Yet these assets are pushing a campaign that’s shorter on substance than it has to be. In place of a detailed contrast between the GOP’s shortcomings and failures and the real change that’s promised, the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year tree — but they do require a tree.
 
McCain and Palin have nothing to lose and everything to gain from being honest with America’s Republicans about where Bush and Congress have erred. All of them already know. None of them are about to run to the Democrats. And the central message of the McCain-Palin campaign — this year, true reform truly puts country first — can only really soar on the back on an honest reckoning. ~James Poulos

James understandably wants an honest reckoning of Republican failures, but as I’m sure James can see there is actually a lot to be lost electorally by emphasizing how many things the GOP did wrong and failed to do during the period of unified government.  One of the reasons why the McCain/Palin ticket seems to stand for little aside from the trinity of War-Drill-No Earmarks is that there is essentially nothing else that the candidates can say that is deeply critical of the Bush administration or the old GOP majority in specific terms without implicating one or both of the nominees in the GOP’s errors.  Hence the need for vague general statements about reform and accountability–to hold the GOP accountable for its failures would obviously mean voting against McCain, or at the very least not voting for him.  Did the administration abuse its power, break the law and trample on the Constitution?  McCain was there backing them up almost every step of the way.  Did the federal government impose new unfunded mandates on local school districts through NLCB?  John McCain voted for NLCB and still supports it.  When McCain has not gone along with the administration, he has since backtracked (on tax cuts) or he has not mentioned his opposition (he opposed Medicare Part D) because he assumes it will be an electoral liability.        

This is not helped by the divergent views of the GOP nominees in certain areas (e.g., stem-cell research, ANWR, climate change) that end up blunting different aspects of the ticket’s appeal to certain Republican and independent constituencies.  For that matter, as we have been discussing, the anti-earmark message is contradicted in important ways by Palin’s record, in addition to being an incredibly trivial thing to make a major part of the campaign.  The lack of substance in the campaign is a function of McCain’s own aversion to detailed policy knowledge (if Palin is the candidate of the gut-level connection, McCain is the candidate of gut-level policymaking), but it is also an expression of the complete inability to recognize other Republican errors and missed opportunities and to focus instead on a crusade against pork on the profoundly mistaken assumption that pork was a principal reason why the GOP lost control of Congress.  They cannot present an honest reckoning to the public because they have yet to make such a reckoning themselves. 

Even in their tacit Gustav-induced acknowledgement of failure at the federal level concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina there was no reason to think that similar cronyism and incompetence would not prevail in a McCain administration, except that we are all supposed to believe that McCain is significantly different from the man whose policies he backs almost all of the time.  At the heart of all of this are McCain’s positions on immigration and Iraq, which have been such powerful drags on the reputation of McCain and the GOP respectively.  McCain now plays down his “comprehensive reform” position, and he talks obsessively about the “surge,” but he has no intention of running against the Bush administration on these matters.  Thus we are necessarily left with a McCain/Palin message that is either trivial (earmarks are bad!), insufficient (we should drill more!) or crazy (fight the Russians!).  What should trouble us all the more is that McCain and Palin are clearly being rewarded for running this kind of campaign, and McCain has gained considerably the more he and his supporters have embraced symbolism and vacuous attack ads as the keys to Republican success.

“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” he [Kagan] said. “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.” ~The Politico

On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Gov. Sarah Palin took a hard-line approach on national security and said that war with Russia may be necessary if that nation invades another country [bold mine-DL]. ~ABC News

To the extent that you have the likes of Kagan in the foreign policy elite and they also hold insane views with respect to confronting Russia over anything and everything, Kagan may be right that Palin’s judgement is no worse than theirs, since his judgement on relations with Russia is atrocious and so is hers.  Of course, her horrendous view is almost certainly a direct result of listening to McCain advisors, including Kagan, who probably forgot to mention that threatening WWIII is not a good way to start reassuring voters that Palin is ready to be President.  

P.S. Palin gets hegemonist bonus points for this:

The Governor advocated the accession of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.

With respect to Dr. Trifkovic, I think his hope that “The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety” was misplaced.  She has already embraced these schemes, and I see no reason why she would reject them were she one day to become President. 

Update: Palin also said, “We will not repeat a Cold War,” but seems to have no clue that she is proposing to do just that.  To be fair, I should add that her statement about a war with Russia was tied to NATO membership for these countries, so her remarks are no worse than the standard McCain view that these countries should be incorporated into NATO, but that still makes them quite awful.

