Jim Antle writes:

If McCain carries swing states like New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico or runs up huge margins in red states like Kentucky or even Virginia, it could make the difference in the Senate contests.

If the current Kentucky polling holds up, local Democrats are going to want to stay as far away from Obama as possible.  According to SUSA’s latest, 61% of Kentuckians say they will vote against Obama no matter who his VP is.  McConnell is probably safe in this environment, and this anti-Obama sentiment could bleed over into the KY-03 House race that has a rematch from ’06 between Yarmuth (who has backed Obama) and Northup.  Virginia is a much more difficult proposition for the GOP, since Mark Warner is enormously popular, and recent statewide elections have been trending Democratic, which means that McCain’s best hope is for a lot of split-ticket voting.  He is unlikely to run up large margins in Virginia, though Rasmussen currently shows him with a wide lead over Obama (11 points).  New Hampshire is not necessarily out of reach at the presidential level, but it is unlikely that McCain can save Sununu, who has suffered from large deficits against Shaheen from the beginning of last year.  Recent polling has shown Minnesota to be competitive in the presidential race, but any boost for Coleman here would probably be tied to a Pawlenty VP selection.  The Senate race in Colorado is going to be more competitive, in part because Schaffer has already started his campaign; the Republicans in New Mexico are getting a late start on the general (they are not determining their nominee until June), they are going to be badly bruised by the primary fight between Pearce and Wilson, and the state party is a shambles.  The best chance for anyone to come in on McCain’s coattails is probably in Colorado.

There has been a fair amount of chatter about VP choices this week, spurredon by Romney appearing with McCain at a campaign event and remarks by a McCain campaign staffer, Bloomberg’s introduction of Obama earlier this week and by the Casey endorsement of Obama.  The idea of selecting Casey seems far-fetched, and not only because he is pro-life in a party that isn’t, but also because selecting him sends the signal that Obama needs help in Pennsylvania in the general and because it puts two first-term Senators on the ticket together.  Having two Senators on a ticket is generally a bad idea anyway (it usually isn’t tried, it just barely worked in 1960, and definitely didn’t work in 2004), and having two of them with a combined six years in the Senate come Inauguration Day is a gift to McCain.  The same goes for speculation about selecting Webb.  The Democrats have a problem that, even though their bench is fairly deep, a lot of the people on it are rookies, so to speak.  You can rattle off more than half a dozen solid-sounding suggestions, including Strickland (even though or perhaps because he is a Clinton backer), Brown, Bredesen, Gregoire, Napolitano, Webb and even Sebelius, and then realise that four of them would receive the same label of “inexperienced” that Obama has already been working against all campaign.  Choosing either Dodd or Richardson would be helpful in overcoming that kind of attack.  However, a choice of Richardson would, among other things, keep the divisions from the primaries front and center and be a constant irritant to former Clinton supporters.  As a matter of competing for an important swing state, choosing Richardson might not be a bad idea, but the question becomes whether adding Richardson harms the ticket in other parts of the country.  Despite the margin of Casey’s victory in 2006, it’s not at all clear that he could reliably deliver Pennsylvania.   

The Republicans have the problem of having a very weak bench that doesn’t offer them many attractive alternatives.  The fact that Rob Portman’s name keeps coming up with remarkable frequency is a sign that the GOP has extremely few plausible options.  The choice of Romney seems uniquely designed to maximise McCain’s problems with conservative voters on a couple fronts.  The movement conservatives wary of McCain’s flirtations with Democrats will not be reassured by the selection of someone whose conservatism is of such recent vintage, or at least they shouldn’t be if their objections to McCain are not simply poses.  As I suggested during the primaries, Romney will not represent competent management and economic know-how to economically anxious voters in the Midwest and elsewhere, but will serve as the living embodiment of corporate America and economic globalisation.  If McCain gets undue credit for authenticity, he still benefits from this undeserved public image, so adding the consummate phoney Romney to the ticket tarnishes what Romney would inevitably call the “brand” of McCain.  When the election may hinge on strong results in the Rust Belt, including chances of poaching Michigan and Pennsylvania, it is actually a very bad idea to put Romney on the ticket.  While Romney has the native son angle in Michigan, more Michiganders in the primary voted for someone else and the Romney coalition is heavily dependent on party regulars, who are already going to be backing McCain.  It’s not clear that McCain can’t already win Michigan without Romney anyway; the drawbacks of a Romney selection are numerous, and the benefits seem few and far between.  There is also the problem that McCain lied about Romney’s views on the war, which reminds everyone not only of the personal antipathy between the men but of McCain’s willingness to be utterly dishonest and unscrupulous when he has to be.  This is obviously something that McCain doesn’t want people to notice about him. 

