Remarking on recent Spanish successes in sports and elsewhere, Steven Stark adds:

Barack Obama recently returned from a celebrated international tour, where he stopped in Germany, France, and England. Alas, it was a political sightseeing trip better suited to the politics of the continent a century ago, before the outbreak of World War I. No Spain, no central Europe, not to mention no East Asia. Obama’s “New World” looked an awful lot like the old one.

Well, I suppose, but think about the foreign and domestic political implications of all this and the amount of time required to pay attention to rising countries and Asian allies.  Visiting Spain would have provoked countless attacks along the lines of “Obama visits Zapatero, who abandoned the war in Iraq and surrendered to terror…just like Obama would!”  These would be hyperbolic, absurd attacks, as the attacks on Zapatero have been, but it would not be the sort of meeting Obama wants to be seen having four months before an election.  If he went to central Europe, which countries would he visit and which ones would he end up skipping (and thus implicitly slighting) in the interests of time?  In terms of the capacity to project power, economic might and population, Britain, France and Germany remain the foremost countries in Europe and, at least in that sense, they are our most important allies in Europe.  East Asia is filled with political landmines, and going there would also draw attention to the rather glaring omission of East Asian issues from all of his relevantforeign policy statements.  If his Russia policy is scanty, his recently stated policy for China could easily be confused for what passes for McCain’s, and his policies for Korea and Japan are essentially unknown.  While it is not in East Asia, India appears nowhere in his major statements, and the extent of his campaign’s references to U.S.-Indian relations is, so far as I know, his campaign’s dismissive description of Hillary Clinton as the Senator for Punjab.  To his credit, Obama prioritized his visits with current U.S. needs and major alliances in mind, but his choice of locations is also a reminder that there are many allies in Asia, including some of our most important long-term trading partners, he has not touched on very much at all in his public remarks.

Despite being endorsed by Steve Cohen, the representative for TN-09, and despite a wave of crude attacks on Cohen from the challenger Nikki Tinker that make the anti-Obama McCain ads look like children’s programming, Obama has not endorsed Cohen, the overwhelming favorite for re-nomination in a majority black district today, on the dubious grounds that he doesn’t want to interfere in a primary.  As FirstRead’s Mark Murray points out, however, Obama was willing to do a radio spot endorsing John Barrow in Georgia (who did not endorse until after Obama won the Georgia primary), much to the consternation of progressive bloggers. 

Even though he has a vastly more progressive record than his predecessor, Harold Ford, and he is the incumbent, Cohen did not receive the backing of the candidate he endorsed on the eve of Super Tuesday.  Unlike many members of the CBC, which Cohen briefly considered joining because of the composition of his district before the Caucus leadership told him to go away, Cohen backed Obama when there was little obvious advantage in doing so.  While this move on his part may have helped him with his constituents, this seems to be another case of Obama forgetting about the people who helped propel him to where he is today.  For progressives, it is just another warning that he will not stand up for progressive candidates even when they are very popular incumbents.

Update: An angle to this story that has since occurred to me is that Obama may have refrained from endorsing Cohen because of the latter’s opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution last year.  As longtime readers will remember, I have urged the adoption of this resolution in recognition that the Armenians did suffer from a planned genocidal campaign during WWI, and I had a column making that case in TAC last November (one of my most unpopular columns so far!).  Obama was and remains a supporter of recognition, and it might be that Obama knows about the strong opposition to Cohen from Armenian-American activists that would make him wary of endorsing Cohen.  That might resolve the apparent contradiction with the Barrow endorsement, since Barrow was a co-sponsor of the resolution.  All of that must remain speculative.  In the end, Cohen threw his support to Obama early on and has not been repaid for his loyalty.

Second Update: Check in with our man in Tennessee, A.C. Kleinheider, for Tennessee primary results and commentary.  As he reports, an additional aspect of this story is that Tinker is seen as representing the Ford family rivalry with Cohen, which dates back to the Ford-Cohen face-off in 1996, and Harold Ford Jr.’s wife donated the maximum to Tinker’s campaign.  Ford has now denounced Tinker’s tactics, which Kleinheider considers a very significant move for any Memphis-based pol.

Certainly, greater religious intensity and more frequent religious practice among evangelicals may account for why they are more likely to be pro-life than Catholics, but there are probably a couple of other reasons that may be equally important.  Just as Ross has observed when discussing Obama and “the Catholic vote,” Catholics are more or less fully assimlated in American society and so an article that highlights the divided views of American Catholics on abortion is a bit like an article headlined, “Americans Disagree About Controversial Issue, May Affect Election.”  

