Incidentally, people often pronounce “Rye-hahn” as “Ray-hahn.”  I don’t lose too much sleep over it. ~Reihan

It’s a good thing that I don’t rely on Bollywood movies to guide my pronunciation.

On a serious note, Reihan is right that it isn’t a huge blunder to misremember Zardari’s name or mispronounce Ahmadinejad’s name.  It probably should undermine McCain’s claim to be some kind of legendary master of foreign affairs just a little, but I am reminded of Clinton’s difficulty pronouncing Medvedev during a primary debate, which was not as important as the fact that she knew who he was and what role he was playing in Russian politics.  The thing that is troubling about McCain is not that he said Ahmadinejad’s name wrong on one occasion, but that he thinks demagoguing against Ahmadinejad is the equivalent of having a real Iran policy or that he thinks Ahmadinejad is in charge of the Iranian nuclear program.  I would rather have someone who didn’t pronounce Putin’s name correctly but didn’t want to go to war with Russia over Caucasian states in which we have no vital interests rather than having the reverse.  The thing to bear in mind is that on substantive policy questions McCain fails the test time and again.  He could be fluent in Farsi, and nothing would change his horrendous judgement on foreign policy.

Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin.

The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is “clueless.” ~Ed Schultz

Six days to the VP debate, that is.  Add this report from Schultz to the first call for Palin to step down from the ticket from a former supporter, and you have the makings of total disaster for the McCain campaign in this next week.  The word disaster was honestly the first that came to mind when I heard the VP announcement as I was driving back to Chicago.  I remember saying, to no one in particular in my car, “Total disaster.”  Because I don’t want McCain to win, I wasn’t concerned that choosing Palin was a disaster for his chances, but I nonetheless felt a sense of wonder about it in the way that insane, futile attacks on fortified positions might inspire a certain strange admiration.  I wondered at the time, “What could they have been thinking?”  Of course, they had been thinking, “Mac wants Lieberman, which is even more insane, so let’s settle for the merely deranged.”  Now they are paying the price.

After the Republican convention, I joked that the convention theme was, “Can we have a mulligan?”  It seems to me that the McCain camp would very much like a do-over on the VP selection, but they know that if they dump Palin now it will definitely be over.  If he dropped her now, or if she resigned for whatever reason, the combination of media triumphalism (the narrative would be, “so much for experience and judgement!”), liberal Schadenfreude and conservative despair would be so great that McCain wouldn’t stand a chance.  Even though his result is now more likely to end up resembling Dole’s rather than, say, a respectable Ford-like defeat, he will have to trudge on and accept whatever happens.  He might even earn some grudging respect late in the day; perhaps some generous Obama supporters will liken his campaign to the charge of the Light Brigade.  He is, after all, so very concerned about Sevastopol, as he reminded us tonight.  The entire Palin episode has been like some drunken bacchanalia that gave way to a terrified awakening several weeks too late.  When her critics were painting her as a new Eagleton, her supporters were laughing at them as lunatics filled with hate, and now they are beginning to think that the haters may have been onto something.  The GOP is experiencing self-immolation, and I can’t say that I am very bothered by that.

Aside from the reliable yes-men at NRO and some of the other large conservative blogs, I am having a hard time finding anyone who thought that McCain did better than stay even with Obama tonight.  The idea that McCain won the debate seems not to have crossed the minds of anyone not already deeply committed to stopping Obama, which suggests that McCain’s performance was worse than it might at first appear.  As the “underdog,” as he constantly calls himself because he has been lagging behind all year, he had to expand his voting coalition beyond the true believers who think that his obsession with the “surge” is a serious foreign policy position.  As a member of the incumbent party, he had to define himself as sufficiently different from the administration in both style and substance to lend credibility to his theme of reform.  These are not necessarily mutually exclusive goals, but he achieved neither of them.  As much as I hated Obama’s me-tooism on foreign policy, it would not have appeared to be me-tooism to undecided voters, but would have sounded like the statements of a hawkish liberal, which is what Obama is, and blunted McCain’s non-credible attempts to paint him as the second coming of McGovern.  Both of them outlined terrible policy views, but Obama conveys them with a reasonableness and balance that McCain simply doesn’t have.   