Choosing Huckabee will be “doubling his trouble,” at least with party leaders and pundits, and this will hurt his already weak fundraising and push elite movement conservatives away from him, but as a matter of winning the most votes it might not be such a bad idea.  Huckabee’s very late, opportunistic turn towards restrictionist views on immigration (which restrictionist voters embraced) could help inoculate McCain against immigration-related defections, and his social conservative credentials are pretty much impeccable, and he has significantly more experience as a government executive than Romney.  Electorally, Arkansas seems safely in the GOP column, so Huckabee doesn’t add anything there, but he should shore up McCain’s support on the right with some religious conservatives.  Huckabee doesn’t help with Catholics, but it remains to be seen whether a VP choice could drive away Catholics who are already drawn to supporting McCain.  Huckabee did finish in second place, after all, and has the second-largest number of delegates, which would seem to make him a more logical choice for uniting the party around the nominee.  However, the disproportionate hostility to Huckabee in the movement is so great that selecting him would create a problem for McCain with conservative elites that he doesn’t need, and Huckabee’s policy ideas, or lack thereof, do not complement McCain’s own aversion to policy detail.  In that respect, and probably in that respect alone, it makes sense to select the super-wonk Romney. 

Update: James adds:

Until then, we can revel in the karmic blowback involved in an Obama/Casey ticket, to wit: the endless ridicule heaped on the right’s most ardently Christian second-string pols boomerangs back as people seriously consider betting all the marbles on the guy who beat Alan Keyes and the guy who beat Rick Santorum.

This citizen reporter video giving a post-mortem on the Huckabee campaign was interesting enough, but the most bizarre part was the man’s complaint towards the end talking about how “the money” changed Huckabee over the course of the campaign.  Yeah, that’s it–it was all the piles of money that Huckabee had that pushed him in the directions he went during the primaries.  That must have come as news to the people who worked for the campaign!

Ross talks about the Bacevich and Kmiec endorsements of Obama, which I am likewise inclined to see mainly as statements of how utterly unacceptable they find McCain and the modern GOP, at The Current and also here.  It seems clear to me that both endorsements hinge on foreign policy disagreements with the Bush administration, and both see Obama as a possible improvement over the status quo and in any case much to be preferred to McCain’s promise of more of the same.  On anything else, especially domestic social policy, the problem is fundamentally one of trust: the GOP could say anything at this point on any of a host of issues, and for many conservatives it wouldn’t matter.  Regardless of platform differences and potentially worse domestic policies coming from the other party, the GOP is now seen by many on the right as operationally no better than the Democrats and in many respects much, much worse.  Indeed, because they are for the most part operationally no better, it is that much worse to continue to entrust them with power. 

In their defense, the GOP leadership and its defenders will say, “We gave you Roberts and Alito!  What about the lower court appointments?  What more do you people want?”  Of course, part of the problem for pro-life conservatives who are frustrated with the GOP is that these appointments, while reasonably sound, have accomplished nothing and, if their confirmation testimony is anything to go by, will accomplish nothing as far as these voters are concerned.  This may be an irresoluble problem for the GOP, because it is increasingly difficult to sustain a voting coalition based perpetually deferred hope, which is a result of the original judicial usurpation that took this issue away from the normal deliberative and electoral process.  Having heard the claim, usually not true, that “this is the most important election ever” for determing the future of the Court every four years for the last 30, pro-life conservatives not only begin to feel taken for granted, but also begin to think that their agenda will never really be a top priority for the party so long as their support for the party is basically guaranteed.     