As Kilgore suggests, Catholics are on the whole more accommodating of mainstream American culture, while evangelicals make considerable conscious effort (however unsuccessful) to belong to a counter-culture or, perhaps to be more accurate, many seek to establish political markers in lieu of a real counter-culture while creating their own versions of mainstream cultural products.  As Kilgore correctly observes, “they [evangelicals] are famously enthusiastic about adopting contemporary culture in their own liturgical and missionary practices,” but this should be understood as a case of appropriation rather than accommodation and acceptance.  At the same time, my guess is that American Catholics are relatively more pro-choice as a group than their counterparts in other industralized countries for a few reasons.  First, there is no tradition of organized political Catholicism or Christian Democracy here as there is in many European countries, and the history anti-Catholicism in U.S. politics may have discouraged the expression of political views that could be directly related to Catholic Church teaching, so there has not been a natural vehicle for mobilizing Catholic voters in the same way as in, say, Bavaria.  There is also probably a certain reluctance to breach the mythical “wall of separation” that dovetails nicely with the current Democratic platform.  Many American Catholics remain tied to the party supported by their ancestors, that party has since become adamantly pro-choice and a generation of Democratic Catholic office-holders has promoted the idea that one can support legal abortion without compromising Catholicism, which combines with the very American resistance to obeying episcopal authority in “private” matters that has grown up in the Catholic Church in the U.S. in the last few decades. 

This helps to explain why Obama’s position on abortion, as thoroughly pro-choice as it is, will not hurt him much among white Catholic voters, whose support for Obama keeps growing, and it will continue to drive evangelicals away from him.  This has indeed been happening according to the last Pew survey, as Obama lost five points among evangelicals to fall to a lowly 20% and gained seven points to take the lead among white, non-Hispanic Catholics.  This is why Obama will not make a “move to the center” on abortion: all things considered, it is unnecessary.

Quoth the mayor of Newark:

I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East.

It seems to me that Cory Booker should be in a different line of work if he wants people to ask him about nonproliferation, much less run to him to talk about Middle Eastern politics.  This came from an interesting part of Matt Bai’s article on whether Obama represented “the end of black politics,” which included Booker’s remarks that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed simply as a black leader and identified with the standard issues of “profiling by police, incarceration rates, [and] flagging urban economies.”  While I suppose this desire is understandable if a politician aspires to statewide or national office, I still find it rather odd.  Presumably, whatever one thinks about typical Democratic views on these issues, the Democrats who espouse them think that they are representing their constituents’ interests by taking these positions.  Whether they are, in fact, representing their constituents’ best interests is the subject of debate, but it does seem a little curious that a politician wouldn’t want to be identified with issues on which he thinks he has the right ideas.  It seems to me that there are many Republicans who have this same defensive attitude when it comes to social issues (John McCain leaps to mind), as if they are glad to receive votes and take money from donors on the basis of these things but are clearly embarrassed to be associated with the people and the issues in question.  It is fitting, I suppose, that this dynamic seems to apply most to the issues important to those two constituencies that provide the most loyal support for their respective parties–blacks and socially conservative Christians–and are most taken for granted by the parties. 

On the right, there is the same desire to break out of stereotypes, whether it is Sam Brownback talking about Darfur and prison reform or Rick Santorum pushing debt relief for developing countries, but at least on the Republican side this has the unfortunate effect of strengthening the worst activist and interventionist tendencies already present in the party.  The effort to carve out a different political identity that goes beyond a relatively “narrow” social issue focus unfortunately seems to result in something of a grab-bag agenda that adopts faddish proposals in no small part for their ability to shock and surprise journalists and political opponents.  It’s worth pondering which bad Democratic habits will be reinforced as black politicians become more prominent as state and national leaders.

John Schwenkler points us to this summary of an appearance by Rick Santorum at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life:

After he’d accused Obama and other Democrats of religoius fraudulance for a few minutes, journalist Terry Mattingly of GetReligion.org asked whether it’s possible that rather than being fake, perhaps,Obama was sincerely reflecting a form of liberal Christianity in the tradition of Reinhold Neibuhr. Santorum surprised me by answering that yes, “I could buy that.”

However, he questioned whether liberal christianity [sic] was really, well, Christian. “You’re a liberal something, but your not a Christian.” He continued, “When you take a salvation story and turn it into a liberation story you’ve abandoned Christiandom [sic] and I don’t think you have a right to claim it.”

