For those who have been asking, here is a post updating you on Chuck Baldwin’s campaign as the Constitution Party nominee.  There is a story floating around (via Third Party Watch) that Baldwin’s campaign manager has been quoted saying things that would distance the campaign from the legacy of the Revolution, but the campaign swiftly swatted down any suggestion that Baldwin’s people were taking such steps.  It would have made no sense if they had tried to distance themselves from Paul and his supporters, since Baldwin is one of the obvious alternatives for Paul voters, especially those who are culturally and religiously conservative and can’t quite see themselves backing a Libertarian ticket (especially one with the ludicrous Wayne Allyn Root on it).  More important for the practical success of the campaign, there is a rumour that the alleged “Ron Paul billionaire” will provide a few million dollars to Baldwin to aid in ballot access.  According to the story, the funding comes on the condition that Baldwin keep hammering on the issues of sound money and the evils of the Fed, which should give our goldbug friends someone to support.  It’s not entirely clear to me that this is what the CP needs to make its priority, but then again Baldwin’s campaign has almost non-existent financial backing as it is.  In terms of visibility and media attention, Baldwin-Castle ’08 unfortunately doesn’t have anywhere near the draw of Barr-Root or even the absurd McKinney’s Green ticket.

In other recent CP news, there is a candidate running for the House in New Jersey’s 2nd District, Peter Boyce.  The Republican incumbent, Frank LoBiondo, is in a district that is rated as safe Republican by CQ, so it’s possible that Boyce could have a decent showing and still not flip the seat to the Democrats.  However, LoBiondo’s margins of victory have always been large and the third party presence has been anemic at best.  The Libertarians managed to get 1% six years ago, and that is the best that any third party challenger has done.   

Update: Here is video of Baldwin talking about medical marijuana and foreign policy (via).

When I checked with it to ask for a list of prominent conservative supporters, the [Obama] campaign seemed genuinely unaware that such supporters even existed. ~Bruce Bartlett

Via Sullivan

I expect that they are as mystified by the phenomenon as I am, because they would also have great difficulty understanding why conservatives would support Obama.  Such is their concern for transcendence and unity–be forewarned, hopesters.  Indeed, the emphasis of Bartlett’s piece on Obama’s rhetoric and style underscores the lack of substantive reasons for such support.  “Sympathy” for school vouchers is like so many other examples of Obama’s interest in policy reforms that conservatives and libertarians find attractive–it is a line used to show that Obama is thoughtful and reflective, but it ultimately suggests no strong interest in advancing said reform and it commits him to nothing.  The campaign knows as well as anyone that the following statement is not really true:

Conservatives of almost all ideological flavors (even, gasp, some supply-siders) have been drawn to Obama–out of a genuine affection and a belief that he may actually better embody movement ideals than McCain [bold mine-DL].

Yet this is exactly what several of them are not saying at all.  This is what their critics accuse them of saying as a way of ridiculing them.  A couple of them have said something like this from time to time, but on the whole the enthusiasm for Obama derives from the important reality that Obama is not John McCain.  There is a desire to punish the GOP for Bushism, and so they rally around the most practical vehicle for defeating the inheritor of Bushism.  This is very clear from what most of them say in their own arguments. 

Prof. Bacevich’s oft-cited article, which is indeed much more interesting as a discussion of what conservatism is rather than as a justification for why conservatives should opt for Obama, is a perfect case in point.  The article offers a fine definition of conservatism and a brilliant, withering assault on the failures and flaws of the GOP and McCain.  The positive case for Obama is all but non-existent (there is reason to think he would end the war), and it is laced with caveats:

None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama’s run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.

If this is an endorsement, who needs criticism?   

P.S.  Ambinder has some useful graphs that make it quite clear that almost no one thinks of Obama as conservative, and not all that many think he is a moderate.

Mark Halperin has another one of his lists, this time outlining the things that McCain is underestimating as the general election starts.  Number 10:

That in modern America, perception is often reality and style often beats substance.