The problem that McCain had was that he could have given this performance back in January or earlier and he wouldn’t have had to say anything different, which was a good indication that he was just falling back on the same old tropes he always uses when talking about any of these issues.  In addition to that, he made a series of mistakes and false statements from the trivial (bungling names of foreign leaders) to the much more serious (distorting Obama’s position on withdrawal), his combative style did not sit well with a lot of his audience and his contempt for his opponent–a key part of his political style–came through and worked to his disadvantage.  It is impossible to separate this from the events of the last week.  No one not already supporting him could have found McCain’s non-answers on economic and domestic policy persuasive, and after his flighty behavior in response to the financial crisis he had to demonstrate a sobriety and poise that he simply doesn’t have.  Despite McCain’s efforts to portray himself as the underdog against a one-term Senator named Obama, which is actually pretty far-fetched when you think about it, Obama remains the challenger and benefits from anti-incumbency sentiment regardless of his accommodation with status quo views.  McCain needed to persuade undecided and independent voters that it is worth gambling on another Republican administration as the current Republican administration goes down in flames after eight years of failure, and he didn’t get anywhere close to doing that.  The worst thing about McCain’s performance is that it was just about as effective as he has ever been in a debate, but it doesn’t matter, because he has too much ground to make up and an opponent formidable enough to keep him from doing that.

Update: Jim Antle is an exception to the rule.  No fan of McCain’s, he thinks the Republican nominee did better:

McCain simply pinned Obama’s ears back during the foreign policy and military exchanges. I don’t agree that his nonsensical campaign suspension and bailout participation aided this in any significant way. But I haven’t seen an old Washington hand mop up the floor with a smarmy, inexperienced but glib pol like this since Cheney kicked Edwards’s posterior in the 2004 vice presidential debate. Obama was on the defensive most of the time, and his “not true” interruptions were mostly ineffectual.

I don’t know about this.  It comes back to the differences in style.  McCain and Obama said almost identical things on foreign policy aside from Iraq, which leaves the undecided voter trying to discern between the presentation of these nearly-identical views.  As a matter of style, I am at a loss as to how anyone could rate Obama the loser.  On substance it is pretty clear to me that where McCain and Obama differed the latter was the winner.  For instance, it seems to me that if I am the average undecided voter, it doesn’t make much difference whether supporting Musharraf was a good or a bad idea, but more informed viewers will know that after about 2005 or 2006 no one could really mount a credible defense of our unstinting support for Musharraf.  McCain was not only flacking for a discredited Pakistan policy and tied himself to Bush’s last-ditch support for Musharraf needlessly, but he made a faux pas in identifying the last period of Pakistani civilian rule as equivalent to being like a failed state, which implies that he thinks Pakistan is once again a failed state (and, by extension, perhaps he favors another military coup?).  Given the tenuous state of U.S.-Pakistani relations today on account of incursions and strikes into Pakistan, which McCain has criticized talking about but apparently does not oppose doing, this is the sort of thing one does not say out loud about an allied country even if it is true.  By the same standard that he chastised Obama for his remarks on strikes into Pakistan, McCain is guilty of the same kind of blunder, except that it comes at an even more delicate time in relations with the country in question and effectively belittles the civilian government. 

The regular viewer might not have picked up on the debatable claim that Pakistan was a failed state c. 1999, but I’m pretty sure there are regional experts who would dispute that description if the technical definition of failed state and the criteria of the Failed State Index are anything to go by.  Actually, when people hear the phrase failed state they think, not unreasonably, of places such as Somalia and Afghanistan, so what McCain said tonight was that Washington should continue to provide copious amounts of aid to a state that is on the brink of imploding.  Pakistan has a lot of problems and its state is weak in many parts of the country, but it simply doesn’t make sense to call it failed when it possesses an organized military, a semi-functioning administrative apparatus and a nuclear arsenal.  It may be dysfunctional in many ways, but that is a pretty long way from being failed.  Here is one definition of failed state:

A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.

There are parts of Pakistani territory where at least part of this description might apply today, just as it could have been applied to parts of Pakistan for the last sixty years, but having relatively ungovernable or autonomous regions does not mean that the entire state is failing. 

To the extent that you can call Pakistan a failed state, of course, you must call Iraq and Afghanistan under U.S.-backed governments the same things, except that they are even worse.  Furthermore, under Musharraf’s tenure since they have started ranking countries Pakistan has become progressively worse.  Foreign Policy‘s Failed State Index for the last two years has listed Pakistan at 12 and 9 respectively on the list of most failed states, so it is certainly not doing very well, but the gradual worsening of conditions in Pakistan vindicates skepticism of Musharraf’s rule rather than support for it.  McCain’s lauding of Musharraf, based in no small part I imagine on Musharraf’s own fantasies of being an Ataturk-like figure for Pakistan, is obviously misplaced, and a well-informed audience would recognize the extent of his blunder.  If I were an Obama partisan, I would be hitting McCain, ostensibly the great foreign policy master, on this for days to come.  If McCain demonstrating his lack of understanding is what “pinning back” Obama’s ears means, I should think Obama would welcome more of it.

