Barack Obama may depart this summer from his road-warrior tour of election-battleground states to take a trip around the world, one intended to shore up his credentials on foreign policy. ~McClatchy

Robert Stacy McCain is right when he sees terrible political danger for Obama in this proposal.  Going to Iraq is one thing, and could be cast as an imitation of Eisenhower, but spending much time elsewhere would be a mistake.  It would be a daily occasion for McCain to say, “While Barack Obama is travelling the world to make up for his lack of foreign policy experience, I am here talking to the American people about their problems, because I am the American President Americans have been waiting for, blah blah blah.”  It would seem to confirm every attempt to portray Obama, whether it has been made negatively or positively, as post-American (cue that picture of him with Zakaria’s book), multicultural or “globalised.”  It would convey the worst symbolism during the general election.  It will remind voters of how many places he has not been before, and it will hardly help to have numerous stories about the chair of the Subcommittee for European Affairs to begin with the line, “On his first trip to Germany, Barack Obama…”, while at the same time giving off the air of over-confidence (“he must think he has already won”) and allowing himself to be cast as a globe-trotting pol indifferent to domestic concerns a la George H.W. Bush.  It will amplify whatever damage his remarks about small-town America had and revive that old controversy.  Republican activists will have a field day: “While John McCain is touring this country and speaking to his fellow Americans about what matters most to them, Barack Obama continues to wander the globe to talk to foreign audiences, who protest against America as eagerly as they cheer for Sen. Obama,” and so on and so forth.  Besides, the election is not so lopsided that either major candidate can afford even a couple of weeks away from campaigning.  The impracticality of the tour in itself could be used as a way to attack Obama’s judgement.   

The McClatchy story continues:

Obama advisers are eager to find a way to harness his popularity overseas to boost his appeal to undecided voters back home, and to show that the 46-year-old freshman senator from Illinois can compete with McCain on foreign policy.

If they are eager to do this, he needs to fire them or get them working on something else.  This is an unreservedly terrible idea.  His popularity overseas is almost certainly a net liability here, at least for the time being.  Obama boosters may not like to hear that, they may find it distressing and unfortunate, but that is the political reality.  If John Kerry suffered electorally because he was “vaguely French” and had French relatives, Obama could very well face a wipeout in November if he goes on a world tour, even if it is not a very long one.

The latest campaign controversy comes from an Obama interview with ABC News in which he said this:

What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated….And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world.

He is saying this in the context of explaining why he opposes the detention facility at Guantanamo (as do McCain and that dangerous enabler of terrorism, Colin Powell) and, by extension, why he supports the Boumediene ruling.  Of course, it is true that we put the ’93 WTC terrorists on trial, and it certainly seems true that there is nothing fundamentally different about the Guantanamo detainees who will now be put on trial.  That may be debatable, but it is far from obvious that there is a meaningful difference.  Obama is saying that he is against a para-constitutional legal order, and apparently the McCain campaign wants to make it known that they support such a thing.  The critiquesthat Obama wants to return to “September 10 mindset” (that’s from McCain’s foreign policy advisor) or that he wants to make terrorism a matter of criminal investigation and prosecution alone would be embarrassingly silly if they weren’t so likely to be politically effective.  The candidate who has urged launching strikes into Pakistan and supported the bombardment of Lebanon is not one who is leery of using force to respond to terrorism and other security threats.

Also in the interview is Obama’s statement on school vouchers, which might have come from an NEA talking points memo:

We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools.

Contrary to the (bizarre) expectations of certain starry-eyed Obamacons, Obama does not actually support school vouchers.  I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in: his nods to conservative reform proposals are head fakes.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama is wrong about vouchers.  As I have said before, I have never quite understood the preoccupation among movement conservatives with school vouchers, which are strongly opposed for the most part by their own middle-class constituencies for exactly the reasons Obama gives.  These people don’t want to lose any funding for their school districts, which are for the most part not in total disrepair, and they see no advantage for their children in supporting the measure.  Even so, where anyone got the idea that Obama would entertain school choice as part of any education reform is beyond me. 

Update: Philip Klein responds:

So Larison doesn’t buy Obama’s head fakes on domestic issues, and yet he expects those of us who favor aggressive action against terrorism to buy Obama’s national security head fakes hook, line, and sinker.

