There are some issues where the most important job is to rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption: Confronting Putin, tackling earmarks and reforming the process of government.

But most issues are not confrontations between virtue and vice. Most problems — the ones Barack Obama is sure to focus on like health care reform and economic anxiety — are the product of complex conditions. They require trade-offs and policy expertise. They are not solvable through the mere assertion of sterling character. ~David Brooks

Does Brooks really think that the most important thing to be done in developing Russia policy is to “rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption”?  Does he believe that the relationship with Russia can be reduced to a confrontation between virtue and vice?  Isn’t Russia policy exactly one of those areas that requires trade-offs and policy expertise?  Or is this an admission that “confronting Putin” is nothing more than egregious posturing?  Is this an acknowledgement that the whole of McCain’s Russia policy is nothing more than one long exercise in moralistic posturing divorced from policy expertise?  One wonders what the “assertion of sterling character” will do in shaping the U.S.-Russia relationship, unless it is to convince Moscow that our leaders are prone to windy bluster and empty threats.  Perhaps the next time Saakashvili launches an ill-advised military strike, he can call upon the Armies of Decency to support his campaign, since McCain, he of the sterling character assertions, will not be able to do much for him.

As Rush Limbaugh understands, but the Democrats apparently do not, a McCain administration would not be like a Bush administration. ~David Brooks

This is true enough–it would be much, much worse.  While Mr. Bush and his backers have often tended to portray their political opponents as freedom-hating goons and bigots (remember how doubting the “freedom agenda” was no better than racism?), McCain always portrays his political opponents as dishonorable cads who put their petty goals ahead of high and noble ideals, which McCain is invariably defending.  If McCain supports a given policy, opposition to it is ipso facto selfish and small-minded, because opposing the policy means opposing the great reforming crusader who only acts to serve the public, which must mean that his opponents persist in their opposition because they are self-serving, corrupt or possessed of some malevolence.  Bush is relatively much more reasonable and accommodating.  He merely thinks that God has appointed him liberator of the world; McCain’s hubris is much more powerful.  If you want an idea of what a McCain administration would be like, imagine the last eight years and then remove whatever common sense and competence there has been and you will be close.

The article that Dr. Hadar notes on the main blog contains an interesting item that I have seen mentioned before, and I think it helps explain another reason why Palin prevailed over the others:

Others in the inner circle favored Mr. Pawlenty or Mr. Romney. Ms. Palin had no strong advocates in the group, an outside adviser said, but she had no detractors, either.

Something that longtime observers of McCain know is that he likes for his staff to be composed of people who are all deeply loyal to him and who vie with one another for his favor, which leaves McCain maintaining an uneasy balance among the rivals.  This is one reason why his campaign has been such a disorganized circus for so much of the last year and a half and why it has had such difficulty elaborating a consistent message.  The VP selection process seems to have been subject to the same problem of internal rivalries among advisors, but in this case the same dysfunctional squabbling that has weakened the campaign so far was greatly intensified.  This is not unique to McCain, but it does help to explain why Palin’s name rose to the top: there were no strong Palin supporters or opponents in the campaign, which meant that McCain would not be endorsing or snubbing any of his advisors by picking her.  She was the lack of consensus choice, and the one least likely to spark a civil war among his own top people.  His advisors may not be thrilled with Palin, but none of them is furiously hostile, and so McCain has managed to keep a modicum of order in his own camp. 

How close McCain really did come to picking Lieberman  is either the most hilarious or the most frightening thing about the article.  Had he chosen Lieberman, he would have lost in a rout after revealing a very Bush-like instinct to reward old friends and loyalists with key positions.  Given the likely alternative, Palin was the safe pick.

Imagine if we had kicked Russia out of the G8 and broken most ties with Moscow—as the Republican nominee, John McCain, and many neoconservatives have long wanted to do. Then, when the Russians attacked Georgia, we would have had only two options—appeasement or war. ~Fareed Zakaria

This is all true enough, but Zakaria seems to miss something here.  This is always what will be left if you follow a foreign policy view that takes for granted that every international crisis can result in one of two things, namely appeasement or confrontation.  The worldview that says removing means of outside leverage against Russia is “punishing” Russia is the same worldview that holds every accommodation and every attempt to pursue common interests through some measure of compromise to be weakness and surrender.  A worldview geared towards ceaseless confrontation that defines anything other than ceaseless confrontation as spineless capitulation is a worldview that guarantees the clashes that it pretends are inevitable.

