It appears that Lake County, and Gary in particular, will probably come in with enough votes to flip Indiana into Obama’s column.  The Clinton machine has finally been overthrown.  Despite the certainty that she will win overwhelming victories in Kentucky and West Virginia in the next two weeks, she is essentially finished.

Update: It seems she has held on to victory, but only just barely.

It’s Election Day (again), and the initial exits point to some potential problems for Obama as far as the makeup of the electorate is concerned: there is relatively low black and youth turnout in both states.  Other exits show that Wright has had a significant influence on these primaries, and this has obviously worked to Clinton’s benefit.  A Clinton win in Carolina no longer seems so far-fetched.  I still doubt it will happen, but everything appears to be breaking her way. 

Rasmussen has some Wright-related polling that has a finding that seemed counterintuitive to me: more people were less likely to vote for Obama after he denounced Wright than before, and this was concentrated most among Republicans (38% v. 15%) and white voters (32% less likely v. 20% more).  Overall, 24% were more likely, 27% less likely, but Obama’s disowning of Wright bizarrely seems to have hurt him most among those people to whom the disowning was supposed to appeal the most and it helped him most among black voters (43% more likely v. 12% less) who might have viewed the disowning more negatively.  In short, his damage control does not seem to have worked.  This makes me wonder what would have satisfied these white voters, or if there was anything Obama could have done then or earlier that would have made any difference.

Update: According to CNN’s North Carolina exit polling, Obama should end up with about 54% to her 46%.  Networks have called the state for Obama.  It appears as if the almost worst-case scenario for Democrats has developed, in which Clinton will eke out a narrow victory in one state, Obama wins one by a reduced margin, and it will be as if these elections never took place. 

Correction: Updated exit polls show a larger Obama win in North Carolina, more like 60-40.  However, with 34% reporting Clinton holds a sizeable 14-point lead in Indiana.

Second Update: So it seems as if Clinton’s lead will keep shrinking to a very narrow margin, while Obama’s keeps growing by leaps and bounds.  With 15% reporting, he’s up by 28 in N.C.  At this point, her Indiana win is going to appear so much less important than his win that it could bring things to a more rapid close.  Now the Democrats really have marched themselves off a cliff, and nothing that happens in the next month can change that.

In case I hadn’t made it explicit, the margin of Obama’s victory seems to make my statements earlier in the post look pretty stupid.

Third Update: Obama’s gaudy 20+ point margin has been shrinking into the mid-teens.  It’s beginning to look as if that Rasmussen 9-point margin might not be so far off.  Meanwhile, Clinton leads by just four.  The hilarious thing about the entire night is that Obama will come out of both primaries with a net gain of perhaps 7 pledged delegates.  They have got to fix their ludicrous system.

Newt Gingrich is back to haunt us again, this time offering up nine panderific ideas that reek of the desperation of a party with no ideas–and he’s supposed to be one of the idea men of this gang!  My favourite has to be this one:

Introduce a “more energy at lower cost with less environmental damage and greater national security bill” as a replacement for the Warner-Lieberman “tax and trade” bill…

This will also be known as the No Trade-Offs/Free Lunch Act of 2008.  Gingrich forgot to mention introducing the bill to protect endangered unicorns.  Gingrich supplements this with such proposals as, I kid you not, an earmark moratorium (take on those tough issues, Newt!), a gas tax holiday that will allegedly be paid for by “cutting domestic discretionary spending,” using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to manipulate oil prices (very slightly), tackling all of the outrageous waste at the Census Bureau (?), and, naturally, banging the drum about the judiciary.  The one idea that sounds mildly interesting is an overhaul of air traffic control systems, and it is the most technocratic of the nine, which means that it will take the longest to put into practice and will have limited impact on public opinion.  This list is nothing more than tinkering around the edges and is so far removed from an agenda of “real change” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) that it’s laughable.  I can just see the average voter now as he hears about these proposals, “Sure, the GOP exploded the deficit, created a huge new entitlement and backs a war two-thirds of us want to end, but they are on top of that Census Bureau problem, so all is forgiven.”  If this is the best they can come up with, they may be in bigger trouble than I thought.

