Otherwise quite sensible, Mark Krikorian praises Cinco de Mayo because ” it’s always a cause for celebration when the French get beaten.”*  This creates some internal contradictions in the reflexive Francophobia that has been an annoying tic on the right for the last six years: if the French are beaten in a battle, that means that they actually fought in a battle, which suggests that they do not automatically surrender to their enemies.  That’s a difficult paradox to resolve. 

Of course, there are plenty of occasions when the French or their forerunners among the Franks were victorious that should make us very happy, starting with Poitiers and ending at least with Yorktown.  In light of what came later, I doubt too many Americans would be interested in popping corks to mark the anniversary of the fall of Dienbienphu.  For my part, I have always viewed Cinco de Mayo as a rather sad holiday, since it is notable mainly because it is one of the only occasions in history when the Mexicans have ever prevailed over anyone.  Now it has been commodified and turned into an excuse for middle-class whites to drink Cuervo to excess, but without the attendant integration and respect that attaches to the Irish for St. Patrick’s Day. 

* Yes, I realise this is at least partly tongue-in-cheek, but I’m tired of the attitude behind such jokes.

As I discussed last week, Obama is not faring well in West Virginia and Kentucky, and the new Rasmussen West Virginia poll shows that he has gained no ground in the last six weeks.  Trailing Clinton 56-27 overall, he loses all age groups and all income groups.  20% of black voters support Clinton, a figure that seems to be finding a parallel in some of the surveys of North Carolina and which have elsewhere been routinely dismissed as incredible.  He loses among men by 21 and among women by 36.  His unfavs are at 50% (remember that this is a closed primary), and even among those who say Iraq is the most important issue he trails by four.  As in the March poll, 40% say they are unlikely to vote for Obama against McCain.

57% of likely voters in the West Virginia primary say that they think it likely that Obama shares some of Wright’s views.  61% say that he denounced Wright out of political convenience.  17% remain unsure which candidate they will support, but it is not hard to imagine most of them breaking for Clinton and giving her a 40+ point win.  Tomorrow may or may not go well for Obama, but next week is going to be a horror show.

It was several steps above most chain steaks, but far below what you would get at a decent Manhattan steakhouse.  Then again, it was half the price. ~Rick Lyman

Well, yeah.  That’s the idea.  That seems like a fair-trade off for most folks, some of whom have never been to Manhattan and don’t particularly want to go.  However, after reading just the Outback review I find the condemnations that are pouring in against this review article to be a bit puzzling.  Lyman’s description of the Outback he visited sounds very much like any Outback you might go to around the country, and that is part of the appeal of chain restaurants.  Much as I generally find the proliferation of these chains to be troubling in some ways because of the uniformity and homogenisation they represent, they are very popular because they have more or less uniform standards nationwide and you know what you’re getting every time you walk in.  Plus, the food is usually decent.  In any case, as someone who actually likes the Outback chain (in my youth, it used to be a big deal during our Florida vacations to go to the original St. Petersburg Outback, and it was there that I developed my lifelong obsession with iced tea), I found nothing remotely condescending or anthropological about the review.  Normally, I am as ready as anyone to denounce arrogant New Yorkers for looking down on the rest of the country, but this time I just don’t see it.

One of the factors in the special election for Louisiana’s 6th District that no one seems to have said much about is the Katrina factor.  There are two aspects to this.  First, in the last three years there has been an influx of people from New Orleans into the Baton Rouge area, most of whom are black and likely to vote Democratic and some of whom probably contributed very directly to Cazayoux’s win this week.  The aftermath of Katrina has likely changed the demographics of the district enough in a short time so that Bush’s 55% 59% in 2004 is misleading as an indicator of Republican strength in the district, and that 2004 figure already shows some erosion of support from 2000.  It may be that the 6th was already trending towards the Democrats and was given an extra push in that direction by the population changes after the hurricane.  Second, there is probably some localised hostility to the Republican Party because of its association with the administration’s failures in relief efforts and because Mr. Bush quashed the plan proposed by the outgoing Republican House member, Richard Baker, for federal recovery assistance.  Add to that Jenkins’ serial losing streak in the state, and then consider that Jenkins lost by just under 3,000 votes and that turnout for this odd Saturday election was probably unusually low.  (Louisiana Secretary of State reported 23.5% turnout.)  IL-14 flipped on a Saturday special election, too, and that makes me think that these results may not be as meaningful as they at first appear.   