A half-term governor has more claim to leadership and experience than does a one-third-term U.S. senator who has risen through a big-city political machine. ~Lisa Schiffren

Mind you, this comes from the same person who thought that a ten and a half-year governor of Arkansas was beyond the pale and unspeakably foul because he sometimes raised taxes to pay for road improvements (oh, yes, and he also believed in God, which is very undesirable).  I’m not sure that a VP choice that satisfies Ms. Schiffren is necessarily politically savvy.  This is what the GOP hacktivists* are reduced to arguing.  It really is, as I have guessed it would be, a race to the bottom: which ticket will prove itself to be more absurd and unfit before November 4?  The slightly less absurd pair wins.

It’s not clear to me that Republicans should want to brag about a nominee whose only experience in statewide elected government has lasted just about as long as the current presidential campaign, much less should they want to remind voters that her experience prior to that was governing a small town with fewer inhabitants than the average Chicago ward.  It also doesn’t make much sense to stress that Obama did rise through a big-city political machine and managed to catapult himself to the political heights in less time than it took Palin to reach Juneau as governor, unless the goal is to remind people that he is, in fact, an impressive political talent.  As for Biden, it’s fair to note that he has often been wrong on foreign policy.  Together with John McCain, he fully backed the attack on Yugoslavia, whose after-effects are now being felt in Georgia, and together with George Bush he supported the invasion of Iraq.  Strange that Schiffren doesn’t mention that.       

* Hacktivist here is the combination of a hack and an activist; no hacker references intended.

In one of his last AFF posts, James ponders independence for the statelets:

Indeed, recognition affords the West a powerful opportunity to explain to Russia that once you play this game, you must play it fair, i.e. both statelets must not become mere Russian garrison states. Sure, there will be bases. But we know how this works; we know the difference between Qatar and Kosovo.

That’s true.  Qatar has oil, and Kosovo has none.  Okay, that was an easy shot.  Unlike Kosovo, Qatar is not plagued with drug traffickers, mafiosi and terrorists masquerading as a legitimate government, and it does not go through the farce of holding elections whose outcome is already determined.  Unlike Kosovo, Qatar has some reason to exist as an independent state, and its independence has some legal justification.  Qatar is a satellite state that basically does what it is told, while Kosovo is a wild card whose independence will come back to haunt us and Europe. 

While I’m on the subject, the Georgians have less claim to Abkhazia and South Ossetia than the Serbs have to Kosovo, but that’s no reason for people to go around recognizing enclaves.  The sort of logic employed in partitioning Serbia and Georgia does not bode well for multiethnic states that border powerful neighbors.

There is a great deal of admiration for Sarah Palin among my colleagues, with the notable exception of Clark, which makes me want to ask the simple question: what has really changed since Thursday that makes the GOP ticket any more acceptable than it was last week when it was, I assume, somewhere between loathsome and horrible?  As I said in the comments of another post, the choice of Palin will likely mean that, in the event that he wins, McCain believes that he has already bought off conservatives and need do nothing else for them.  Palin will become merely a figurehead, dispatched to quell restless conservatives whenever McCain tries to get some foolish immigration legislation passed or when he calls for a deployment to guard the Mongolian frontier against the Russians.  Having appeased social conservatives with a symbolic VP nod, he can ignore them even more than he already does.  Should the ticket lose, social conservatives are then left holding the bag and legions of East Coast Republican pundits will stream forth to explain that the ticket failed because Palin’s pro-life views were “too extreme” and why the GOP needs to get over talking about abortion.  How can we not get behind Palin?  Because she has agreed to work for John McCain, that’s how. 