War is a dreadful thing to be avoided if possible, but it is not always possible to avoid it. The history of the 20th century teaches that outright pacifism — such as flourished in England and France after World War I — can be an incitement to aggression. If France had been willing to fight a small war when Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland, they could have avoided the big war they eventually got. ~Robert Stacy McCain

Would Mr. McCain grant that there are some people, who are otherwise quite sane, who actually are much more often in favour of using force to resolve international disputes than they are not?  Are there not actually militarists and jingoists, those whose resistance to going to war is much weaker and their bar for justifying it lower?  Many people have valorised and continue to valorise war for a variety of reasons, and to that extent they really are pro-war.  There are pro-war people today who were antiwar when it came to bombing Serbia, just as there were pro-war people then who have become antiwar with respect to Iraq, and then there are those who have been pro-war in both cases.  We have to be able to call the latter pro-war in some sense, since their default response to international crisis or dispute seems to be, put crudely, “Bombs away!” 

Some wars are necessary, but most are not.  In that sentence lies the difference between someone who is pro-war and someone who is antiwar.  The former will think that a great many wars have been necessary, while the antiwar person will be hard-pressed to think of many.  Austria’s war on Serbia in 1914 was not necessary–Austria had already received virtually every concession it had demanded, and the dispute could have been resolved without the use of force–and everything that came out of that initial conflict was likewise unnecessary.  There are no absolutely pro- or anti-war people who will always support or always oppose every war, but there are clearly people biased towards the use of force and those biased against it.  It is one of the central arguments of this magazine, as I understand our position, that it is natural and indeed vital for conservatives to be biased against it and to support it only when justice permits and necessity requires it.  In that context, I think it is fair to describe the tradition of conservatives who opposed entry into ongoing wars or who opposed starting wars of our own as an antiwar tradition. 

The alternative tradition that has generally supported America entering ongoing wars and that has been willing to start or provoke wars is not absolutely a “pro-war” one (it is more accurately a nationalist one that supports pretty much all American wars), but in context and as a matter of shorthand I think the label is not only appropriate but necessary.  Frankly, you don’t get to support a war of aggression, such as the war in Iraq, and then wash your hands of the complications that it brings on by saying, “Of course, I abhor war, and I never wanted this to happen.”  At some level, every person probably does abhor war or some aspect of it.  The question is the degree to which one abhors it and its effects and what effect that has on how you respond to a policy aimed at joining or starting a war.  To say, “We should invade, but I don’t want the war to happen” is to try to have it both ways.  The equivalent would be if a war opponnent tried to take credit for some good that came out of the war, even though he had opposed the war up until then–he would be ridiculed and mocked for wanting the best of both.  If you support going to war, you have concluded that it is a better option than the alternatives and to that extent you want it to happen.  In some cases, this is the correct position to take, but in most it is not.        

Here is something that I don’t quite understand about the objection to the label “pro-war.”  Everyone understands the context in which the label is being used, just as the labels hawk and dove meant something specific to the Vietnam War.  Interestingly, we now use hawk and dove to refer more generally to attitudes towards the use of force, but I see no one complaining about describing certain politicians as “hawkish,” which is frequently the same as saying that they are pro-war.  I would call myself an antiwar conservative, but I am decidedly not a pacifist, partly because I don’t think anyone can really be a thoroughgoing pacifist.  Virtually everyone believes in the right to self-defense, so there is really no question of outright pacifism.  For that matter, the people who governed France in the 1930s weren’t pacifists, either, and their unwillingness to go to war over the occupation of the Rhineland came from a combination of war fatigue, yes, but also from the recognition that it didn’t make a great deal of sense to go to war to keep Germans from occupying their own territory.  They made a judgement that it was not worth it, and that the terms of the old peace had been excessive.  They did not rule out the possibility of going to war with Germany, but rejected doing so at the time.  As the events of 1939 make clear, they obviously did think that war was a legitimate and acceptable means of policy at some point, so whatever else we want to say about the strategic mistakes of British and French policy leading up to WWII pacifism has nothing to do with it.  You can say that the governments were antiwar, and certainly antiwar people today are going to have to put up with comparisons, however far-fetched, with those governments.  So I don’t see why those who supported invading another country with no real justification cannot be fairly called pro-war, since they definitely were and, for the most part, still are in favour of the war, even if they do not favour War in the abstract.  Indeed, they consider their continued support something they can be proud of, so why should they be bothered by having others describe them as pro-war?

