My poststhis week at Taki’s Magazine continue the discussion of Lukacs and Buchanan that started with the review from the 6/2 issue.  One expands on my earlier critique of the review, and the other addresses Lukacs’ critics.

This NPR poll (via Krieger) has an interesting feature that measures agreement with a series of statements with and without partisan labels.  On the whole, the overall difference in support or opposition for a given position between the “partisan” and “non-partisan” respondents is not that great (the GOP’s position loses approximately 60-40 regardless of labeling), but there was one figure that caught my attention in the breakdown of the Iraq responses.  When told that it was the Republican position, Republican respondents were significantly more likely to support that position than otherwise.  Agreement was 69-28 in the “partisan” group and 55-38 in the “non-partisan,” so when not conditioned to respond tribally according to party loyalty Republicans were much less likely to support the party’s standard Iraq position.  Put simply: when voters are considering the policy substance offered by the competing parties, the Republican position scarcely wins a majority of its own partisans and loses badly with everyone else.  It will hardly be news to anyone that supporting the war in Iraq is a losing issue for the GOP, but past polling has given the misleading impression that the party is overwhelmingly supportive in such a way that makes Republican dissent difficult.  Perhaps these results point towards a more evenly-divided GOP that would tolerate more open opposition to the war.   

Partisanship was a bigger factor in Republican responses.  Democrats were only slightly more likely to choose their party’s position when given a “partisan cue”–agreement was 80% in the “partisan” and 76% in the “non-partisan” group.  Independents were slightly less likely to agree with the Democratic position when it was associated with the Democrats by name (53% in “partisan” vs. 57% in “non-partisan”), but this is obviously not as dramatic as the difference in the Republican responses.  There does seem to be some small resistance to the Democratic position on Iraq simply because of that party’s “brand” image among independents, and this resistance naturally grows much stronger among Republicans.  It is actually Republicans who make up this 14-point difference who bother me the most, since it seems that these are the people who don’t really believe what the party leadership is offering but go along out of herd instinct.  It is not entirely surprising that party loyalty (or antipathy) would shape how people respond to these questions, but the gap between Republicans who agreed with the substance of the position and those who seem to have felt compelled to agree with the party line is quite remarkable.

More striking, and also of interest to readers of TAC, is the difference among Republican respondents to positions on trade.  When told that it was the Republican “free trade” position, Republicans agreed with it 63-33.  Without partisan cues, Republicans agreed with a less “free trade”-oriented Democratic statement that included a call to renegotiate NAFTA 54-43.  That’s a forty-one point swing that apparently hinges entirely on partisanship.  All that cognitive dissonance has to give these people a headache.  Interestingly, Democrats feel more obliged to agree with their party’s line on trade in an almost mirror image of the differences in Republican responses on Iraq: 69% of Democrats in the “partisan” group agreed with their party’s line, while just 53% agreed in the “non-partisan.”  Independents are significantly more likely to agree with the Democratic position when the Democratic label isn’t attached to it: 61% agreement in “non-partisan” and 52% in the “partisan” group.  The Republicans have a policy problem.  It’s the Democrats who seem to have a brand or image problem.

P.S.  There’s no comfort for the GOP in these results when it comes to tax policy, either.  Without partisan cues, Republicans agree with the Democratic line 52-38, which is a 53-point shift from the “partisan” group where Republicans agreed with their party’s view 66-27.

Yglesias:

But of course we’re not supposed to talk about this, anymore than we’re supposed to talk about why Phil Donohue got fired or why Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan both had fierce anti-war positions off air that they avoided expressing on camera.

I can’t recall how outspoken Matthews was, but anyone who was actually watching Buchanan on television during the relevant 2002-03 period in question knows this is a lot of nonsense.  On the show that they hosted together, Bill Press and Pat Buchanan regularly inveighed against invading Iraq for the whole of 2002 and through the beginning of the war.  I should know, since I watched it daily.  They once had Medea Benjamin on as a guest, for pity’s sake, and that was a good deal more of an antiwar stand than certain current Atlantic bloggers were taking at the time.  

I don’t doubt that there was corporate pressure on newsrooms to spin their coverage in the months leading up to the war, and Buchanan and Press was cancelled at the end of 2003, so make of that what you will.  Of course there was pressure from corporate executives.  You don’t need journalists to admit the exisence of this pressure to you–you just needed to watch and read the coverage.  The fawning credulity with which most journalists treated the administration’s claims was everywhere, and it is hard to believe that it was the result of a collective lapse of intelligence and common sense.  That makes it all the more bizarre that anyone would choose to cite Buchanan in particular as having been somehow reticent about his antiwar views on air, since he was one of the few notable exceptions to what was often an otherwise mindless pro-war stampede of pundits and bloggers that accompanied the months leading up to the invasion.

Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for. ~Mike Huckabee

The sound you just heard was Mike Huckabee’s hypothetical 2012 campaign imploding.  It was one thing to justify tax hikes to balance budgets or pay for necessary road maintenance, but to adopt the treacly, preachy Gerson-style whining about mean ol’ right-wingers who want everyone to suffer and die will guarantee that Huckabee’s future political endeavours will be as cash-strapped as they were this time and the resistance to any future candidacy will be doubly intense.  Before this, economic conservatives merely hated him.  Now they will become obsessed with thwarting him at every turn.  Frankly, a lot of us who enjoyed the angst he was causing mainstream conservatives and were rooting for him secretly or openly against Romney will not be sorry to see him lose in the future.  No one wants to be lectured to by someone spouting Gersonism, especially the particularly disingenuous kind that calls for “as little” government as there can be without ever being able to find a single thing that government does that it shouldn’t do. 

There are obviously many, many problems with Huckabee’s assessment.  First, it vastly overstates the power and influence of what he calls “social liberalism and economic conservatism” within the GOP.  As his own candidacy demonstrated, social conservatism and something less than strict economic conservatism pack a lot more punch electorally, and meaningful Hayekian libertarianism in the GOP is generally so scarce and strongly opposed that Huckabee warning against it is a bit like warning about a Zoroastrian takeover of Iran.  He is not alone in this, since some people at Cato have made a cottage industry out of inflating the political strength of libertarians by conflating libertarianism with “social liberalism and economic conservatism,” but this is wrong.  If Huckabee thinks that this force represents the gravest threat to the GOP and “Republicanism” it suggests that Huckabee has not been fully conscious for the last eight years, since the chief things that brought the GOP into discredit have been 1) Iraq; 2) New entitlement spending; 3) The mishandling of Katrina; 4) Abuse and torture of detainees; 5) The administration’s effort to force-feed the country “immigration reform” of a kind it didn’t want; 6) Corruption.  These discredited the GOP with different constituencies, but all combined to create the generally miserable conditions for the party.  Whether or not they were consistent with one kind of “historic Republicanism” or another, they were all serious errors that cast doubt on the capacity of anyone who embraces Republicanism to be a competent governor.

Here Huckabee seems to be making Medicare Part D some sort of litmus test for what it means to be a good Republican, when pushing this entitlement through Congress was one of the worst blunders of the current administration.  He mistakenly imagines that the economic conservatives who waged a scorched earth campaign against him in the primaries are particularly influential or powerful, when they could not even derail his candidacy.  Meanwhile, Huckabee has consistently shown himself to be on the side of the “compassionate” conservative boondoggles and errors of this decade, and here he has effectively aligned himself with the government-expanding forces within the GOP, which is to say that he has aligned himself with a lot of “historic Republicanism” of the Nixon variety and against a significant part of conservatism.

Sullivan points out that some maps projecting the candidates’ electoral votes at this time four years ago were wildly wrong as predictions of the outcome, which ought to send cold shudders through every Obamaite in the country for a couple reasons.  First, the electoral maps are only representations of the polling at the time, and most polling (except for reliable operations such as Rasmussen) in mid-2004 did show Kerry with sizeable leads.  John Zogby, to his everlasting embarrassment, was predicting a Kerry landslide on Election Night itself.  Oops.  Second, Kerry’s lead earlier in the year in many polls gradually evaporated over the summer and fall, which reflected the typical erosion of support for the candidate from the non-incumbent party.  What does this mean?  It means that Obama’s continued weak levels of support in reputable national tracking polls (he continues to trail in both Gallup and Rasmussen this week) and his anemic polling in many swing states should be worrying his supporters a lot more than they are, and it may mean that Obama’s results on Election Day may be much worse than what those electoral maps are projecting today.  Just as polls are not predictive, but are a rough measurement of opinion at the time they are taken, these electoral maps are not predictive, and we all understand that things will change between now and Election Day.  The rather grim thing for Obama boosters to consider is that the change is more likely to be for the worse for their candidate than it will be for the better.

