Dan notes that Obama is planning to campaign a lot out West, perhaps hoping to exploit the spoiling power of the Barr-Root juggernaut, but it’s worth bearing in mind what Ambinder says on this point:

But the truth is the ONLY way, given the electoral college map that Obama is presented with, he can win the presidency if he loses Ohio or Pennsylvania by winning the West — by winning at least four of these states: New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada and Washington. He cannot afford NOT to fight for the West. If he doesn’t fight for the West, he loses.

That’s very much in line with what I was saying earlier this month.

Remember how I was saying that Obama’s profound unpopularity in Kentucky would secure Mitch McConnell’s re-election?  Yes, well, that was apparently very wrong.  Rasmussen has a new poll showing McConnell at 44% and trailing Lunsford by five.  Incumbents polling under 50% are traditionally considered very vulnerable, and given the intense anti-GOP sentiment this year it is now easy to imagine that Kentucky flips along with perhaps as many as nine others (including a more long-shot Nebraska upset).  Given such hostility to GOP incumbents in Kentucky, it is all the more remarkable that Obama gets just 32% support.  There is going to be a lot of split-ticket voting this year:

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of McCain voters say they will split the ticket and vote for Lunsford. 

Which people do Sam Nunn and Rob Portman know, and how much are they paying them?  David Brooks put forward the names of these two for what seems to be the umpteenth time as possible VP selections for this cycle by one columnist or another (though usually Nunn is mentioned as a choice for McCain, not Obama), and I have yet to see anything approaching a good rationale for either one.  If competently running the OMB were a qualification for success in an elected executive capacity, Mitch Daniels should be a giant among Republican governors.  In fact, no one talks about him as a potential VP choice because he is poorly regarded in his own state and his own state is Indiana, the birthplace, as Vice President Thomas Marshall of Indiana said, of second-rate men.  Portman also has the distinction of being a former Congressman, which would make him the most underqualified VP selection in decades.  Nunn might be an intriguing choice, if reviving aged, blue dog hawkishness were a top priority of the Democratic Party and the country, but it isn’t. 

Meanwhile, Daschle makes for a more amusing possibility, but he is such a dedicated Obamaite that his selection would do nothing for party unity.  Pawlenty is a far more credible choice, since he at least has some executive experience, and would fit the bill of aiding McCain in governing far better than Portman.  Portman’s name keeps coming up, I suspect, because the GOP is desperate to find an Ohioan who isn’t deeply unpopular or under indictment who could stand to be associated with them, and they know that they need Ohio in the election, but as a matter of how McCain will govern after the election selecting Portman makes little sense.

Since January, Eunomia has had an additional six hundred posts, which makes for about 1,900 in the last year.  My thanks to the editors here at TAC for taking Eunomia on board the magazine’s site and thanks to all of my loyal readers, commenters and blogging colleagues who have made working on Eunomia such a pleasure these past three and a half years.  As always, I hope to keep making Eunomia a source of worthwhile commentary and discussion, and I look forward to working on the next 5,000 posts.

One thing is certain: neither the editors at Newsweek nor George Will has a clue what “Caesaropapism” means.  Unfortunately, it seems that this error derives from Gene Healy’s well-received book, The Cult of the Presidency, which I have heard from many people is an excellent and vitally important critique of the imperial Presidency.  It is unfortunate, then, that it should be marred by the use of such a glaringly irrelevant and inappropriate term. 

Here’s Will:

Healy’s dissection of the delusions of “redemption through presidential politics” comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d’être, “agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility.” Liberals think boundless government is beneficent.  Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls “Caesaropapism” as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor [bold mine-DL].

No doubt as a description of the constitutionalism of convenience espoused by many mainstream conservatives, this is quite right, but what I can’t understand is why Healy would have chosen Caesaropapism as the term to describe it.  It is just Caesarism.  There is no “papism” of any kind involved, because it does not concern doctrine, religion or anything pertaining to the realm of the sacred and clearly because it is has nothing to do with any ecclesiastical office or the usurpation thereof.  Then again, those most often accused of Caesaropapism, Byzantine emperors, never engaged in it, either, so it makes even less sense in the context of describing a secular American office.  This seems to confuse the modern therapeutic state and the President’s assumed role of Therapist-in-Chief with a claim to sacred or religious authority, which gives the therapeutic state too much credit and inadvertently invests the Presidency with an aura of sacrality it does not possess. 

