Obama is somehow still in league or sympathetic with them.   

John Kass is probably one of the only people to understand how Obama operates; one of the others has been Ryan Lizza.  I’d like to think that I have also more or less recognized the same thing that David Sirota saw in Obama months and months ago, which is his avoidance of confronting power and his aversion to risk.  His preference for consensus-building and his habit of using conciliatory language, which annoyed so many progressives early on, show him to be the opposite of a radical; he has no interest in getting at the root of our current problems, but generally wants cosmetic changes and wants to tweak how things are managed.  Flipping on the FISA legislation and signing off on the bailout are just two prominent examples from this year of how he yields to establishment consensus; his less-than-outspoken opposition to the war inside the Senate, his half-a-loaf withdrawal plan and his endorsement of the Iraq Study Group proposals are more examples of his desire, as Kass says, to go along and get along.     

Kass has made it clear all campaign long that Obama is neither radical nor corrupt himself, but he simply looks the other way when surrounded by those who are.  That may not be very inspiring, but it isn’t the sort of complicity that McCain wants it to be.  Of course, as we are being reminded this week in the Best of S&L, McCain has sometimes done more than just look the other way when surrounded by corrupt associates.  Lizza reminds us that Obama is an aspiring member of the establishment, and Lizza’s story is filled with the accounts of the once-upon-a-time patrons and backers of Obama whom he left behind (at least as they see it) as he ascended ever higher.  The dissatisfied former patrons and allies Obama has left in his wake bear a striking resemblance to the small army of enemies Palin made as she rose up in Alaska politics.  Obama has no compunctions about cutting off old allies when they begin to threaten his future–nothing terribly unusual about that, but Obama adds his own flair when he declares that Jim Johnson never worked for him or Wright isn’t the person he knew.  Sirota has argued persuasively that Obama yields to powerful interests, which bothered him particularly in connection with Obama’s trade and economic policies, but whatever area of policy you’re in you can come away with the consolation or disappointment that Obama will accommodate himself to the status quo.  This is the real reason why trying to portray him as the terrorist’s pal or as a raging anti-American black nationalist (and, again, I have to stress that it is the anti-Americanism of Ayers and Wright that agitates the people who obsess about them) is so profoundly stupid.  To say, as Robert Samuelson once said of Obama, that he represents the sanctification of the status quois to expose the main theme of Obama’s campaign as empty and meaningless.  That the people running the McCain campaign cannot understand this basic truth is perhaps an even more damning indictment than all of the charges of dishonesty and dishonor that are now properly being hurled at them.

Ross:

The fact that conservative America has been saddled – thanks to the vagaries of network-news color schemes and the closeness of the ’00 election – with a hue long associated with international Communism and its enablers, while American liberalism gets to claim the color of the sea, the sky, and Frank Sinatra’s eyes, is a small but obnoxious outrage, and as the Right prepares to enter the political wilderness I’m proud to do my part to at least reclaim our rightful color.

What is strangest about the partisan color schemes that have prevailed for the last decade is that they are not only the reverse of the colors that used to be loosely associated with the parties in the twentieth century (a curious detail that seems to have largely been expunged from memory), but they are entirely the opposite of the normal modern association of the color blue with relatively more conservative and nationalist parties and the association of the color red with left-leaning and social democratic parties.  My Brownson-inspired cracks about Red Republicans aside, the Republicans today are much more like the political Blues of 20th century European politics.  It has been remarkable to see how a completely arbitrary change of colors used by television stations in reporting the Electoral College results in 2000 has caught on and become the basis for widely accepted symbolism for both parties.

Every two or four years for the last several election cycles since I started voting, I have seen conservatives make the team/tribe argument as if “Stick To Your Own Kind” was repeating on an eternal loop in their heads.  Helen Rittelmeyer is the most recent:

I could probably state my entire objection in a single sentence—”Conor, you’re my editor and I love you, but don’t take sides with anyone against the Family, ever”—but I’ll say a little more for clarity.  

This has never made sense to me.  Tribal politics assumes some affinity, whether based on real or fictive kinship, and speaking for myself I find that I have few affinities with the tribe I am usually expected to defend and support.  Belonging to a political team presupposes that you are pursuing the same goals, and to the extent that being a movement conservative means having a goal of supporting the GOP more or less regardless of what it does then I don’t share those goals, either.  This logic of being a team player has been taken to absurd depths in the last eight years, as anyone who broke with “the Family” has been penalized for violating the political equivalent of the code of omerta.  In “the Family,” when someone ends up at odds with the boss he has to go to serve as an example to others.  Disloyalty is not good for business, and if you know what’s good for you you’ll keep your mouth shut. 

Maybe that’s just the way of things and there would at least be a certain consistency to all this except, of course, partisans and movement regulars are very flexible in their loyalties to specific leaders depending on circumstances.  Mr. Bush was once movement conservatives’ champion, but many of them have broken or are breaking with him now.  There are things that even party/tribal/team loyalty will not permit (e.g., backing the White House on immigration or the bailout), at which point conservatives rediscover the virtues of independence and opposition.  When the need arises, they have no problem not just speaking but also acting against the boss.  Conor has spoken against a prominent member of “the Family” (i.e., Palin) and he should apparently be treated as a turncoat, but Jeb Hensarling helped humiliate the GOP leadership and the President and he has been and will continue to be feted as a hero in many movement circles.  Even though the House GOP role in killing the bailout the first time probably did more to sink McCain’s chances in this election more than a thousand Conor Friedersdorfs calling for Palin to step aside, because it showed that McCain could not accomplish anything he set out to do in the negotiations, you can take it to the bank that almost all of the people who denounce Conor as some Obamacon stooge think the House GOP rebels are great.  In other words, it is not even the objective advantage or disadvantage to the electoral chances of the GOP ticket that is the real criterion here; it is simply whether or not movement conservatives happen to like a certain argument or not. 