These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories. ~Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria urges us to take up a “globalised” attitude or mentality.  None of this is really a question of competitiveness, productivity or prosperity.  It seems to be an appeal to a weird mix of self-importance (I want to have the biggest Ferris wheel!) and, apparently, an obsession with trivia.  Yes, I suppose Taipei 101 is the tallest building in the world right now.  We Chicago residents sure are jealous!  As I learned while I was over there, the building loses a great deal of money because there are not enough firms that want to put their offices in it.  It is the tallest white elephant on earth.  One of the reasons for this is that the multinationals would rather do business directly in China, but like so many of the genuinely silly examples Zakaria gives Taipei 101 is a symbol of precisely the sort of symbolic gestures of power and wealth that many countries indulge in to compensate for their relative weaknesses in these areas.  Perhaps my view is not very representative–I am probably one of the few who think that having Bollywood surpass its counterpart in California is probably a great step up in many respects.

Zakaria isn’t making a declinist argument exactly.  In fact, for most of the excerpt, it isn’t entirely clear what argument he is making, except to say, “Other people are getting richer, and the world isn’t as violent as you may think.”  But unless you’re an alarmist or a jingo, you don’t think that the world is all that violent.  Zakaria hits the right, calm note when talking about international affairs:

If this is 1938, as some neoconservatives tell us, then Iran is Romania, not Germany.

And we all know what those Romanians did, don’t we?  Oh, right, they were occupied by Germany–pretty scary! 

Zakaria has very properly mocked McCain’s mad foreign policy vision before and does so again, much along the same lines that I did in a recent column for TAC, and offers a voice of reason when discussing all of the allegedly unprecedented threats to our very existence that supposedly dwarf the dangers from the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the Wehrmacht put together.  Zakaria gets a bit carried away when he calls Russia “the most aggressive and revanchist great power today,” since this suggests that they are somehow more aggressive and more revanchist than, um, we are, which seems debatable, but even here he is making the sober point that Russia hasn’t actually engaged in aggression or revanchism that “we” might normally associate with rising powers.  In other words, by his own description, the most aggressive great power isn’t aggressive, which means that Washington’s obsession with provoking such a power for no good reason makes no sense as a matter of defending Europe or U.S. interests.   

Michael takes Zakaria to task very roughly for part of this excerpt from Zakaria’s book, and I agree with him that Zakaria’s remarks about the metric system are a bit obnoxious and also ridiculous in their way.  “American, globalise thyself,” he tells us, but it’s never clear exactly why we should.  Zakaria talks airily about “joining the world,” but we joined the world a long, long time ago–isolationism is a mythical beast.  Of course, Zakaria cannot leave well enough alone after what was mostly a sensible set of observations, so he goes into globalist sermon mode:

We have become suspicious of trade, openness, immigration, and investment because now it’s not Americans going abroad but foreigners coming to America. Just as the world is opening up, we are closing down.

I am inherently suspicious of people who talk about “openness,” because this is the sort of rhetorical bludgeon that is used to push policies that do not, in fact, serve the national interest.  To be against “openness” sounds bad, because it suggests that you must want to live in solitary confinement in a dungeon with no doors.  Why, you just might be against “the open society,” which is certainly very bad, even though few societies more effectively condition and police the thinking of their members than the “open” ones.  Part of that conditioning is the deployment of this rhetoric that valorises “openness.” 