Finding Bacevich’s treatment of life issues lacking, Ross said:

It further remains the case that while overturning Roe wouldn’t magically restore us to some Ozzie-and-Harriet wonderland, returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life. And it further remains the case that to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time. These realities may not require pro-lifers to vote for John McCain, but they deserve more serious consideration that Bacevich affords them.

They certainly deserve serious consideration, but in Prof. Bacevich’s defense I think he does not give them more serious consideration than he did because the GOP doesn’t give this issue very serious consideration.  Pro-life voters aren’t blind–they saw a party apparatus that was perfectly willing to embrace the pro-choice Giuliani or the until-very-recently pro-choice Romney, and they saw the vituperation and even hatred shown to Huckabee, one of the most consistently and reliably pro-life candidates in the race, to say nothing of the contempt for Ron Paul, the candidate who secured the endorsment of none other than Norma McCorvey.  Are all these people now supposed to pretend that the party and even conservative movement establishments weren’t openly rooting for the defeat of the pro-life candidates and cheering on Giuliani and Romney?  Considering the utterly disproportionate opposition to the long-shot candidate in Huckabee compared to the extremely positive and friendly treatment meted out to Giuliani and Romney, you could hardly blame a disaffected pro-life conservative for thinking that the GOP’s main priorities are war and money, and that social issues are good for mobilising turnout and nothing else.  

I have made some small effort in discussing the problems of essentially being single-issue voters, whether as pro-lifers or war opponents, at Taki’s Magazine, but that post is really just the starting point for more extensive discussion.  The argument in support of Bacevich and Kmiec’s position would be that voting for a presidential candidate on an issue of war and peace is much more likely to lead to the desired result in the foreseeable future than voting based on the promise of future judicial appointments, whose ultimate decisions in a case many years down the road may or may not lead to the overturning of Roe.  Of course, all of this effort that goes into weighing the pros and cons of this or that candidate assumes that individual votes have any impact on the final outcome, when in almost all cases they don’t, and there is something slightly ridiculous about essentially powerless voters pondering how their votes will affect things on a grand level of national policy.  If one feels compelled to vote, it seems as if it ought to be based on a decision about how well each candidate represents your views and how likely it is that he will represent your interests.  Clearly, except for single-issue antiwar voters, supporting Obama is somethig of a reach for anyone to the right of Lincoln Chafee, which is why the endorsements of Obama are largely anti-endorsements of the opposing party.  It’s the old “he can’t possibly be any worse” logic, when, of course, he can be worse in many ways.  That does not mean that he will be, but the easy assumption that he almost has to be an improvement is one that many people made about then-Gov. Bush, much to their later chagrin.  Pessimism reminds us that it is hope that is the dangerous, distorting force in our politics, as it causes us to act against our own interests and to believe things that we would normally never believe.    

Ross’ Current piece is especially interesting to me, since the title (“Catholics for Obama”) draws attention to one of Obama’s consistent weaknesses in state after state, which is, as Ross notes, his weakness with Catholic voters.  The coverage of Bob Casey’s endorsement, like the Kennedy and Kerry endorsements before them, also highlights this weakness, since it would not be considered so important except that Casey is an at least nominally pro-life Catholic in Pennsylvania.  What Ross might have emphasised more is what Bacevich and Kmiec have in common, both with each other and with Obama.  All of them are academics, and I suspect that Obama’s professorial manner has something to do with winning them over.  Perhaps less important, but potentially relevant, Kmiec and Obama share some similar background in the study of law, and Bacevich, as a much more advanced scholar of international relations, has something in common with Obama in that Obama was an IR student in his youth.  This is a kind of identification that many Catholic Democratic voters, whether in Pennsylvania or elsewhere, cannot make with Obama, and may actually be a hindrance to their identification with him.