Loyalty and power rise and fall, as I suppose they have always done, in direct proportion: as Mr. Bush has become weaker, the more willing his former supporters are to turn against him.  The disloyal ones are no longer penalized, and it is taken for granted that this new disloyalty is necessary.  Indeed, under the new boss, it is positively vital to make clear that you believe that the new boss is nothing like the old boss.  The scramble to flee from Bush after years of shameless support shows that the collective good of the team/tribe takes precedence, except when it doesn’t.  Turning on the boss and his people if it helps “the Family” in the long term is considered acceptable, but I suppose that is the kind of decision that can only be made at theDon level.  It’s not for mere peons, Conor! 

If Conor has made any mistake, it is that he attempted to make some rational and consistent analysis of the woes of conservatives and make conclusions accordingly.  Doesn’t he know we’re at war there’s an election going on?  Having found that conservatives trusted in Mr. Bush’s competence for less-than-substantive reasons, he foolishly noticed that they were doing the same thing all over again with Palin and considered this very undesirable for conservatives, and then he made the blunder of saying out loud what he and everyone else could see as plain as day. 

Austin Bramwell outlined the process of enforcement pretty effectively a couple years ago in TAC:

At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.” Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Add to this list the claim that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be President, and the reaction to Conor’s original article fits the pattern.

If the theme songs are any indication of the quality of Bond films, obviously we already know Casino Royaleis superior to its sequel.  Cornell actually won an award for best original song and a Grammy nomination for that one.  Speaking of Cornell, his new album release is scheduled for Election Day, which is good news for Republicans–its title is Scream.

John Schwenkler has been resisting the strange trend among conservative bloggers to identify some new, affected folksiness in Sarah Palin’s public appearances, and I find his arguments entirely persuasive.  Then again, it didn’t take much persuading.  Assuming an increase in aggregate folksiness, there are two realistic explanations: Palin has reverted to old habits of speech as crutches to cope with the additional pressure of being in the national spotlight (we can call this the SNL Theory of Increasing Adorability), or she has simply emphasized existing habits of speech that she has always had. 

There seems to be a connection between perceiving affected folksiness and believing that Palin was somehow more effective in debates and conversant with policy two years ago than she is now, as both Conor and Peter see something significantly different in her ’06 performances.  This is related to the claim that her previous nationally televised interviews are supposed to be quite impressive.  Having reviewed the interviews, I was not impressed, and I think if we look more closely at her gubernatorial debate performances and the testimony of her rivals we will find the same flaws we have seen in recent weeks.  These have been magnified as she has moved to a larger stage and been forced to address issues far outside her normal experience.

Schmidt’s hard-nosed determination to control the slightest detail is irksome to some members of McCain’s staff. One senior aide referred to Schmidt as “message Nazi.” ~The Los Angeles Times

That must make his job very difficult.  Schmidt working for McCain must be what it would be like if the “soup Nazi” were not allowed to make soup.  How can a “message Nazi” make people adhere to something that doesn’t exist?

Elsewhere I have said that language is the first casualty of war, but it is also part of the collateral damage of political campaigns.  Peter Lawler advises McCain to hit Obama on foreign policy, “showing, from the record, that Obama is actually pretty much of a McGovernite.”  I have to assume that here McGovernite does not refer to any identifiable foreign policy views that Obama actually holds, and certainly does not refer to any views that McGovern held.  You would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful similarities between what McGovern was offering in 1972 and what Obama offers today.  McGovern called for us to come home, while Obama tells us to go deeper into Pakistan, wants us to give security guarantees to Ukraine and possibly bomb Iran.  What does McGovernite mean in this statement except “something I don’t like”?   

Meanwhile, at C11 Laurie Kendrick informs us:

Fear not, America is completely ready for its first Black President; we should be more worried about his being a Democrat because Democrats are notorious for whittling away at defense.

So, what can we expect if Obama wins?

Massive cuts in defense spending. The military will just have to do the best it can.

One wonders when the euphemism “defense” to refer to power projection to the other side of the world will be abandoned, but until we find that out it might be useful to remember that Obama promises to expand the size of the Army and Marine and to increase Pentagon spending considerably.  In this election, Democrats are notorious for “whittling away at defense” in the same way that Republicans are famous for competent management and fiscal responsibility, which is to say that they aren’t.

Then there was this:

Thanks to “democrafting”, the words Bush and Republicans are now synonymous with failure. 

All those occasions when Bush and the Republicans failed also help. 

I’m not quite sure why anyone feels the compulsion to return to these tired, irrelevant accusations that last made sense c. 1988, and it’s not clear how denying that Bush and the former GOP majority were failures is going to remedy anything.  It might be more interesting to consider whether the DoD budget actually needs to be increased or whether we might be wiser to reduce the number of our commitments and deployments around the world.  Instead of implausibly painting Obama as a foe of the Pentagon, his critics could question how he can pay for his massive domestic spending plans and his increases to the military budget in the straitened circumstances of the next few years.  If you want to attack Obama, it could be more useful to criticize Obama for his overreaching, hyper-ambitious foreign policy rather than try to define him as a McGovernite.  Whether or not such criticism will be effective in defeating Obama, at least his critics will be able to say that they made credible arguments against him.