The use of this term is troubling on many levels.  As someone who works on Byzantine history, I am constantly concerned to explain, as many in the field have done already, why the word Caesaropapism is terribly misleading, a product of an earlier age in which confessional and secular historiography alike wished to portray a corrupt Oriental empire in the worst possible light.  Of course, it derives in part from a liberal and Protestant historiography in which flinging the accusation of “Papism,” which included the alleged excessive meddling of the Papacy in secular affairs, was considered appropriate and even progressive.  If the Catholics were supposedly guilty of “Papism,” Orthodox have supposedly been guilty of “Caesaropapism.”  Never mind that it was the settlement at Augsburg and the Protestant states of northern Europe that created actual state churches in which some measure of Caesaropapism did exist–blame the Greeks and Slavs instead.  The accusation of “Papism” was mostly code for describing all Catholic societies as backward, regressive and dangerous to freedom; it has been a shorthand for all of the hang-ups expressed in the Black Legend and the anti-Catholic hysteria of 1688 and afterwards.  Likewise, Caesaropapism is a term of abuse intended to belittle the most Christianised society in the ancient and medieval world, and it is deployed by moderns, usually liberals (broadly defined), for whom disestablishment or what we have come to call the “wall of separation” was an obvious and necessary good.  For early secular historians of Eastern Empire, Christianity ruined the empire but then in turn became compromised by ties to the state, while for confessional historians from the West emperors such as Justinian typified a system in which the emperor supposedly ruled the Church.  This was all a lot of nonsense, since the emperor did not rule the Church and could be chastised and challenged by it, but that hasn’t stopped it from living on into the present day. 

Healy correctly notes the blasphemous language of many Presidents, a trend that became very common starting with Lincoln and continuing after him, in which they describe their role in quasi-prophetic and salvific terms.  However, this is also not Caesaropapism, but simply the creepy appropriation of Biblical language by the executive to justify its own agenda.

Maybe those overwrought Kentucky Derby analogies were premature.  According to Rasmussen, Clinton leads in Kentucky by nine (51-42), Obama trails by 25.  (His unfavs are at 61%)  Together with West Virginia, Missouri and Arkansas, this would be yet another state that Clinton seems capable of winning that Obama would lose and lose badly.  That makes for a fair number of electoral votes (45), if North Carolina is also included, that seem to be obtainable by Clinton and are much harder for Obama to get. 

The remarkable thing about the Kentucky numbers is the age of the people that do support Obama most often: it is not young voters, but voters 50-64 and 65+ who are more likely to back Obama than their children and grandchildren.  Just 27% of 18-29 year-olds back Obama, while 68% back McCain, and the same is basically true of 30-39 year olds (60-29).  Obama’s support peaks among 50-64 year olds at 36%.  Clinton runs 15 points ahead of Obama in his supposedly core demographic of 18-29 year olds, and she wins every other age group.  She wins a higher percentage of Republicans than he does, and she wins over a higher percentage of Republicans than she loses from the Democrats.  Oh, and she runs even with McCain among independents, while he loses them by 28, but why worry? 

P.S. Looking at the Kentucky crosstabs more closely, I see that the least surprising and most significant shift of votes comes among Democrats and women: 48% of Democrats support him, 78% support her; 57% of women back Clinton, 34% back Obama.  Clinton gains 15 points more than Obama among men as well, but the biggest changes are found in these two groups.  About one-third of the Democrats who would support Clinton but won’t back Obama seem to be ripe for the taking by a third party candidate, because they won’t support McCain, either.  In an Obama v. McCain race, 13% of Democrats opt for a third candidate compared to just 2% of Republicans and independents.  Possibly the best scenario for Barr and Nader is to have an Obama v. McCain race that drives disaffected Democrats away from both candidates.

He [Hagel] doesn’t — yet — seem to be animated by obvious political ambition. ~Kelley Vlahos

My colleague on the main blog seems in this part of her post to be tactfully omitting the unfortunate collapse of the Hagel ’08 boomlet, which was followed by the farce of the Bloomberg-Hagel (or was it Hagel-Bloomberg?) boomlet, after Sen. Hagel had started shooting rhetorical barbs at the administration to demonstrate his independence to his new best friends in the press, who had dubbed him, quite prematurely, as an antiwar dissenter from the White House line.  As I said many, many times last year to the annoyance of some, Hagel had not yet become an opponent of the war, he eschewed the antiwar label and for intents and purposes did nothing much that would distinguish him as an opponent.  Meanwhile, one will find that the intensity of Hagel’s public criticism of the adminstration tracked quite closely with the rising national unpopularity of the war.  This is understandable and appropriate in its way, but hardly the stuff of heroic resistance.  Many war supporters, such as John Warner and Sam Brownback, opposed the “surge” in full or in part because they thought the plan to be mistaken or misguided, so it’s not clear to me that Hagel’s great moment in speaking of footwear merchants was nearly as impressive as everyone seems to think it was. 