The real point is that Obama doesn’t make substantive concessions on domestic policy, whereas on foreign policy he is much closer to the mainstream consensus, whether we are talking about Israel, the “war on terror” or any other question of national security and foreign policy.  He isn’t making “head fakes” on national security at all, because he is, in fact, consistently supportive of an activist and fairly aggressive foreign policy on everything except Iraq.  The “nods” to which I refer above are the sort of meaningless throwaway lines that Obama has made when he has fielded questions on vouchers or affirmative action or other domestic policies.  I am not talking about fully articulated, formal policy positions that are stated in his campaign literature and reflected in his voting record. 

My conclusion about Obama’s view on vouchers comes from what Obama himself says his view on vouchers is, rather than being misled by the “bipartisan” posturing that he will engage in to show how reasonable and accommodating he can be.  Ironically, the one area of policy where he is broadly in agreement with the Washington consensus, foreign policy, is the one where people constantly assume that he is some new McGovern, while his domestic platform is much farther to the left, as conventionally defined, than his views on foreign affairs.  Despite this, for some reason, it is on domestic policy that people keep imagining that Obama is open to a variety of ideas, and it doesn’t seem to bother them that there is absolutely no evidence for this.  Obama’s statements and votes on national security and foreign policy are consistently more aggressive and within the mainstream consensus in Washington than Klein gives him credit for, because it seems to Klein to be basically inconceivable that someone could oppose the war in Iraq and yet otherwise be robustly in support of antiterrorism and using force overseas. 

Some Obamacons like to imagine that Obama will embrace school choice, because that is what their ideal, imaginary Democratic friend would do; Klein looks at Obama’s actual record, ignores what it obviously means and then imagines the worst-case scenario (from his perspective) of what an Obama administration would mean in foreign policy.  So this is what puzzles me about Klein’s position.  He thinks that Obama must be misleading the public when Obama takes a formal position on a question of national security and foreign policy that doesn’t fit his preconceived notion that Obama wants to abandon the “war on terror” and change U.S. Israel policy, and relies on second or third-hand anecdotes to back up his suspicions, but he’s quite content to accept that Obama is opposed to vouchers on Obama’s say-so.  But Obama probably once had dinner with someone who supported school choice, and we all know what that means.  Oh, right, it means nothing.

Peter Suderman (writing at the other TAS) notes McCain’s confusion over his own cap-and-trade policy, which is hardly surprising, since the great foreign policy “expert” has also shown that he thinks Iran is in cahoots with Al Qaeda and the great immigration policy reformer has often demonstrated an impressive lack of knowledge on the details of immigration policy and of the comprehensive “reform” legislation itself.  McCain has gained his reputation for expertise in various policy areas by adopting a sanctimonious, moralising tone after striking whichever pose on them will fit the crafted persona of the outspoken truth-telling “reformer.”  The blunder on cap-and-trade is typical of someone who thinks that policy positions are symbols for expressing his attitude about a particular subject: he supports cap-and-trade because he thinks it will show that he, like his hero Teddy Roosevelt, “cares” about the environment, but he doesn’t care enough to familiarise himself with the relevant details of what the legislation would actually do.  But the details aren’t relevant to him and he may think they shouldn’t be relevant to you–it is what his support for the measure expresses about John McCain that matters. 

As I’ve noted before, McCain has to hope that policy knowledge is not a prerequisite to becoming President (Mr. Bush’s election suggests that it is not), because compared to Obama it is he who will be playing the part of the confused naif.

