Some people in New Hampshire seem to be very fickle.  As I noted in an earlier post, Obama had suffered a 23-point swing against him over a two month period, and now he has enjoyed a fifteen-point swing in his favour as many McCain backers have swung around to back Obama again.  Rasmussen has tried to account for this volatility by focusing on the margin of error, but none of the other states they are tracking has seen this kind of rollercoaster action.  So it may be that New Hampshire independents are actually moving back and forth in their preferences with great frequency.

Meanwhile, in more sobering news for Obamaites from the “Casey belt,” Obama leads McCain in Pennsylvania by two, while Clinton trounces McCain by eleven.  The 23% of Democrats who back McCain and the mere 63% of Democrats who support Obama would seem to account for a lot of that difference.  His lead among Pennsylvania independents is also slightly smaller than Clinton’s, and his advantage with Republicans is negligible.  Obama’s larger problem is that this is being replicated nationally.  From the Rasmussen tracking poll article yesterday:

McCain’s edge can be traced directly to the fact that just 66% of Democrats say they will vote for Obama at this time. Twenty-three percent (23%) of all Democrats say that if the election were held today, they’d vote for McCain [bold mine-DL]. Another 11% would opt for “some other candidate” or remain undecided. McCain, who wrapped up the GOP nomination more than two months ago, attracts 79% of Republican votes and holds a modest five point advantage among unaffiliated voters.

This 23% of Democrats in Pennsylvania who back McCain probably make up a large part of the 25% of Democrats who think Obama should drop out of the race.  Are these just Clintonite dead-enders?  Maybe, but this percentage of Democrats who are resisting Obama’s candidacy has been pretty constant throughout the contest.  Obviously, if McCain gets anything like 20-25% of Democrats in November it is very difficult to see how Obama wins.

For over three years, Eunomia has not really needed a comments policy, thanks to the good sense and courtesy of my regular readers, but let me set some general ground rules to remove any ambiguity that may exist about what kind of comments I will approve and what kind I will not.  Comments that are disrespectful to anyone here will not be approved, and users who have been previously approved who make such comments may be stripped of their privileges.  I do reserve the right to disapprove any comment, but with the exception of the sort of comments I just mentioned I am glad to have all perspectives represented here.

Iain Martin writes about the Crewe and Nantwich by-election that the Tories just won in a landslide (the first by-election they have won against Labour since 1978), and notes something that points to why the victory has broader significance:

A detailed study of the result, according to a Tory campaign source, will “scare the hell out of them”: working class voters in their thirties voted Tory. These are people who previously either did not vote or voted Labour.

Most striking to me was the idea that people in their thirties voted Tory, since these are people who grew up with memories of Major’s failures and have mostly known Labour as the party of government.  For a long time, as I had understood it, younger voters were trending heavily away from the Conservative Party, much as they are moving away from the GOP here, and now this may be changing.  I don’t know that this can entirely be credited to Cameron, but he seems to be exploiting the slow-motion collapse of Brown’s government better than anyone expected.

Recent congressional losses, President George W. Bush’s unpopularity, and bleak generic ballot poll numbers have conservatives fearing the “liberalization” of America – a movetoward [bold mine-DL] secularization, the growth of government, stagnation, mediocrity and loss of freedom. ~Fred Thompson

They would do well to fear, since the administration has either actively promoted or successfully brought about at least four out of those five.  I appreciate Thompson summing up what has been happening over the last seven years, even if he doesn’t seem to understand that these things have already occurred.  It is telling that Fred Thompson, whose presidential campaign was the epitome of reheated 1990s talking points, should respond to the claim that conservatism is ailing, since his lackluster campaign was in some ways a perfect symbol of its loss of imagination.  So much of what Thompson says sounds right, but there is no hint of applying the principles he talks about so often to the present day.

Update: In case it has to be spelled out, I would draw attention to what Thompson actually says in this paragraph.  When he refers to conservative fear of “liberalization,” he is referring to a fear of a process that may be about to begin, and he then defines that process as a “move towards” the things he lists.  You fear things that have not yet happened.  The unfortunate thing about Thompson’s statement is that several of these things have happened on Bush’s watch and I don’t seem to recall Fred Thompson being in the vanguard of the resistance, and yet Thompson treats these things as approaching woes that are to be combated.  There’s really no other way I can see to read what Thompson said.

On the main blog, Dan writes about Nevada and New Mexico:

If Republicans in those states are as libertarian-minded as they’re cracked up to be, Barr could inflict some real damage on McCain.

It’s hard to know, but despite the libertarian leanings of our former Gov. Johnson I think it is safe to say that Republicans in New Mexico are much less libertarian-minded than their fellow partisans in, say, Texas.  These are impressions and may exaggerate things a bit, but New Mexico Republicans tend to be more moderate in the center and north of the state, strongly socially conservative and more restrictionist in the south and southeast and, when you can find them, staunchly and primarily pro-gun and anti-EPA in the west.  While I can see Barr gaining some support on account of immigration, his opposition to the war is not likely to resonate very well back home among most Republicans, but I could see him making some inroads in the southeast.  My guess, and I admit that is mostly just a guess, is that Barr would fare much better in states such as Montana and Idaho.  Those are states that are probably least in danger of being flipped to Obama unless Barr has a remarkably large share of the vote.  Nevada and New Mexico may be close enough that even the relatively smaller success of a Barr ticket could change the outcome.  Depending on the impact Barr wants to have, he could choose the focus of his campaigning accordingly.   

P.S.  Not that it will matter to the Libertarians who are busily deciding their nomination, but I would add that I have very little interest in voting for a Libertarian ticket that does not have Barr at the top.  If Barr does not win the nomination, it will be Baldwin ’08 for me.

Rod makes what is apparently a necessary clarification these days:

And Revelation says absolutely nothing about the Antichrist being a Muslim. Nothing.

I could say that these sorts of chain e-mails and the frequency with which they are passed on and believed demonstrate that mass democracy is a profoundly flawed and foolish system, but that would be a bit too easy.  This chain e-mail also drives home how culturally and historically illiterate many Americans would have to be to not already know that the Apocalypse of St. John never mentions Muslims because it was composed over five centuries before Muhammad.  Of course, that would assume that these people have read the Apocalypse in the first place.  What is perhaps more troubling is that those who would be most inclined to take seriously prophecies taken from the Apocalypse presumably consider themselves very serious Bible-believing Christians, and yet giving credence to the nonsense being peddled about Obama would seem to show that they do not know their own Scriptures terribly well.  If many Americans are poorly educated in their own history and culture such that they are susceptible to this kind of rubbish, this is hardly their fault alone, but I think I draw a different lesson from the popularity of these absurd e-mails than most. 

The kind of worshipful, servile adulation heaped on Obama by the media, giving rise to such things as the “Obama Messiah Watch” and not entirely ironic references to him as some kind of saviour figure, has generated a popular backlash that takes the glowing coverage, the swooning throngs of supporters and references to the “cult” phenomenon among his enthusiasts and reinterprets them in the worst possible way.  The action-reaction dimension of this is obvious: journalists propose, basically as a joke for their own amusement, the idea of the Obamessiah, and gradually this moves out into the broader public and the reaction against this is to take the joke all together too seriously and argue that he must actually be anti-Christ.  Journalists, pundits and bloggers who have enjoyed the inside jokes about treating Obama as something close to the Second Coming have, in addition to their frivolous trafficking in what tens of millions of Americans would regard as blasphemy, probably failed to consider that this would boomerang and come back to hurt the candidate whom they have promoted so adoringly.  This is yet another example of how the excessive boosting of Obama in the most politically dangerous ways is coming back to haunt him.  In this case, it is happening in the form of these under-the-radar communications that are taking the elite and official praise of Obama and turning it into powerful and apparently somewhat popular invective against him.

I must be in a strange mood today, because I am even feeling inclined to defend libertarians against Prof. Bainbridge’s assault.  Bainbridge responded to McArdle:

To me, this is basically wrong headed. I can’t think of anything more contrary to the spirit of Burkean conservatism than a seach for the “next big thing.” Indeed, I would argue that a large part of the problem with modern conservatism is that Bush and the K Street Gang were more concerned with finding something big to do than with standing athwart history shouting stop.

Instead, it is the Libertarians and the progressives who are Big Idea people. Despite their obvious differences in philosophy, they share the absurd belief that if only their big idea(s) came to pass, society would inexorably progress towards some ideal.

Notably, except for Objectivism, there are no big ideas on his list that could be reasonably connected to libertarians of any stripe, and most libertarians tend to regard actual Objectivists as the scary cousins you never want to invite to family functions.  Goodness knows I love to give libertarians grief about all kinds of things, and there is some truth in the observation that libertarians, classical liberals, and modern liberals/progressives share certain fundamental assumptions about progress that conservatives properly do not share, which is why they tend to be optimists and we are not (or at least should not be).  However, it seems to me that libertarians typically eschew “big ideas” in the way that Bainbridge means them, which is not the same as saying that they eschew all ideology.  Libertarians are ideological, but it is because of the content of their ideology that they are among the least inclined to endorse “big ideas” if these entail massive collective efforts, especially when realised through the state’s coercive apparatus, and they are also probably temperamentally least inclined to accept comprehensive and totalising cultural or political projects designed, as they would critically view it, to infuse life with meaning.  What Ms. McArdle meant by the “next big thing” was not, I assume, the “next big federal entitlement program we could use to buy votes” or the “next big social engineering project,” but rather the next major policy debate.

Responding to McArdle, Andrew Stuttaford says:

As for the notion that there’s merit to be found in stepping out of the arena to think great thoughts, I don’t get it. The most useful ideas emerge from engagement with the world, not withdrawal from it.

It is tempting to say, “Of course you don’t get it–you think the criterion for measuring the worth of ideas is their utility,” but that would not be sufficient.  As Stuttaford presumably knows, it was during their time in “the wilderness” that the Tories did some of their best policy thinking and laid the groundwork for what followed in the 1980s, and the same could be said, perhaps to a lesser extent, about conservatives here during the same period.  There is also something very strange in thinking that going into the political wilderness has something to do with living the life of an anchorite, as if the entirety of “the world” was the government and the political process.  Is it unimaginable that one could “engage” the world without being bogged down in the minutiae of party politics for a few years? 

P.S.  This line of criticism is very similar to the sort of thing you hear from people who belittle liberal arts students: “What are you going to do with that?”  Oh, I don’t know, perhaps understand something of lasting value?

Update: Stuttaford has responded, and from his second post I see that I read too much into his original comment about “engagement with the world”:

Unfortunately he seems to overlook the fact (or I didn’t make it sufficiently clear) that what I was writing about was politics, nothing more, nothing less.

Fair enough.  I also take his point that the policy work that prepared the way for Thatcher’s government had been going on before the Tories had been in the political wilderness.  It seems to me that he and McArdle are basically in agreement, and when McArdle talks about “going into the wilderness for a little while, where they can get their heads together without having to worry about the intellectual compromises of actual politics,” this is not an abandonment of “the business of shaping policy and winning elections.”  I would say that it is instead a necessary precondition to that business, and that a period of time in opposition may make your arguments sharper and better attuned to changing circumstances.

George Packer’s big “fall of conservatism” article surveys the state of both the movement and the GOP, and the early criticisms have been right to point out that political viability and intellectual vitality are not necessarily related and may have very different causes.  What is striking about the state of conservatism and the Republican Party alike is that both have gone into their respective tailspins pretty much simultaneously, which is in large part a result of hitching movement conservatism to the GOP and making its institutions into the party’s policy shops and, more often than not, the party’s policy apologists at a time when the GOP for the most part pursued unusually bad policies.  Over certain things, such as immigration, you could see glimmers of independence and proof that there were some things that movement conservatives were not going to abandon or minimise because it satisfied the administration and its allies, but these episodes are noteworthy because they have been relatively so very rare. 

Movement conservatism has become stale, uncreative and in a lot of ways uninteresting because it no longer seems to take account of the real world.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that in the political sphere movement conservatism, on the whole, seems to have forgotten its basic lessons about the corrupting influence of power, the dangers of concentrating power in too few hands, the limits of what government can accomplish and the bedrock principles of constitutional republicanism.  It wants credit for being sober, prudent and responsible, but does not want the discipline or the vigilance that these things require.  At home it has been and, unfortunately, continues to be all to ready to serve as a defender for executive usurpation and misrule, and it has tied itself so closely to Iraq that it will have to spend several decades rebuilding credibility on national security with the public beyond the true believers.  In foreign affairs, it has more often than not taken complete leave of its senses, whether or not this is an entirely new thing, and has grown accustomed to seeing a  global counterinsurgency as an apocalyptic battle for the fate of the world, as if to acknowledge that most U.S. deployments around the world make no sense unless we can exaggerate our enemies into some “existential threat” that threatens to destroy us all.  It remains true what Prof. Lukacs said of conservatives over twenty years ago: “American conservatives welcomed (at worst) or were indifferent (at best) to the dangers of excessive American commitments to all kinds of foreign governments…,” except that today there is a great deal more welcoming.  Not having learned that one of the principal mistakes about Iraq was the hyping of what would have been a minimal threat had the government’s claims been right into a grave danger, the same alarmism has been applied to other smaller, relatively weak states that pose no significant threat to us.  Conservatism builds its reputation through counseling caution, restraint, responsibility and a sober and realistic assessment of the way things are; when it becomes caught up in ideological fantasies and alarmist overreactions it not only loses reputation but also intellectual coherence and rigour.  The fantasists, who paint dark pictures of Venezuelan empire and the restored caliphate setting up outposts in Rome, then have the gall to lecture the rest of us that we “don’t get it” or “don’t understand” the world around us. 

This is not, however, another Gerson/Brooks complaint that there are too many conservatives attached to the “dogma of limited government”–where were all these “dogmatic” government-shrinkers for the last 10 years?  Arguably, in practice, movement conservatives effectively gave up the fight for limited government over ten years ago and have really never looked back.  Now they are reduced to muttering about earmarks, because they seem not to have the arguments for reforming or reducing entitlements.  They still trot out the phrase “limited government” to mobilise voters, but one reason the “purists” have grown disenchanted with the party is that this abandonment of small government ideas became perfectly clear during the Bush Era, even though the abandonment had started earlier.  Why were they abandoned?  In short, because they were deemed to be unpopular, and thevalue of any conservative idea in those days was based on whether it could win Republicans elections.  The era of big government was over, yet it had only just begun anew. 

The “reformists” are typically more creative, but by and large have accommodated themselves to both the welfare and warfare states.  They deserve more attention than I can give them at the moment, but I will try to return to this question in the next few days.

Moving to a very serious matter, let me say a few words about why you should never watch the new Indiana Jones movie and that for your own sake you should, as much as possible, pretend that it does not exist.  This is not because I have seen it, which I haven’t and ideally never will, but because no one should reward George Lucas for trashing his other successful and enjoyable film franchise with a belated, lame sequel.  How do I know that it will be so awful?  It isn’t because of reviews that describe its weaknesses, but because it is the fourth Indiana Jones movie.  There should not be a fourth, and its very existence is a deeply, perhaps unforgiveably wrong effort to squeeze as much cash out of an old idea as possible.  The Last Crusade ended the franchise as successfully and brilliantly as anyone could hope to conclude such a story and had the protagonists at the end actually riding into the sunset!  That should have been the finale, but there is nothing in Lucas’ filmography that he cannot try to rehash and thereby taint.