It seems to me that, whatever his motives, the timing of Edwards’ turnaround on the war was much better than Hagel’s, since he went into opposition–indeed fierce, outspoken opposition–fairly early on.  That he was doing this at least partly to rebuild his reputation in the party and prepare the way for a future presidential bid seems clear, but at least when he became antiwar he actually started opposing the war vocally and uncompromisingly.  Certainly, it’s easy enough for Edwards to say whatever he will now that he isn’t in the Senate, but then Hagel’s willingness to criticise the administration became much greater after he had decided on retirement.  Someone will have to explain to me why it is so impressive that, just when Hagel is most needed as a serious, responsible voice in the ever-shrinking Republican conference, he is getting out of town or at least out of the position of influence that he currently has.  Viewed one way, Hagel risked alienation and broke with the GOP leadership, and now has to retire because he cannot win re-election, thus paying a high price for principle, but I think the more accurate way to see it is that Hagel broke with the party over this disagreement and then avoided having to answer to his constituents at the polls for the decisions he took over the last two years.    

Whether or not one can explain Sen. Hagel’s shift of views entirely in terms of “obvious political ambition,” there was clearly some enthusiasm for the spotlight that seemed to coincide awfully closely with the electoral shellacking the GOP received in 2006 that propelled him to the front of the war debate.  After the midterms there was then a great deal of discussion about shoe-sellers and impeachment (Hagel mentioned the latter again last week), all of which had been remarkably absent in the previous three years, at least as far as the public was concerned.  If there was no ambition revealed in the very public flirting with Bloomberg, then I don’t know what Hagel was doing.  Ross has been more blunt in how he describes it.  Arguably, Hagel saw the 2006 results and concluded that the people had spoken and it was now time to ratchet up the criticism.  Viewed more critically, Hagel’s actions are those of someone who has very carefully tried to be on the side of the majority while always striking the pose of the thoughtful independent.  Don’t misunderstand me–there are times when Hagel actually is thoughtful and independent-minded, but he doesn’t display these qualities nearly as often as his admirers say he does.  

I’m not generally one to dwell on the Strange New Respect phenomenon, since it is natural that journalists who have a certain left-leaning view of things find it refreshing and encouraging when they find someone on the right who seems to share some of their concerns.  It’s a lot like the way some mainstream conservatives responded to Obama when they first saw him speak, “Finally, a liberal we don’t have to loathe!”  How long ago those days seem now!  It is also understandable that they will lionise this person for showing strength of character and vision, just as war supporters claim that Joe Lieberman has great integrity and courage…because he agrees with them.  Even so, Hagel seems to be a good example of this phenomenon, since it is only thanks to the media’s romance with Hagel over the last year and a half that anyone, much less Obama supporters, would be entertaining the idea of having Hagel on the ticket with Obama.  In his administration, maybe, but as Vice President?  One reason why this selection strikes me as utterly implausible and also politically ruinous for Obama is that, aside from the war, Hagel is as close to the White House in his voting as anyone in the Senate.  This is not a question of his conservatism, of course, but of his consistency in voting with the administration on almost everything.  I cannot think of many less suitable running mates for the champion of “turning the page” and breaking with the Bush administration than Hagel.  That doesn’t mean that Hagel wouldn’t be a valuable member of an Obama Cabinet, and his foreign policy views are sometimes fairly sensible and they align more with Obama’s than they do with any other candidate’s, but the notion of putting him on the ticket would tend to confirm the most cynical readings of Hagel’s moves in recent years while also detonating whatever credibility Obama may have as a representative of meaningful change.

TAC Contributing Editor Jim Pinkerton is moderating the Libertarian presidential debate tonight, which is a good excuse to link to his article on the future of libertarianism.  You have to love how the crowd at the debate is booing all mentions of Reagan and Bush the Elder.  The American Conservative received mostly cheers, though I could have sworn I heard a few boos.

