Lott: I don’t understand what Clark Stooksbury said, but I’m going to mock him anyway.

Deep down, political contests are about picking symbolic champions. ~Steve Sailer

Precisely right.  The idea of having a symbolic champion is powerful and can overwhelm pretty much everyone.  Even though Ron Paul supporters were, are, drawn to the man largely on the basis of his policy views there is no doubt that many of us also see in him an embodiment of the decent Middle America whose interests we think he also champions.  What I find so troubling about symbolic champions among the major party nominees is that the desire to identify with them simply overrides critical thought.  Voters stop asking whether or not a certain candidate actually represents their interests and settle instead for someone whom they regard as coming from them.  This is usually defined by the expression, “He shares my values.” 

These “values”-sharing candidates are granted a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of what their voters will allow them to do because of the trust engendered by these common “values.”  More often than not, the “values”-sharing politicians in the GOP do not deliver on any of the social and cultural issues that matter most to their voters, and the clever thing about this racket is that they never need to deliver.  “Values”-sharing is not something that can be quantified, so it is difficult to fall short.  So long as these politicians continue to recite the right lines and occasionally take highly symbolic public stands to prove themselves worthy, no substantive changes in law or policy are ever expected and failure to bring them about becomes more or less irrelevant. 

This is one reason why social conservatives, who seem to be more inclined to vote on the basis of shared “values” than other conservatives, are such a large constituency that gets so little in exchange for their support.  Economic and national security conservative demands are much more concrete and specific, and failure to meet them is punished accordingly.  Even on judicial appointments, the area where voters can at least see some kind of real action, social conservatives must be satisfied with appointments that have marginally higher probabilities of yielding the desired results at some undetermined, future time.  Should they not yield the right results, the relevant rulings are usually years after appointment and are virtually cost-free for the politicians who made and confirmed the appointments.  Despite the complete unreliability of “values”-sharing politicians on this score, social conservatives routinely line up behind them every cycle with the stubbornness of compulsive gamblers.

This does make it more or less useless to argue with committed supporters of such a champion, with whom they have identified and bonded, on the basis of that person’s record, and it also significantly raises expectations about what that champion will be able to do for you and yours.  This inevitably sets up the supporters for disillusionment when the champion “betrays” them by doing things they dislike, even though the candidate may have made it very clear that he was going to do these things during the campaign.  At the time of the election, the agenda did not matter–the feeling of “sharing values” mattered.  By the time the specific parts of the agenda are enacted, which may very well directly harm their interests, these voters have no recourse but to sulk and look for another symbolic champion who will really be one of them. 

I don’t know how many times in the last week or two I have seen quotes from voters to the effect that Palin “gets” what ordinary (or is that exceptional?) people experience or that her background is just like theirs.  The implication is that it means something that she “gets” their experience and shares a similar background, as if it will have some effect on how she functions once in office.  Of course, there is no necessary connection between her passion for hunting big game, fishing. going to an evangelical church or living in a small town and her political agenda.  Peter Suderman writes at C11 on these cultural cues:

Though these preferences correlate to some extent to one’s political beliefs, they don’t actually determine them.  So it’s pretty silly to carry out debates about ideology by proxy. If we’re going to have these debates, let’s have them about the issues, not the signals.

It is doubly silly to take the signals or cues as the definitive evidence that a politician will represent your interests in the absence of knowing anything about his (or, in this case, her) record.  However, if there is one thing that this election has reminded us, it is that democracy is very, very silly.

She may have fired the governor’s chef and sold the state jet, but Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska has also presided over a dramatic increase in state spending in the last two years.

Still, she can accurately claim that her state is in good fiscal health, thanks to an explosion of revenues from state taxes on oil industry profits.

Indeed, in her 20 months in office, Palin’s toughest financial decisions involved dickering with the Legislature on creative ways to spend and salt away the billions of dollars in oil revenues pouring into the state treasury.

At times, Palin has been more economic populist than small-government conservative, partly because of Alaska’s unique government financing system.

With no statewide income or sales tax, Alaska funds about 90 percent of the state budget from royalties and taxes on oil producers. Soaring oil prices and a higher windfall oil profits tax – an increase pushed through by Palin, now the Republican vice presidential nominee – have state coffers overflowing with petrodollars. The Alaska oil industry calculates that its annual payments to the state doubled in a single year to $10.2 billion.