McCain leads in Mississippi by a margin smaller than you might expect (six points), but the real news is that all those conservative Democratic voters in Mississippi have started expressing a shocking willingness to vote for federal candidates from their own party.  Roger Wicker, whose former MS-01 House seat was just lost to the Democrat Travis Childers in the special election to replace him, is essentially tied with former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who holds a nominal lead of one point.  Some had mentioned earlier in the year that the Mississippi Senate race was going to be surprisingly competitive, and more so than Kentucky.  As it has turned out, Kentucky is also extremely competitive, which must be very worrying for Wicker, who suffers from being an incumbent without necessarily having the recognition and support statewide that incumbency normally brings.  Indeed, Musgrove apparently has higher name recognition statewide, since he has obviously been elected to statewide office before, while Wicker’s current position was through appointment to replace Lott.  The DSCC’s own polling gives Musgrove an eight-point lead over Wicker, but whatever the case incumbents with numbers as low as 46% five months before an election are in bad shape.  I hope Trent Lott is enjoying his lobbying money, because he single-handedly opened the door to the decimation of his state’s Republican delegation and made it that much more likely that the GOP will lose the ability to filibuster legislation in the Senate.

Count ’em: the GOP is likely to lose Senate seats in New Hampshire, New Mexico, Virginia, and Alaska, will have a hard time defending Oregon, Minnesota, North Carolina and is suddenly faced with competitive races in Mississippi, Kentucky, Nebraska and even Texas.  That’s eleven, and that still doesn’t take into account the trouble Collins may have in Maine.  If the GOP somehow lost all eleven, they would have the fewest Senators in the chamber that they have had since the 95th Congress (1977-79).  Even without losing the safer seats of Nebraska and Texas, the GOP will still be reduced to 40 seats and lose the filibuster.  This is actually terrible news for Obama, because it will make it very easy for McCain to warn against the dangers of unified government and increased Democratic majorities in Congress as a reason to vote for him. 

Update: As a commenter points out, I neglected the Colorado Senate race.  That’s twelve.

With Webb on the ticket, it would be much tougher for McCain to convince Americans that Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are the product of inexperience and naiveté. ~Steve Kornacki

Why?  Consider how this plays out.  As it is, Obama stresses his superior judgement and ridicules the value of experience that leads to terrible policies such as the Iraq invasion, and then argues that there should be negotiations with various “rogue” governments, which McCain ridicules as naive and proof of inexperience.  All that is necessary for this line of attack to work and persuade many voters to be wary of Obama is for the media to treat McCain’s criticism as somehow serious (which they always do), allow him to keep repeating it without any meaningful challenge (ditto) and treat the “experience gap” as something that Obama has to address (hence endless talking up of Jim Webb as VP).  If you add Webb to the ticket, how does any of this change?  Webb was prescient and right about Iraq, and in his way so was Obama, so then what is the real difference between Obama making a claim about ending the war in Iraq and Webb making that claim?  Does Webb magically have more credibility because he served in Vietnam even though both made comparable arguments in their pre-war warnings against invading? 

Arguably, if you put Webb on the ticket with his military service and Navy Secretary experience you re-emphasise Obama’s lack of those things, and furthermore, just as I have been saying all this week, you stress that these things that Obama doesn’t have are really important and, in fact, they are so important that Obama has to use Webb to deflect criticism against him along these lines.  What you end up getting is not immunity from McCain’s attacks, but confirmation that McCain has a legitimate point that Obama is inexperienced and that this is a significant problem.  But if it’s a significant problem, why won’t McCain’s attack work and why won’t it drive voters away from Obama?  Because voters can rest assured that when the going gets tough, Jim Webb will be…second in command?  How does that reassure voters about Obama‘s judgement and his decision-making?  If he’s inexperienced, maybe he overrules Webb’s counsel and embarks on a misguided policy that Webb told him would be a bad idea; perhaps he will be reluctant to yield to Webb’s counsel if people begin suggesting that Webb is the one really running foreign policy, which could inspire him to push a bad policy to demonstrate that he is in charge.  I can’t imagine why anyone who wants Obama to win would keep pushing VP selections that seem sure to trip him up down the line. 

Isn’t the Obama-Webb pairing something like the idea circulated during the 2000 campaign, and regretted ever since, that Cheney would be the one guiding and advising the hapless Bush, which was why Bush’s inexperience shouldn’t trouble us too much?  How did that work out?  You can imagine McCain having fun with this, just as he did when he tore into Romney when the latter spoke about consulting lawyers and experts: “Unlike my opponent, I won’t need to rely on my Vice President to help me understand issues of national security, blah blah blah.”  Obama overcame Clinton partly by flipping everything upside down and making her (vastly exaggerated) claim of experience into a liability that tied her to the “old politics” and the status quo, and yet when faced with a major decision Obama is supposed to embrace the expectations and standards that, had he followed them during the nomination fight, would have surely meant his defeat?