Let’s also understand something very important: should McCain-Palin win in ’08, Palin is not going to be the future of the Republican Party at a national level.  Barring some accident or a one-term pledge, should they somehow prevail this time, Palin will likely remain second fiddle to McCain in 2012 as well and will probably then be reduced to the status of Thomas Marshall and, yes, Dan Quayle.  Should McCain not seek renomination, Romney, Huckabee and Pawlenty are all going to be waiting to take advantage of discontent with a President McCain, of which there will be plenty.

One of the reasons why Palin’s name seems to have been kept such a closely-guarded secret in the weeks leading up to the announcement on Friday seems to be that the McCain campaign made the choice in haste and did not engage in the thorough vetting that one assumes campaigns do.  That lack of preparation ensured that the public and media would experience maximal surprise–and it will probably ensure future surprises for the McCain campaign!  This is the classic McCain style: blindly winging things from day to day with no coherent or consistent plan for what comes next.  While many people are taking the Palin pick as evidence that McCain is unserious or reckless or, when they want to pay him a compliment, a “gambler,” this is simply the latest in a long line of episodes when McCain tried to thrive on nerve and impetuous actions instead of relying on long-term strategy and careful planning.  In this move, McCain has shown, mostly for ill, that he is the antithesis of Obama.  A maverick temperament married to utterly establishment political views is probably the worst conceivable combination, since it carries with it all of the dangers of an unpredictable person who holds real power and all the flaws of Washington consensus politics. 

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has been on the warpath since Friday.  Andrew had the mistaken impression that McCain and the GOP were at some point in the recent past serious about national security, which the Palin pick now seems to contradict, and so he has been disgusted with the cynicism of McCain’s move.  Let’s remember this much: half of the modern GOP’s reputation on national security is based on bluster and exaggeration, and the other half is based on the successes of previous administrations that pursued courses of action that most of the modern GOP would find abhorrent and full of appeasement.  McCain’s candidacy represents the full embrace of the first half and the almost complete neglect of the latter, except when there is a useful Reagan reference to be made.  Choosing Palin is no more and no less cynical than anything else McCain has done over the years.   

There was something from one of Andrew’s latest posts that jumped out at me:

[Brookhiser]’s discovering that the actual people in the Republican base are much less interested in national security than in religious orthodoxy.

Whether or not Brookhiser is aware that the party base is not all that deeply attached to the Iraq war or that they are not especially concerned about national security on the level of policy, it seems to me that Andrew is misreading the reaction to Palin’s pick rather badly.  The activists and movement spokesmen are the ones who are excited and energized, but these are the very people who wanted to fight the candidacies of both McCain and Huckabee–the largest vote-getters–for as long as possible.  The bulk of GOP primary voters were not interested in national security or religious orthodoxy as such, but were instead drawn to appealing or seemingly appealing personalities, and they were particularly drawn to those candidates with what they call compelling biographies.  What the Palin pick has done is to excite all those activists who hated the idea of a McCain nomination and thought that Huckabee was something close to a lesser demon, which is to say that it has “solidified” behind McCain precisely those people on the right who were the most likely to crawl across broken glass to vote against Obama anyway.  Now they will be more enthusiastic as they crawl across the broken glass.  The choice has gained McCain next to nothing, and probably lost him a great deal.

Brookhiser is also badly confused if he does not understand that the only thing that saved McCain’s campaign during the primaries was his position on the war; the only thing that energized people about McCain’s candidacy was his view on the war and his constant yammering about the “surge.”  For a huge number of Republicans, his biography and his support for the war combined to outweigh all of his many flaws, and now choosing Palin has tipped the balance in his favor for most of those Republicans who were clearly unhappy that he prevailed instead of Romney.  Religiosity is just one piece, and perhaps not even the most important piece, of the enthusiasm about Palin.  Far more important for many of these people is the impression that McCain has finally yielded to conservative demands rather than having insisted on mocking and insulting their concerns.  Conservatives were girding themselves for the worst, for Lieberman, and instead they wound up with a right-wing Alaskan–I would put the exuberant reaction to the choice down to shock as much as to anything else.  Above all, it is the belief that movement conservatives have finally beaten McCain, and that the “maverick” has conformed to their wishes that fills them with so much excitement.