Until a few years ago, the state government struggled financially for years because of low oil prices. But that’s all changed. In the first two budget years under Palin, the state government has stashed almost $6 billion of surplus revenues in various reserve and savings accounts in anticipation of future drops in the price of oil. And the state has allocated another $4 billion over two years for a laundry list of new capital projects, mostly small grants initiated in budget requests by legislators for their districts. ~The Boston Globe

Thank goodness that McCain will have Palin to help him battle out-of-control spending in Washington!  This is the record of the governor some people wanted to anoint the future leader of the conservative movement and the GOP.  The more we are acquainted with what she has done in office, the more it should be clear that the problem with choosing her was not simply a case of promoting her too quickly but of promoting her at all.

Remarkably, she has, in those two weeks, single-handedly re-assembled the decisive Reagan coalition. ~John Brummett

While it must be reassuring to believe that Palin has such magical powers, she has not reassembled anything of the kind.  The Reagan coalition disappeared, or to be more accurate the Republican Party has changed significantly over the last 20 years just as the country has changed.  Today’s GOP is not even the Republican coalition of the ’90s.  What she has done is to excite members of the Bush coalition to send money, volunteer and turn out in November in larger numbers than they would have done otherwise.  She has most excited the Republican core of the Bush coalition that largely turned out in the same numbers for Republican candidates in 2006 as they did in previous cycles.  She is the attractive face of what has been called the “new fusionism,” the neoconservative-led marriage of pro-life social conservatives with interventionists.  As I have said before, she is the would-be future heir to the legacy of Bushism, an ideology that is effectively indistinguishable from this “new fusionism.”

I know the CW–Palin has locked in the base, freeing McCain to move left. But jeez, McCain isn’t moving to the left just on immigration, and he isn’t moving subtly. Listen to this new radio ad, which might as well be titled “Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research, Stem Cell Research.” That’s how often the phrase is repeated. How much more Screw-You-I’m-Taking-You-for-Granted can McCain get?  Are conservatives complete suckers? ~Mickey Kaus

I suspect this is a rhetorical question, since the come-to-Palin revival has made clear once and for all that there are no policies so offensive or objectionable to conservatives that they cannot be erased from memory by political stunts and symbolism.  McCain/Palin will endorse ESCR, but because Palin has “walked the walk,” as they say, it will not matter that McCain is still compromising a principle that pro-lifers believe is non-negotiable.  (Notice how during the Gibson interview she very carefully avoided committing a McCain administration to opposition to ESCR and kept emphasizing that she was talking about her personal opinion.)  Instead of seeing through the Palin selection as a ruse and understanding that she is being used as little more than a prop to lure social conservatives to the polls to elect an administration that will ignore them entirely, most conservatives are now completely on board with the GOP ticket.

This election is a struggle between the followers of American exceptionalism and the supporters of global universalism. ~Gerard Baker

At first glance, this sounds plausible, and then you realize that it is not possible to identify which party is exceptionalist and which is universalist.  Obama endorses virtually every aspect of U.S. hegemony and has repeatedly expressed his acceptance of American exceptionalism.  It doesn’t matter if it is true whether his personal story was possible only in America–he accepts the mythology that tells him so.  Who are the supporters of global universalism if not advocates of the “freedom agenda” who say such stupid things as, “We are all Georgians now”?  There is a bipartisan consensus in favor of the marriage of American exceptionalism and global universalism, according to which American values are at stake whenever another “democracy” is threatened, which is how our nationalists can spout drivel about the universal rights of man and our universalists can wax poetic about the “idea” that is America.  Meanwhile, both of them are fundamentally at odds with the real national interest and the common good of this country.  But Baker’s interpretation here is mistaken for another reason–the electorate does not divide along these lines, but along entirely different cultural fault lines largely unrelated to foreign policy.  Foreign policy simply becomes another area where these other divisions are expressed.