It’s bunk, all of it, and nobody understands this better than John McCain. With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity. Once the victim of a classic racist smear job in backwoods South Carolina (where he was whipped in the 2000 primary after a Karl Rove whispering campaign suggested he had an illegitimate black daughter), McCain has now positioned himself on the business end of that same deal. ~Matt Taibbi

Via Kelley Vlahos

Watermelon-waving?  It takes a certain mindset to conjure up that reference out of thin air.  I must have missed that one, but then I am not so exquisitely attuned to the racial overtones of critiquing Obama’s consistency on his war position (the infamous “fairy tale”) or the claim that Lyndon Johnson was instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act.  The lie that the Clinton campaign trafficked in racist appeals during the primaries is one of the most popular, most dishonest attacks of this election cycle, though it was probably one of the least effective outside of professional pundit and blogger circles.  This lie gained currency because it fit the portrayal of the Clintons as utterly unscrupulous and willing to do or say anything to win, even though there was no substance to the claim in this case.  The new lie is that McCain is going to employ such appeals, when he has repeatedly gone out of his way to overreact to the slightest hint of anything remotely offensive, such that he initially ruled out talking about controversies pertaining to Obama’s associates that the news networks had already been covering for weeks. 

That doesn’t mean that McCain isn’t going to attack Obama personally, as I have long been arguing that this election was going to be one of the nastier ones in recent memory because both candidacies are founded on appeals to biography and character, which means that character assassination will be the order of the day.  This won’t take the shape of “watermelon-waving” smears, but will be framed in terms of experience, national security and Americanism, which is to say that it will be pretty much a standard-issue critique of “weak” and “naive” Democrats who are supposedly not zealous enough in their Americanism.  This is not something new for McCain starting in the last couple of years–this is how he sees the world.       

Taibbi is right to the extent that the Democratic nomination contest has not ushered in an era of bunny rabbits and rainbows “a futuristic era of political tolerance and open-mindedness,” but did anyone besides maybe Scarlett Johannson ever believe that it would?  Taibbi’s piece is also interesting in that it may be the first evidence that once-friendly and sympathetic journalists are turning on their creation, which could be doom for McCain.  But by and large Taibbi’s criticism of McCain lands with a thud.  Consider this opening paragraph:

McCain’s transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as “agents of intolerance” — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. “He’s inspirational,” McCain said.

Of course, you have to be on some kind of medication (as Joel Osteen often appears to be) to think that Joel Osteen represents anything remotely similar to the televangelism of Jerry Falwell.  It is deeply worrisome that McCain finds Joel Osteen inspirational, but in the very phoniness of Osteen Taibbi should find some consolation: the message he preaches is false and deeply antithetical to any sort of traditional or conservative Christianity, which is probably why it is hugely popular and why McCain sees some advantage in throwing out Osteen’s name.  Who knows?  Maybe McCain really is inspired by such an empty vision, which is sad, but it hardly demands the vitriol Taibbi heaps upon it, unless Taibbi is actually bothered by McCain’s lack of fundamentalism.  Mentioning Osteen is evidence that McCain wants to be known for approaching religion in the most superficial way imaginable. 

Osteen is representative of the latest strain of American Christianity that draws on the nonsense of self-actualisation and prayer-as-wish fulfillment (Become a Better You is the title of his new book) with some of the prosperity gospel heresy thrown in on the side.  Dopey self-help Christianity expressed in such books as Your Best Life Now (can you think of a title more out of step with the traditional Gospel message?) is hardly the same as the Christianity of the “religious right” with which McCain still has mostly poor relations.  If this is evidence of McCain’s “transformation,” McCain hasn’t changed all that much.  In yet another ham-fisted Democratic outreach to believers, Nancy Pelosi has tried to cultivate Osteen and his followers, and one of the memes out there about Osteen is that Obama is an Osteen-like politician (obviously not intended as a compliment).  Of course, if someone were to say about Obama what Taibbi has said about Osteen, that would be cited by some Rolling Stone correspondent as proof of “watermelon-waving” smears.

Most of the rest of Taibbi’s charge that McCain has been “transformed” into a “dumbed-down, hypersimplified incarnation” of himself shows that Taibbi wasn’t paying attention to McCain’s foreign policy views for very long.  The fearmongering and the simplistic view of the world have been there for at least a decade since he started pursuing the Presidency.

Jim Antle wrote a post critiquing Kmiec’s latest today:

If Kmiec wanted to explicitly argue that he was supporting Obama in spite of his pro-choice views because of the war or some other proportionate reason, that would be one thing. But instead he wants to pretend that a vote for Obama somehow advances pro-life goals on abortion in some meaningful sense.

