Larry Hunter takes Obamacon enthusiasm to its logical extreme and simply pretends* that Obama’s domestic policy isn’t the domestic agenda he will pursue:

Plus, when it comes to domestic issues, I don’t take Obama at his word. That may sound cynical. But the fact that he says just about all the wrong things on domestic issues doesn’t bother me as much as it once would have. After all, the Republicans said all the right things – fiscal responsibility, spending restraint – and it didn’t mean a thing. It is a sad commentary on American politics today, but it’s taken as a given that politicians, all of them, must pander, obfuscate and prevaricate.

This is roughly as persuasive as Philip Klein’s attempts to discount everything Obama says about foreign policy and national security and assume that he is, in fact, a secret McGovernite/appeaser who wishes Israel harm.  What I find remarkable is that Hunter will take Obama at his word on the war and then conveniently overlook everything else in Obama’s record and his foreign and security policies that suggests that Obama’s credibility as an antiwar politician is quite poor.  In general, Obama proposes an activist, hawkish foreign policy and accepts the use of essentially all the surveillance powers that Mr. Bush received or usurped, and his position on Israel policy is indistinguishable from that of the current administration.  None of this satisfies Klein, just as apparently none of it worries Hunter. 

The worrisome thing about Obama is that it seems you generally can take him at his word when he stakes out a policy position, and most of what he has said he will do is quite awful, especially when judged from an antiwar, constitutionalist conservative perspective.  On the whole, when he has reversed himself substantively it has been in the opposite direction away from those few things that antiwar conservatives have found appealing.  In the last six weeks, he has adopted a more confrontational attitude towards Iran than he had displayed before (and he does this at a time when the Bush administration has started becoming more interested in negotiation!), caved on Fourth Amendment protections and has at the very least “shifted emphasis” on Iraq.  With the opening of intermediate-level negotiations with the Iranians, one of Obama’s signature issues has been co-opted by the sitting administration after he had started to adopt a more belligerent tone regarding the Kyl-Lieberman amendment.  Certainly, this formal opening to Iran is interesting and probably good news, but it also deprives Obama of one of the few aspects of foreign policy in which he remains reasonably distinct from Mr. Bush.   

Of course, you can still argue that Obama is marginally preferable to the even more hawkish, pro-security state candidate in McCain and you can insist that third-party voting is useless, but as the two candidates “converge” it is Obama who is gradually losing whatever attractive features he may have once had in the eyes of antiwar conservatives.  There are tactical “moves to the center,” and then there are capitulations to establishment positions.  The only reason to expect that Obama will abandon his central domestic agenda proposals once in office is if the political pressure to push them through Congress is substantially weaker than the pressure resisting them.  That seems obvious, and perhaps it is, but it goes to the heart of why Obamacon arguments such as Hunter’s make no sense: the preference for avoiding confrontation and political risk that makes Obama potentially less of a concern on domestic policy is the same preference that will ensure that everything Hunter likes about Obama is also going to vanish or diminish after the election.  Put another way, Hunter is basically hoping that Obama proves to be such a weak President that he cannot advance his domestic policy agenda, but that he is also such a tremendously dynamic and effective President that he will be able to restore compromised civil liberties, end the war in Iraq and resist entanglement in a new war with Iran.  That is a pretty rare combination.

P.S.  Actually, Hunter hopes that Obama will be like JFK, but if we took this comparison on its face this would mean that Hunter hopes Obama will be inclined to cut taxes but will botch every major foreign policy decision he ever makes, which would be the exact opposite of Hunter’s stated reasons for supporting him.

* I should clarify: Mr. Hunter doesn’t really pretend this, but simply doesn’t care one way or the other, as he says towards the end:

But here’s the thing: Even if my hopes on domestic policy are dashed and Obama reveals himself as an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool, big-government liberal, I’m still voting for him.

Reveals himself?  He hasn’t been hiding his agenda.  What does Mr. Hunter think Obama has been proposing to do for the last year and a half if not drastically expand the government’s size and role?  What happens when his hopes on civil liberties and foreign policy are also dashed?  This seems relevant, since it is already happening.

Ross and Chris Hayes discuss the New Yorker cover, the Obama campaign and more here.

This is a good example of why creating averages of polls can be a problem.  First of all, the averages for the presidential race, whether at Pollster or RCP, incorporate polls (such as the methodologically suspect June Newsweek survey and the LAT/Bloomberg poll) that are entirely unlike all others that skew the average in a certain direction.  Second, the “average” acquires a strange, almost canonical authority because it includes a number of polling results rather than being subject to the flaws of any particular poll, and people then invoke the average as if it were more authoritative rather than being correctly understood as less precise.  For the purposes of measuring overall momentum, averages can be useful, but when you include everything from typically reliable Rasmussen and Gallup numbers to the volatile Zogby results to the ridiculous PPP you are going to have an average that splits the difference between meaningful and useless.  This is not really to defend Dick Morris, but when he says that Obama’s lead had virtually disappeared in the Rasmussen tracking poll, he was stating something that is demonstrably true.  In the days since he wrote that, a small Obama lead has reappeared, but Obama’s position remains virtually identical to what it was six weeks ago at the end of the Democratic primaries, and for three consecutive days last week the candidates were separated by no more than one point.  Dick Morris is wrong about enough things that we don’t need to impute more errors to him than he already makes on his own.

Update: Sullivan draws attention to Mr. Koffler’s comment below.  I should have made clear in the post that I don’t attach significance to the movement of one tracking poll by a couple points that lasts for two or three days.  I certainly didn’t agree with Morris’ larger contention that this movement was a consequence of various Obama reversals.  Mr. Koffler explains where I’ve gone wrong here, and I appreciate the useful correction to my mistake.  Finally, I stated things in this post quite clumsily, particularly in the line about difference-splitting.

I can hardly stand “what our team needs to do” sorts of books. Pretty much all democratic partisan politics is irredeemably nationalist, and I really get tired of largely morally bogus debates about whether caring for poor people means we need to bribe people to get married or to move more money from really rich Americans to relatively rich but not-so-rich-for-Americans Americans, or both. ~Will Wilkinson on Grand New Party

Wilkinson would prefer instead morally bogus debates about whether caring for the poor means abolishing borders and swamping our country with millions of immigrants.  For my part, I get really tired of Wilkinson’s lectures about things and people he identifies as “nationalist,” when he has made it quite clear over the years that he makes no distinction between nationalism and patriotism, lauds others who fail to make this distinction and in any case doesn’t understand what patriotism is.

Ross replies to my earlier post on the Bishirjian essay and Ross’ response to it, and I take his point when he writes:

Actually, the fact that Bishirjian’s essay made many theoretical points with which I agreed was precisely why I thought his completely unimaginative, Limbavian proposals for what conservatives ought to actually do were worth highlighting.

This is fair, and I think I should add that there are several things that paleo and traditional conservatives will find frustrating about the essay.  In Bishirjian’s defense, the essay was not exactly a policy paper and was more of a diagnosis of the current predicament and a statement of what being conservative in such a predicament means, which is why his flirtations with policy proposals are bound to be unsatisfying to anyone, especially those who have just immersed themselves in domestic policy details for many years.  All the more reason why it would have been better to omit them or refocus the proposals on just one thing to show how policy might be profitably changed to advance the strengthening of intermediate institutions (and not just settling for repeals as the essence of policymaking).  Bishirjian’s contrast between national historic sites and theme parks (in which the theme parks were considered preferable because they were privately operated) was undoubtedly one of the most unfortunate parts of his argument, and it seemed to me that this contrast partook, as I hinted before, of an enthusiasm for technological progress and market forces that is not entirely in agreement with his concern to cultivate strong community institutions. 

Having made the case for some of the merits of Bishirjian’s essay before (and I expect I will have more to say about them in later posts), I should say that I found the grab-bag of specific policy proposals mentioned in the essay to be the weaker part of the essay.  Ross is right that instituting a flat tax wouldn not fundamentally change the structure or power of the federal government:

An administrative state funded entirely by a flat tax would, I suspect, look exactly like the one we have today, except the tax burden would be more regressive.

One of the ways the grab-bag of specific policy proposals weakens the essay is that it takes up space that might be used to elaborate on what Bishirjian’s idea of “ordered living” would look like in practice.  For instance, when he urges us to “educate ourselves in the wonderful literature of the West and in the recovery of philosophy that émigré conservative scholars from Western Europe brought to this nation when they were exiled from West, East, and Central Europe,” that implies an enormous amount of vocational work in building and funding schools and staffing them with teachers who are dedicated to instructing people in something between a classical liberal arts curriculum and a Great Books program.  On the college level, it might look very much like St. John’s in Santa Fe, but in earlier stages it is not necessarily as clear how it would be applied.     

To that end, to the extent that he was going to mention education reform, discussing how and why present-day secondary and post-secondary education does not provide this and how it might be changed would have been more relevant to the desired ends that Bishirjian seeks.  Bishirjian seems to suggest that this educational effort must precede the “preservation and growing” of private institutions, but what seems to be lacking is any idea that there should be the establishment of new institutions, namely schools.  However, new schools would seem to be necessary, since there are very few that would seem to offer anything like the curriculum Bishirjian supports.  More to the point, many, many new private schools will need to be built and staffed if there is to be anything like an interruption of the public near-monopoly on primary and secondary education and if there is to be any likelihood of an improvement in the relative quality of the education received there.  This then raises a host of other very practical questions, starting with a basic one: who is paying for this?  That is, who is covering the financial costs that funding all these new private schools will impose?  At the root of it, though, is a more basic problem: where will one find the teachers?  As I have said more than a few times, one of the reasons why conservatives are underrepresented in educational institutions is that they, we, tend to go into other lines of work and are uninterested in or unattracted to the steady, consistent cultural work of education.  Put another way, conservatives have largely been losing the culture wars because they are not even actively contesting much of the ground. 

The other, more obvious question is: who actually wants such a change in the way education is structured?  School choice is routinely repudiated by middle class, suburban voters, because they see it as a threat to their reasonably good, well-funded school districts.  As Ross and Reihan note in their book and again in the recent article, “The real educational crisis for most suburban families is a crisis of affordability, in which home prices and tax rates in above-average school districts climb as ambitious parents struggle to give their children a leg up.”  If this is an “educational arms race” with ever-rising costs, the logic of Bishirjian’s proposal would probably mean still more significant escalation.

Some good news for a change.  Via Nick Gillespie comes the word that Patrick Syring, the State Department official who was harrassing members of the Arab-American Institute, has been sentenced to one year in prison for the threats he made against James Zogby and others.  Thanks to the commentary by George Ajjan, I first noted the Syring case last August when he had been indicted.

This is by way of saying that George Ajjan’s blog is an invaluable resource, and I’m glad to see that he has returned to blogging after the unfortunate defeat of Senate primary candidate Murray Sabrin, whom George was supporting very actively.

Why anyone would be inclined to heed the requests of buffoons at lgf, I have no idea, but it is useful to remember that the thought policing of the conservative movement on matters related to Israel is constant, obnoxious and tiresome.  A war with Iran is actually in the interests of neither the Israeli people nor those of the American people, and it is not in the interest of the region as a whole, either.  Mr. Buchanan continues to do invaluable service to our country in making the necessary arguments against wars that are not in the national interest.  In his latest column, he said:

No ally, no client state, should ever be allowed to drag America into a war she has not chosen, constitutionally, to fight.

This is simply common sense and patriotism. 

Update: The geniuses at lgf have put in a redirect on the first link above, so there’s no point in clicking on it.  Suffice it to say, they are calling for banning Pat Buchanan from Townhall.com.

Ross responds to Richard Bishirjian’s rich and worthwhile essay from Modern Age with an observation:

Now here’s what I find interesting. Earlier in the essay, Bishirjian – good paleocon that he is – goes on a tear against the contemporary conservative movement, complete with a sneering reference to the jingos in “mass media Talk Radio.” Yet when it comes time to advance a domestic political agenda – one that’s in keeping with European philosophy, “ordered living,” and the Great Tradition of the West – his proposals are essentially identical to Rush Limbaugh’s preferred domestic policy!

It’s a little disappointing that of all the insightful points Mr. Bishirjian made about the threat of centralisation and regimentation to a sane and humane social order Ross finds the references to a flat tax and some kind of education reform to be the most interesting.  The link is to the NYT profile of Limbaugh, which includes his six-point list that overlaps in some places with policies Mr. Bishirjian supports.  What is notable about this and Ross’ ongoing spat with Limbaugh is that when it comes to practical politics Limbaugh and Ross are effectively in agreement about what the government should be doing far more often than Bishirjian and Limbaugh are.  Limbaugh may nonsensically complain that Ross and Reihan want to embrace the New Deal, as if the GOP hadn’t already abandoned overturning that agenda decades ago, but for all practical purposes Limbaugh generally proposes very little (except perhaps for Social Security privatisation) that could be fairly described as being in any way anti-New Deal. 

Bishirjian is proposing a thoroughgoing repeal of the centralised administrative state that has grown up over the last century, but while he is making many proposals that might find an audience in conventional GOP circles he is also making a fundamentally communitarian case for building up intermediate institutions that would probably give Limbaugh hives.  More fundamentally, in Bishirjian’s disdain for jingoists and advocates of the security state he is worlds away from Limbaugh even on domestic matters, who is arguably far more collectivist and statist than Ross in his uncritical embrace of the administration’s national security and foreign policies.  It is, of course, these same policies that vastly increase the power of the state that Limbaugh supposedly wants to constrain within some limits. 

The problem is not really with Bishirjian’s agreement with Limbaugh’s nods towards reducing the role of government, but with Limbaugh’s incoherent claim to be a defender of “limited government” when in practical terms he routinely favours the expansion of government powers when it is done in the name of security and war.  More to the point, the divergence between Bishirjian and someone like Limbaugh reappears on the domestic scene once it comes to the question of what should be done after the government has been reduced in size, since I’m reasonably confident that the phrase “ordered living” would terrify Limbaugh.  This comes back to the more basic disagreement between decentralists and reformers of the centralised administrative state: the former assume that the centralised administrative state is the enemy of the common good and of the preservation of a certain way of life, while reformers think that this state is in any case not going anywhere and must be redirected towards that preservation, which the decentralists believe to be impossible.    

P.S.  At the time same time, Bishirjian’s apparent enthusiasm for up-to-date technology is a bit disconcerting.

Atrios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven’t seen — oops, I shouldn’t have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites — but I haven’t come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. ~Gary Kamiya

That’s true.  You’d have to rely on Larry Johnson to come up with something like that.  But the flag in the fireplace isn’t much of an exaggeration at all of various false charges that Obama has no respect for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or what-have-you.  The hubbub over Obama’s “endorsement” by Hamas as some kind of “proof” that he was friendly to Hamas or bad for Israel and the basic assumption shared by many Republicans that leaving Iraq is “surrender” to Al Qaeda (or something like that) aren’t exaggerated very much by the picture of Bin Laden.  Considering how much trouble that Hamas “endorsement” caused Obama, I was amazed to see Christopher Beam finish his piece in Slatewith these words:

And, no, Obama’s fist bump was not a secret show of solidarity to Hezbollah. It’s really a secret show of solidarity to Hamas. Just kidding!

Yes, laugh all the way to McCain’s inauguration! 

Of course, it will take some enterprising chain e-mailer about five seconds to remove that last sentence and cite it as more “proof” of Obama’s abiding love of Hamas.  Anyone who has any familiarity with these chain e-mails knows that they are ripping Obama’s own words from The Audacity of Hope out of context to “prove” that he has some higher loyalty to Muslims, and this is being credulously circulated around all the time.  Sometimes critics will include the context and then ignore the significance of what it means when he wrote, “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”  Of course, he was writing here about American citizens who are Muslims, and he is talking about standing with them in the event that there are attempts to curtail their civil liberties.  Would that this supposedly ardent civil libertarian Obama had been voting to support a filibuster of the FISA legislation! 

It amazes me that we have just come out of an era in which roughly half the population was at one time certain that Saddam Hussein not only had operational ties to Al Qaeda (false) but was responsible for 9/11 (some embarrassingly large number of people still believe this), and yet we still get these harangues from Kamiya and The Los Angeles Times about how harmless and unimportant misinformation is.  “People aren’t that stupid!” they declare.  They’re not stupid, but they can be ignorant, and that ignorance can be exploited, just as the Bush administration did in its arguments concerning Iraq.  When national polls are finding that nearly 40% of the public believes Obama went to a religious madrassa (madrassa itself ultimately just means “school”) and about one out of eight people think he is a Muslim, you have to be strangely optimistic that this kind of misinformation won’t spread any more than it already has.        

I intend for this to be my last post commenting on this cover image matter, because one of the most damaging things that the image and controversy about it have done is to distract almost entirely from recent things related to The New Yorker that aren’t phenomenally stupid.  These would be the enormously important reports derived from Jane Mayer’s book on the torture and detention regime and, less importantly, also overshadowed Ryan Lizza’s interesting investigation into Obama’s Chicago political past.  The former is obviously of great importance to debates on national security, treatment of detainees and most of all to understanding what crimes were committed by members of the government.  The other has some notable points, the most important of which was this concluding one:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.

While I have tended to put it more harshly than this, this is what I have been arguing for some time now.  Obama is not interested in challening the status quo in any fundamental ways, and he has no interest in confronting powerful interests and lobbies.  This is why the people who are most critical of him because of his alleged “weakness” on Israel, antiterrorism or national security have been entirely wrong about him, while those who keep hoping that his hawkish gestures are only temporary are being taken for a ride.  The closer he gets to being elected, the more he will accommodate the Bush era status quo in all these areas.  Those who are basically satisfied with the foreign and national security policies of the last eight years can feel very comfortable knowing that they have two candidates who will reliably line up with them on almost everything.

In the course of the conversation, it became clear that Perot thought Obama was a Muslim. When I informed him that Obama was actually a Christian, Perot was relieved. He didn’t hate Obama; he just had an instinct to believe whatever he happened to see online over what he read in reputable newspapers. ~Jonathan Alter

All of this might also have something to do with the small problem that Perot has the reputation of being not quite right in the head, but that’s not entirely fair.  One must also ask what sources these people are using.  It isn’t as if “online” sources are uniformly awash in nonsense and gossip.  There are certain kinds of online media and certain sites that excel in misinformation, but there are just as many that don’t.  However, if a reasonably well-informed, albeit eccentric, billionaire can buy into such idiocy, there’s no telling who might be susceptible to it among all those voters who still have no idea what either candidate believes at this late stage in the election.  The notion that only die-hard rejectionists would entertain bizarre ideas about Obama gets things backwards in a lot of cases–some people become die-hard rejectionists because they come to believe bizarre things about him.  If many general election voters have only just started paying attention or won’t pay attention until the autumn, it doesn’t help when you have an image circulating since mid-July depicting the most terrible distortions about a candidate.  The Wright controversy exploded the way it did because there was a visual record, and people could watch Wright say what he said, which obviously gave the controversy more staying power and made Wright’s remarks more memorable than they might have otherwise been had they just been published in a transcript. 

It’s not surprising to see someone at the official Obama NewsletterNewsweek taking the view that I and many others have taken that the image is very damaging, but Alter is right to emphasise the power of images to override whatever arguments are set up against them.  Visual associations are powerful and readily remembered.  Propagandists and campaign communications directors (more or less the same thing in different guises) know this, which is why they spend so much time concerning themselves with presentation, atmospherics, backdrops and the like.  To take a less extreme example, the principal reason why McCain’s “green background” speech was regarded as a failure was its visual effect, and for the most part no one remembers what he said–only that he said it against a hideous green background and looked absurd.  Virtually everyone knows that how candidates appear at presidential debates have an influence on how they are perceived by their audience, and can even affect how the viewers decide whether one candidate or another prevailed.  People will remember this image long after many of them have forgotten the purpose of the artist in making it.       

Update: One of the responses I keep seeing is something like what the L.A. Times wrote in its editorial:

Obama’s campaign is deeply worried about the legions of morons who they apparently believe make up the heart of this great nation.

There is an idea that people who think the image will do real damage to Obama politically must be assuming that there are “legions of morons” or that there are some people too “unsophisticated” to grasp the obvious satire.  Here’s the problem: satire relies on an audience possessing sufficient knowledge to understand the references well enough to recognise that they are being used ironically.  It isn’t really a question of sophistication or lack thereof, and it isn’t even a question of intelligence.  What matters is how much voters already know about Obama and his wife.  To think everyone will “get” the joke as a joke, you have to assume that everyone has been following the election campaign as obsessively as political junkies and professional bloggers.  Of course, there has been a string of columns and articles discussing how relatively unknown Obama still is to much of the country, and yet to hear the defenses of the cover image you’d think that everyone has followed all the twists and turns of the campaign from Springfield till now. 

In fact, this is the high-information argument that takes for granted that everyone in the country already knows the maximal amount about every phony Obama controversy and also knows enough about Obama himself to know that the controversies are phony.  “Oh, yes, the burning flag in the image is rather like the one William Ayers once stepped on in protest of the government!  And we all know who William Ayers is, don’t we?  Very clever!”  This assumption is absolutely wrong, as any focus group with undecided and “swing” voters could tell you.  Given the characteristics of many undecided voters, you could not have come up with an image that was more likely to provoke undecided voters in all the wrong ways if the goal was to deprive the false charges of their power and influence in the election.     

In a new effort to “help” Obama yet again, the cartoonist for the Seattle P-I has done this mock-up of a cover for the McCains.  As everyone can see, a rather crucial difference between what the cartoonist did here and what the New Yorker cover did is that the things being used to mock McCain (rather than refute charges against him) have some significant basis in truth:

The two images aren’t really comparable, but they’re being treated here as if they are, which is actually to reduce the New Yorker image to its most plain, “literal” meaning as an exaggeration of real traits.  The first is a roundabout satire of false charges being made against the two figures, and the second is simply a caricature exaggerating certain truths about McCain (e.g., his age, support for the security state, his enthusiasm for killing Iranians, his wife’s former drug problem).  If you wanted to make an argument that the New Yorker image reflects some exaggerated form of “dangerous” truth about the Obamas, you would put it side by side with this McCain caricature as this presumably pro-Obama cartoonist has done.  Nice work.  Those of us who don’t support Obama should just get out of the way of his fans and let them drag him down.   

Second Update: The LAT editorial has another claim:

It may be that there are some spectacularly literal-minded Americans who will see the New Yorker’s over-the-top portrayal of Obama as a confirmation of their worst fears. But then, they weren’t going to vote for him anyway.

Of course, there’s no way for them to know that.  They assume that there are no potential Obama voters who could be swayed by misinformation and provocative images to vote for someone else, which is to project their own stereotype of the kinds of people who are likely to vote for Obama in the general election (i.e., people just like them).