With Hurricane Ike cutting a savage path through Texas, Senator Barack Obama canceled plans to appear on the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” and asked voters to consider the “quiet storms” taking place in the lives of many Americans as they weigh their choice in the presidential race. ~The New York Times

Why does Obama do this?  Does he really want to remind people of the time when he referred to the Virginia Tech massacre (on the day it happened) to talk about the “quiet violence” of Don Imus?  Or does he want to call to mind the occasion when he warned about the “quiet riots” in the black community?  This sort of language has one of two effects: it trivializes the violence or the storm in question, or it grossly exaggerates the power of the less dramatic and destructive problems to which Obama is referring.  Either he is saying that the storm is not all that devastating to east Texas, or he is saying that these “quiet storms” are as damaging as a powerful hurricane.  Neither is true.

Blake and Shay Johnson of Reno were even more plain-spoken [about Palin].

“She’s an American,” said Blake. ~The Politico

That’s a stroke of luck.  Here I had been thinking all along that she was Canadian. 

Palin’s first campaign destination on her own was there in Nevada, and it seems that each of her public appearances is going to be pretty much like the last:

Palin, greeted by chants of “Sarah, Sarah,” spoke to about 3,500 people for about 20 minutes. She was interrupted frequently by cheers and applause. And she led the audience in the now-familiar refrain: “Drill, baby, drill.”

In addition to showcasing this profound understanding of energy policy, there was this:

In her remarks, Palin delivered several feel-good lines: “America is an exceptional country and you are all exceptional Americans.”

It is remarkable that Palin, whose popularity is rooted firmly in her ordinariness and the perception that she is a normal, common American (indeed, one of the people in the Carson City crowd praises her for her common background), has adopted this sort of language.  If everyone in her audience is an exceptional American, being exceptional becomes the new norm, in which case all attempts to make distinctions between the normal and abnormal, the regular and the exceptional, become useless.  This is very close to the modern self-esteem cult’s false proposition that everyone is a winner.  If Obama uttered such saccharine nonsense, he would be mocked for months for his drippy, feel-good sentimentality. 

Chesterton once identified “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal,” which might be a good shorthand description for what McCain is doing to Palin by adding her to the Republican ticket.  Now it would seem that a generally normal person, Palin, is employing language that empties the words normal and exceptional of their basic meanings in a way that undermines the core of her own popular appeal.

P.S. Apparently, there are people who think Palin is from Canada:

Karen Porter, an economically hard-pressed longtime waitress at Paul’s (“I used to be on a beer budget, now I’m on a bus budget”), would be what political scientists call a “low-information voter,” if only she were registered. Attracted to Obama (“I think he really cares about people in the middle class”), Porter is tempted to vote for the first time. When asked about his Republican rival, Porter said, “I don’t know much about McCain. I hear a lot about his vice president. What’s her name? The one from Canada.”

Weep for the future.

Alex Massie offers this challenge to Palin critics:

Still, a super-qualified running-mate is not much use if they don’t help the ticket win in the first place. And that’s why I ask: what was John McCain supposed to do? The front-running candidates for his Veep would each, I think, have guaranteed his defeat. Mitt Romney? Please! Tim Pawlenty? What a snooze. Joe Lieberman? You have to be kidding. none of these men could have had Sarah Palin’s impact upon the race. None of them would have been a potential game-changer.

There is no question that no other selection, except perhaps choosing Jindal (and probably not even that), could have dominated the news for the last two weeks in the same way, but I’m not sure it’s true that none of them could have had the potential to change the dynamic of the campaign.  Choosing either Romney or Liberman would have been a game-changer, all right, but in the way that a forfeit changes a game.  While movement leaders and many activists would still have swooned, it seems certain that selecting Romney would have been an electoral catastrophe.  Palin provoked so much hostility from the left and from the media because of culture war themes that were magnified by class differences, and despite Romney’s ceaseless effort to make himself into a culture warrior he does not possess the credibility to generate the kind of excitement or fear that Palin does.  Romney would have actively alienated evangelicals and working-class Americans just as much as Palin has attracted them.  Marginal gains in Michigan would have been offset by demoralization across the rest of the Midwest and the South.  McCain’s mockery of Romney as the “candidate of change” would be replayed daily.  Obviously, I think Romney would have been politically very foolish.  Likewise, had Graham prevailed on McCain and Lieberman became the nominee, the election would already be over. 