The troubling thing I find in the summary is not that a Republican imputes bad (or rather non-existent) faith to professing Christians in the other party, since it is also pretty much standard fare for liberals to get on their own soapboxes and assure everyone that real Christians could never support a given GOP policy, or they may insist that it is hypocritical to confess Christ and endorse, say, tax cuts.  (Sometimes, when it comes to things as heinous as legal abortion, torture or aggressive war, there is certainly a valid argument that Christians shouldn’t support such things, but that would apply to Christians on both left and right.)  It’s not a particularly attractive habit, but it is one that we come to expect from partisans.  What I find troubling is that Santorum feels free to see-saw between the correct understanding that he cannot know–and should not judge–whether Obama’s faith is sincere and the partisan talking point that he joined his church only for political advantage.  God alone knows all the reasons why Obama joined his church, and if that’s true you cannot conclude categorically that Obama joined his church simply for political gain.  (Was there a political dimension to his membership?  Of course there was, and it would be a bit surprising if that weren’t somewhat true for politically engaged conservative Christians as well.)

In fact, Santorum’s critique of liberal Christianity as theologically deficient or misguided is where he is on the strongest ground, because doctrine is something that can and should be assessed critically.  It is quite reasonable to conclude that Obama, among others, is a sincere liberal Protestant who is therefore going theologically awry because he is a sincere liberal Protestant, but you cannot simultaneously find fault with his doctrine while also saying that he doesn’t really believe it and then expect to be taken seriously.  It is one thing to say that a given church or doctrine lacks the fullness of the truth and is therefore necessarily spiritually lacking, but it is something else all together to claim that those who believe in that doctrine are engaged in a massive fraud by merely pretending to believe.  The first is a reasonable, defensible position, while the second is pretty much baseless character assassination.

The McCain and Obama campaigns are mirror opposites. Mr. McCain offers little biography, while Mr. Obama is nothing but. ~Karl Rove

This is ludicrous, and it surprises me a little that even someone as dishonest as Karl Rove would try to pass off this most blatant of lies.  McCain offers little biography?  The candidate who went on a self-styled Biography Tour offers little biography?  Then there was the small matter of his first national ad: it was so substance-free and obsessed with McCain’s time in Vietnam that the name of the ad was McCain’s serial number!  Even his campaign’s motto, “Country First,” is a continual reminder of how he wants to present his wartime service as his definitive qualification for office.  It’s true that Obama’s candidacy is founded on his biography, but so is McCain’s, and what is strange about this claim is implication that McCain has reached this point in the election on the basis of his firm grounding in policy expertise.  I’m not sure the already blissfully message-free McCain campaign can become even more centered on McCain’s biography than it already is.

It is now common ask why Obama does not have a larger lead in national polls, and it is reasonable for Democrats to worry about what this means for the autumn given the recent history of Republican polling gains as the election approaches, but the argument that Obama “should” be doing better right now is based in large part on the assumption that the intense anti-GOP mood ought to translate into a landslide victory that Obama is so far “failing” to win.  Of course, he’s still winning and he’s currently projected to improve on his predecessor’s Electoral College tally by 45 votes at the least.  This does not have the makings of another 1932, as some Democrats may have hoped, or even another 1952, as I had long assumed it would because of the unpopularity of Bush and the war, but bears closest resemblance to 1976.  Given the greater, earlier engagement of much of the electorate in this cycle, the increased speed with which most of the electorate has been informed about the candidates and the increase in the sheer amount of electoral coverage online and on cable, it could be that the old, gaudy double-digit Democratic leads that previous nominees used to run up in the summer and proceeded to lose in the autumn (as in ’76 and ’88) are simply never going to happen again.    

There is not that much reason to expect that the presidential coalitions will have changed that much from the kind of polarization and evenly-divided electorate of the past two cycles.  This polarization is structural, for reasons Steve Sailer has made clear, which is confirmed in other ways in The Big Sort.  This is another reason why bipartisanship tends to be strongest in those areas of policy that are least representative of public opinion, since the divergent interests of polarized voting blocs will tend to increase the incentives for not cooperating with the opposing party.  At the same time, the more polarized the electorate is, the greater the importance of pulling in the remaining undecided voters, who are famously the last to start paying close attention to the election, which ensures that the major party candidates will try to minimize any stark differences between them.  Activists may prefer a choice rather than an echo, but electorally it is often less humiliating to be the echo who loses by two or three points rather than the choice that almost two-thirds of the electorate reject.   