The arguments for the status quo in de-industrialisation free trade and importing wage slaves immigration are so remarkably weak politically, morally and economically when it comes to serving the interests of American citizens that there will always be a guilt-trip saved up at the end of any article or chapter that describes globalisation.  In place of argument, there is the insinuation, “You must not like foreigners–what is wrong with you?”  In fact, very few people argue that we should cease giving H-1B visas to educated and skilled immigrants, many of whom already speak the language and are well-suited to fairly rapid assimilation.  However, the overwhelming majority of mass immigration comes from the influx of poor, unskilled workers, and it is this that has undesirable economic effects and constitutes a massive demographic change in many parts of the country that most Americans want to see brought under control, if not halted all together.   

That is a real problem, which Zakaria absolutely fails to address (at least in this excerpt), except to dismiss opposition to it as evidence that we are “closing down.”  Indeed, if “the rest” are doing so magnificently, why does there continue to be a flood of labour into developed countries?  Lost in the paean to globalisation is the recognition that population growth in parts of the world is outstripping the means to feed people (exacerbated by rising food prices worldwide) and also outstripping the means to employ them, or that the mass urbanisation in Africa and Asia has created huge numbers of unemployed migrants who have abandoned their villages for opportunities in the cities that fail to materialise.  The dislocations of globalisation, which trouble and worry us, can be quite devastating to the peoples in the rest of the world, which is usually why the most vehement anti-globalisation forces are on the left, which view these dislocations as the result of Western exploitation and which tend to portray globalisation as disproportionately good for us at the expense of other people.  Yet the most powerful argument against these policies (which are first and foremost in the interests of multinationals, and not necessarily in the interests of of any of the nations involved) would be one that recognises the damage and upheaval globalisation causes foreign economies at the same time that it strips us of our manufacturing and inundates us with cheap labour.  Again, the benefits and costs of globalisation are distributed very unevenly, and those who bear most of the costs are told that this is all for the good–not their good, mind you, but a general, vague good that they are supposed to support.  When they act very rationally in their own interests to challenge this arrangement, they are then mocked for their, oh, I don’t know, “antipathy to people who are not like them” and berated for being against “openness.”  At the very least, if globalists really think that their policies are the best way forward they are going to need to find more persuasive arguments and find them fast. 

One of the reasons there has been such a sharp backlash against neoliberalism in Latin America is that the benefits of neoliberal fiscal and trade policies–the very ones Zakaria praises–were very unevenly distributed, and when it came time for the lending institutions to support a country in Argentina that had wholeheartedly embraced these policies they instead permitted the Argentine economy to be wrecked and its middle class to be nearly wiped out financially.  One wonders if the people of Argentina would recognise the prosperity Zakaria describes.  This has, of course, discredited the forces aligned with those policies and driven them from power in country after country.  Bolivia is slowly tearing itself apart in part because the backlash against neoliberalism was so severe that it has sparked a counter-reaction in the wealthier, eastern provinces, which are now proclaiming autonomy from La Paz.  Globalisation is heightening ethnic tensions within states, and we can expect that it will increase them between states in the future.  On the whole, the world is fairly peaceful, but the very policies that Zakaria champions seem likely to make sure that this is a temporary situation.

Here is a lovely Pashto song from Afghanistan, Dokhtare Bagh, “I Am A Daughter of the Garden,” and here is a performance of Dokhtare Kuchi.  I was first introduced to Afghan music through this album about six years ago, which also briefly inspired an interest in the Dari language.  The obvious Indo-European connection with the word dokhtar is clear.  Here is a more modern version of Zim Zim Zim, .  This is a performance of Molla Mamadjan.

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God. ~Damon Linker

I’ll be interested to hear Prof. Fox and Ross‘ reactions to this, because I expect that Prof. Fox will probably agree to some of this but ultimately find the critique to be overreaching and Ross will challenge most of the assumptions contained in this paragraph.  My response just to this first paragraph may take a post all its own.  The rest of the review of Wayward Christian Soldiers is actually much better than this initial framing that makes it part of Linker’s tired, old project of forcible separation of religion and politics.  The main reason for this is that Marsh’s thesis is much better than Linker’s own arguments on these subjects, but when Marsh is allowed to speak he makes many important points.  But first let us deal with Linker. 

