Whatever else you want to say about Michael Gerson (and I could say a lot), he is just really, really weird: 

A president is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols. He is supposed to be the face-painted superfan at every home game; to wear red, white and blue boxers on special marital occasions[bold mine-DL]; to get misty-eyed during the most obscure patriotic hymns.

More significantly, this passage is filled with more than a little irony: 

It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans.  

But one of the points that David Kuo made in his book is that there were plenty of people in the Bush White House who shared similar laughs at the expense of these people, which is actually in some ways worse, since these are the people who voted Bush into office.  Did Gerson join in the laughter?  Maybe not, but he worked alongside people who viewed these people as rubes and pawns to be used.  We await the Gersonian moralising against Bushian elitism, knowing that it will never come.

I have good news for my postmodern, post-Smyrniot colleague: James has a street (hodos) named after him, which is even more remarkable since the Greek for James is Iakovos.  Maybe the street is named for both Mr. Apostolopoulos and James at the same time–what a mark of distinction for Mr. Apostolopoulos. 

At Taki’s Magazine, Richard puts the conservative dilemma this way:

If we went for Baldwin, our vote would be perceived as, “Wow, those guys are to the right of John McCain!” This is not helpful. 

Helpful to whom?  I think it’s very helpful to keep framing all the things that are wrong with McCain as evidence of the leftward drift of the Republican Party; I also think it’s true.  I suppose it isn’t helpful if we want to pretend that we are not, in fact, to the right of McCain and that there is a new right/left divide defined in such a way that we are the moderates.  But we are to the right of McCain, and that’s a good thing.  Does that win votes?  Well, no.  But if you’re inclined to vote for Chuck Baldwin in the first place, winning votes is not exactly your priority.  A more interesting result might be a different reaction: “Wow, those guys far to the right of John McCain are much more sane and prudent than he is!”  That simultaneously works to discredit him and help us.  Meanwhile, voting for Obama could inspire the reaction, “Wow, those guys are to the left of Hillary Clinton!”

P.S. Richard, there is a cure.  It’s called pessimism.

Ross reads my mind.

Ross cites some notable figures given by Michael Franc about the profile of donors to the different parties, but I have to call a foul when I see someone refer to John McCain as a “populist,” even if it is just in passing.  If McCain is a populist, I am a Sandanista.  Aside from his silly gas-tax pander, which is also not really populist and is exactly the kind of phony economic populism you would expect from him, McCain has almost never taken a position that one could confuse for populism (i.e., supporting a wide distribution of wealth and power or having government actually serve the interests of citizens).  

One reason why Democrats are hauling in more CEO and corporate donations is that they are poised to dominate the government, or at least increase their majorities in both houses.  The donations are a kind of insurance.  If the Congressional GOP didn’t have the look of a three-day old horse carcass that had been picked clean by vultures, they would probably be getting many of the donations that are now going to the Dems, and they were getting many more such donations in the bad old days of the DeLay era.  Nonetheless, corporate donors have been more generous to the Democrats generally since the ’90s when the Clintons began cultivating friends in the the financial sector.  The other reason is that there is obviously no connection between being a top corporate executive and being interested in what the GOP is selling if the Democrats are perfectly willing to accommodate you.  In many ways, corporate executives, especially those who work for multinationals, are going to be more inclined to the views of progressive globalists, and the latter will often find the Democratic Party more amenable to them on a host of issues.  What seems to be missing from this analysis and from Ross’ response is any discussion of the GOP leadership’s complete disconnect from its own political base in its consistent, egregious tilt towards corporate interests.  One of the continuing problems that will bedevil Ross and Reihan’s project, which has some worthy elements, is that the GOP has been and will to some degree always be a party that more often than not serves corporate interests.  They aren’t going to act like a “working-class party” anytime soon.  That has its merits and flaws, but it means that those Sam’s Club Republicans will continue to have their interests unrepresented.

James has taken his disgust with Hillary Clinton to the big time with a column in The Guardian, in which he rejects the suggestion that she be made the VP candidate.  As a matter of electoral calculation, I think he is basically right.  She will not cover Obama’s weaknesses, which I doubt can be covered over effectively, and she will weigh him down with all of her own preoccupations and baggage.  For Clinton, it really is all or nothing, and in the end that means that she will get nothing.

Anyone who invokes Alan Keyes as an authority must be having a hard time proving his case, and I think that especially applies to Sean Higgins’ article that alleges that Obama is an agnostic (“The Unbeliever” is the title).  Let’s be clear about something: Obama is a liberal Protestant, which means that by definition his kind of Christianity is not going to mesh with mine or Alan Keyes’ or most conservatives’, in part because his denomination emphasises the Social Gospel and the activism associated with that, but also because it belongs to a very different theological tradition.  The unwittingly hilarious adoption of the very literalist idea that we should not place a period “where God has put a comma” is a perfect example of how the UCC almost makes a dogma out of the idea of evolving, adaptable religion.  Obama has read and actually likes Reinhold Niebuhr, which I assure you is exceedingly rare among anyone who is not genuinely interested in Christian theology, however liberal its form.  As a rule, agnostics would not bother to read Niebuhr or, having read him, would either become convinced atheists as a result of boredom or would become Christians.  Everyone who knows much about Obama understands that he came to Christianity intellectually, as one might expect given his style and personality, and this is the one place where I am most sympathetic to Obama, because my conversion was similarly not produced by a blinding flash or light or a tolle, lege moment, but was the result of a gradual process of reflection, study and a slowly dawning understanding why God became man to save us.  It’s true that there was a single moment when I understood that Christianity had to be true and that Christ was, is God, but even that came through reading a quote from Berdayev.  Am I an agnostic because I was not thrown to the ground by a vision?  This line of attack is misguided. 