Second Update: For once, undecided voters and I have a similar reaction to something.  From the Stan Greenberg focus group:

Both candidates saw their net favorability ratings rise over the course of the evening. McCain started off with a 22-point net and gained 9 points. But Obama went from a 6-point net favorability to plus-45, a shift of 39 [bold mine-DL] points that placed him higher than McCain at the end of the debate (69% versus 62%).

McCain was seen as the more negative of the two—by 7 points before the debate and by 26 points after. The audience did not like it when he went after Obama for being “naïve” or used his oft-repeated “what Senator Obama doesn’t understand” line. When the two clashed directly in the second half of the debate, with Obama repeatedly protesting McCain’s characterization of his statements or positions, the voter dials went down. Voters appear to have judged McCain too negative in those encounters and Obama more favorably.

If improving one’s position with undecided voters is the real goal of presidential debates, it is hard to doubt that Obama helped himself much, much more than McCain did.

Obama’s opening statement was his standard theme, complete with a reference to a “defining moment,” and McCain’s was an appropriately meandering answer that somehow ended up talking about job creation and foreign oil.  He seems to have been taking lessons on how to give answers from his running mate.  Now he’s bragging about his call for Cox’s resignation, and returning to his old song about the evils of greed and corruption.  Convergence continues–both will vote for the bailout. 

McCain naturally follows up by saying that we should control spending.  He’s back on his hobbyhorse: earmarks are a gateway drug!  Pork and earmarks are evil!  Studying the DNA of bears is bad; Alaskan studies of seal DNA is presumably desirable.  Oh, no, Obama supported earmarks!  McCain is actually going to make the argument tonight all about earmarks.  He’s already losing and we’re not even through the first half hour. 

Is it just me, or do their fiscal disputes seem absurd in light of their agreement on the bailout?

“Two thousand!  Two thousand” McCain says, talking endlessly about earmarks.  Obama is doing quite well, especially as compared to some of his clumsy primary performances.  McCain is starting to let his contempt for Obama show.  He keeps laughing like some sort of disturbed gremlin.  Obama has avoided his old habit of disjointed, professorial answers.  McCain is back on his anti-spending kick.  Ethanol subsidies and earmarks are in his sights!  He is making a solid effort at avoiding the questions about priorities, unless he thinks ethanol and unnecessary defense contracts are the burning issues of the day.  His answer is a more elaborate “finding efficiencies” response.  Lehrer notices that neither of them answered the question.  Now Obama is fumbling as he tries to avoid committing to anything.  Google-for-government has made a return appearance.  Lehrer is getting annoyed.  McCain: let’s have a spending freeze on everything except defense, veterans’ benefits and entitlements, which is to say the vast majority of the budget.

This debate seems strangely disorganized. 

It took 40 minutes for McCain to mention the “surge.”  It seems that the debate over the war tonight is going to be another exercise in talking past one another: the “surge” worked, the war was wrong, we’re winning, took our eye off the ball, and repeat.  McCain: stop talking about the past!  Let me now rehash Obama’s record on the “surge.”  Obama: you want to talk about the past?  I’ll tell you about your views on Iraq!  McCain: Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy (of course, McCain thereby shows that he doesn’t understand the difference, since he has called the “surge” a new strategy countless times).  “Let us win!” McCain says in his best Rambo impersonation.  McCain is in his full-blown self-righteous mode.  I can’t imagine that undecided voters are responding well to his tone, but then I don’t really understand undecided voters.  McCain stupidly reminds people that Obama wanted soliders out of Iraq last March, which is what people want. 

Obama makes his points about Afghanistan, showing that he does actually know what strategy means and McCain does not.  Now he’s on to Pakistan–look out!  Wait for the McCain “he wanted to bomb Pakistan” rebuttal.  And…there it is!  He’s actually right that there needs to be Pakistani cooperation, but he doesn’t seem to understand that the problem with launching strikes without their permission is not just something you shouldn’t talk about but also something you shouldn’t do.  He also doesn’t seem to know Zardari’s name.  Obama reiterates his bad idea about launching strikes into Pakistan without their permission, but gets a good dig against McCain’s belligerency.    McCain: it’s okay if I want to start a war with Iran, because I once opposed sending soldiers to Lebanon.  McCain goes down his roll call of different interventions, inexplicably reminding people that he supported interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.  Obama: “You don’t muddle through.”  McCain: Obama didn’t go to Afghanistan earlier! 