It is debatable that the “religious right” has “polarized the nation,” but more than that is questionable whether the nation really is as polarised as Linker says, and further it is not obvious that this is undesirable even if it were true.  That is, it’s not clear that these consequences, even if the result of the activities of the “religious right,” are actually “destructive.”  The closer one looks at “the religious right,” the more one is struck by the extraordinary degree of hand-waving in which it engages and the paucity of influence it really has when all is said and done, but let us suppose that it has been able to do the things Linker claims.  Theological certainties are basically good things–why wouldn’t we want them “injected” into public life?  “Injected” sounds bad–this is the sort of thing that junkies and poisoners do, they “inject” things, bad things, into their bodies or others’ bodies–but if instead we said that religious conservatives introduced (or re-introduced) theological certainties into public life, not only would religious conservatives agree that they have done, or tried to do, this, but they would be baffled as to why anyone would be concerned.  

If you believe in God and His final judgement, everyone‘s acts and goals have metaphysical significance.  Linker has put things rather crudely, since this line does not just strike at Mr. Bush’s gnostic madness, but effectively attacks providential order and transcendent moral order by implying that there is something awry in attributing metaphysical significance to earthly acts.  The thing he is really attacking is the revolutionary urge to realise the Kingdom here below, but as so often with secular critics of religious conservatism Linker does not distinguish between fanatics and traditionalists.  Again, if you believe in God, everyone is ultimately an instrument of God and everyone is part of His providential order.  This is not something concocted by religious conservatives, and in any case it is once again not clear why this is inherently “destructive” or undesirable.  When Mr. Bush dresses up his war of aggression as part of some mission to realise God’s plan of liberating the world–a crazier, more destructive form of liberation theology, I dare say, than most of what comes out of Trinity United–that is worthy of condemnation, and, of course, manytraditionalists have condemned it.    

Most depressing of all is this passage:

Just as the history of the civil rights movement has led the overwhelming majority of African Americans to identify themselves with the Democratic Party, so the vast run of evangelical Protestants have come to view the Republican Party as their natural home–the place on the American political spectrum where their distinctive outlook will be represented and championed.

I call this depressing because I am confident that many evangelicals believe this, and even now do not see that their genuine enthusiasm and loyalty are taken utterly for granted.  Their outlook will not be represented and championed.  It will be patted on the head and told to stay in its place, and if religious conservatives are very, very good, they will get an anti-Roe cookie while the culture goes to bits around them.  

Marsh, the author of the book, is right that the administration has engaged in blasphemy in its rhetoric.  Of course it has.  As I wrote last year:

For the same reason, there is something deeply disturbing about the conflation of God’s gifts and political liberty, and especially with the political liberation of other nations. (Disregard for the moment whether such liberation of other peoples is entirely genuine or in the best interests of the United States.) First, it can dangerously blur the lines between the sacred and the profane, investing the “freedom agenda” with a divine mandate and the presumption to represent God’s will in a shockingly impious manner. Even more importantly, in President Bush’s claim that God bestows universal freedom on all of humanity there is the danger of encouraging despair and loss of faith in a God who supposedly gives universal freedom but nonetheless withholds it from billions of our fellow human beings and who denied it to most of humanity for thousands of years. Bush’s assertion ends up sounding rather like a theistic version of Rousseau’s “man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains,” which is a suggestion either of divine impotence or an invitation to revolutionary warfare to realize God’s supposed purpose of bestowing universal, political freedom on the world.

While I think the following overstates things a bit, I have a hard time disagreeing with this:

Just as nineteenth-century German theologians tailored God to fit the psychological needs of the rising bourgeoisie and the political needs of the Rechtsstaat, so twenty-first-century American evangelicals take their theological cues not from the Bible or the Church Fathers but from Karl Rove and Michael Gerson. 