It seems to me that Prof. Kmiec tried making that first argument, and he was bludgeoned and mocked by quite a few critics for ignoring Obama’s position on abortion.  Since then he has been advancing the argument that Obama is fair-minded and willing to engage others’ ideas, which theoretically means that he will be open to pro-life proposals such as those Kmiec keeps offering.   That’s all very well, except that it just isn’t so, as I was saying over a year ago:

The rest of the excerpt is the recounting of another story related to abortion politics, where we are again treated to just how fair-minded (and pro-choice) Obama is (”I understand your deep conviction on this matter, which I am now going to dismiss with stock soundbites about the safety of women”), which apparently ought to make other “fair-minded” people happy enough to notice that he hasn’t really addressed the central question of whether abortion can be morally justified or not, whether it is right for a Christian man to sanction or tolerate the constitutional fraud that gives legal protection to the murder of unborn children. 

Of course, it can’t be justified and it isn’t right, which is why “fair-minded” Senators who might one day like to be President have to engage in roundabout justifications for their position, saying that they support “choice” for the sake of poor women everywhere.  The phantom of the back-alley abortionist, whom the pro-choice pol has summoned from the ether, hovers nearby and is supposed to cloud the judgement of people who recognise a moral abomination when they see it.  But the phantom just provides a comforting excuse to endorse something that it would be politically dangerous for a Democrat in most places to oppose.  All of this is supposed to show us that Obama is thoughtful, rather than callous, profound rather than predictable, but it does not.  It is the tactic of the man who says, “I appreciate your point of view,” when in fact he does not appreciate it and wants to neutralise your criticism by deflecting the question in an entirely different direction. 

If Obama wants to discourage abortion, he could start by not supporting public funding of it.  That would discourage the practice.  But we all know that isn’t going to happen.  He couldn’t bring himself to vote for legislation protecting children who survived botched abortions.  Opposing the legislation in committee, he then audaciously voted present when the bill came to the floor, which is as good as voting against without incurring the same political risk.  Here was his argument against it:

Number one, whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — child, a 9-month-old — child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place.
 
I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute. For that purpose, I think it would probably be found unconstitutional.

His campaign’s own fact check page does not dispute this, but says that he would have supported the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act because “the difference between the state and federal versions, Obama explained, was that the state measure lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade.”  Of course, opposing legislation with which he substantively agreed (if we are to believe this unverifiable claim of support) because it lacked this technical language is the most obvious dodge.  Wouldn’t the great and fair-minded negotiator and bridge-builder have proposed amending the legislation to make it more broadly acceptable?  Of course, he had no incentive to go against pro-choice interest groups when he was in Springfield, and he has and will have none in Washington.  It’s not clear to me why anyone should entertain the notion that Obama is going to break with key Democratic interest groups to heed pro-life proposals. 

But the real problem is that Obama’s analysis of the bill was quite astute and his logic impeccable–if a child born alive after a botched abortion is entitled to protections under the Constitution, it becomes exceedingly difficult to justify denying those protections to unborn children, which would render the “right” to terminate their lives moot.  Qualifying language saying that the legislation in question does not undermine Roe does not undo the reality that the rationale for the legislation voids the entire concept of a “right” to abortion.  If the child is deserving of protection at a particular moment, why not before that?  In order to keep the Roe regime intact, even the most straightfoward, pragmatic legislation designed to protect the weakest among us must be defeated, because it might lead to those protections being extended even to the unborn, which Obama and his campaign make clear is unacceptable to him.

The risibly small bounce for Obama has now disappeared, and actually he now polls below where he was in late May and has returned to the level of support he had about one month ago.  That’s not surprising, and I expect we will see blips of movement for both candidates throughout the summer.  The race will likely remain very close unless and until one of the major candidates implodes, and the movement of undecided voters (7%) to one or the other will come fairly late as it usually does.  If the 8% “neither” figure is right, that opens up a larger field than usual to the third party candidates and holds out the prospect of multiple third party candidates gaining better than 1% of the vote, which is quite rare.