My guess is that a Pawlenty choice would have been very different.  As with any counterfactual scenario, we’ll never know, but given what we do know about the response to Palin here are a few reasons why a Pawlenty choice would have shaken up the race considerably.  It is hard to imagine that a more conventional choice making as much of an impact as Palin, but as everyone has acknowledged Palin is an extremely high-risk, high-reward pick and so far we have mostly seen only the reward and not the downside for McCain.  Picking Pawlenty would have been less bold, but also far less transparently desperate and indifferent to qualifications.  While Pawlenty would have been deemed the safe choice–McCain would have been choosing a longtime loyalist whose chances at receiving the nod had been discussed for months–he would have been almost as unknown nationally as Palin without the problem of being quite so obscure and far removed from the national debate.  Despite having been on political junkies’ VP lists for most of the year, most voters would not have known much about him, so he would not bring any more baggage and would bring fewer surprises than Palin. 

Unlike Palin, though, he has a longer record as governor of Minnesota than Palin does in Alaska, he has the distinction of being one of a handful of Republican governors of a “blue” state left standing and he narrowly won re-election in one of the worst years for Republican gubernatorial candidates in decades.  Considering some of the more superficial attributes, Pawlenty has a working-class background (his father was a Teamster), he is the same age as Obama, and he actually plays hockey, all of which would have added a similar dose of youth, working-class voter appeal and a connection with hockey fans across the Upper Midwest.  Like Palin, he was originally Catholic and then converted to evangelical Protestantism, but unlike Palin he grew up in the Catholic Church and so might have had some connection with Midwestern Catholics.  A lot of the same identity-driven enthusiasm about Palin could very well have accompanied a Pawlenty nomination, since it is quite clear that what matters to a lot of her enthusiasts is not anything she has done but who she is and what she represents.  With the convention in his state capital, Pawlenty’s nomination would have seemed particularly fitting. 

As Noam Scheiber noted a few months ago after he wrote a profile of Pawlenty, “Pawlenty is smart and extremely fluent in the details of domestic policy–something McCain can’t come close to claiming, but which will be pretty critical in a campaign waged over health care, infrastructure, and energy.”  Compared to a running mate who doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the basic elements of the federal budget and who reinforces the campaign’s obsession with oil drilling, Pawlenty would have been a more capable lieutenant and consequently a more effective attack dog on policy.  Rhetorically, he has had a habit of breaking with the GOP without diverging much from fiscal and economic conservatism, but has supported enough “populist” legislation (e.g., increasing the minimum wage) that he cannot be readily reduced to a caricature of a Republican.  Electorally, Pawlenty might have helped McCain more in the Upper Midwest.  Given how close Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan still are this year, Pawlenty could have helped offset the Democratic advantage of having a nominee from Illinois.  Granted, Pawlenty is not a very engaging speaker, which is a problem, but he is clearly far more capable of handling the press and arguing his case on television.  Concerning foreign affairs, Pawlenty has led a number of state trade delegations overseas and has visited National Guard units in several countries, so he would not have been as much of a novice in this area as Palin.  On immigration, he has a little credibility as an opponent of illegal immigration and supporter of border security, which would have reassured conservatives a little on that score.  If the Palin nomination blows up in McCain’s face, as I think it still probably will, a lot of people will look back at the supposedly boring, safe choice of Pawlenty and wonder what might have been.  As someone who dreads the prospect of a McCain administration, I’m glad that McCain opted for the riskier choice.

Via James Fallows, I see that Prof. Andrew Bacevich, a TAC Contributing Editor, was recently interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air about his new book, The Limits of Power, and again by Bill Moyers.  Prof. Bacevich also has a new, extensive article adapted from his book in the latest issue of TAC.  In the NPR interview, Bacevich was especially interesting and persuasive when he was talking about the relationship between American expansionist impulses, reckless foreign policy and our culture of consumption and acquisition, which is a theme he discusses at some length in this article.  Here is a provocative excerpt:

Carter’s speech did enjoy a long and fruitful life—chiefly as fodder for his political opponents. The most formidable was Ronald Reagan. He portrayed himself as conservative but was, in fact, the modern prophet of profligacy—the politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption. Beguiling his fellow citizens with talk of “morning in America,” Reagan added to America’s civic religion two crucial beliefs: credit has no limits, and the bills will never come due. Balance the books, pay as you go, save for a rainy day—Reagan’s abrogation of these ancient bits of folk wisdom did as much to recast America’s moral constitution as did sex, drugs, and rock and roll.