More to the point, Gerson took his theological cues from his own sentimentalism, and the administration took its theological language from Gerson, and evangelical supporters of the administration embraced what Gerson had Bush tell them.  There is something painfully true about the critique of modern American evangelicalism as a form of liberal Protestantism, but not exactly for the reasons Linker gives.  It is the obsession with sentiment and feeling that unite the two.  Count me as broadly sympathetic with Marsh and Barth in their reaction against this, despite my obvious confessional and other differences with both.  Emotionalistic religion is not just personally alien to me, but I think it is a case of succcumbing to disordered passion.  We are all subject to disordered passion, but one of the worst kinds of this is the kind that distorts our understanding of revelation.

Update: Prof. Fox points to his response, which he wrote when the article came out a couple weeks ago.  Ross probably also responded already.  I must not have been paying much attention that week.

Rod doesn’t agree with my explanation about the pass given to Hagee and McCain:

But Larison goes on to say that Hagee is getting a pass on his endorsement of McCain, or vice versa, because Hagee is pro-Zionist. I think this is way off. McCain isn’t being held responsible for Hagee because McCain didn’t spend 20 years sitting in the pews at Hagee’s church, and didn’t claim Hagee as his spiritual mentor. Everybody knows that McCain is not a particularly religious man, and doesn’t care for the religious right. Fault McCain for cynicism or weakness by making nice with them, and you’re on solid ground. But most people perfectly well understand that John Hagee’s theology has had little or no influence on John McCain’s thinking.

I’ll come to McCain in a moment. The most frequent reaction to the Wright controversy has not been, “Does this tell us what Obama really believes?”  Instead the reaction has usually been, “This shows terrible judgement, and reflects very poorly on him.”  Except for the most implacable critics, no pundit or blogger thinks Obama believes the things that Wright believes (Obama’s bigger problem is that quite a lot of Democratic primary voters do think this), and most have taken him at his word that he doesn’t believe them.  We float theories about why Obama stayed in the church and so on, but even Rod, who otherwise thinks Obama has been lying about what he knew about Wright and when he knew it, doesn’t claim that Obama believes these things.  So we’re not really talking about the influence on the candidate’s thinking, which makes the length of McCain and Hagee’s association and exposure to Hagee’s sermons (or lack thereof) far less relevant.  We’re determining what these associations say about a candidate’s judgement, and we’re also questioning whether presidential candidates should associate with such characters.  Normally, unfortunately, if an evangelical minister says something inflammatory or even mildly controversial, the media are all over it and remain fixated on it.  Not so with Hagee.  He received perhaps one news cycle of attention, and then vanished.  Remarkably, McCain gets credit for his obviously cynical manipulation of religious conservatives whom he viscerally dislikes–the very kind of thing that earns him the media’s endless devotion–and Obama effectively receives blame for being something like an intellectually serious and regular church-goer who has given some thought to what he believes.  (I’m sure the jokes have already been said, or will be soon if they haven’t, that Obama must be the only Democratic candidate in history who has suffered politically for being too frequent in attending church.)  Rather hilariously, Obama is simultaneously blamed as an opportunist looking for “street cred” and criticised as a willing disciple of Wright, as if there could have been no other explanation for his membership in the church.  Meanwhile, Hagee has mainstream political credibility because he happens to adopt the most extreme form of what Rod notes is a majority, popular position, and he is taken seriously not just by AIPAC but by a great number of political leaders of both parties who value him as an ally in advancing the “pro-Israel” cause.  In the real world, Wright is a small fry politically, while Hagee is a mover and shaker, so naturally we have been preoccupied with the small fry and ignoring the person who actually is in a position to make policy.  Hagee’s motives for taking the positions he does are not scrutinised very closely by most of the media, and the militarism that he preaches does not cause a ripple–it is only when he attacks Catholics in theological polemic that anyone bothers to notice, and even then it is mostly half-hearted.  “Oh, McCain rejects his comments?  Case closed!” 

When these associations have a direct and obvious relevance to important foreign policy questions, it seems appropriate to draw significant attention to what is absolutely a cynical alliance of convenience between McCain and Hagee.  Yes, we already know that McCain favours uncompromising, hard-line and militaristic policies, but Hagee’s endorsement reveals an important political dimension to this: McCain has allied himself with a prominent “pro-Israel” lobbyist (which, in political terms, is what Hagee is) to secure evangelical votes on the basis of his national security and Israel policy views.  McCain has joined together with someone who called the bombardment of Lebanon a “miracle from God.”    That’s fairly bloody-minded fanaticism, if you ask me, and I don’t throw around the label of fanatic very often: Hagee was justifying and glorifying the war in Lebanon, which included the bombardment of Lebanon’s civilian population.  I don’t know of anything that Wright has said that really equals this.  To the extent that you believe that Obama joined Trinity and embraced Wright to acquire political capital and “street cred,” how much more should we view McCain’s acceptance of Hagee’s support in the same way since we pretty clearly know that McCain has not joined together with him out of some profound sense of shared faith?  The alliance was made purely for political gain, which ought to make their association even more subject to scrutiny and challenge.  Ultimately, I care less whether Hagee influenced McCain’s thinking, which is already bad enough in my eyes, than I care about the public knowing what kind of people are influencing future administration policy on serious matters of war and peace.  Treating the two as a pair of pastors misrepresents the problem: Wright is a pastor (a wealthy, annoying pastor, but still just a pastor), while Hagee leads a significant lobbying organisation and is received by some of the biggest names in Washington as a friend and ally.  Wright’s influence on policy was always going to be vanishingly small anyway, and now it will be non-existent.  Hagee’s very real political influence will continue on.  That is the kind of influence the media ought to be scrutinising, not least since Hagee’s influence may have some impact on what the government actually does.  I think my original argument still holds up: Hagee’s influence is basically dismissed or ignored, because his views on policy do not seem especially outlandish or strange to the media, and the media are in any case hopelessly blind to McCain’s flaws.

James writes:

It’s Hillary’s campaign that’s been running on hallucinations — the political journalism equivalent of nitrous oxide.

But remember the other campaign whose success once seemed so far-fetched that imagining it was premised on heavy drinking* followed by a real-life nitrous oxide chaser, and then consider the possibilities.

*Not Crown Royal!

For voters younger than he, Obama is the closest they’ve ever had to a political leader of their own generation….And for the next-older cohort, at least the self-conscious ones who tend to dominate the cultural definition of any generation, Obama flatters their driving desire to imagine themselves forever young. He’s technically a baby-boomer, but still comes across as a boy wonder, which allows people in their fifties to feel reassured that they’re not yet decrepit. Plus if all the kids love him and we also love him, that means we’re still kinda sorta youthful ourselves, right? It’s related to the generation-gaplessness that modern parents enjoy feeling when they and their children watch Stephen Colbert together, and listen to the same music (Feist!) on their identical iPods. ~Kurt Andersen

James should have a field day with this paragraph alone, but before he pounces I would make a few points.  First, there has always been an element of Boomer wish-fulfillment in Obama’s candidacy, since liberals of that generation may still remember the 1960s as the era when their cause was prematurely snuffed out and they see Obama as the revival of something similar to what they saw in the Kennedys and so on.  Andersen has described another important part of Obama boosterism, which has been confirmed in the past by anecdotes of superdelegates being swayed by their children’s enthusiasm for the candidate, and this is an incessant need for Boomers to retain the appearance of being hip and an equally powerful drive among the “grups” (or “gruppies”) to avoid acknowledging as much as possible that they are, in fact, now in their thirties and even forties.  The “Obama Generation” spans generations, since successive generations are engaged in ongoing denial that they are actually ageing, but it relies heavily on the “grups” and the youngest voters.  

Notably, when Obama loses large numbers of the thirtysomething set, this coincides with a significant loss of overall support, as polling from Nevada has shown.  Meanwhile, in the states where Obama is less popular overall the youngest cohorts are not necessarily more supportive than their elders, but may be less so, at which point some of his greatest reserves are to be found among the Boomers.  That doesn’t mean that most Boomers back him, but that their levels of support are more consistent from state to state than among other generations and they are more constant over time.  Obamaism may be a fad for the young, but for a certain kind of Boomer it is a long-deferred dream come true.