Update: Jim Antle says, “But there have been too many examples of this trend to explain away.”  But there haven’t been “too many examples of this trend.”  There hasn’t even been a trend.  There have been two examples this year of special elections that led to a seat flipping from Republican to Democratic control, and both can reasonably be explained in similar ways (with the added factor in Illinois that association with Obama is a plus for House candidates, not a liability).  Quin Hillyer provides the appropriate corrective. 

Second Update: Connected with the Katrina factor, the 6th district was already 33% black, which the influx of new residents after the hurricane increased. 

P.S. Another thought occurred to me–these days Barone is always going on about Obama’s strength in state capitals, so it is possible that the 6th district, which includes a state capital and a sizeable black population, is unusually friendly territory for Obama, making ad campaigns that try to tie Cazayoux to Obama seem even more short-sighted and useless.  The same does not apply to Mississippi’s 1st, where Childers has been quickly fleeing from any association with Obama, which is significant in itself.

Third Update: Jim Antle follows up on his earlier post, and I see that I have misread him when he is talking about trends.  He was referring to the secular anti-GOP trend that is very real, and no doubt he’s right when he says that “[t]here are good reasons to believe that Democrats will add to their congressional majorities in November.”  There certainly are good reasons to believe this, and I think we are in agreement that the Democrats are going to expand their majorities considerably.  There are nonetheless fewer reasons to think that this increased majority will include the gentlemen from Louisiana and Mississippi.

Loose talk about putting Jindal on the ticket is a sure sign of how bad the alternative choices seem to be.  This isn’t to say that Jindal wouldn’t make a good selection on the merits, but it would deprive Louisiana of an energetic and competent governor at exactly the wrong time, and it would deprive local Republicans of their de facto leader in the wake of the notable, but not necessarily very significant special election result in Louisiana’s 6th that has put the Democrat, Cazayoux, in the House.  Jindal should stay put in Baton Rouge and follow through on what he promised to do. 

Besides, if I am wrong about how competitive the presidential election will be and it turns out to be a major Democratic year with McCain playing the role of Dole, any higher ambitions Jindal might have had will go out the window, probably forever.  That’s bad for him, but also bad for the GOP and perhaps even for the country.  Republicans don’t have an endless supply of popular and conservative governors, and they can’t go around frittering them away in reckless VP selections.  The conventional wisdom, which was correct then and and now, is that McCain doesn’t need someone from the South, and if he does need a Southern governor to shore up the ticket in the South all is lost anyway.  So Jindal doesn’t necessarily add that much to the ticket, and the danger of him appearing as a green pol being promoted too quickly is real. 

Does Cazayoux’s win portend general election doom for the GOP?  I am doubtful.  I am beginning to think that special elections for the House turn on the specific candidates and local conditions much more than they reflect national trends, and the NRCC, not exactly awash in strategic genius, has chosen to fight these elections by constantly invoking Nancy Pelosi and Obama.  This seems to shout in a loud voice, “We have no ideas!  We have no agenda!”  And, of course, they have no ideas and no agenda, which is a problem, but it strikes me as very strange that the GOP actually wants to nationalise the House races by tying local Democrats to national liberal figures.  If you nationalise the House races in this climate, you’re sunk.  If you can appeal to local interests, you might have a chance.  If, that is, Republicans can remember how to appeal to local interests, instead of nattering on about the evil of earmarks.   

Update: Ross takes a similar view.

Second Update: Jim Antle agrees–we’re on our way to a blogger consensus!

At The Current, Reihan lets his run wild:

On the domestic front, one can imagine Wright building bridges to small government conservatives by calling for sweeping decentralization, the better to empower neighborhoods and churches.

I appreciate Reihan’s experiment, and he is right that Wright would be a more “interesting” candidate, since his every public appearance would become the occasion for a new firestorm of controversy.  If he ran for office, it would be a good time to be a blogger. 