On Iran, McCain recites the usual litany: no second Holocaust (there isn’t going to be one), no arms race (there might be one, which would make the Iranian threat much less dangerous), we need a League of Democracies (stupid!).  He has pretty effectively avoided answering how any of this relates to U.S. national security.  Obama works on his anti-Iranian hawkish pander, claiming (falsely) that he has always supported labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.  Obama scores the easy point that the League of Democracies is useless in handling Iran.  McCain bungles Ahmadinejad’s name.  Now it’s time to talk about talks “without preconditions”!  Obama scores another easy point by citing Kissinger’s endorsement of talking to Iran.  Obama makes his preparation vs. precondition distinction, which he uses to obscure what his original answer on this last year really was.  Obama hits him on the Zapatero gaffe.  McCain keeps repeating his claim that he would be “legitimizing” other regimes, which is the basic error of his view.  McCain is getting petulant.  How in the world has Henry Kissinger become the center of this debate? 

Obama: Russia is very aggressive and a threat to the region; Russian actions were unwarranted.  Russia has to leave South Ossetia and Abkhazia (good luck with that one!).  Affirm fledgling democracies!  He rattles off names of small countries.  MAPs for Georgia and anybody else that wants one!  But no Cold War–this sounds just as ridiculous as when Palin says it.  Oh, and nonproliferation.  Despite having sold out completely on this issue, Obama is still getting hit for “not understanding” so-called Russian aggression.  McCain: There’s a pipeline!  (It’s a pipeline that had nothing to do with the war, but there is a pipeline.)  McCain waxes poetic about Saakashvili as usual.  The two of them are indistinguishable.  It’s very depressing.

Best other liveblogging line of the night comes from Alex Massie:

McCain says “off-shore drilling is a bridge.”  To Nowhere, obviously.

McCain lies about Obama’s position on withdrawal.  All the things that annoy me about Obama’s position (premising withdrawal on conditions on the ground, consulting with commanders “on the ground,” etc.) McCain pretends don’t exist.  McCain is a flat-out liar.  Weirdly, after pushing back against McCain all night, Obama lets McCain get away with it.

McCain: “There are some advantages to experience, knowledge and judgement.”  If only he had the knowledge and judgement.  Did McCain just claim that he is the more flexible candidate when it comes to foreign policy?  This is crazy stuff. 

Happily, it is now finished.

Update:

A poll of undecided voters rated Obama the winner 40-22% with 38% saying it was a draw.  That is more in line with my impression of how the debate went.  Maybe I can understand something about the mind of undecided voters after all.

Also, the theme song of the week, since Kissinger has been in the news a lot lately: an old classic.

Second Update: Quin Hillyer and the CNN viewer panel rate Obama the winner.

Third Update: Halperin grades Obama as having done better than McCain.  The CW has now been firmly entrenched.  The telling thing is that this has happened in a debate for which a lot of us assumed McCain wasn’t very well-prepared (he was busily grandstanding in D.C. saving the world, after all) and focused on a subject where McCain is supposedly some grand master and Obama is allegedly a novice.  Obama proved that the idea that he is somehow not well-versed on foreign policy is nonsense.  From here on out, McCain is in a lot of trouble.  In future debates he can’t just keep saying, “Earmark reform, drill, baby, drill, maverick” and expect people to pay attention to what he says. 

Steve Benen grades the performances with almost the same marks that Halperin and Andrew give.  Especially after the last two weeks that the McCain campaign has had, McCain really needed a decisive win to give him a much-needed boost.  His bailout-related stunt, at best, neither won nor lost him anything, and at worst it will saddle him with the bulk of responsibility for whatever Congress produces or fails to produce.  If a deal is reached, and most Americans hate the bailout idea, McCain will suffer the backlash; if the deal fails, he is excoriated by pundits and journalists until Election Day.  Considering all of that, McCain’s possibly eking out a tie with someone whom he regards as a naive fool is actually a serious defeat.

Fourth Update: Frank Luntz’s focus group responded more favorably to Obama.  Curiously, that focus group wanted more emotion from McCain and not from Obama, whom a lot of bloggers seem to have regarded as too detached.