Perhaps McCain underestimates this for some reason, but it seems to me that he is the one Republican candidate, aside from perhaps Mike Huckabee, who understands this better than anyone and has used it to his advantage many times already.  McCain and his loyal backers are counting on the perception that McCain is the anti-Bush, the independent maverick truth-teller, will trump the reality that he represents a continuation of almost every policy of Mr. Bush’s administration, and they are being aided in this on a regular basis by gullible or sympathetic pundits and journalists who keep framing every McCain move as an instance of “McCain distancing himself from the Bush administration.”  McCain regularly won among anti-Bush voters in the GOP primaries, and this perception of independence from the conventional GOP line seems to be a reason for his continuing appeal to independents and his ability to outpoll his own party label by ten points or more.  In the eyes of the media, McCain must necessarily be distancing himself from Bush, because they “know” that McCain is the Good Republican and Bush is the antithesis of this.  They are also counting on McCain’s ability to get by without having a clue about numerous areas of policy.  They probably anticipate that he will once again be able to prevail by muttering boilerplate about opposing wasteful spending and the dreaded earmark with the odd gas tax holiday pander thrown in for good measure.  It’s worked before, so why not on a larger scale with the general electorate? 

What Halperin also misses here is that in any contest between Obama and McCain, Obama is the substantive, policy-oriented candidate, while McCain is the one offering mostly pious bromides about victory, service and being American.  If style often beats substance, Obama is in trouble because, as his supporters tirelessly remind us, Obama does have a substantive policy agenda (even if he doesn’t spend as much time talking about it and a lot of his boosters don’t care what it is) and McCain’s entire campaign has been even more driven by biography and character than Obama’s.

Yglesias:

Nobody under 40 really remembers it, but the recession around the middle of Reagan’s first term was really, really, really bad. It licked inflation, but at the cost of sky-high unemployment and the worst recession since the Great Depression. And even then the public’s view of their personal finances was rosier than it is now.

Many more people say that their finances have become worse in the last year rather than better, but that this result is probably quite misleading even if we are trying to compare the public’s mood about the economy today against the mood in the early ’80s.  If you own any equities, the last year has been rather ugly on the whole, and now that there are many more stockholders today as a percentage of the general population than there were in 1981 it is not hard to imagine that in a volatile market those stockholders would say that their finances have worsened.  Add to these the people caught up in the collapse of the housing bubble, and you will come up with a very large part of the population.  So there are a lot of Americans suffering from financial losses or anxiety about potential losses who were not exposed to risk in the same way in the early ’80s.  In a roundabout way, this is actually a testament to the success of the economic expansion over the past three decades, since it reflects in part how many more people are benefiting from, while also suffering from the risks of, participating in equities markets.   

Of course, electorally the recession of ’81-’82 was not very good for Republicans in Congress (they lost a net of 27 seats in the House), so as a matter of the political significance of the public’s view of their finances these numbers have to be deeply troubling to the GOP today.  This is all the more remarkable given that the economy has not yet gone into recession and may not do so.

To turn to more edifying and important matters, Ross raises an interesting point about theodicy:

It’s my impression – and it’s only an impression, which is why I’d like to see someone do the necessary intellectual spadework to refute it or back it up – that this argument has gained increasing currency even as our material conditions have dramatically improved; which is to say, the less suffering a particular population experiences, the more likely the suffering it does experience will be cited as evidence against the existence of a benevolent deity.

Ross’ impression seems right to me, and you might call it the modern luxury of impiety.  If you are relying heavily on agriculture that depends on favourable weather and freedom from blights, as people for most of history did, and you are exposed to the ravages of famine or plague without the protections of extensive food surpluses or medical treatment, the irrationality of blasphemy and doubting God’s benevolence becomes much clearer.  At the same time, enjoying plenitude and wealth allows those with the most advantages the luxury of worrying not so much about the suffering that they experience, since they tend to experience relatively little, and worrying a lot more about suffering elsewhere.  Questioning God’s benevolence in this context becomes akin to the “pornography of compassion,” as Dr. Fleming has called it, in which people feel obliged to make a great display of how much they care about suffering on the other side of the world–in this case, they care so much that they feel obliged to curse God.  With the exception of natural disasters, which are the things that you might think would cause more doubt than human cruelty, complaints against God for things that we do to each other are really quite bizarre.  First of all, if you believe that God did not create man with a sinful nature, but that man turned away from God, it is difficult to believe that God can be blamed for what we do to one another.  “But why does God permit it?” someone always asks.  The standard (and true) answer is that God permits it because He respects human freedom, up to and including the freedom to disobey, because neither obedience nor love would be of any value if it were not ultimately voluntary.  This is why it surprises me some that great horrors in history undermine faith in God’s goodness.  Actually, it doesn’t surprise me that much that it undermines faith in people who lived through those horrors, but it is a bit odd that those who were not there or not even alive when it was happening will cite such events as their “evidence” that either God does not exist or if He does then God is not good.  For these people there is not even the memory of the horror to contend with, but a more removed knowledge about the events, yet as often as not it is the latter who find great horrors more theologically significant than those who survived them. 