8:06 Barr named Ayn Rand as his favourite philosopher in response to the first question (which wasn’t supposed to be asked until later).  I’m not sure if this is deeply worrying evidence of insanity or evidence of absolutely shameless pandering to the Libertarian crowd.

8:09 Mike Gravel takes a more serious tone to attack the two-party system.  Gravel makes a better impression to me in his opening remarks.  The crowd responds rather more enthusiastically to Gravel than to Barr.

8:12 Massachusetts state party chair George Phillies appeals to his history of party activism and his role as a centrist party unifier.

8:14 Michael Jingozian (an Armenian libertarian!) sets a more reflective, subdued tone.  Mary Ruwart makes a rather amusing feminist appeal to nominating a woman to “pick up the ball” that the Democrats have dropped; she also makes an appeal to her history in party campaigning and says nice things about freedom.

8:16 Steve Kubby, cancer survivor and medical marijuana activist, praises the virtues of medical marijuana, but then makes the marijuana issue a broader issue of defending liberty.  His personal story seems compelling, and Kubby makes what is probably the most coherent opening statement so far.

8:19 Wayne Allyn Root is, as he puts it, the anti-politician, “homeschool dad” and first-ever small businessman and Jewish-American presidential nominee.  He is way too excited, but then I suppose enthusiasm can be an asset in winning the crowd.

8:21 Mike Gravel must be going for the Eunomia vote, because he named Solon as his favourite philosopher.  Solon!  His answer was quite brilliant, actually, and if I had never seen him before I would argue that he ought to be the nominee.  Phillies oddly named Cicero, the antithesis of heroic resistance to tyranny, Jingozian named Ben Franklin and Ruwart copied Barr by naming Ayn Rand.

8:28 Sorry, technical difficulties crashed my browser, so I missed the last few minutes.  I just caught the tale-end of a good Gravel answer on foreign policy.  Phillies praises Chinese lack of industrial regulation?  Jingozian makes a straight antiwar appeal.  Ruwart calls for withdrawal from Iraq and cheers on trade.  Kubby claims that America has no enemies (!) and comes out against bombing civilian populations.  Strange feedback on his microphone is distracting.  Root praises Jefferson and impoundment, acknowledging his pro-war past.  Barr rejects foreign occupation and nation-building, calls for withdrawal not just from Iraq but from Japan, Korea and around the world.  This is a more forthright non-interventionist line than I expected he would take.

8:35 Phillies proposes nuclear and renewable energy.  Jingozian agrees, and opposes drilling in ANWR, among other things.  Ruwart says that the “true cost of oil” would be made known if we withdrew forces from countries with oil, which would then spur on the development of alternative fuels.  Kubby would “walk his talk” and talks about fueling engines with cooking oil.  “Get the politicians out,” Root says, and makes  the sensible point that ethanol is a gigantic fraud.  Root wants to drill everywhere.  Barr likes polar bears, but opposes making them an endangered species; he rails against regulation.  Gravel proposes moving away from gasoline in five years and…basically makes no sense. 

8:44 Jingozian calls for intellectual humility and acknowledging what we don’t know.  Ruwart talks about establishing fines for imposing externalities through pollution.  Kubby wants to arm the chickens and trust the market.  Root loves to take shots at Al Gore.  I am ready for him to go back to Las Vegas.  If I wanted a talk radio host for President, I would say so.  Barr opposes international institutions and Kyoto and complains about having to wait a long time to answer the question.  

8:49 Gravel takes a property rights angle on pollution externalities.  In my estimation, Gravel is generally making a much better impression during this debate than Barr.  Phillies takes a more ardently green line.

8:51 Ruwart calls for abolishing PATRIOT and Real ID Acts.  She name-checks Ron Paul and makes a good argument on civil liberties.  Kubby attacks Barr for having been a former PATRIOT Act supporter.  Root cites PATRIOT Act and warrantless wiretapping as the reasons he became a libertarian.  Privatise the “war on terror”?  What?  Barr cites his work on civil liberties in recent years and utterly rejects both acts.

9:00 Kubby calls U.S. immigration policy something that the KKK would have produced–clearly he’s interested in expanding the party!  Root takes an anti-welfare line on immigration, citing the example of his ancestors who didn’t need it, and calls for secure border and “pathway to citizenship” for those here.  Barr notes that there is no immigration policy to speak of; Barr makes basic border security points.  Gravel unfortunately, but predictably, takes an open borders line.  Will Wilkinson has found his candidate.  Phillies imagines a future where everyone is rich and happy, and then makes a standard anti-welfare point. 