What is interesting about this is that Obama’s campaign has gone out of its way to raise expectations about the outcome of this election.  He has sometimes said that the election is not going to be a tied contest with both campaigns fighting over a few voters in the middle in a couple of battleground states, but aside from the number of battleground states being contested that is more or less exactly the general election we are poised to have.  More recently in his controversial “dollar bill” remarks, he has said that no one really thinks the GOP has credible answers for any current challenges, which means that he is barely leading the representative of a party that is entirely bereft of any good policy ideas.  So there has been some encouragement from the campaign that Obama should be doing better than he is, when there is actually little reason why the two major political coalitions should have changed so much to allow Obama to move much beyond Kerry and Gore levels of support. 

Conceivably, a different Democratic nominee might be doing slightly better, and I am still convinced that nominating Obama was a blunder on the Democrats’ part for which we will all end up paying, but the disconcerting thing to realize is that even after eight years filled with illegal warfare, rampant criminality, the authorization of torture and numerous executive abuses of power the nominee of the party primarily responsible for all of this will probably still pull in 47-48% of the vote and maybe more.  Since most of the worst abuses were in the executive, the enduring strength of the Republican presidential coalition is particularly disturbing, since the people who have been held accountable for the administration’s wrongdoing have largely been merely the President’s lackeys and enablers in Congress rather than the authors of these policies.  In November we seem poised to throw out more of the lackeys from their relatively powerless perches in Congress.  Meanwhile, we may end up potentially rewarding one of the biggest enablers of the crimes of this administration with the executive power whose abuse he did little or nothing to challenge.

James will probably have more to say about this, and I can imagine that one of his first responses to the charge that Obama is a postmodernist would be to shrug and the second would be to laugh.  There are postmodernists on the left who are no doubt attracted to pomo methods and arguments because they want to subvert prevailing narratives and challenge established authorities that they find undesirable.  To one degree or another, conservatives have employed similar methods in attacking prevailing historical narratives and working to deconstruct liberal mythology about their revered heroes.  What is remarkable about Goldberg’s complaint against postmodernism is not just that he oversimplifies what it is, but that he does not seem to appreciate the irony that his defense of “old-fashioned literal truth” is the defense of a perfectly modern, positivist epistemology that assumes that objectivity exists, which is the product of a particular period of history.   

Of course, there is an argument, and a rather good one at that, that some traditional American conservatives either anticipated certain pomo critiques or came to similar conclusions.  This is not to say that Obama is therefore some sort of crypto-Kirkian or anything of the kind, but that traditional conservatives may appreciate the relationships between myth, power and language in ways that a pomo on the left might also find familiar, even though we would come to vastly different conclusions about what to do with this understanding.

In his Reason review of Gerald Russello’s book advancing this claim, my colleague Dan McCarthy writes:

Toward the end of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, the conservative scholar Gerald Russello insists, “The possible connections between…Kirk’s conservatism and postmodernism are more than a simple enemy-of-my-enemy stance toward liberalism.” His book makes a surprisingly strong case for that unlikely claim. But it also reinforces what is likely to be the reader’s first impression: that the lowest and surest common denominator between Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, and pomo theorists such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard lies in their shared antagonism toward the Enlightenment and liberalism in all its forms.

It is natural, then, that Goldberg, whose conservatism is more or less a warmed-over classical liberalism by his own admission (p. 402-403 in Liberal Fascism), would find postmodernism worrisome just as he has been put out by neo-traditional conservative and old European conservative arguments that challenge the liberal tradition in which he is working.  Of course, this reaction turns into a kind of self-parody when he describes Obama’s claim that words matter as one “sounding like a sorcerer offended by the suggestion that magic incantations are mere sounds.”  Of course, the idea that words and names do not possess significance is similar to the nominalism that exercised Richard Weaver for so much of his career; the understanding that control over the definition of words is a source of power was ancient when Orwell talked about Newspeak, and it is also common sense.  Any student of modern propaganda must understand at some level that the words (and images) people use have real psychological and therefore political power.  In fact, I wager most conservatives today take for granted that “words matter,” if only in a negative way because conservatives are well-acquainted with the power of pejorative labels to dismiss and marginalize an argument and many of them are well-versed in using such labeling against other conservatives.  Even in this complaint against postmodernism, Goldberg himself is making a sort of pomo critique of how liberals have sought to control language and speech and set up their own set of norms, which, as we regularly complain, are designed to empower them and advance their agenda.  As a regular part of his criticism of the left, Goldberg delights in “incredulity toward metanarratives,” the definition of postmodernism Dan cited from Lyotard in his review, but the metanarratives he chooses to question and critique are different from those critiqued by left pomos.  There is nothing at all wrong with this, but it does tend to make it seem much less outrageous that Obama has postmodern tendencies. 

