Toby Harnden is a smart politcal correspondent for the Telegraph, but like a lot of observers this week he has a mistaken interpretation of Obama’s response to the death penalty ruling that came down on Thursday:

Obama’s a Mid-western senator rather than a Southern governor so he won’t have the opportunity Clinton had to fly back home to order the execution of a retarded man. But he did have the next best thing this week – the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision that quashed the execution of a Louisiana man who raped his eight-year-old daughter.

Without a blink, Obama aligned himself with the Court’s four conservative justices – John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – who had voted to uphold the death penalty for child rape. The father of girls aged nine and seven, he seized the opportunity to display populist revulsion and take a hard line against a despicable crime. Not for him the cool rationalism of Dukakis.

However, anyone who listened to Obama’s actual statement on the ruling would have been hard-pressed to find any “populist revulsion” in the man’s voice.  When reading it, there is no trace of “revulsion”:

I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable. That does not violate our Constitution.  Had the Supreme Court said, ‘We want to constrain the abilities of states to do this to make sure that it’s done in a careful and appropriate way,’ that would have been one thing. But it basically had a blanket prohibition and I disagree with that decision.

Whoa!  Calm down, Senator!  Obviously, Obama responded calmly and advanced a legal argument that the statute in question does not violate the Eighth Amendment.  As a matter of constitutional law, this seems right.  If his statement now counts as an expression of “populist revulsion,” we are definitely lowering the bar for what constitutes populism.

The nature of Obama’s response is not surprising.  Whatever the merits of a given position, Obama never expresses “populist revulsion” even when he is talking about a popular policy (e.g., ending the war) or even when he is demagoguing against NAFTA.  In his more recent flip on NAFTA, he referred to “overheated” rhetoric he used in the past, but the fact is that Obama never really uses “overheated” rhetoric; it is always pretty mild and tepid.  As many people have observed, Obama remains reserved and calm, and he tries to avoid flashes of anger, which are pretty much a requirement if you want to engage in some “populist revulsion” against elites, judicial or otherwise.  This reserved, calm persona is one of the things about his style that attracted conservative admirers and alienated some of the more, er, opinionated progressives.  If he risks being likened to Dukakis, I think his campaign considers that a risk worth taking if the alternative is being caricatured as a politician filled with anger or ridiculed like Dean after “the scream.”  

It may be that conservative talk radio hosts are blundering when they mocked his response earlier this week, but Obama’s response to the death penalty ruling only confirmed in their minds the similarities with someone like Dukakis.  Indeed, one of the things that most of Obama’s admirers like to stress is precisely his “cool rationalism,” which is not necessarily something that disqualifies Obama in the minds of most intelligent observers, but this was a potentially damaging perception that Bill Clinton managed to avoid.  That was a large part of the political advantage for Clinton’s sympathy shtick: it created, or tried to create, an emotional connection with voters that eluded wonkish and legalistic pols.

Kimberly Aldinger, 45, of Seven Valleys, a dialysis technician who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, is open to Obama but “until I see what he wants to change and how he’s going to change it, I am totally undecided.”

Sheryl Randol, 51, a single mother of three who works for a pharmaceutical company, wants to see the Iraq war ended but doesn’t know enough about either candidate.

Obama “has to show me that he’s got the intelligence and the people around him to make a difference globally,” she says. “I want to see concrete plans, not just spin.” ~Paul West

Reading about undecided voters is always an extremely frustrating experience.  Granted, I spend much more time reading, thinking, writing and talking about politics than most people, and I am following the campaign even more closely as a blogger than I have done for any other presidential election, but these sorts of statements drive me right up the wall.  I do understand that normal, sane people don’t want to spend much of their time thinking about politics, I know most folks are very busy with their own affairs, and I freely acknowledge that there is something odd about those of us who follow it very closely.  Even so, there is still no excuse for trotting out these justifications at this point.  The presidential campaign has been going on for almost a year and a half, primary voting on the Democratic side went on for six months and we had a mind-killing 20 debates, and the general election is now just a little over four months away.  I don’t accept these cop-outs that any of the candidates have failed to “show” voters enough or that their proposals and plans are somehow still vague and undefined.  If undecided voters are too busy, too uninterested or simply can’t be bothered to pay attention, that’s all well and good, but let’s not pretend that they can’t make up their minds because the coverage hasn’t been substantive enough or the plans aren’t specific enough.  We hear this refrain about wanting to see “concrete plans” every election cycle, and every cycle we hear this after months and months of being inundated with such plans.  How can someone who wants to see the war in Iraq ended not know by now which one is opposed to it?  It defies understanding. 

Even if you accept Chris Hayes’ explanation that undecided voters think politics is important, but don’t like doing political things, that doesn’t excuse such incredible disengagement.  Hayes likened the undecided voter’s attitude toward politics to his own dislike of doing laundry; I would compare it to my dislike of driving.  Even though I don’t like doing it, I do bother to acquaint myself with traffic laws and some minimal familiarity with how to maintain a car.  If some people think of politics as a chore, you’d think they would at least make the effort to do that chore reasonably well.

Responding to Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer, James writes:

Well, they did have a clear strategy for ’solving’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But when Clinton offered it to Arafat, Arafat rejected it.

Up to a point, yes, but a strategy that is “clear” may also be clearly unacceptable to the other side for reasons that go beyond stubborn rejectionism.  But then the “clarity” of the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict has been exaggerated.  In the case of the 2000 Camp David deal, we were regularly told about how generous and extensive the deal offered to the Palestinians was, and everyone already took for granted that Arafat was awful, so when he rejected it most of us (at least those of us in America) accepted the official story that the deal was excellent and rejecting it was “proof” that there was simply no use in negotiating with the Palestinians.  One of the reasons why it was supposed to be controversial for Obama to have Robert Malley as an advisor (regardless of how peripheral or minor he was) before the Hamas business was that Malley had once had the poor taste to argue publicly that the 2000 deal wasn’t necessarily very good and rejecting it wasn’t so unreasonable:

The Palestinians saw acceptance of the US ideas, even as “bases for further negotiations,” as presenting dangers of its own. The Camp David proposals were viewed as inadequate: they were silent on the question of refugees, the land exchange was unbalanced, and both the Haram and much of Arab East Jerusalem were to remain under Israeli sovereignty. To accept these proposals in the hope that Barak would then move further risked diluting the Palestinian position in a fundamental way: by shifting the terms of debate from the international legitimacy of United Nations resolutions on Israeli withdrawal and on refugee return to the imprecise ideas suggested by the US. Without the guarantee of a deal, this was tantamount to gambling with what the Palestinians considered their most valuable currency, international legality. The Palestinians’ reluctance to do anything that might undercut the role of UN resolutions that applied to them was reinforced by Israel’s decision to scrupulously implement those that applied to Lebanon and unilaterally withdraw from that country in the months preceding Camp David. Full withdrawal, which had been obtained by Egypt and basically offered to Syria, was now being granted to Lebanon. If Hezbollah, an armed militia that still considered itself at war with Israel, had achieved such an outcome, surely a national movement that had been negotiating peacefully with Israel for years should expect no less.

And then later the updated form of this offer did not appear much more attractive:

Unlike at Camp David, and as shown both by the time it took him to react and by the ambiguity of his reactions, Arafat thought hard before providing his response. But in the end, many of the features that troubled him in July came back to haunt him in December. As at Camp David, Clinton was not presenting the terms of a final deal, but rather “parameters” within which accelerated, final negotiations were to take place. As at Camp David, Arafat felt under pressure, with both Clinton and Barak announcing that the ideas would be off the table—would “depart with the President”—unless they were accepted by both sides. With only thirty days left in Clinton’s presidency and hardly more in Barak’s premiership, the likelihood of reaching a deal was remote at best; if no deal could be made, the Palestinians feared they would be left with principles that were detailed enough to supersede international resolutions yet too fuzzy to constitute an agreement [bold mine-DL].

So ambiguity and uncertainty seemed to define the process in 2000, at least as the Palestinians saw it, and there was not nearly enough clarity.  In the case of Israel and Palestine, it does not mean much to say that so-and-so doesn’t have a “clear strategy” for resolving it, since that criticism might be applied to just about everyone.

There has been a fairamount of blog commentary already on Brooks’ column, some of which has focused on discussing the list of younger conservative bloggers and what it represents for the future of conservatism and/or the GOP. 

Isaac Chotiner notes the lack of agreement among us, which is true, but that may at least be a welcome sign of vitality.  If you took away from the column that all of the named bloggers were the advance forces of the Sam’s Club agenda, you would certainly be on the wrong track, but I don’t think that this is what Brooks is suggesting.  Brooks is saying that the agenda Ross and Reihan are laying out and the kind of politics they advocate will eventually triumph in the GOP, ultimately because this is the agenda, or something like it, that its voters will embrace or perhaps even demand.  (By the way, James will object strongly to being called a “voice.”) 

Ezra Klein observes that most of the ten named in the column aren’t Republicans, but I think that’s probably wrong, and John Schwenkler agrees.  While it’s certainly true of me, I’m not sure that it applies to most of the others.  Reihan and James are appropriately hard to pin down, but in practice I am guessing that they would gravitate towards and be “engaged” with the GOP.  Of course, I don’t know whether the others are registered with a certain party affiliation, but it certainly seems wrong to say, as Klein does, “Reading that list, I’d score it almost evenly for Obama.”  Aside from Megan McArdle, I don’t know that any of the bloggers mentioned support Obama.  James argues that Obama represents the best kind of defeat Republicans could hope for, but that is a lot less than full support.

Speaking of John Schwenkler, he is a newer blogger who has risen quickly to become an important advocate of traditional conservatism, and I’m glad to say that TAC has been among the first publications to notice his talents.  John has the cover story in the forthcoming issue on conservatism and food culture in what I suppose you could call our “crunchy” con issue–we also have Rod Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan, whose book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Caleb Stegall has recently discussed here.  I mention John as an example of what Brooks was arguing when he talked about writers rising through unconventional channels outside of the normal movement structures, because John has started writing in magazines and journals just as I did, which is to say by first being a blogger.

Remember Clinton’s debate line about Obama’s ties to “slumlord” Tony Rezko?  Since Rezko was mostly known for the corruption charges against him at the time, this line of attack didn’t really register with a lot of people and the use of the word slumlord was supposed to be seen as another example of some nefarious speaking in “code” about race.  It refers, of couse, to Rezko’s past as a private developer who took government subsidies and loans to manage low-income housing developments, which fell into disrepair and which he then abandoned for greener pastures. 

This Globe story about Obama’s support for subsidies to failed housing developers (who were also campaign contributors), including Rezko, is grist for Nader’s mill and could embarrass Obama with some very bad publicity.  This concluding passage says it all:

Jamie Kalven, a longtime Chicago housing activist, put it this way: “I hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his involvement with that [development] community.”  

A lot of progressive, civil libertarian and conservative admirers of Obama hope that there is not much predictive value in Obama’s record on many of the policies they support.       

Update: It seems that I beat Mickey Kaus to the anti-Obama punch, but he appropriately makes up in rhetoric (“Obama’s Katrina”) what he lacked in timing.

After all of the grief I have given him over the years, I am impressed and a bit humbled that David Brooks chose to mention me along with a Who’s Who of bloggers on the right.  Thanks for this goes in no small part to the release of Ross and Reihan’s new book, Grand New Party, which is the occasion for Brooks’ column:

Ross Douthat and my former assistant, Reihan Salam, are two of the most promising. This pair has just come out with a book called “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

There have been other outstanding books on how the G.O.P. can rediscover its soul (like “Comeback” by David Frum), but if I could put one book on the desk of every Republican officeholder, “Grand New Party” would be it. You can discount my praise because of my friendship with the authors, but this is the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head.

I’m just starting to read Grand New Party, but from what I can tell, if you can discount my friendship with the authors (if I may call it that), it deserves the praise it is receiving.  I should add that Ross and Reihan have done a great deal to help make this blog a success (they were linking to Eunomia very early on), and engaging with their arguments has, I hope, made my own better.  We have had and continue to have many disagreements, but I have been very glad that we have always managed to remain cordial and constructive in our critiques.

As authorities have investigated a polygamist sect in Texas, Mormon church leaders in Salt Lake City have largely stayed on the sidelines, weighing a response.

Church officials knew the sect’s similar name and practice of polygamy — part of Mormon church life until it was banned more than a century ago — would cause people to confuse the two.

Now the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, is starting a public relations campaign that seeks a delicate balance: distinguishing itself from a small, separate group that claims some of the same history while not denigrating someone else’s beliefs. ~USA Today

Then again, the FLDS church doesn’t just claim some of the same history, but has a direct connection with that history as a splinter group that broke away from the LDS.  Schismatics have a claim on the history of the group from which they separated, which doesn’t mean that they interpret that history or their doctrine correctly, but it’s not as if they just started up the group a few years ago and laid claim to something to which they had no connection. 

The real issue isn’t not denigrating the beliefs of people in FLDS, but avoiding the sorts of full-throated denunciations of polygamy (such as the one Romney made when he declared polygmay the “worst thing” he could imagine!) and marriage of young women to older, sometimes much older, men that have the potential to offend members of the LDS church.  These might be offensive because they could appear to be attacking or denigrating practices that their own prophets engaged in during the early history of the LDS church, which would in turn bring up exactly the kinds of difficult and unwelcome questions about their church’s past that this P.R. campaign is designed to avoid.

Even so, the effort is understandable given this information:

Cook said the church’s feeling that it had to do something was confirmed by a survey of 1,000 people it commissioned in late May that found 36% [bold mine-DL] thought the Texas compound was part of the LDS Church or the “Mormon Church” based in Salt Lake City.

Another 6% said the LDS and FLDS were partly related, 29% said the groups were not connected at all, and 29% weren’t sure, the survey found.

That’s a total of 42% who think the LDS church still has something to do with polygamy over a century after the practice was abandoned, and almost another 30% who were unsure one way or the other.  That tends to confirm my guess from last year that some significant part of anti-Mormonism in America has a lot to do with an enduring popular false belief that Mormons practice polygamy.  No doubt, some significant part is also rooted in other more basic doctrinal objections for those who pay close attention to such matters, but for a lot of people this utterly outdated perception of Mormons is probably what is responsible for the resistance to a Mormon presidential candidate and for more widespread opposition to Mormonism as such. 

It’s not as if the LDS church hasn’t already been very active in trying to change this perception.  I’m not sure that there’s going to be much Mormons can do to overcome this association when so many people still accept what is obviously not true.

Reihan:

The history of partitions in divided societies is long and ugly. That said, we don’t exactly think of Greece or Turkey, or even India or Pakistan, as failed states. We consider them troubled states that are fragile in many respects.

But if you were a British citizen c. 1922-23 seeing the utter devastation and forcible expulsion of the Greek and (the few remaining) Armenian communities in Anatolia, or again a British citizen c. 1947 watching the horrendous bloodshed after Partition, you wouldn’t exactly be congratulating Lloyd George and the other Allied leaders for their brilliant plan to let Venizelos launch his military operation nor would you be cheering the Atlee Government for their clever handling of Indian and Pakistani independence.  Even if dividing these populations by religion made the most sense for these nations at the time–and this is very debatable–it was a solution premised on the assumption that mass slaughter would result anyway if it were not so arranged.  These are “successful” resolutions to what are already catastrophically failed policies. 

Of course, the expulsions in these cases were not reversed, and to a large extent this is why Greece and Turkey were able to come to terms at all during the interwar period, but the legacy of that experience contributed to internal political instability inside Greece for decades, arguably all the way until 1974 and perhaps even longer than that.  I don’t have to remind anyone about the enduring danger of instability along the Indo-Pak border.  Also, while we may not now think of these states as failed states, and may never have done, by most measures Iraq is a failed state (the third worst in the world as of last year) and to the extent that we can compare Iraq with those four Iraq is most like the most basketcase-like of the four, Pakistan.          

Before this Reihan said:

This is an aspect of the withdrawalist critique that I find particularly frustrating.  “Aha! But you didn’t turn Baghdad into a harmonious multifaith enclave of cosmopolitan prosperity! Yet!” Right.

Yet to a much greater degree than today, as Reihan knows, Baghdad used to be a relatively integrated city that saw intermarriage and mixed neighbourhoods filled with members of different sects.  Sectarian identity did not used to possess quite the same political significance that it acquired immediately before and ever since the 2005 elections, but once it became a badge that determined where you could live, who your friends could be and what kind of name you should give when confronted by armed goons all of that went to pieces.  Harmonious and cosmopolitan it may not have been, but it was far more so in the “bad old days” than it has been since, which is really what is behind Klein’s point about the cleansing of sectarian enemies out of mixed neighbourhoods.  Destructive sectarianism has restored some measure of peace in the same way that the burning of the Greek and Armenian quarters in Smyrna more or less ended the Greco-Turkish conflict, which is to say in the worst possible way. 

The point isn’t that Baghdad has not become a multifaith enclave, but that it used to be something like that and was then turned into a highly segregated and divided city thanks to the mix of invasion, insecurity and sectarian-cum-democratic politics.  Hence, the nightmarish violence of 2006 has subsided into merely horrible because most of the potential victims of new sectarian violence have been pushed into new parts of the country, fled to Syria and Jordan or elsewhere or were killed in the first waves.  And this is dubbed success.  This was the point Klein was making here–the causes of reduced violence are many and some have nothing to do with the additional brigades, and some are the after-effects of the magnificent failure of the occupation to fulfill its obligations to secure the population of the country it ostensibly controlled.  Meanwhile, “surge” defenders would very much like to credit the change in tactics with most or all of the improvements, and then allow this reduction in violence to make it seem as if something fundamental had changed about a society in which armed gangs were butchering civilians just a year and a half ago for happening to be in the wrong district.  That is what I call an unpersuasive case.

James Gibney eviscerates the much-touted deal that Charlie Crist and the State of Florida struck with U.S. Sugar over land adjacent to the Everglades.  This jumped out at me today, since the public-private collusion that the deal represents is exactly the sort of thing that “reform” conservatives are supposed to deplore, yet it was being happily touted by Michael Medved yesterday (which I heard yesterday as I was scanning the radio on the way to church) during his interview with Reihan.  One need not listen to much Medved to gather that his idea of reform is whatever helps win the next election.  Even though I have my disagreements with it, I’m glad to say that Reihan’s understanding of reform is much more meaningful and worthwhile. 

Reihan, meanwhile, was touting Grand New Party, which he co-authored with Ross, that came out this week, which ideally represents the best that reform or “reformist” conservatism has to offer.  One hopes that the two visions being offered on the radio yesterday (i.e., Medved’s and Reihan’s) could not be more different.  At the same time, Crist’s rather dubious deal with U.S. Sugar represents the sort of Republican coziness with government-supported corporate interests that ultimately seems entirely antithetical to the best of what Ross and Reihan propose to do.  The deal reveals the serious obstacles inside the GOP to the adoption of an agenda that serves the working and middle classes and generally shows what thwarts the GOP from changing its “image,” because its actions create and reinforce that image all the time.

After weeks of criticism from Republicans about the leisurely pace at which they seemed to be preparing for the general election, McCain’s campaign has apparently settled on a highly personal campaign theme that aims to differentiate McCain and Obama on both character and issues. ~The Politico

This is very much in line with what I have been expectingforsome time now.  Given that McCain knows nothing, or next to nothing, about policy (including his own positions!) and his biography is what has recommended him to voters all along, this strategy was almost guaranteed from the beginning.  Furthermore, this approach seems to have some chance of working. 

The article describes the plan this way:

The strategy: Paint Obama as conventional politician who always takes the safe and easy political road [bold mine-DL], then amplify the distinction by framing McCain as a patriot, somebody who has put sacrifice above self.

Since Obama does always take the safe and easy road, this won’t have to involve any real distortions of his record, either, which will end up winning McCain more plaudits from pundits for his allegedly abiding sense of honesty.  The second part has already been done for him by the media a dozen times over.