Update: Jim Antle joins the conversation.

The problem with having idealists form your foreign policy is that idealists tend not to care for the grotty details that upset their world view. ~Dean Barnett

So says someone writing for The Weekly Standard.  I wonder if he appreciates the phenomenal irony of that statement.  Oh, wait, of course he doesn’t–it’s Dean Barnett.

After listening to these autobiographical excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, read out loud by Obama himself, I’m left with the conviction that, in the 2008 election we are facing the mother of all cultural battles. ~Stanley Kurtz

This is one thing, and probably the only thing, that Kurtz and I can agreeon.  The campaign seems primed to be more divisive and contentious than usual because the two campaigns are so heavily dependent on the symbolism of each candidate’s biographies, and so they are bound up with all of the cultural arguments that each candidate’s personal associations bring to mind.  The culture clash will be intense (to some extent, it already is), and its expressions will be particularly harsh because they will be targeting the candidates personally.  As I said last month:

The problem with candidacies defined so completely by biography, as Obama and McCain’s candidacies clearly are, is that everything in a candidate’s biography then becomes more or less fair game, and the political incentives for using the candidate’s family and friends to attack him become very great.  Far from having the most high-minded and respectful campaign in memory between two media darlings, we are probably about to embark on one that will be remembered for its bitterness and the sheer volume of third-party personal attacks made, because it is precisely in the candidates’ integrity and biography that their electoral strength resides.

It seems to me that Dionne’s claim that the culture wars are coming to a close in this cycle is an example of the kind of error that political writers, including myself, make often enough: we very much want some major change to happen or disappear (or sometimes we fear a change, but also welcome it because it validates our critique of the status quo), and so we think we have found evidence that it is happening or disappearing.  In my view, this is what pro-war advocates of the “surge” have done almost since the beginning of 2007, and it is what supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” do whenever they see a restrictionist lose an election (meanwhile they conveniently overlook the massive popular opposition to their legislation).  Sager posits that the GOP is not “libertarian” enough, and holds that this is the reason why the GOP is failing in the West without ever looking beyond what he wants to see.  Some liberals will predict, or rather express the hope, that the “Religious Right” is dying, evangelicals are abandoning the right, and so on.  They very much want this to be true, and when they discover that it isn’t you get complaints about it, such as What’s the Matter with Kansas?  Meanwhile, the liberals raising alarms about theocracy are making a different, but related error: because they have feared religious conservatives for decades, they need to talk about sinister developments that they can blame on religious conservatives and so justify their increasingly unhinged fear of these people. 

For my part, I was telling anyone who would listen for all of 2007 and part of this year that the war would doom the GOP, because I was sure that something so profoundly wrong had to cost the GOP a chance at the White House, and yet McCain, the ueber-hawk, is the Republican nominee and is doing just fine in the polls.  I kept forgetting that openly antiwar candidates simply haven’t won presidential elections while there is an ongoing war, and for the most part you don’t have many examples of openly antiwar candidates running for President in these circumstances.  Nonetheless, McClellan and McGovern both lost in landslide defeats.  Now it is true that Iraq is unusually unpopular, and more unpopular at this stage of the war than Vietnam, so this might be the year when that changes, but it doesn’t seem to be happening as I expected.  As I have said before, arguments over Vietnam, like arguments over Iraq, are not simply arguments over a military campaign overseas.  If they were, cost-benefit analysis and simple pragmatism would offer the obvious course of action: get out and get out now.  National polling shows that two-thirds of the country want us out within two years, but this obscures the fact that disapproving of the war does not mean that all the current opponents of the war embrace a thoroughgoing antiwar narrative; many of them certainly would not share my characterisations of the war as immoral and illegal.  So, instead of being arguments about policy, they are arguments about “values” and American identity.  Simply put, the party that has tended to be antiwar during the last 36 years has also been the party on the losing side of these other arguments, even when they have been right on the policy question, and so they have lost time after time in presidential elections where these arguments are most powerful.  An Obama-McCain contest will be an almost perfect test of this proposition.