As completely implausible as this alliance of right-wing decentralists and Jeremiah Wright might be, there’s a lot to be said for this kind of thing generally.  If I understand it correctly, Wright’s communitarianism, like a lot of left communitarianism, comes from the legacy of not expecting public authority to do much for, and to do a good deal against, your community; rightist decentralism comes out of a similar conviction borne of a similar distrust of concentrated and distant power.  Where they differ is that the former has promoted self-reliance (at least to some extent) on the assumption that no one else will provide much of anything, much less the right kind of assistance, and the latter wants to go back towards a world of more or less self-supporting communities on the assumption that there are only too many people willing to offer assistance as a means of acquiring leverage and power over your community.  In the end, however, I am skeptical that most minority communities will ever be fully supportive of a decentralist agenda, even though in many parts of the country it would empower them more than any arrangement under the current system would.           

Reihan is making another very important point elsewhere in this short item, which is that to have a truly vigorous and serious debate there needs to be many more stark clashes of differing perspectives.  This again goes to the heart of the problem with the Obama campaign: it is premised on the idea that there is too much division, when every major calamity or failure of policy has been a product of bipartisan consensus, and that we need more unity and collaboration, when we actually need more frequent and more pointed disagreement about fundamental assumptions concerning the role of government, America’s role in the world, the distribution of power and wealth, and the desirability of channeling or blocking cultural change.  In the last eight years, we have had a unified government, and it has done a great deal of damage.  Even when the opposition party acquires some power, it is cowed and intimidated out of using it because it is simply not permitted in “serious” circles to advance in a meaningful way policies consistent with views diametically opposed to those of the administration.  The trouble is that we have not been divided enough.  The variety of political views in America does not receive its proper representation, and even when we are discussing actual policy (rather than “hope”) we are instead treated to the spectacle of quibbling over the minutiae of how best to run the empire and expand the government. 

At Taki’s Magazine, I have two newposts up on the subject.  Here is Paul Gottfried’s response to my first post, which I try to address in the other one.

Fine, one more post on the endless Wright controversy.  Onseveraloccasions, I have argued that there is a double standard being applied in the treatment of Hagee and Wright, but it isn’t the double standard that is being routinely trotted out in recent days.   Frank Rich sums up this view:

But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

Of course, one of the reasons why the Wright business provokes many conservatives is the resentment of a double standard when it comes to racial attitudes, whether perceived or real, that is deployed against whites and conservatives in particular.  If Joe Biden so much as makes a bad joke, it’s treated as if it were a three-alarm fire, Geraldine Ferraro’s basically innocent remark “has no place in our politics” (as Obama likes to put it) and we heard  a cacophony about what Obama called the “quiet violence” of Don Imus (and those are just some of the most prominent episodes in the last year or so), but all Obama needs to do to satisfy most journalists is to disavow his pastor.  Heaven help an actual conservative who utters some poorly chosen words, because no one else will save him.  So if there is a double standard on racial matters, it is one that is indisputably working to Obama’s advantage, at least as far as the media are concerned, while the white Democratic voters who are moving away from him are probably doing so at least in part because they know full well that they would be ostracised or fired if they were to utter anything even 1/100th as incendiary or provocative as the things that Wright says on a daily basis.  I suspect that this grates on some people.  As I have been trying to say before, what we should want to see is an end to this mindless policing of thought, speech and association, but as long as we do have it let’s be clear about who usually benefits from the double standard. 

Of course, it is absolutely legitimate to take a candidate’s associates into account when you vote, but then it seems to me that those who have closely associated themselves with Mr. Bush have a great deal of explaining to do–will they disavow him, his errors and his crimes?  (Of course, we know they won’t.)  After all, ironically enough, McCain owes Bush for some significant part of his political success in a couple of ways: in a very direct way, many from Bush’s campaign backed McCain early on and made him the heir apparent, which, despite the failures of 2007, helped to carry him on to win the nomination, and in a negative way Bush provided McCain with the perfect foil against which he could cast himself as the reformer and independent-minded McCain of myth.  McCain owes his current position to Mr. Bush much more than Obama owes his to Wright, yet there is no expectation that he will meaningfully repudiate Mr. Bush more than he has, which isn’t very much.   