Reihan asks:

So will we stop hearing that Palin “lied” about the Bridge to Nowhere? I’m guessing we won’t.

Well, Reihan, we will keep hearing about it because she has been lying. 

The relevant facts concerning Palin and her false “Bridge to Nowhere” claim are these.  As a gubernatorial candidate in 2006, she supported the project and objected to the derisive name that she now uses to score points.  At the time that she was a candidate, she said:

OK, you’ve got Valley trash standing here in the middle of nowhere…I think we’re going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project. 

In reaction to public criticism about the project, Congress still allocated the money to Alaska but not for the purposes of building the dreaded bridge.  Palin accepted the infusion of federal dollars for use on other projects.  When she said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the bridge, the feds had already pulled the money for that project, which means that she decided, abent federal pork, she would not go ahead with the project using only state money.  So her later rejection of the bridge project was a concession to political reality, and not the high-minded opposition to wasteful pork that she wants you to think that it was, since she was quite glad to take the money.  Here’s the main thing: no one would care whether she supported the bridge project or not, except that she and McCain have made her opposition to the bridge project the centerpiece of her public persona as a great reformer and fighter of government waste, and McCain insists that all earmark spending is inherently wasteful and wrong.  By McCain’s own standard, Palin’s eventual opposition to the bridge project is beside the point–it is federal pork as such that he finds offensive and which he now claims  Palin has combated as part of his effort to make Palin into a credible reformer of Washington.  It is hardly inspiring that she has to make false statements in order to make this central claim, and it is deeply troubling that the “reform” ticket is daily making claims about Palin’s record that only the most generous partisan could accept as honest. 

To hear her tell it, she was some bright-eyed champion of halting earmark spending who wanted nothing to do with that ridiculous “Bridge to Nowhere.”  The reality was that she very artfully changed her position to fit the new political circumstances.  Meanwhile, the people in Ketchikan (a.k.a., Nowhere) remember how she exploited Alaskan resentment at the national derision of their area to win support for her bid for governor, only to turn around on the national stage and use the same derision to put herself on the same page with McCain.  From the Reuters report:

During her first speech after being named as McCain’s surprise pick as a running mate, Palin said she had told Congress “‘thanks but no thanks’ on that bridge to nowhere.”

In the city Ketchikan, the planned site of the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere,” political leaders of both parties said the claim was false and a betrayal of their community, because she had supported the bridge and the earmark for it secured by Alaska’s Congressional delegation during her run for governor. The bridge, a span from the city to Gravina Island, home to only a few dozen people, secured a $223 million earmark in 2005. The pricey designation raised a furor and critics, including McCain, used the bridge as an example of wasteful federal spending on politicians’ pet projects. When she was running for governor in 2006, Palin said she was insulted by the term “bridge to nowhere,” according to Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein, a Democrat, and Mike Elerding, a Republican who was Palin’s campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city. “People are learning that she pandered to us by saying, I’m for this’ … and then when she found it was politically advantageous for her nationally, abruptly she starts using the very term that she said was insulting,” Weinstein said.

The story goes on:

The state, however, never gave back any of the money that was originally earmarked for the Gravina Island bridge, said Weinstein and Elerding.

In fact, the Palin administration has spent “tens of millions of dollars” in federal funds to start building a road on Gravina Island that is supposed to link up to the yet-to-be-built bridge [bold mine-DL], Weinstein said.

“She said ‘thanks but no thanks,’ but they kept the money,” said Elerding about her applause line. Former state House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican who represented the Kenai Peninsula city of Homer, is also critical about Palin’s reversal on the bridge issue. “You don’t tell a group of Alaskans you support something and then go to someplace else and say you oppose it,” said Phillips, who supported Palin’s opponent, Democrat Tony Knowles, in the 2006 gubernatorial race.

A press release issued by the governor on September 21, 2007 said she decided to cancel state work on the project because of rising cost estimates. “It’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island,” Palin said in the news release. “Much of the public’s attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here.”

Perhaps the most damning part of this lie is that it shows that Palin has engaged in the same sort of derision of Ketchikan when she is on the national stage that she correctly identified in Obama’s San Francisco comments on small-town Americans.  You can say that this is simply the way of things, or you can say that this is just what politicians do, but you cannot say that she represents some burgeoning new reformism when she has not done the very things she is claiming as proof of her reform credentials. 