Yet what these people seem to be terrified of most is the possibility that God really has allowed man such an extensive freedom, and that God is nothing like the caricatured martinet dictator that the sad New Atheists portray Him to be.  Indeed, one gets the impression from many complaints against God for permitting suffering that they would very much welcome a deity who regimented and ordered their lives in order to provide maximal security and prosperity.  As modern life has become in many respects easier, more comfortable and more secure, perhaps many moderns find the freedom that God has permitted them to be overwhelming and bewildering and their complaints against God are framed in terms that might be used for complaints against their fellow men: “if God really loved us, He would intervene and fix everything.”  If you really cared about other people, you would want to meddle in their affairs to an obnoxious degree. 

Even though God does intervene in history in dramatic, powerful and world-changing ways (see the Incarnation), what troubles the doubters is that God does not intervene more often.  It’s as if they want to say, “Stop respecting my free will and just do something for me!”  That this sounds exactly like the statement of a spoiled child is appropriate, because that is what it is.  Then, in those moments of chastening and real trial that God permits or wills, the spoiled children whine even more when they are confronted with some small modicum of loving discipline.

It is not in the least clear to me what this accomplishes, except to harden divisions among ourselves that should not even exist, but let’s come back to the heart of this entire controversy.  The problem that John Zmirak and others have had with the review is not especially that it was critical (how could it be, since John believes that the United States was right in entering WWII?), but that it included admittedly gratuitous references to David Irving.  This is supposed to have constituted a smear, yet in the context of the review Prof. Lukacs was contrasting the differences between the two.  You can argue that Irving’s name should never have entered into it and that there is no reason to make the comparison, but to hold that it is a “smear” to say that Mr. Buchanan is not like and different from Irving is to make the word smear utterly meaningless.   

I would reiterate that this fratricidal hurling of anathemas among people who, in fact, agree an overwhelming majority of the time is completely mad. 

P.S. Dylan Waco at Left Conservative has a good post on all of this as well.

Obama’s 2008 AIPAC speech reads very much like his 2007 speech, except that this one is perhaps even more overflowing with boilerplate pander lines than the last.  Here was a new item that I think he neglected last year:

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

It is not clear to me how those who want to see Obama as an advocate of “even-handedness” will be able to maintain the hope that he represents any significant change in U.S. policy. 

There were also some notable moments in self-contradiction:

And we should work with Europe, Japan and the Gulf states to find every avenue outside the U.N. to isolate the Iranian regime — from cutting off loan guarantees and expanding financial sanctions, to banning the export of refined petroleum to Iran, to boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization [bold mine-DL].

As every Clintonite remembers, Obama hung the Kyl-Lieberman amendment around Clinton’s neck for months and used it as an example of how Clinton was embracing the policies of the Bush administration (while his supporters simultaneously praised Obama for taking a position on launching strikes into Pakistan that was the policy of the Bush administration).  What did the Kyl-Lieberman amendment do?  It labeled the IRG’s Quds force a terrorist organisation, which Obama at the time interpreted (not entirely absurdly) as a prelude to justifying a military strike.  When it comes to talk at AIPAC, though, this sort of labeling becomes a good and right idea.  The GOP has already latched on to this inconsistency and will keep hammering on it. 

No doubt those who want to portray Obama as “weak” on Israel will conclude from this inconsistency that he says one thing to one group of people and another to a different group, which proves that he can’t be trusted, but what this really shows is that when he goes to an interest group’s conference he toes their line as carefully as he can.  The lesson is that he can’t be trusted to take real political risks or challenge entrenched interests for the sake of anything approaching real policy change.  What this tells me is that he will play antiwar and J Street-type voters for suckers with appealing rhetoric on Iran and then maintain the failed status quo. 

Then there was another rather striking statement:

And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region.

In the AIPAC speech, Obama thinks this is a very bad thing, but when he was talking to Jeffrey Goldberg he said something that his supporters insisted be read in exactly this way in order to deflect the unfair criticism that he was referring to Israel when he said:

But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy [bold mine-DL]. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

So something that infects all of our foreign policy, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has nothing to do with trouble elsewhere in the region?  Oh, okay.