There is absolutely a double standard being applied to Wright and Hagee that lets Hagee (and, by extension, McCain) off the hook, and it is pretty obvious why.  Hagee is the head of an influential lobby that supports Israel and takes the hardest imaginable line on policy in the Near East, so the combination of a “pro-Israel” position and a reflexively pro-war view secures Hagee and anyone who associates with him from any serious criticism.  In other words, he has taken what is somehow considered a “respectable” and “mainstream” view on these policies, and this inoculates him to other criticism that he has awful views of Catholics.  Meanwhile, Wright’s policy views with respect to Israel and the Near East are diametrically opposed to Hagee’s (and, for that matter, to most of Obama’s views), and it is as much for this (and the “anti-Americanism” charge) that the media focus on him with so much more intensity, and it is for this reason that Obama had to throw in that fairly blatant pandering line on Israel in his Philadelphia speech that otherwise had nothing to do with foreign policy.  Wright has said offensive, untrue and stupid things; Hagee has actively promoted dangerous, destructive and stupid policies and gloried in the bombardment of civilian populations.  The latter is treated as a “legitimate” policy view that should not be stigmatised or challenged, while the former must be vigorously policed and punished.  Lieberman calls Hagee a “man of God,” while Wright is deemed by pundits left and right to be a crackpot.  Would that we could work up as much indignation for the terrible policies that Hagee regularly endorses and promotes as we have for words that are basically irrelevant to the business of government. 

Besides, there is a general double standard that is going to define the entire campaign: McCain was a media darling before most people knew who Obama was.  Not just any white politician, much less a Republican, could normally get away with being tied to Hagee as easily as he has, but McCain is basically untouchable by the media because the media refuse to question his judgement, which most of them have already decided is sound and reliable.  When he panders, his admirers in the press corps make excuses for him (“he doesn’t really believe that!”); when he gets things amazingly wrong, they cover for him (“he has tremendous experience and knowledge on national security!”); when he tells what are obviously lies, the bold teller of truths is given a pass because the journalists know, deep down, that at least McCain feels really bad about lying.  McCain could associate with known criminals and terrorists, and the media would find a way to put it in a good light (“he was gathering intel on their operations!”).

It is a strange thing that Southerners are for some reason being blamed of late for some undue attachment to the policies of Woodrow Wilson, when the South provided no less than two of the Senators of the six who opposed the declaration of war in 1917.  In an era when Southerners were keen to demonstrate their loyalty, and general servility to a pro-war executive was the rule all over the country, this seems to me to be a somewhat significant sign of Southern resistance rather than support.  Needless to say, there was little or no dissent from the Northeast.  It is also hardly a secret that the greatest proponents of the war were progressive Christians, not conservative and fundamentalist Christians, and these were typically concentrated more in the urban centers of the North.  Considerable resistance to the war and wartime policies of conscription emerged in the South, and “[w]hen war was finally declared in April 1917, some of the most vocal opponents were southern Democrats.”  Claude Kitchin of North Carolina is one counter-example of a Southern Democrat who continued in office after 1918–his constituents did not punish him for having opposed entry into the war.    

Vardaman’s later electoral defeat is taken as evidence of some Southern enthusiasm for Wilsonian fantasies, when it is unfortunately evidence of a much more dangerous tendency common to all Americans of punishing members of Congress who go against the executive.  Sen. Stone of Missouri died before the Armistice and the 1918 election, so we will never know if his consituents were going to vote him out.  Opponents of the war were relatively few and scattered all over the country (Lane from Oregon, Gronna from North Dakota, Norris from Nebraska, LaFollette from Wisconsin), yet they plainly represented the overwhelming majority of the population in 1917.  Yet, the fact remains that in 1918 some Democratic politicians who quite correctly and wisely voted against entry into the war were defeated, in part because they had gone against the President of their party and had been seen to side with his predominantly Republican opponents.  However, war hysteria managed to sink the careers of some Republican politicians in other parts of the country as well, including the well-known Jeannete Rankin of Montana.

Again, Sullivan seems to be misunderstanding the origins of mainstream conservatives’ special new contempt for Obama.  Sullivan describes it this way:

But to go from this to the vicious attempt to portray Obama as a fraud, an actor, and another phony politician is a sign of the hard right’s nervousness. When you listen to Sean Hannity, you hear someone who looks at Obama and sees every racial fear he has ever had about black Democrats personified. The difficulty of making distinctions between, say, Sharpton, Jackson and Obama is just too much for him. 