It seems to me that Obama was annoyed by Keyes for a couple of reasons: Keyes is an histrionic looney, who would annoy anyone who had to debate him for any length of time, and it is insulting to have one’s faith and integrity attacked by a ludricrous Pharisaical showman.  I think Obama’s views on, and more importantly his votes and actions related to, abortion are entirely incompatible with faith in Christ, but we should be very clear that even this would make him at most a bad Christian, not an “unbeliever.”  Unless we would play the role of the Pharisee, we should be careful not to declare someone to be agnostic because he does not live out that faith as he should (or, more to the point, as we think he should).  As someone who came to the Faith by an intellectual and fairly academic route, I would say that arguments that assume that all conversions happen in the same way are going to get things badly wrong quite often.  I grew up without much in the way of religious instruction, and I was educated at very secular private schools, and I went through the same syncretistic and multiculti phase that Obama did, so I think I probably relate to his conversion to Christianity better than most and I take umbrage at the suggestion that it is somehow less than genuine or phoney or staged for effect.  If it is, there is no way that you or I can possibly know that; God alone knows.  Let’s have some humility. 

Update: Mr. Higgins offers this most unresponsive of responses.  I’ll grant the point–Mr. Higgins wasn’t citing Keyes as an authority.  He was employing him as a rhetorical club, which is a much more suitable role for Keyes to play.  So, very well then, Higgins cited Obama about the exchange with Keyes, but this citation does not support the larger claim.  If you were accused of a lack of faith by a bombastic clown, it would get under your skin, too.  The overriding point that Mr. Higgins did not even begin to prove his case remains. 

Posting will likely be light starting tomorrow and through the weekend.  I will be driving to and then very briefly attending the Medieval Studies Conference at Kalamazoo tomorrow to talk about Maronites and (you guessed it) monotheletism, and otherwise I’ll be caught up with teaching responsibilities for the next few days.  The burningObamaconissues of our day will have to wait.

Michael is right that uses of the word “globalise” are usually just nonsense, and Ross is right that “globalising ourselves” is undesirable, but if the phrase means anything then I have to dispute Zakaria’s original claim that Americans have failed to “globalise.”  On the contrary, because we have been at the leading edge of globalisation (and half of anti-globalisation abroad is a resistance to the Americanisation of local cultures), we (or many of us) were among the first to do whatever it is you do when you “globalise,” and now many of us find that we don’t care for the results at all.  Others, such as Friedman and Zakaria, are for the most part very happy with what has happened.  Following up on Michael’s point, Zakaria uses the word “globalise” in the way other people use the words “progress” or “freedom.”  It is taken as a self-evident and real good that you are promoting for the good of all mankind (never mind that it just happens to serve the very particular interests of your faction or group), and it functions as a marker of enlightenment and sophistication.  In this case Zakaria is implying, “Once you have sufficiently “globalised,” you will come to see things as I do, wise and far-seeing observers that I am, and you will cease your ridiculous opposition to the policies I prefer.”  Because Americans do not endorse the policies Zakaria wants them to, or because Americans have begun to have doubts about policies that have been pushed on them for decades without much regard for what they think of them, they have demonstrated their lack of globalisation.  In other words, they have started failing an ideological test, while passing that test will lead to nodding approval from globalists (and that’s about all that they will get from the exchange).  To “globalise” ourselves would be to accept the assumptions and beliefs of progressive globalists.  Instead of persuasion, the latter really do seem to be reduced to imposing a kind of moral stigma on those who have yet to get with the program, which is typically framed as an attribution of irrational fear, hatred or ignorance to those whom you have been unable to persuade.  The assumption is that the benefits of what they propose are so obvious and the costs so low that no one could question the desirability of their policies.  Lamenting that we have not “globalised” ourselves is the usual finger-wagging lecture that we Americans have somehow cut ourselves off from the rest of the world, when exactly the opposite has been happening for at least the last twenty years and really, taking the long view, for the last 100, and it sets up the audience for an exhortation to rededicate the nation to the “mission” that the globalists have declared that we have.  But we don’t have a “mission,” and we are awfully tired of the people who keep trying to force us to have one.

Ambinder:

Still, big victories in West Virginia and Kentucky will help Clinton make the argument that she is indispensable.

Sullivan:

What Obama needs to do is fight hard in those states to keep her victories muted.

Actually, what he needs to do is to change the subject and act as if these primaries are not happening (or, to borrow a page from the Clintons, to claim that they “don’t really count”), because there is simply no way that he is going to change the powerful opposition to him in these states.  Imagine the resistance that he faced in the Monongahela Valley, and then expand it to include entire states, and you have an idea of what he’s up against.  Among white Democrats in Kentucky, he has a 51% unfav rating.  He has a 45% unfav rating among 18-29 year olds , and 12% very unfavourable among black voters, and this is in a closed primary.  Those 30-39 year olds really don’t like him–they go for Clinton 67-20.  He is set to lose both states by 25+ points, and large numbers (40% in both states) say they are unlikely to vote for him in the fall.  West Virginia is in some ways more bleak: 24% of black voters view him very unfavourably there, he has an overall unfav rating of 50%, and trails Clinton by almost thirty.  If she wins late deciding voters as she often does (and did again yesterday), we could be looking at 40+ point margins.  The less attention he brings to these primaries, the better for him.  McCain has problems unifying his party, but they are as nothing compared to this.

P.S. This is also why she isn’t going to go away for the next month, despite the certainty that she will not be the nominee.  As the old line put it, she’s come too long, too far, too slow to stop now.  Obama boosters will be having fits for weeks, denouncing Clinton in ever-more vituperative ways, which will work to aggravate the already difficult task of unifying the party..