Update: Let me clarify this last paragraph.  When voters are asked a simple question about whether they approve/disapprove of the war, there is a huge majority that disapproves.  Where I have erred is to mistake that huge majority of disapproving voters, or even a huge majority that wants withdrawal of most forces within two years, to be an indication of an inevitable rejection of the party and candidate who argues for continuing the war.  As a strict matter of policy and pragmatism, you would, or at least I would, think that the 65% or so who want us out within two years would not back McCain, since he proposes to do the exact opposite of what they say they want.  This is where the question of “values” comes in.  This operates on a few levels.  The first is the problem that antiwar candidates keep running up against, which is that they are smeared and attacked for lacking in patriotism or being anti-American; they are necessarily in a difficult position, because they very actively criticise the government, which their opponents manipulate and twist into an attack on the country itself.  So even though it is almost always an outrageous lie that the antiwar candidate is “anti-American,” if this lie is repeated often enough then enough voters get the impression that they would be backing someone who is not patriotic if they voted for him.  This is absolute garbage, but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that garbage doesn’t have an effect in politics.  Then there is a question of stopping an ongoing war, even when a majority agrees that it has not been worth it and was a mistake.  Huckabee got a lot of mileage out of talking about national honour, and McCain talks about it all the time, and this is a subject that can be very readily demagogued to the disadvantage of the antiwar candidate, as if it dishonoured veterans and war dead to end a futile and unnecessary war.  It is appalling that people who support the initiation of aggressive war can talk about honour with a straight face, but they get away with it.  Then there is another, more incidental matter of conflicting “values,” and this is where the foreign policy debate and what we conventionally think of as the culture wars intersect: with some notable exceptions on the right, antiwar voters are overwhelmingly on the cultural, as well the political, left, and so being antiwar has become conventionally identified not just with being on the left politically but also culturally.  Therefore, antiwar candidates are associated with the baggage of the cultural left even if they personally reject it. 

Thus the Middle American candidate who said, “Come home, America,” was tarred as the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.”  Now, obviously, Obama is not McGovern, as I have said many times.  You cannot imagine him saying, “Come home, America,” but he is still being targeted with the same kinds of smears.  It is happening again.  So when I say that the argument isn’t about policy, but about “values” and identity, it is to these factors that I’m referring.  This is why McCain’s first general election ad is almost entirely free of any policy-related material and is extremely heavy on symbolism and efforts to manipulate the audience’s patriotism to McCain’s advantage.  That is why the voice in the ad asks, “What must a President believe about us?  About America?”  This is the language of a litmus test, and it is a litmus test of the candidate’s Americanism.  This is unfortunately how pro-war candidates win.  If the election were about Iraq, the GOP would be blown away, which is why they are making arguments about the war into an argument about the definition of America and a referendum on Americanism.  This is very depressing development.  This is a reality of American politics that I had successfully ignored in the past, but it can’t be ignored for long.

There is no better way for NATO to move forward than by extending full membership invitations to Albania, Croatia and Macedonia and by beginning the process to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance in the future through membership action plans (MAPs). ~Donald Rumsfeld

I can think of at least five better ways NATO could move forward: 1) NATO could reduce its membership to those countries that are actually capable of consistently fielding overseas deployments of some meaningful size for joint NATO missions; 2) It could disband entirely as an outdated relic of the Cold War; 3) It could return to being a defensive alliance for the sake of collective European security, rather than a club for Washington-approved regimes (WARs); 4) It could spent its time building up the military capabilities of existing members before extending useless defense promises to countries we have no intention of defending against attack; 5) It could disband entirely as an outdated relic of the Cold War.  Guess which one I prefer?