The problem with most of the statements Goldberg critiques is not that they reflect a pomo sensibility, but that they are pretty clearly efforts at deceiving the public.

Via Andrew, Jeffrey Goldberg contemplates the problems an Iranian bomb might create: 

Something else changes: Terrorist groups that threaten, or have threatened, American targets – terrorists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon – will come under the protection of the Iranian nuclear umbrella. Hezbollah’s rockets have helped the group establish a local deterrent to Israeli attack; an Iranian bomb would strengthen Hezbollah in Lebanon, and well beyond Lebanon. 
An Iranian bomb would also set off new tension between India and Pakistan, an ally of Saudi Arabia that would almost certainly turn to Pakistan for help with its program, making the Indians, who are already distressingly close to India [sic], exceedingly nervous.

I assume that he means to refer to the relations between Iran and India in this last sentence, since India has been building the same sort of strategic relationship with Iran that it is now cultivating with Afghanistan in an effort to check Pakistan on two sides.  Including Pakistan and India in the discussion is important, because it is not possible to understand an Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons without bearing in mind its long-running rivalry with Pakistan for influence in Afghanistan and in the region generally and the perceived need to match Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal with one of its own.  An Iranian bomb would complicate the situation and could encourage more proliferation, but one can also see how it could make an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange even less likely.  If two of Pakistan’s neighbors have a nuclear deterrent, the consequences of using its weapons become even more disastrous and so, one assumes, less likely.  

While it would be ideal if no states possessed nuclear weapons and the increase in the size of the nuclear club makes total nuclear disarmament even more difficult, there is some reason to believe that as more states acquire nuclear weapons there will be fewer occasions for large international conflicts because of the severe dangers that would come from escalating any disputes into a full-scale war.  The Kargil war in ’99, in which Pakistan’s military tested the limits of how much aggression its newfound arsenal would permit, could have escalated into a larger conflict, but it was in some significant part because both states had nuclear weapons that ultimately neither expanded the conflict.  As more states acquire these weapons, which would seem to be a more or less unavoidable consequence of globalization and the spread of technologies, low-intensity and proxy conflicts will probably become the norm even more than they already have done.  If we think of them as attempts to thwart the spread of knowledge and technology that is part and parcel of the global economy, wars for nonproliferation are a bit like fighting against the waves.

Meanwhile, the last time Hizbullah really threatened American targets was in the ’80s, so even when we are trying to discuss the consequences of an Iranian bomb beyond Israel’s security concerns we keep coming back to talking about threats to Israel.

Earlier, Goldberg asks:

Can we really live with a Middle East that has eight or ten nuclear powers?

It seems very improbable that there would be that many.  It is not difficult to imagine an Iranian bomb prompting Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to try to acquire a bomb, and Syria might follow suit, but I don’t see how we get to eight or ten states.  All of those, together with Israel, would still make for six new nuclear states, of which the Saudis are probably the most worrisome.

At the same time, instead of discouraging Afghan-Indian ties, as Kaplan recommends, the U.S. needs exactly this kind of strategic balancing to succeed to make clear to Pakistan’s military establishment that Afghanistan is not the ISI’s playground any longer.  India has a permanent, vested interest in cultivating a strong, stable Afghanistan; our interests here, while important, are transitory and will end in the near future.  Our presence there will eventually end, so in the interests of regional stability Afghanistan needs to have powerful regional allies that can counter the most dangerous elements within Pakistan’s military.

In his last interview, conducted last summer, Solzhenitsyn had some important words for all of us.  Responding to a question about the danger that there will be no accounting for the crimes of the Soviet government, he said:

As for “brooding over the past”, alas, that conflation of “Soviet” and “Russian”, against which I spoke so often in the 1970s, has not passed away in the West, or in the ex-socialist countries, or in the former Soviet republics [bold mine-DL]. The elder political generation in communist countries was not ready for repentance, while the new generation is only too happy to voice grievances and level accusations, with present-day Moscow a convenient target. They behave as if they heroically liberated themselves and lead a new life now, while Moscow has remained communist.  Nevertheless, I dare hope that this unhealthy phase will soon be over, that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.  

Solzhenitsyn also warned against an anti-Russian essentialism:

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country. One should not attribute this to the “sick psychology” of the Russians, as is often done in the West.

Addressing the decline in relations between Russia and the West, he observed:

The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a “knight of democracy” has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West’s reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

He also expressed concern about the missed opportunity of forging a more stable alliance with Russia earlier in the decade:

But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West’s irrational refusal of this hand. No sooner did the US accept Russia’s critically important aid in Afghanistan than it started making newer and newer demands. As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears.