Commenting on my ACLU post, James writes:

This is a perfect illustration of the failure to recognize why torture’s problematic in the way I claim. I oppose torture. (Though I conceptualize torture relatively narrowly, I do opposite it fully.) Yet I do think that winning wars very very often requires cruelty and savagery. The erroneous notion here belongs to Barnett and Co., who falsely think that winning this war requires cruelty and savagery far away from the battlefield in space and time.

What Barnett referred to as “cruelty and savagery” were, in fact, war crimes.  He invoked the mass bombing of civilian centers as his “proof” that such things are “necessary,” and then applied this to the use of torture.  I suppose cruelty in warfare is unavoidable, if we think of war itself as cruel, but savagery is exactly what is avoidable.  The possibility of discriminating between combatant and non-combatant and also between enemy and captive rests on the assumption that there will be acknowledged limits imposed by a civilised code of conduct on how non-combatants and captives are treated.  There will be what might be described dramatically as “savage fighting,” but savagery itself is not something that we can or should accept as inevitable.  I take James’ point that the defenders of the torture regime deliberately confuse war zones with captivity far away from the battlefield to reduce every situation to the equivalent of combat, which they think allows for a wider range of permissible action, but I think we run the risk of blurring the difference between warfare and war crimes when we allow that savagery is required.

Relations have been strained ever since Barack Obama endorsed Ned Lamont over Lieberman when the latter challenged the former in 2006. ~Marc Ambinder

That’s a bit surprising, since Obama endorsed Lieberman during the Democratic primary race itself long before most of his colleagues did.  (Obviously Obama wasn’t going to go against his party’s nominee to support a certain sore loser after the primary.)  It’s a strange sense of loyalty that demands that a colleague keep supporting your campaign after you lose a primary and decide to break with your party. 

This is from the AP story on Obama’s backing of Lieberman at the time:

“The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.

“I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf,” he said.

Obama received widespread attention for his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, delivered while he was still a state senator.

Lieberman became Obama’s mentor when Obama was sworn into the Senate in 2005 [bold mine-DL]. They stayed close at Thursday night’s event, too, entering the room together and working the crowd in tandem.

Frankly, this is the mentor-pupil relationship that Obama’s critics ought to spend time focusing on.

If the latest SUSA poll from North Carolina is to be believed, Clinton has an outside chance of winning there, leading McCain by six, while Obama trails by eight.  Along with Missouri, in addition to the rest of the “Casey belt,” this would be yet another state where Clinton appears to be more competitive.  Her North Carolina advantage seems to come almost primarily from white women Democratic voters.  While Obama hemorrhages 28% of Democrats, she cuts down that crossover to just 17%, and she improves among women by 10 points over Obama; she also wins independents, while Obama loses them by 9.  This suggests that North Carolina can be had, but not necessarily by Obama, which is a bit ironic considering that it has been the Obama campaign that has talked the most about being more competitive in the South.

This ties in to the Electoral College mathdiscussion that has beengoing on.  Rasmussen shows Obama running much better in Colorado, to be sure, but in the trade-off between the states he can win and those he is likely to lose he ends up with far fewer electoral votes.  Interestingly, North Dakota and Nebraska seem to be more competitive than I had thought, but if the rationale for an Obama nomination becomes, “He might flip Virginia, North Dakota and Nebraska!” it doesn’t seem very compelling because it still seems so far-fetched. 

What is really remarkable about all of this is how closely contested the presidential race seems to be despite the immense structural advantages that the Democrats undoubtedly have.  Then again, the first post-Watergate presidential election was extremely close and the badly damaged incumbent party’s candidate made up an enormous deficit over the summer and fall and almost pulled off a comeback.  Arguably, the GOP’s reputation was not as badly damaged in 1976 as it is today, and the close result in 1976 might owe a lot to having an incumbent President on the ticket, but ’76 is a good example of a Democratic victory that almost wasn’t.  For the longest time I assumed that structural advantages, the war and anti-incumbency would doom the GOP nominee, and I pushed that view for months in 2007.  It made sense, and it still makes a certain amount of sense, but the public is not cooperating with this scenario when it comes to the presidential race.  Given how close the race is in this extraordinarily pro-Democratic year, you have to wonder how much worse Clinton and Obama would be polling in a more normal presidential election.

James has some interesting thoughts on Austin Bramwell’s TAC review of Heads In The Sand (not online yet, sorry) and his definition of conservatism, which Bramwell has defined in terms of defending the legitimacy of institutions.  I may say something about the review at another time, but I want to address the other item first. 

If we applied the label institution widely enough to include social and religious institutions, that might take account of part of what conservatism is, but to ground it in a defense of legitimacy without reference to authority or legal or religious tradition seems potentially more “vacuous” than to say that conservatives respect tradition.  Dwelling on the obvious limits of this basic statement about tradition, Bramwell is correct when he writes:

A “tradition” is no more than something which is handed down.  That which is handed down, however, can be wise or unwise, uplifting or debasing, liberating or constraining.