James restates a common theme:

His triumph is questionable in terms of small-ball politics, but neither you, I, nor the Democratic party should worry much about that. In terms of the American character, it´s an important and refreshing reminder that we can, in fact, raise the bar when it comes to our politicians, and admire the luxury of our own high expectations both conscientiously and confidently.

But there is a caveat:

All of this is ruined, of course, if Obama caves and Hillary slithers onto the ticket.

It seems to me that everyone is getting ahead of themselves.  Tonight Obama will technically “clinch” the nomination by crossing the 2,118 delegate threshold almost regardless of how well or poorly he does in the last two primaries, at which point the Clinton campaign will say, “But, of course, all those Michigan delegates you claim you have aren’t really yours, so you’re not there yet, ha ha!”  This is what Michelle Obama complains about when she talks about how “they move the bar,” but “they” will keep “moving the bar” unless and until Obama cedes to Clinton a spot on the ticket.  What no one has been able to explain to me is how it is that Hillary Clinton, whom these same critics paint in the most lurid colours as the mistress of disorder and the spirit of chaos, will yield now when she refused to yield when it had become essentially mathematically impossible for her to take the pledged delegate lead.  According to her worst detractors, she is the epitome of blind egotism and the lust for power, but now she will step aside for the greater good?  Now that she can more or less reasonably claim to have a popular vote plurality, we’re supposed to believe that she will depart when she would not before?  I must brush up on my Clinton demonology, because it seems to me that you cannot believe that Clinton is a soul-sucking revenant who comes to destroy us all (as her more sympathetic critics have portrayed her this year) and believe that the race is over tonight.  Of course, it could be that she is not quite the nightmarish creature her enemies claim that she is, in which case including her on the ticket not only makes sense but does not compromise any high principles or expectations.     

It will become increasingly clear that for the sake of party unity he will be compelled to choose her, and yet this necessary act will be received by many of his admirers as the complete betrayal of everything he stands for?  Talk about moving the bar!  Not only is he going to be forced into choosing her, but then he will be denounced as a charlatan when he does the only thing that Clinton’s partisans realistically leave open to him.  As a practical matter, if he does not choose her, what just happened on Saturday in settling Florida and Michigan, and Michigan in particular, is going to come back to haunt Obama and could provoke a convention fight that might spell disaster for whichever ticket emerges on the other side.   

Update: As expected, she will never go away.

As John Schwenkler notes, Bill Kristol affirms that McCain and Obama have essentially the same view on Iran and broader foreign policy except for Iraq, and Sullivan highlights this with an award (!) without noting that the claim that Obama and McCain are very close in their foreign policy views besides Iraq fundamentally undermines everything Obama purports to represent in foreign policy.  In the one area of policy that is truly screaming out the most for bold and dramatic breaks with the past, Obama largely embraces the failed Washington foreign policy consensus, as some of ushave been sayingfor nearly a year.  While it is somewhat refreshing to hear someone else acknowledge the reality that Obama is utterly conventional in his views on Near East and Israel policies, contrary to the excited warnings of negotiations with Hamas, pressuring Israel over settlements and other red herrings, this is exactly the aspect of Obama’s record and his platform that should give his antiwar supporters pause and make them think about what, if anything, Obama is really likely to change should he be elected. 

Perhaps antiwar voters will decide that they still prefer Obama solely because of his position on Iraq, but there should never be any illusions that he proposes sweeping changes in how the United States acts in the world.

You might say that being able to fit in at a chain restaurant’s salad bar should not be a meaningful qualification for high office, but then you are not David Brooks (via Orr):

Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can go into an Applebee’s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.

There’s just one problem with Obama’s “problem”: there is no salad bar at Applebee’s, much less one that you can go “into” (how big does he think salad bars are?), as those of us common rubes who have actually eaten at Applebee’s can attest.  It seems to me that Brooks was grasping for some symbol of the Everyman, had probably read or read about Applebee’s America at some point, remembered something about the “gut-level connection” its author mentions as a politically significant factor and then concluded, “To have a gut-level connection with the Everyman, one must eat at Applebee’s and, most important of all, one must eat at the salad bar.”  But then this betrays a crucial misunderstanding of the American rube, since all fans of chain restaurants know that most people don’t go to these places for anything so healthy as a salad. 

Update: Video here.  Apparently the “Applebee’s guy” responds well to transactional politics, even though the “Applebee’s guy” is likely to be middle-class and suburban, who are typically not the downscale voters that have resisted Obama’s appeal for the most part.