Update: James has come up with a devastating counterblast:

Voters simply may not care or be thinking that hard.

This is almost certainly right, and it is even more likely to be true with respect to Veep Madness.  Meanwhile, Ross and Jim Henley have more, and Ross has a follow-up post as well.  Ross adds that “for the symbolism of an Obama-Webb ticket to work, it would have to be wedded to something more tangible than what Webb has brought to the table in the Senate – some specific policy proposals, for instance, that would allow Webb to act like a heterodox figure, rather than a guy with a history of interesting views who’s sublimated them all in service to his party’s orthodoxy.” 

But then you might have thought that for the symbolism of Obama’s hope-and-unity tour to work, he would have to have done more than co-sponsor a bill on securing loose nukes with Dick Lugar and have some evidence of his great powers of bipartisan leadership, yet so far people keep buying into it.  It seems to me that many people, myself included, liked to think of Webb as being more “centrist” (even though on the war he was to the “left” of almost half of his current Democratic colleagues), but this was as misguided in its way as the tendency to label this or that politician a “maverick.”  By and large, a pol achieves the status of a “maverick” because of the pose that he strikes or because of his personality.  The reality that admirers don’t want to acknowledge is that if a politician votes like a left-liberal, he is for all intents and purposes a left-liberal, and the fact that he used to say interesting and provocative things that he could never get away with saying today as a Democrat is actually something of a depressing confirmation that there is no room in the ranks of that party for much of the past career of Jim Webb that people on the right talk about and find so intriguing.   

Second Update: Jim Antle also responds and has an interesting post on reports that the Obama campaign is actually vetting Sam Nunn.  To follow up on one of Jim’s objections to my earlier argument about Webb, it might seem that a Webb or Nunn pick would not exactly be engaging in a “bidding war over who is more militaristic and irresponsible in foreign policy,” since these two have been Iraq war opponents and have counseled the sort of responsible defense policy one once associated with Republicans (including such Republicans as Jim Webb).  But in certain respects it would appear that way, since Webb is one of the true believers that Vietnam could have and therefore should have been won had it not been for nefarious Democrats at home (a view that is not all together popular on his side of the aisle) and Nunn was, as Jim notes, not a McGovernite in a party that was and, in parts, still is (and I don’t say that as a criticism).  What I was trying to get at is that choosing a VP candidate to some extent because of his military service or past hawkishness appears to be an attempt to make the ticket seem more credible on national security, but this assumes that the one major candidate who got Iraq right doesn’t already have enormous credibility on national security, which means that everyone is still defining such “credibility” in the same way that they tend to define “seriousness” in foreign policy, which means maximal hawkishness and hegemonism.  Today’s Democrats can try to outbid the GOP here, but they will always lose.  Selecting a VP candidate to augment a supposed lack of national security credibility compels the Democrats to compete on that ground, because it accepts a conventional understanding of what it means to have credibility on national security, and that conventional understanding has been crafted by militarists and interventionists.  It is the same understanding that compels Obama’s campaign and his supporters to tout his foolish position on launching strikes into Pakistan without Islamabad’s consent (a position that, as his supporters like to boast for some reason, he shares with President Bush), and it is folly.

Jim Antle makes a good point in response to my last post:

But there clearly is this sort of vulnerability for a Democratic nominee, there has been in more elections than not since 1972, and it is particularly a problem for Barack Obama now with certain working-class white voters in his own party. You can say that it can’t be fixed. You can say that attempts to fix it are likely to be self-defeating and embarrassing, as John Kerry reporting for duty surely was. You can say you disagree with this critique of Obama [bold mine-DL]. But the problem clearly exists and doesn’t require Democratic validation. Democratic acknowledgement may not help, but it doesn’t seem arguable that this is a problem. It only seems arguable whether it can be solved.

It is this point about disagreeing with the critique that seems most important.  One of the reasons why the “unpatriotic” or “un-American” charges have worked against previous nominees at all is that the Democrats either did not take them seriously or actually embraced the terms of the debate being set by their opponents.  They disagreed with the critique, but often acted as ifthey agreed that the problem of perception was a substantial problem.  Thus Al Gore, a pro-war “centrist” himself, felt compelled to choose another pro-war “centrist” to “balance” the ticket, and Kerry did the same.  They internalised the critique of their enemies and gave the impression that they were guilty of the thing they were being accused of being, which ended up confirming the accusation in the minds of the public.  This has put Democrats in the position of having to engage in a bidding war to demonstrate their patriotism in the most heavy-handed ways, which has usually mistakenly involved trumpeting their willingness to bomb one country or another or being unusually reckless in promoting democracy and human rights abroad.  Obama’s supporters sometimes seem eager to remind the world that he would be willing to violate Pakistani sovereignty with impunity, unlike the wimp John McCain, and next they will probably laud his willingness to escalate the drug war as proof of his “toughness.” 