Yet an institution’s legitimacy is always grounded in some political and legal or, quite often, in a religious tradition.  The legitimacy of institutions depends on a tradition, which, as Bramwell says, may be wise or unwise, uplifting or debasing.  The Supreme Soviet had de facto legitimacy in its own state and the Soviet government’s institutions were regarded as legitimate, but does that then mean that the men who sought to defend and preserve it were conservatives?  In what way does this defense-of-legitimacy definition differ from the utterly unsatisfying “conservatives resist change” thesis, which is another way of saying that conservatives defend the status quo?  What is more, if that is what the defense-of-legitimacy thesis means, why would anyone embrace it unless he believes that the status quo is acceptable?  In other words, if this is the essence of conservatism, why would anyone find conservatism even remotely worthwhile?  Defending the legitimacy of institutions that have none, or have lost it, is not terribly edifying, either, and such a defense seems to take no account of whether such institutions’ legitimacy deserves defending.  Are the members of ZANU-PF conservatives?  Of course they are not, but under this definition they could readily be considered as such. 

We are reluctant to recognise legitimacy in barbaric and totalitarian states on the assumption that they base their rule in a rude appeal to power, rather than authority, and indeed they displace the idea of authority all together.  Historically, communist regimes tend to strip away legitimising myths (“power comes from the barrel of a gun”) at the same time that they promote the biggest fantasy of them all, which is that they were, are, workers’ governments.  So, properly speaking, such regimes cannot have legitimate institutions that rightfully possess authority, but the legitimacy of those institutions is still defended by those who would maintain the status quo, and particularly those who would maintain the conditions that permit these defenders to hold some considerable power and status.  So to speak of legitimacy without discussing authority and usurpation does not get us very far.  There is something that must precede any discussion of legitimacy, and this is respect for rightful authority, which implies that authority can be wrongfully claimed and thus illegitimately possessed by a usurper.  That, in turn, implies that this legitimate authority has grounding in something other than accident or widespread deference.

Someone who respects a certain tradition will want to defend the legitimacy of the institutions that derive from that tradition in part because the tradition is bound up with this matter of legitimacy.  Furthermore, in respecting the tradition it is possible to recognise departures from it or attacks upon it from usurpers.  Remarkably, Bramwell’s entire discussion of legitimacy does not consider the problem of usurpation and what the appropriate conservative response to it would be.  Usurpers will frame their actions as legitimate and appropriate.  Caesar was supposedly a protector of the Republic, and William III was not an invading foreigner aided by traitors, but was the liberating, rightful ruler!  Those who believe these fictions and follow the usurpers are not, as far as I can tell, conservative in any sense of the word.  They may be very pragmatic, and they will find a place for themselves in the new order, but allies of usurpation cannot be conservatives.  If conservatives are concerned with the legitimacy of institutions, there must be some standard against which they can measure whether those institutions have been taken over by those who do not have a legitimate claim to them.  One can very easily imagine how this defense-of-legitimacy conservatism could rally around an abusive executive in the name of defending the legitimacy of the Presidency; indeed, this slavish attitude towards the Presidency has been present among a great many self-styled conservatives for a long time.  If “respecting tradition” is too vague or vacuous, Bramwell’s alternative seems to me to be potentially quite pernicious. 

While Bramwell puts too much weight on a defense of legitimacy as the defining element of conservatism, he similarly undervalues the importance of legitimism within any particular political tradition.  For example, he can say about an arch-usurper that he “preserved legitimate government in North America in the only way possible,” which is to say, “he preserved legitimate government in North America” (the poor Canadians don’t count, I suppose) simply by coercion and power and not by any appeal to rightful authority.  Curiously, legitimate government was not threatened with extinction–certainly no more so than when the colonies rebelled–so how was Lincoln’s course of action “the only way possible”?  Did the Crown lose its legitimacy in the eyes of all its other subjects when it failed to suppress the colonial rebellion?  It did not.  Then again, if avoidance of war on this continent was the goal, our ancestors certainly should not have rebelled against British rule.  Further, it would seem to follow that the Loyalists (and our Canadian neighbours) were, are, the last defenders of legitimate government on this continent, and they managed this without having to kill hundreds of thousands of people.  If that was the case, this suggests that legitimate government is more durable and is less in need of mass slaughter to preserve itself than the example of Lincoln would have us believe.  Indeed, one might make the limited need for coercion and the lack of violent resistance the proof that a government continues to be accepted, or at least endured, as the legitimate government.  Arguably, once it must suppress those it considers to be its people with bloodshed it has not only “lost” legitimacy because of the violence used to suppress its people, but had already lost that legitimacy, which is why there was the need to resort to force to shore up its deteriorating position.     