This morning I arrived in Chicago after my brief vacation back home.  There is a lot that has happened in the last few days that I will be talking about before too much longer, but for now I’ll say a few things quickly.  I should say that my initial reaction to the choice of Sarah Palin was much more like Michael‘s than anyone else’s I have seen.  While I have very few reasons to complain about Gov. Palin’s views (her foreign policy remarks on Friday being chief among them), I think it does her a tremendous disservice to name her to a national ticket before she is fully prepared for that role, just as it would have been a disservice to Jindal had he been named.  Leave aside for the moment the important point that drafting a governor not yet halfway through her first term neglects and devalues the importance of state government and insults Palin’s voters. 

If the goal is to drag down the ticket and at the same time provide a Buchananite scapegoat for Republican defeat in the fall, a defeat I now believe to be more likely than it was a few weeks ago, McCain seems to have done his work well.  As Gov. Palin’s remarks yesterday made clear, she seems unlikely to balance the worst instincts of McCain and his advisors and may instead be used to confer conservative legitimacy on McCain’s domestic and foreign agendas.  The remarkable thing about the choice is that it was done for transparently electoral reasons and appears at first glance to be a poor choice with respect to governance, but in reality Palin will likely prove to be an electoral liability, possibly costing McCain the election in the Midwest, and yet I think she would probably be a competent and effective Vice President despite her short time in statewide office.    

P.S.  The controversy over the firings of her state trooper ex-brother-in-law and the Public Safety Commissioner, which had already prompted the establishment of an investigation by the Alaska legislature last month, is also going to dog the campaign, whether or not Gov. Palin did anything wrong.  Correction: I misstated the nature of the controversy: Wooten, the ex-brother-in-law, was not fired, but Monegan, the Public Safety Commissioner, was fired.  It was the questionable nature of Monegan’s firing, which may or may not have been done in retribution for his refusal to fire Wooten, that drew complaints and prompted the legislature to authorize an investigation.

Update: Of course, it will be more difficult for the party regulars to blame the loss on a Buchananite if she insists that she never supported Buchanan.  Apparently, she did not support him in the 2000 election.

There are any number of theories offered for the tightness. One is that Obama is too temperamentally aloof for most Americans. ~Andrew Sullivan

The word choice here caught my attention.  Over the last few months, I have noticed “aloof” being used more and more often to describe Obama.  This jumps out at me because I remember using it back in February to describe him, or more precisely to predict how he would be perceived in the general election and why this would end up being his downfall:

The reason why the relatively more wonkish, detail-oriented candidates repeatedly come up short is that they confuse a display of competence and understanding with demonstrating intense expertise with the specifics of their policies, which matter primarily to interest groups, bloggers and box-checking ideological gnomes.  Romney could run rings around McCain and Huckabee with his expertise, but that didn’t matter.  The same has been true with Clinton in her struggle with Obama. 

All the things that horrify a republican about mass democracy–the identitarianism, the ”gut-level connection,” the vacuous rhetoric and the cheap, manipulative symbolism–help to explain why we end up with the candidates we do, and they will explain why the aloof, relatively more expert candidate in the general election, Obama, will end up losing.  

Tagging Obama as aloof was not entirely new in February, but my commenters at the time thought I was off the mark.  Politico apparently made the same claim in a December ’07 article.  However, I think the aloofness goes hand in hand with the wonkishness and expertise, so that while it is electorally a problem it is a signal of other desirable qualities.  It’s just not often the case that someone with this combination prevails in a popular election.  Most of McCain’s critics probably think that it deals him a serious blow to describe McCain as a visceral, emotionally-driven person, but I think those of us who are against McCain (regardless of whether we are for Obama) make a mistake if we treat this as an electoral weakness, just as we are missing something when we emphasize how little McCain knows about any policy questions.  They are the sources of his strength as a candidate, and I suspect that they are part of the explanation for why he continues to run far ahead of the generic GOP candidate.     

P.S. Extra points for identifying the origin of the title.  It’s not hard, but I thought I would try something a bit less serious before I go on vacation.