The point is that Democrats cannot defeat today’s GOP in a bidding war over who is more militaristic and irresponsible in foreign policy, just as the GOP can never outbid the Democrats when it comes to making lavish, irresponsible promises about domestic spending.  To fight the election on this ground is a losing proposition for Democrats, and this is why efforts to out-veteran the veteran opponent, which is part of the rationale for selecting Webb, will simply draw attention to the “weaknesses” that have been attributed to Obama.  It is an attempt to beat the opposition at its own game with a candidate who is uniquely ill-suited to playing that kind of game.  Hence he has tried to frame the election in entirely different terms, because once the election is defined along tradiitional lines he probably knows that he will lose. 

Suppose he chooses Webb.  What then?  Each time someone explains why he chose Webb, the answer will come back that he had to choose someone who had served in the military (because he hadn’t) and whom Middle Americans could accept (because they couldn’t accept him), and so each time Webb is mentioned voters will be reminded of the critique of Obama.  He has negatively defined himself in ways that are particularly advantageous to his opponent.  Instead of destroying or cancelling out the critique, it would strengthen it, and simultaneously play the game of the “old politics” that Obama professes that he wants to escape.  Is there an electoral reality that confirms that Obama has political weaknesses with certain constituencies?  Of course.  The trick, then, is not to dwell on those weaknesses and not obsess over winning over voters who cannot be won over.  The larger point would be that if Obama is so unelectable that he cannot put together a winning coalition without accomplishing the impossible and winning over these die-hard anti-Obama Democrats of Appalachia and so forth, it won’t matter whether he chooses Webb or Tony Hawk.  Meanwhile, choosing Webb sends the signal that he is going to chase a will o’ the wisp and lacks confidence in his ability to win without that sort of overt symbolic pandering.  When Gore chose Lieberman, he was playing into the hands of his opponents who kept insisting that he had to distance himself from a popular administration because of its sleazy reputation, and it was indicative of a broader problem with the campaign of yielding to outside criticism and pressure that contributed to a loss of confidence in the candidate. 

Rather than changing the terms of the debate and ushering in the sort of transformation his candidacy is supposed to represent, an Obama selection of Webb would be another instance of the “defensive crouch” from the Democrat who was supposed to be willing to defend Democratic policies forthrightly as the better policies on national security.  Voters respond well to confidence and conviction.  Actions that suggest hesitation, uncertainty or base-covering tend not to help, especially when they are being made by the relatively inexperienced contender.

Sullivan:

I take all her points, but it seems to me that the meme that is strongest against Obama is the usual Fox-Rove culture war stuff, a way to make Obama seem un-American.  Webb destroys that meme and remakes the landscape of the race in ways that hurt McCain.

That is one way to view it, I suppose, but more likely the selection of Webb validates the attack on Obama by acknowledging that there is some sort of liability or vulnerability that Obama had to balance out by choosing Webb.  Choosing Webb is another way of saying, “Yes, Democrats must have a military veteran with culturally conservative attitudes on their ticket in order to demonstrate their fidelity to the United States, which is otherwise suspect.”  Selecting Webb and selecting him specifically because of what he represents, rather than what he can do, accepts the judgement that Obama’s patriotism and American-ness need bolstering.  This has the risk of being every bit as self-defeating and embarrassing as John Kerry’s “reporting for duty” moment at the national convention.

Betty Ethridge, a 59-year-old Democrat wearing a denim jacket with military and POW commemorative patches, said after listening to McCain in Albuquerque that she simply trusted him more than she did Obama [bold mine-DL].

Ethridge said she objected to Obama’s “Muslim upbringing.” Reminded that Obama was a Christian, Ethridge said: “Now he is.”

“His statements lead me more to believe he’s more Muslim than he is Christian [bold mine-DL],” she said. “He wants to change America.” ~The Politico

His “statements”?  Has he been starting his speeches by saying bismillah arrahman arrahim?  (Of course he hasn’t.) What on earth are these people talking about?     

Ms. Ethridge and a lot of Democrats like her in New Mexico will apparently prove to be easy pickings for McCain, who will stress his military record and his interest in Western issues of land, water and conservation, while Obama will be punished for nebulous supposedly Islamic “statements” that are never defined or explained.  This question of trust is going to be decisive.