Bramwell also neglects religion or religious authority in sanctioning certain institutions as legitimate.  Most states throughout history have claimed that their legitimate authority on earth derives from some divine authority or heavenly mandate, and certainly Christians believe that they are obliged to obey the lawful government, which receives its power from God, and even some modern states still rely on employing religion to bolster their legitimacy.  While there are and have been secular conservatives, it is curious that Bramwell makes no mention of the preservation of religious tradition or religious institutions in providing his definition of conservatism.  Perhaps he means to include religious institutions in his more general discussion of institutions, but when discussing legitimacy the failure to mention religion in any way seems to be an important oversight.

The meme we have been seeing for some time hasreappeared: Oregon “cancels out” Kentucky or is “almost a mirror image.”  Yes, 16 point margins are almost exactly like 35 point margins, especially when you double them.  Clinton is likely to come out of the evening with 150,000 more votes and over a dozen more delegates than her opponent, but those have evidently been “cancelled out,” too.    

This is an interesting position for Obama supporters to take, given their candidate’s claim to the majority of pledged delegates.  It turns out that his majority must actually be “cancelled out” by Hillary’s minority.

On his way to a 35-point loss in Kentucky, Obama did manage to win two counties.  Mind you, those were apparently two out of the three counties in which he managed to get more than 40% of the vote.  Some of the lowlights included Magoffin County in the eastern part of the state, where he picked up 5% of the vote to Clinton’s 93.  She has netted something like 240,000 votes.  Needless to say, Clinton has never suffered two primary defeats of such magnitude in consecutive weeks, or indeed at any time during the last five months, and it will be pretty much unprecedented to nominate the candidate who has lost two consecutive primaries this badly.  Oregon can soften the blow later tonight, but it won’t undo the damage.

Occasional TAC contributor Glenn Greenwald has been working with the ACLU’s blog to develop an online symposium on torture for this week, and it begins today.  I was invited to be one of the symposiasts, and my first contribution should be up sometime today.  More links and updates as I am able to put them up.

Update: Here is my post.  Here are the contributions from Joan McCarter and Glenn Greenwald.

Obama has picked up a net 145 delegate advantage in caucuses and a net delegate advantage of exactly seven delegates in primaries. Seven. And as the article also notes and as I noted above, Obama did much better in caucuses than in nonbinding primaries in the two states that held both, Washington and Nebraska. Obama and many, possibly most, superdelegates believe that he has a moral claim on superdelegate votes by virtue of his lead in pledged delegates. But that lead comes almost entirely from caucuses, which have many fewer participants and are presumably less accurately representative of the mass of Democratic voters than primaries. ~Michael Barone

So could the June 3 primaries in South Dakota and Montana, which Obama is expected to win, but not by wide popular-vote margins.  ~Michael Barone

I keep seeing people treat South Dakota and Montana as if they were obviously good states for Obama, but I’ve never been clear on why.  As far as I can tell, no one has bothered to do any polling in either state, so we have no measurement of either candidate’s support.  If it’s true that “demography is destiny” and neither campaign has much luck with the other’s constituencies, what is it about the demography of South Dakota and Montana that makes these states likely to give wins to Obama?  Both states are holding primaries, not caucuses, which suggests that the results are going to look very different from the caucus tallies from neighbouring states.  Obama has tended to do well in overwhelmingly white states where they have caucuses, but not so often in primaries.  Wisconsin remains an exception that gets stranger by the day. 

Correction: There is at least one poll from about a month ago that gives Obama an advantage in South Dakota.  There seems to be no evidence for Montana one way or the other.

Our view is that if the Republican Party of 2008 would prefer to lose with Mr. Pearce than win with Ms. Wilson, it deserves its fate. ~The New York Sun

In light of polling showing both Pearce and Wilson losing to Udall by 25 points, this is not the reason to pick one or the other.  Certainly, I share the conventional view that Wilson would probably be more competitive statewide.  Instead of losing by 25, she might knock it down to 15 before it’s all over, but it’s ludicrous at this point to talk about a Republican victory in that Senate race.  The national mood is running against their party, and the state’s demographic make-up is not naturally friendly to Republican candidates.  It is interesting that Pearce is slightly ahead of Wilson in the weeks leading up to the primary vote.  It isn’t surprising to me that once Wilson had to appeal to Republicans outside the First District that she would have a harder time, but I have expected her legendary campaigning ability to overcome Pearce’s lower-profile challenge.  It was significant that Domenici, long her mentor and patron, refused to pick sides in the primary, perhaps trying to undo some of the damage he did when he originally foisted her on the district ten years ago.  She may yet get the nomination, but it’s not much of a prize.