So Chris Orr really doesn’t like The Happening.  No, that doesn’t quite capture it: he glories in how supremely horrible it is.  This is very much in line with other reviews of it that I have read, most of which have been in the vein of “I wonder if Shyamalan will ever find the place where he left his talent?  It’s probably still sittng in some Pennsylvania farm town even as we speak.”  I have to wonder if Shyamalan wasn’t already tempting fate more than a little to have it released on Friday the 13th, but from everything reviewers have said about it there would have been no day auspicious and lucky enough to save this clunker.  I say all of this as a confirmed Shyamalan fan, one of those few people who thought there were a few interesting parts to Signs and who thought that the premise of The Village was mildly interesting.  Shyamalan’s interest in the peculiarities of places and his constant attachment to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania countryside kept intriguing me even when the stories and the Big Ideas they were supposed to be expressing became increasingly hard to take.  Even after I saw The Village, I kept hoping that there had been some terrible mix-up, but then I saw Lady in the Water and my hope died like a badly-wounded narf in an apartment complex.  The Happening is the result of failing to pay attention to anything anyone said about why Lady in the Water was an awful movie and was also the result of the insistence of “writer-director M. Night Shyamalan” to keep writing his own scripts.  The last few years of following Shyamalan has been like watching the arc of George Lucas’ creative career, but without the really impressive first decade.

I scored 5 out of 7 on Der Spiegel’s German citizenship quiz (via Sullivan), which is pretty bad since I studied German for six years and probably ought to have known all of the answers.  If these questions are representative of the difficulty level of the test, it’s not clear to me why the citizenship test is at all controversial.  The questions seem to be concerned with basic civics and understanding of German law and politics, which is what you would expect citizens to need to know, and for anyone actually living in Germany they shouldn’t be very challenging at all.  Happily, I am a bit more up on my American civics.

Gingrich needs to go back to proposing space-based air traffic control and Census Bureau change we can believe in, so he will stop saying these things:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal “would be far and away the best candidate” to appear on the Republican presidential ticket with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

The good news for McCain is that Gingrich’s imprimaturon an idea these days means that it is almost by definition impractical or absurd, which should make it much easier for McCain to avoid the blunder of choosing Jindal.  Jindal could be a good choice…in another sixteen years or so.  Fortunately, Jindal keeps making it quite clear that he wants to stay in Louisiana, as well he should. 

Beyond being an unwise choice in itself, the whiff of desperation that choosing Jindal would give off would badly undermine McCain’s campaign more than just about anything else.  Like a Webb choice for Obama, a Jindal choice for McCain would draw attention to all of the presumed liabilities that the VP choice is supposedly going to offset.  McCain’s age and lack of polish in speaking are obvious, and there’s no hiding either one, but it makes no sense to have people dwell on these factors, especially when the age factor will make voters even more concerned that the VP nominee can take over if necessary at any time.  At 37 and one year into his first term as governor, Jindal simply doesn’t fit the bill at the present time, and leading Republicans should be pushing other selections if they must speculate about the choice.

On the main blog, Michael seems to be challening Yglesias to a duel:

Yet Yglesias has the stones to frame Iraq as an isolated freakout? A one-off after decades of uninterrupted, unimpeachable successes of the establishment.

As I noted last week, there is a powerful need among internationalists, whether they are realists or liberal internationalists, to treat the war in Iraq as an entirely radical departure from what the establishment was willing to do before, even though many realists and liberal internationalists (including, well, Yglesias) were perfectly willing to go along with the invasion or at least keep their reservations to themselves.  This makes it easier for them to attribute their own blunders to the post-9/11 atmosphere rather than acknowledge something essentially flawed in their assumptions about U.S. interference in other states’ affairs.  The “establishment” was on board with the war, or unwilling to stop it, because invading Iraq was not fundamentally different from the other wars that it had endorsed or tacitly accepted.  Indeed, the formal case for the war flowed out of the bipartisan consensus in Washington about Iraq that had been established in the early ’90s and had gone largely unchallenged except from the margins of the political spectrum. 

In his list, Michael forgets to include what may be the most appropriate comparison and what is also one of the most forgotten aggressive wars of the last twenty years: our unjustified invasion of friendly disagreement with Panama in late 1989, which was carried out for the express purpose of cleaning up President Bush’s CIA legacy regime change.  Toppling Hussein was ultimately just a much larger-scale version of Get Noriega, and it was so uncontroversial (in Washington) that it has all but fallen down the memory hole.