We all understand, or at least I hope we understand, that NATO expansion is simply a boondoggle.  No one has any intention of going to war for the territorial integrity of Georgia, especially when its territorial integrity is already compromised and serves as a perfect flashpoint between the major powers, and there is nothing more foolish than to make defense pledges that you don’t have any interest or desire to keep.  The only people who benefit from this arrangement are defense contractors, who do good business selling new member states weapons they don’t need to defend against threats that don’t exist, and NATO bureaucrats who need to keep justifying their existence to their home governments.  Unlike the last two rounds of expansion, which have sailed through without much debate at all, this round must be stopped dead in its tracks.  Bringing in the Baltics last time was bad enough, but Ukraine and Georgia are simply out of the question.  The other three serve no purpose in the alliance and would create any number of unnecessary complications for it, as Albania and Croatia have ties that are too close to Bosnia and Kosovo while Macedonia is internally unstable and its membership in NATO would be an affront to Greece, one of the earliest members of the alliance.

Rumsfeld’s proposal is the worst NATO-related idea since Giuliani talked about bringing in Japan.  It is such a bad idea that he must obscure the reality about these countries, particularly Ukraine and Georgia:

With respect to Georgia and Ukraine, both nations are democratic, politically mature, relatively stable and committed to the international community after the Orange and Rose revolutions in 2003 and 2004.

If you believe that, he also has a bridge to sell you at a very reasonable price.

I’m not likely to take Ryan “Social Conservatives Have a Death-Grip on Republican Politics” Sager’s analysis seriously in any case, but as someone who hails from the “interior West” I am going to cry foul on any attempt to explain the political changes of the Southwest that does not so much as mention two obvious long-term demographic reasons for shifts in voting patterns: mass immigration from the south and, perhaps more immediately significant, considerable migration from California and other parts of the country to the interior West.  Our states are the places where the Californians frequently go when their cost of living became too expensive, and they then proceed to turn around and start trying to Californianise their new homes by reproducing the politics that had created the mess in California.  This may be exacerbated by new arrivals from the Northeast, but mitigated to some extent by people coming from the Rust Belt.  But that would require actual work, rather than recycling (yet again) the story about how the big, bad social conservatives lost the West.  To repeat this story of the GOP losing the “libertarian” West, you would have to ignore the rather large evangelical population in Colorado.  One might want to check changes in Colorado evangelical voting patterns against changes on the national level to see if the GOP is losing as many of these voters there as they are elsewhere.  As the cost of living goes up in the “interior West,” voting patterns probably have begun to follow the parts of the country where it is most expensive to live, and this means voting for Democrats who begin winning elections based on arguments for making this or that “more affordable.”  Tackling the question of how the population has changed over the last ten or twenty years in specific states would be a lot more useful and much more interesting than listening to a New Yorker raise vague alarms.  These are some of the structural changes that are driving the West towards the Democrats. 

More broadly, the “interior West” has experienced significant urban and suburban growth (mainly suburban), and to the extent that the GOP is losing the suburbs everywhere they are probably also losing some of them in the vicinities of some of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas.  Albuquerque has been growing quickly, attracting a new wave of transplants who are reshaping the First District and making it increasingly likely that my home district will elect a Democrat for the first time.  Profound incompetence, corruption and bad policy at the national level, including but not limited to the war, have been contributing factors in driving suburbanites away from the GOP.   The GOP needs a policy agenda and a message that shows them to be the party of suburban America in what was already being called the “suburban century” 16 years ago.  As Schneider wrote back in 1992:

The prevailing imperative of suburban life is security–both economic and physical.  