More to the point, if she has actually worked to reduce other earmark requests for Alaska, that is the sort of claim she ought to be making publicly.  Palin “stopped” the bridge after a significant component of its funding had been denied by Congress; she “stopped” the bridge when it had become a national symbol of wasteful pork and a target of derision.  In other words, right up until the project became politically radioactive her instinct and her public position was to support it.  It is true that Alaska Republicans supported the bridge and in zeroing out state funding Palin eventually broke with them, but it is equally true that she broke with her old position on the bridge, which had been identical with the position taken by the Alaska Congressional delegation.  Indeed, as she said during her race for governor, she supported state funding for the project and thought it important to get the federal funding while Alaska’s Republican representatives in Congress were still in the majority:

I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now – while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist. 

Give her credit for good political instincts, but please stop trying to say that she is being honest with the public about this issue.   

P.S.  Here is Factcheck.org’s assessment of Palin’s claims, including this important point:

Palin accepted non-earmarked money from Congress that could have been used for the bridge if she so desired. That she opted to use it for other state transportation purposes doesn’t qualify as standing up to Congress.

Of course, that doesn’t even begin to touch her remarkable success in securing earmarked spending for Wasilla, which she has very wisely avoided discussing since being named to the ticket. 

Update: One more thing.  As part of her announcement and convention speeches, Palin has said about the bridge project:

If we wanted that bridge, we’d build it ourselves.

But she did want that bridge (see the above quote), and given the choice of “building it ourselves” or not building it, she opted for not building it.  So even this little rationalization at the end is false.

Second Update: Reihan has a follow-up post.  I would still say that Palin and McCain have been lying about this, but I am glad to see Reihan say this much:

Palin’s approach to the Bridge to Nowhere smacks of rank opportunism, not unlike the use by some basically pro-trade candidates of harsh anti-trade rhetoric.

That’s not a bad comparison, but I think a better comparison would be Obama’s claims about his record on welfare reform.  His pandering on trade was pure primary gimmickry, which he abandoned as soon as necessary, but what Palin is doing is to take something imposed on her by political necessity and attempting to make it appear to be the result of her virtuous reformism.  Like Palin with the bridge, Obama can claim he technically supported it at some point despite his vociferous opposition to the substance of the legislation he was helping to authorize.  Obama supported “moving people from welfare to work” in just about the same way that Palin “stopped” the bridge project–he came around to supporting it after there was no other viable option.  There is some shred of truth to both claims wrapped up in giant balls of distortions and misrepresentations.  However, contra the good Prof. Ramey, her claim about stopping the bridge was not “entirely true” and not even close to it.  She said something that was much, much closer to being entirely false, and she had to know that this is what she was doing.  If that isn’t saying something that you know not to be true, I’m not sure what it is.

James Fallows asks: 

1) At any point will the right-wing press join the effort to hold Palin accountable for her false claim, as all of the press held Clinton responsible?

Unless I count as part of the right-wing press, which is something of a stretch, no.

2)  If Palin keeps making the claim, will press critics redouble their debunking, as they did with Clinton, or taper off for fear of seeming biased or boring?

They will probably give up on it out of fear that they are creating the impression that the media are engaged in a purely anti-Palin campaign, which might very well be contributing to the tremendous outpouring of sympathy and enthusiasm for her. 

3) At any point will Palin herself — or, far more significant, McCain — acknowledge that there are such things as fact and fantasy, and stop making a demonstrably false claim?

Why do that when lying works so well for them?

Richard makes many good points in his complaint about Ron Paul’s semi-endorsement of Barr, Baldwin, Nader and McKinney (Barr didn’t show for the press conference), but I would say that there was never any realistic chance that he was going to make his own third-party or independent run.  I say this with some confidence because Rep. Paul said that he wouldn’t do it months and months ago, and at the time I thought not running in the general election made the most sense.  If there were any chance that a Paul campaign in the general could win 20% of the vote (probably an overestimation), you can be sure that Paul would have been made the scapegoat for Republican defeat.  Instead of being held accountable for their failures, the GOP would have been able to explain away their defeat as an electoral fluke–never mind that a huge independent protest vote indicts the incumbent party for its failures–and nothing would change in terms of policy.  An independent Paul campaign in the general election would make his supporters feel better and would certainly affect the outcome of the election, but would mainly accomplish the election of Obama, for which Paul and his supporters would be held responsible.    