Leaving aside discussing what intellectual tasks are too difficult for Hannity (our time here on earth is limited, after all), the portrayal of Obama as a fraud is not a sign of nervousness.  There is something else going on here.  As I’ve saidbefore a couple times, there is a dynamic of disappointment and competition behind mainstream conservative attacks on Obama: his optimism and Americanism must be shown to be fraudulent, because they compete the competing mainstream conservative version of these things, and the assumption that they are fraudulent inspires feelings of disappointment and anger towards a liberal whom they had once hoped would be respectable and respectful of their views.  They and Obama are closer to one another than probably either side would like to admit, which is why you see so much pious sermonising attacking Obama from the left about the “racism” of his church while trying to find excuses to pin anti-Americanism on him with such dubious controversies as the flag pin.  In a related way, “pro-Israel” conservatives cannot, must not, admit the possibility that Obama is also just as “pro-Israel” as they are, because that would mean that there are alternative ways to be “pro-Israel” other than theirs.  This is not exactly nervousness, but the arrogant sense of superiority that any P.C. inquisitor has for his target, who does represent a challenge but whom they are quite confident they can destroy politically. 

His mainstream conservative critics’ attacks are operating at several levels.  The first is actually an expression of disappointment.  There was a time when many mainstream conservative pundits treated Obama as a refreshing departure from what they had become used to hearing from the left.  Viewed as cynically as possible, this started to collapse once he began winning most of the contests because he now became the main threat, but there was a more substantial reason for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in the early months.  The ferocity of the turn against Obama was partly a function of discovering things that any halfway interested observer could have found out about him or his associates a year or more earlier, but which they had never bothered to find out because they did not take him seriously.  The intensity of the reaction against him was the result of feeling that Obama had not lived up to the image, much of which they projected onto him, of Obama as an acceptable liberal politician (i.e., he became acceptable, because he seemed to be taking their views seriously, and anything that suggested that he was a more traditional liberal would destroy that image).  It wasn’t just that many of them were learning about many of the details of his background for the first time (having taken the superficial, patronising view of the candidate that many of his supporters also adopted in early days, derived from little more than a brief bio sketch and his 2004 convention speech), but that some of them actually believed the hype that he was moving “beyond” race and old ideological fights.  In one sense, they took Obama’s campaign rhetoric far too seriously, but simultaneously misunderstood what he meant by talking about “turning the page.”  But this conception of “transcendence,” which some of his supporters have seemed to share as well, was always bound to meet with disappointment, because it was never realistic and was something constructed by political observers more than by the candidate himself. 

Even with all the good will and right intentions in the world, no politician can move “beyond” race or ideology in any case, and mainstream conservatives were even more bitterly disappointed to find that the “post-racial” candidate held fairly conventional liberal views on social policies related to race.  Modifications to affirmative action that would move it towards a class-based system of preferences do not strike most conservatives as a major concession, and may actually appear more undesirable.  The “conversation” that these critics want to have is one in which Obama concludes that conservative views on affirmative action, crime and all the rest are basically right, and so the disappointment with Obama ratcheted up after his Philadelphia speech, which quite a lot of mainstream conservative pundits decried as both dishonest and revealing of the “real” Obama.  The “conversation” mainstream conservatives seem to have wanted was for everyone to stop having any discussion of race, when it has become quite clear that Obama is not interested in that.  Of course, the condescending view of white resentments, like the later “cling” remarks, were always going to provoke harsh criticism, and rightly so in those cases.  

The pile-on is not simply intended to thwart Obama, but to serve as an example to others, which is what this kind of thought policing is most concerned with doing.  One constantly hears cries on talk radio and elsewhere from white conservatives that there is a double standard of treatment, but instead of following that complaint to its logical conclusion–the policing of thoughts and words is what is truly damaging and unacceptable–they opt instead to hammer away on Obama after having spent decades complaining about the very same policing.  The goal is to take ownership of the tools of thought policing for their side to augment their policy arguments and the record of their preferred party, because it is only through this kind of intimidation that can mask the record of stunning failure of the last eight years.  Liberals should be familiar with this, since they have done much the same thing for decades.  So employing these tools may be a sign of the weakness of one’s arguments, but it is not a sign of nervousness.  Indeed, I expect that mainstream conservatives today are feeling much more calm about the prospect of an Obama nomination than they have at almost any time before now.  They assume that these tactics will work to sink his candidacy, and they are probably right.  Ironically, in the remarks Obama made earlier this week about Wright he accepted the logic of the very methods that will be used throughout the year to defeat him.  Instead of breaking out of the “smallness of our politics,” which are made as petty as they are because of this kind of thought and speech and association-policing, Obama succumbed.