Fifth Update: Are there any Republicans who still wish Palin could have filled in for McCain?  I didn’t think so.

There are other reasons to doubt that the failure to pass the bailout, which seems more likely today than it did two days ago, will lead to the sort of catastrophe that bailout advocates have been insisting on all week.  Small banks are functioning and even thriving as deposits have started flooding into them, and credit from these banks does not seem as if it will be drying up.  The main argument that bailout advocates have had that has made their proposal sound slightly more attractive has been that the complete freezing of all credit would adversely affect the entire population, but if that is not true or significantly exaggerated a major part of both the economic and political rationales for this bailout disappears.  As Todd Zywicki at Volokh Conspiracy has noted, the CEO of BB&T Bank has also raised a number of major objections to the original plan and answers the question cui bono? that most observers have tried to dodge or ignore by insisting that the alternative is unthinkable:

The primary beneficiaries of the proposed rescue are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The Treasury has a number of smart individuals, including Hank Paulson. However, Treasury is totally dominated by Wall Street investment bankers. They do not have knowledge of the commercial banking industry. Therefore, they can not be relied on to objectively assess all the implications of government policy on all financial intermediaries. The deicison to protect the money funds is a clear example of a material lack of insight into the risk to the total financial system.

That tells me that there is reason to doubt the dire warnings that we have been given.  It is also instructive that the bailout deal keeps getting delayed, and now seems much less likely to pass the House without the support of the House GOP.  The House majority does not want the bulk of the responsibility for passing the deal and wants political cover by having most of the Republican caucus vote for it.  As long as that seems unlikely, it is possible that the deal may not happen.  The obvious question is why the House Democrats would not want to take the lion’s share of credit for saving the day, if that is what the bailout will actually do.  One reason why they do not want to own this deal is that they are hearing the same overwhelmingly negative reaction from their constituents as the GOP members are.  The intensity of opposition to this proposal is as great as anything since the populist backlash against the immigration bill.  To give you a sense of how unpopular it is, Kansas Sen. Roberts’ office says that it has received fewer than a dozen calls out of 5,000 that support the bailout.  Even if support for the measure is closer to 30% of the public, the intensity of the opposition is much greater.  It is possible that this sort of grassroots rejection of the nearly universal establishment position is going to prevail again.   

I would add here that the record of bipartisan “achievements” and attempts at legislation over at least the last decade are a major contributing factor to the lack of public confidence in the administration’s proposal.  It may prove to be mistaken, but there is reason to think that an establishment that has been so impressively wrong about so many things over the years is wrong this time as well.  When the government has consistently abused the powers granted to it for addressing this or that crisis, and when the establishment’s interests seem to be consistently at odds with those of the vast majority of citizens, it becomes increasingly difficult to grant them any more power.  At some point the establishment cannot command respect because it frittered away whatever authority it had on blunder after blunder. 

Even so, the Democrats may be willing to back the deal if it appears to be a bipartisan move, as they hope that bipartisan support will reduce the backlash against them.  That is one of the main political benefits of describing things as bipartisan: creating more targets for blame.  That brings us to the more basic point, which is that the majority would pass the deal if its members actually believed it to be necessary.  Clearly, Pelosi wants the Republicans to provide cover because she cannot muster the votes on her side, and she can’t do that because not nearly enough have been persuaded by the argument the administration has presented.  Part of this is a resentment over being burned by past deception and incompetence, but another part is that the administration’s argument is not persuasive.  This goes beyond a lack of trust in this administration or in government as a whole.  The argument is not persuasive because it seems fundamentally wrong, which the administration’s own lack of credibility exacerbates.

Here is illustrated the flaw, or danger, of conservatism as a defense of legitimacy. It will necessarily devolve into a defense of any institution with legitimacy [bold mine-DL]. Mr. Hammer gives us the perfect hip-hop sturm to the Hank Paulson inspired drang of “too big to fail.” The line of legitimacy runs straight and true from Marshall’s McCulloch decision to Paulson’s trillion-dollar bailout. The central banking system encrusted with monied interest barnacles is, it appears, too legit, too legit to quit—and all efforts on its behalf are, ipso facto, necessary and proper. I doubt this is the kind of conservatism Bramwell has in mind. ~Fr. Jape

Old Jape is on the right track as usual.  This was precisely my concern when I first came across the “conservatism of legitimacy” argument that he is critiquing, since it seemed readily exploitable by presidential cultists and every ally of consolidated power, but Jape goes on to outline a different argument from this.  I may return to this second part later on, but first I wanted to make a point about institutional legitimacy. 