Besides, the prospects for third-party or independent candidates on the right have dimmed considerably in the last two weeks as the Palin nomination has worked its magic on anti-McCain conservatives.  Many of the undecided voters who were contemplating a protest vote in states across the South and the old Border states, where I thought a third-party candidate such as Barr might do unusually well, now seem to be swinging behind McCain in their Palinmania.  Perhaps they would have done so anyway even if Paul were in the race, but the reality is that Paul already missed whatever window of opportunity there was.  If there was a time to launch the independent campaign, it was six months ago, but the Paul campaign at that time was still pressing on to win delegates that, in the end, did not vote for Paul at the convention.  If this shows the futility of working within the GOP and trying to save it from itself, it also makes clear that the Revolution for this year had already concluded around February 5, when Paul made most of his largest gains in the caucus states in the Upper Plains and Northwest, or perhaps even earlier when he made the pledge not to run on a third-party ballot or as an independent.  Given Paul’s repeated pledge that he would not run, what I would have liked to see was an endorsement of either Barr or Baldwin or perhaps both together.  Instead, we have a muddled message that boils down to an “Anybody But The Major Parties” argument.   

Update: Barr held his own press conference.

Mike Gravel takes up for his fellow Alaskan.

Helen Rittelmeyer was disturbed by the hostility to urban life on display in St. Paul at the Republican convention:

I was among those who found it slightly chilling to see America’s Mayor get his William Wordsworth on, and only slightly less chilling when the sentiment was expressed by speakers whose cosmopolitan credentials were less obvious. Has the Republican party really drifted so far towards ruralism? Assuming that conservatives want to frame this election as a question of us versus them, does it have to be that us and them?

What I found more troubling is the ease with which these personifications of Eastern urban elites (e.g., Romney, Giuliani, Thompson–who is today as much of a small-town Tennessee boy as I am the President of Nicaragua) play to the crowd’s dislike of coastal and urban elites.  As a political matter, this pandering is simple demographics: even in otherwise fairly conservative states, cities tend to be the stronghold of those with liberal, progressive and centralist politics, as they have been since Bolingbroke and Jefferson inveighed against the corrupting effects of cities on the political order.  The GOP’s main target audience does not live in cities, but in rural areas, small towns, suburbs and exurbs.  “Red” states are typically less urbanized than “blue” states, which helps to reinforce this pattern of support.  One can lament what you could call the populist turn on the right, I suppose, and as the resident anti-democrat I am more sympathetic to this complaint than most, but if it is possible to have an urban conservatism, and I think it is, it is also possible to have an aristocratic populism that respects and takes seriously the interests of rural and small-town America.  A mistake that we often make, myself included, is to imagine that all populists are hostile to all forms of elitism and that elitists must necessarily disdain anything that can be dubbed populist.  This sort of opposition makes no allowance for Bolingbroke, Jefferson or Jeffersonians, and so does not hold up very well when put to the test.  As we see in the case of the phony populists, their deployment of rhetorical anti-elitism is really just a mechanism of diverting attention and advancing the interests of other elites under the cover of defending the very Middle America they are exploiting.  

Just as I don’t think anyone can actually be cosmopolitan according to its original meaning, I don’t think “cosmopolitan conservatism” is possible, either, so Ms. Rittelmeyer gets off to something of a bad start when she frames the dispute in terms of cosmopolitanism vs. ruralism.  Properly speaking, the cosmopolitan–if such a person could exist for very long without going mad–has no loyalty to any particular polis, and this would include megalopoleis such as L.A., New York and Chicago, and if there are urbanites who have no loyalty to their own city they are simply bad citizens and not world-citizens.  If the difference is between mentalities–the broad versus the narrow–it is not at all clear that most urbanites come out looking very good, since there is something quite narrow about disdain for rusticity that has defined urbanites throughout Western history, and it has made them fairly homogenous.  Urban conservatism, on the other hand, does not strike me as impossible, but it is likely to be very different and possibly irreconcilable with the conservatism of the places where most self-styled conservatives live.  This is a matter of conflicting interests and conflicting habits.  The weird display in St. Paul is the result of a party that draws heavily on urbanites for its leadership, but which also still relies heavily on rural, small-town, suburban and exurban people to vote them into power. 