9:08 Root denounces the drug war, makes a non-interventionist pitch and calls for legalising marijuana (shocking, but true!).  Barr talks about jailing people for possession, and opposes federal involvement.  Gravel goes farther and suggests total decriminalisation. 

P.S.  Sorry, I got a bit distracted from following the rest of the debate.  I’ve just tuned back in to hear the closing statements.  Kubby is very combative and seems to enjoy attacking the others.  Root says that the party needs energy–well, he certainly has plenty of that!  Root says his hero is Churchill–good grief, can’t we get away from this hero-worship even at a Libertarian debate?

Update: Dave Weigel of Reason notes in his interview on C-SPAN that the debate was surprisingly polite given earlier hostility to Barr.  Weigel estimates that Barr and Ruwart are “neck and neck” as the frontrunners for the nomination.  Talking about the lower attendance at the convention, he cites the bruising intra-party fight from the last election and Ron Paul’s success in pulling people into the GOP.

At Taki’s Magazine, Marcus Epstein makes quite a lot, indeed too much, out of the publication in the forthcoming TAC of the fairly negative Lukacs review of Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War and explains it in terms of the magazine’s difference from paleoconservative outlets.  That must be why Tom wrote a post attacking the review…on TAC’s main blog.  If that weren’t enough, the editors have been very cunning in masking this distance from paleoconservatism when they brought Eunomia in to be part of their website as recently as three months ago, and I then went and confused things even more by writing a critical post against the review.  As ever, I hope my views on Churchill and Lincoln, among other things, remain anything but boring or conventional, but this is hardly the first time that an argument in support of a more conventional view of American, to say nothing of British, involvement in WWII has appeared in TAC.  Prof. Andrew Bacevich wrote an article (sorry, not online) on FDR and WWII back in June 2005 to which I took great exception, but I never supposed that his argument demonstrated anything about TAC other than the intellectual diversity of the magazine’s contributors that has been one of the great qualities of TAC and also something that I believe is fairly typical of paleoconservative outlets.  Certainly, that is something to which we ought to aspire if it isn’t always the reality.  Both Takimag and TAC publish Austin Bramwell, yet he has in the past written things far more critical of paleoconservatives as a group than anything that Prof. Lukacs has ever written, and so what if he has?  Healthy criticism and pushback are vital to making our arguments better and keeping us from drifting into intellectual torpor.  The last thing the right needs are additional echo chambers in which we congratulate one another on our purity of belief.  

For whatever it’s worth, the editors also ran a fairly critical review of June 1941 in June 2006, which prompted a rare rebuke from Lukacs in the letters section.  (As it happens, I also wrote a letter protesting that review, but understandably the book’s author took precedence.)  That review made rather exaggerated and uncharitable claims about Lukacs’ alleged greater comfort with communism on account of his long-standing judgement that the Soviets posed the lesser threat.  Viewed in one way, one might read the new review as a response to that earlier one, and whatever is unfair in this one is more than balanced out by what was in that one.  More simply, and with much less gnashing of teeth, it is easy to understand why someone such as Prof. Lukacs, who has researched and written extensively on Churchill, Hitler and Europe before and during WWII, would have strong views about a book that, so far as I can tell without having read it in its entirety, directly challenges or rejects central judgements that he has made about all of the above.  One might more appropriately view the publication of such a review as part of TAC‘s ongoing effort to maintain lively debate and welcome differing perspectives within the same magazine.  Indeed, one might go so far as to say that a magazine that abandoned that original goal would quickly become as boring and conventional a paleo journal as some mainstream magazines have become in their way.

So I would close by saying that it is absolutely crazy for us to be attacking one another in such terms over legitimate differences of historical interpretation.  Obviously, invoking the name of David Irving was quite unnecessary for the purposes of the review (though I understand why Lukacs used it to make his traditional point about the danger of half-truths), but then so is throwing around the epithet neocon or accusing John Lukacs of all people of holding neoconservative views.  I am not normally confused with someone who makes a lot of irenic arguments, so I hope this may help persuade everyone to keep this review in perspective and refrain from flinging accusations or charges at people with whom we agree perhaps 95% or more of the time. 

P.S.  Think of all this another way: what is TAC’s position on Barack Obama?  Can you gauge that from what has been published over the last year?  If you looked only at Steve Sailer and the critiques of his foreign policy, you would think that the magazine is unreservedly hostile to him, and if you looked only at Scott’s piece on Obama’s views on Israel and Prof. Bacevich’s “conservative case for Obama” you might think that the magazine was cheering him on, yet the editors have published all of these.

Reihan takes another strong line on the VP selection by the Democratic nominee:

The question is no longer whether Barack Obama should select Jim Webb as his nominee. It is whether he can justify not doing so.

I don’t think that’s the question.  As sociologically fun as an Obama-Webb ticket would be, let’s stop and consider this for a moment.  Leave aside for the moment that Webb has all but said that he will flee the country if someone tries to make him the running mate (this is only a small exaggeration of how much he doesn’t want the job, further confirming in everyone’s mind that he is probably the only one who deserves it).  Webb’s success in shepherding the “new GI Bill” through the Senate is an impressive achievement, and it does the junior Senator from Virginia credit that he has carried the genuine concern he showed during his career and during his ’06 campaign for veterans into the Senate to good effect.  Those of us on the right who cheered his election can take some satisfaction that he is proving to be a very capable legislator, and he is showing the President the way as he said he would.  Still, I am amazed that the first thought when confronted with “a masterful legislative tactician” in one party or the other is, “How can we get this man into the Naval Observatory and waste his talents?”  There are plenty of objections to putting two first-term Senators on the same ticket as it is, and if it is true that virtually no one votes for the Vice President it’s not clear that Webb brings concrete benefits to the campaign, even if he would clearly be an asset in a Democratic administration.  Meanwhile, like the even more ludicrous idea of putting Bobby Jindal on the Republican ticket, selecting Webb all but ensures that any hopes of executive office that Webb might have hinge on the outcome of the election.  Losing VP nominees may go back to their old jobs or are never heard from again.  In this case, what’s best for Obama may not be good for Webb, Virginia or the Senate Democrats.     

Likewise, it shocks me when I read about people seriously contemplating Mark Warner as Obama’s running mate.  In the case of Webb, assuming the Democrats win the presidential race, you would be depriving the Senate Democrats of one of their most promising new members and opening up a narrowly won Senate seat to a fresh contest after Gov. Kaine appoints a placeholder for the bulk of Webb’s term.  In the case of Warner, this abandons a sure-thing Democratic victory in the election to replace John Warner and throws some poor last-minute replacement into the middle of a campaign he will have a much harder time winning.  Unless Obama’s election hinges on Virginia alone, and it’s not clear that this is the state he needs to worry about the most, Mark Warner would do a new Obama administration a lot more good in the Senate as an additional Democratic vote in support of his agenda than he would as a VP nominee who might not even be needed in order to carry Virginia. 

Strangely enough, Ohio and Pennsylvania appear to be less likely wins than Virginia right now, and as Reihan and I have been saying for some time in different ways it is the party that can appeal to those voters of the “lower-middle” in the Midwest that will probably prevail.  Webb may help some with these voters with his populist message, but then why not the Ohio populist Strickland who was just elected with 60% of the vote?  On the other hand, if the selection should have many years of executive experience, Rendell remains a decent choice.  A Sebelius choice just seems bizarre, and were he to choose her it would be almost a request to be defeated.  Rasmussen Reports has the numbers:

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of Kansas voters are more likely to vote for Obama is Sebelius is on the ticket while 34% say they are less likely to vote for Obama with Sebelius as the Vice-Presidential candidate.

Not only does Sebelius not help Obama in Kansas, where he gets trounced anyway, but she actually seems to hurt him (!) where one might think she would be a valuable asset.  Also, SUSA’s running mate match-ups, while hardly ideal measurements given how little-known many of the named candidates are, show that Obama either losesmanyswingstates or runs much more weakly when Sebelius is on the ticket.  In fact, the one running mate with whom Obama consistently runs better is John Edwards.  Presumably some significant part of this is name recognition and familiarity, but it does seem worth remembering that Sebelius’ snoozeworthy response to the State of the Union has been the public’s only experience with Sebelius and it may have done some lasting damage to her national reputation.   

Meanwhile, I think Reihan is still in fulminating mode:

Even if Webb murdered someone in an alleyway in a fit of pique or been paid vast sums by the Chinese Politburo for detailed intelligence about American naval vessels, he would still be a far stronger and more appealing vice presidential nominee than Hillary Clinton.