If the language of patriotism can be abused and twisted by nationalists and ideologues into an insistence on never challenging a particular government, as it often is to shut down dissent against abuses of power, the language of legitimacy can be deployed in corrupt ways to defend the abuses themselves and to justify every excess as necessary to the maintenance of institutions.  There is a superficial similarity between a “conservatism of legitimacy” and actual legitimists from the nineteenth century and earlier, who did invest particular institutions and even particular regime types with reverence, but this similarity disappears when we look closer at the reasons the legitimists gave for their loyalty to monarchy or to a particular dynasty.  Chief among them were divine sanction and legal tradition, which are the foundations of justified resistance against usurpers and tyrants.  As I have said before, to talk about institutional legitimacy without referring to the legal and moral traditions of a people is to reduce respect for legitimacy to a subservience to power.  Legitimism rightly understood contains within it the possibility of dissent and even resistance when necessary for the sake of the legitimate government defined in tradition when that government is under assault by any given set of rulers or magistrates that happen to be in power.  This sort of legitimism is what I understand the correct conservative response to be, which may have nothing at all to do with wanting to preserve institutions or defend regimes that overthrow the constitutional tradition of the country.

Thank God for Ron Paul.

Via John Schwenkler

At a defense conference in Munich, I saw him diagnose and confront Russian hegemony. ~David Brooks

I have no idea what the phrase Russian hegemony means in a world where our sphere of influence supposedly extends to Tshkinvali and Baghdad.  In a time when we have military bases in, military alliances with or military advisors for almost every country on Russia’s borders, talking about Russian hegemony is like talking about Zimbabwean wealth, Bolivian capitalism, Burmese freedom or Chinese democracy.  It is meaningless.  Of what is Russia the hegemon?  The SCO?  That is scary.  If we’re not careful, we might lose Nepal to their nefarious schemes.  In other words, in a column that is supposed to be praising McCain’s insights, Brooks draws attention to a principal example of a subject McCain does not understand and, worse yet, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t understand it.

I resent the reverse classism that Palin uses to justify her lack of experience in traveling abroad, as if only the children of the wealthy go to other countries in their youth.  Yes, those of us who have been privileged to come from families that could afford for us to travel overseas several times before the age of 43 are fortunate, but if she has spent so much time with book-learning about the rest of the world why is it that she doesn’t seem to know anything?  It should not necessarily be a problem that she has not traveled abroad, provided that she does know something about international affairs, but she manages to combine a lack of personal experience with a lack of knowledge about other countries.

Her answer in response to Couric’s question on Hamas and democracy in the Near East was simply pathetic.  There is no other way to put it.

But what is clear from Gallup Poll surveys is that many Georgians value the opposite political ties as those Western-minded Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili desires. Specifically, 41% of Georgians surveyed before the recent conflict between the two countries find their country’s relationship with Russia to be more important than their relationship with the United States. ~Gallup

Via Yglesias

Note that this survey was completed before the war in August.  It is the rational, self-interested response of Georgians to want to cultivate good relations with Moscow.  The confontational, pro-U.S., anti-Russian line that Saakashvili maintains is now supported by just 11% of the population.  There is clearly no public consensus that would back incorporation into NATO when NATO membership necessarily means pursuing a pro-U.S. stance at expense of good relations with Russia.  “Pro-Russian” sentiment is likely to grow from the postwar recognition that poor relations with Moscow cost Georgia a lot and American support benefits them very little.

The good news is that there is no rational reason why good Russian-Georgian relations should lead to worse U.S.-Georgian relations, and the only reason at all why rapprochment between Moscow and Tbilisi would harm our relations with Georgia is if we insist that Saakashvili’s hold on power is some non-negotiable, sacred principle.  If we were willing to acknowledge that a “pro-Russian” Georgian leader is not necessarily hostile to our interests, because we have no vital interests in the Caucasus anyway, that would help considerably.  A Georgian government that pursued the just interests of Georgia first could maintain friendly relations with Washington without becoming adversarial against Russia.  Unfortunately, that lesson was not learned before reconciliation between Tbilisi and the separatist regions became absolutely impossible, which means that any future Georgian government will be compelled in the end to abandon territories that it considers, with reason, rightfully theirs.

Update: On bloggingheads, Chris Preble and Heather Hurlburt discuss NATO expansion, Georgia and the moral hazard of extending security guarantees.