The shamelessness of the utterly phony populism of Romney and Giuliani is what is most galling about Republican theatrics, since the same people who will pander to the small-town and suburban voter as the embodiment of American character are busily at work promoting the policies that seek to uproot people and transform their towns beyond all recognition.  Phony populism of this sort is another form of condescension, the patronizing sort that treats Middle Americans as pets to be trained and conditioned to respond to the right signals, and what it will never do is allow anything remotely resembling a populist agenda (i.e., an agenda that actually serves the interests of the majority of the people) to gain purchase.  What is so discouraging about the promotion of Sarah Palin is that it appears to be an effort to use a small-town American to blind a majority of Republicans to the policies promoted by the GOP that are antithetical to their own interests and it is working.

Perhaps I’m being too sensitive, but I cannot help but think that it isn’t healthy for a political movement to keep telling itself that if only America were tough enough, and if only it were run by “concerned parents and citizens,” all our problems would be solved, and we’d be moving back in the right direction. Because the fact is that there are lots of concerned parents and citizens on the left who feel like the country is going in the wrong direction, and have very different ideas about how to reverse that trend. ~Conor Friedersdorf

I second that, and I would add that the combination of being tough and concerned will get you nowhere, and will probably result in calamity, unless your concerns are grounded in reality and you understand the difference between toughness and bellicosity.  I might go a bit farther than Conor and say that it isn’t particularly healthy for a political movement to take advice on life and politics from celebrities, and it cannot say much for the state of conservative publishing houses that they are promoting books written by Chuck Norris.  I mean, what’s next–relying on radio entertainers for advice on how to vote?  Oh, right.  What might be even more depressing than the publication of such a book is the realization that a political book with Norris’ name on it would probably sell like hotcakes.

But here’s the thing. Even if Palin did initially accept the money [for the bridge], I have a hard time blaming her.  As the Governor of Alaska, her job was to spend Alaska’s taxpayer dollars responsibly, not federal tax dollars.  I have no problem with a state governor taking any money Congress wants to throw their way.  I do have a problem with Congress giving money away stupidly. ~Amber Bryer-Wotte

That’s almost beside the point in this case.  The two people most preoccupied with casting blame in connection with earmarks are McCain and Palin (they were just using this to needle Obama the other day), and they have opted for some reason to make her into an anti-earmark crusader as proof of her “reform” credentials.  The GOP candidates are the ones who want to make the earmark “game” a central issue of the campaign, while simultaneously pretending that the fresh outsider member of the ticket had nothing to do with said “game.”  To that end, they have repeatedly made false and misleading statements about her actual record on the bridge and her willingness to accept earmarked funds.  If Palin was simply taking advantage of a broken system, there’s not much reason to be outraged by that, but there is good reason to take issue with her decision to engage in a pattern of deceiving the public about her record, which she has clearly done in the hopes that her past obscurity will shield her from being held to account for making false claims.  More to the point, once you strip away the hostility to earmarks Palin’s “reform” credentials become pretty thin, and the more it becomes apparent that adding Palin to the ticket really was as much of a P.R. stunt as the critics said it was. 

For my part, I think the Republican preoccupation with earmark reform reveals a truly bizarre view of what is wrong with the federal government and how its dysfunction might best be fixed, as if pork-barrel spending were the main problem with Republican governance over the last decade.  Still, this is the field where McCain and Palin have chosen to fight, and this is what they are choosing to lie about, so it seems fair that they pay some political price for that.

Wait until Andrew sees this one:

Some of McCain’s biggest gains in this ABC News/Washington Post poll are among white women, a group to which “hockey mom” Sarah Palin has notable appeal: Sixty-seven percent view her favorably and 58 percent say her selection makes them more confident in McCain’s decision-making [bold mine-DL]. Among those with children, Palin does better yet. And enthusiasm for McCain among his female supporters has soared. White women have moved from 50-42 percent in Obama’s favor before the conventions to 53-41 percent for McCain now, a 20-point shift in the margin that’s one of the single biggest post-convention changes.

Men may respond more favorably to Palin, but it seems that there is a definite contingent of white women voters who are susceptible to the blatant pander and have responded just as McCain hoped they would.  According to the ABC News poll, McCain has also made up huge ground among Midwestern voters, which suggests that my initial assumptions that the choice would not draw more women and would hurt McCain in the Midwest were wildly off.  It’s true that I have been warning of Obama’s failure since February, but I really did think that a VP selection this off the wall would damage the candidate who made it.  It still seems to me that this Palin boost will ebb as she becomes better known, and I think the choice will ultimately prove to be a liability.  Right now, though, it is looking clever.