For obvious reasons, it is this question of economic security that is especially important in this cycle.  As much as I like a message of limited government, I know, just as anyone who knows the first thing about the level of involvement of state and federal governments in the “interior West” understands, that this message is increasingly ineffective in winning electoral campaigns.  But it is also worth considering what kind of Democrats are winning in these states.  They tend to be centrist, tax-cutting and pro-business.  Even in New Mexico, Richardson has won both his elections by running and governing more or less as a centrist.  So it is not necessarily the case that the GOP needs to engage in a bidding war to preserve itself in the West. 

Keeping the Californians out, while desirable, is not really practicable, but immigration enforcement and control of the borders are possible–they are also exactly one of the things Sager thinks Republicans should give up.  Also, despite what Sager is saying, most of the “red” states of the interior West are not going to vote for a Democrat for President this year.  Sager misleadingly includes New Mexico in this group, as if the land of Tom Udall and Marty Chavez is a natural bastion for his brand of “libertarian” Republicanism, when it was something of a fluke of broader national trends that New Mexico had a Republican governor in 2000.  We have since reverted to the norm of electing Democratic governors, and we have not had a Republican majority in the Roundhouse since Hoover was in the White House.  So of course New Mexico is leaning towards the Democratic side right now–on every level except the federal, New Mexico is essentially a Democratic state.  However, in presidential elections New Mexico frequently aligns with national popular trends, which is why I would still insist that the presidential race is going to be much more difficult for the Democrats than most realise, since they are not polling all that well in a state where they ought to have every advantage. 

Update: McCain is already running general election ads in New Mexico (via Ambinder).  Like everything else McCain, it is awesomely devoid of policy content and focuses entirely on the use of patrotic sentiment and McCain’s military service.  In a state with a large military population, this sort of ad will probably work pretty well.  It also seems to be an indirect way of saying that Obama doesn’t believe all of the things about American goodness and honour that McCain does, and we can expect more of this for the next seven months.

P.S.  It’s also slightly worrisome that the actor (Powers Boothe) doing the voiceover played the crazy Vice President from season 6 of 24.  Does this mean that McCain is going to pick a Noah Daniels-like figure for his veep?

Alex Massie has a sensible take in response to an absurd question from earlier this week:

Is this Glenn Reynolds post a plea for more coverage of Tibet or less of Palestine?
 GOOD QUESTION:  Why Do Palestinians Get Much More Attention than Tibetans?

 

But, just perhaps, the Israel-Palestine question receives lots of coverage because it’s a question, at root, of competing rights, not because the media has an incurably anti-Israeli bias or is, in this instance at any rate, acting in an especially hypocritical fashion.

The other answer, of course, is that readers, are much more interested in the Middle East than they are in China and Tibet and, consequently, this is just market forces at work. Shocking!

The Prager article to which Reynolds linked misses these and other important reasons.  For that matter, why are Cyprus and Kashmir not receiving the same attention as either one?  Partly because both places are relatively quiet right now, but partly for more obvious political reasons.  In the one case, Greece does not wield so much clout that it can make Cyprus into a top priority for other states, and few are very much interested in championing the Greek Cypriot side, despite the absolutely clear illegality of the Turkish invasion and occupation.  In the other, I think neither state claiming all of Kashmir wants to internationalise the issue for fear that it risks losing something it already has.  The world tends to pay attention to disputes when those involved clamour for outside action and when they have more powerful patrons to champion their cause, or when they involve states that outsiders have some extremely powerful ideological or geopolitical reason to support or oppose.  Maintaining relations with China typically trumps concerns about Tibet, or Burma, or any of the quasi-satellites it has been developing over the last decade.  Meanwhile, the Palestinians are often treated by many Western governments as a symbol for improving relations with Arabs and Muslims more generally, while their plight is used as a perennial distraction by the region’s governments; actual Palestinian interests effectively go unrepresented because, as I’m sure many have noted before now, no one has any incentive in resolving a conflict that serves such useful functions for so many different states. 

The brutalities and injustices of occupation in Kashmir, the terrorism perpetrated against Indians and the competing claims of different groups are all there to make for compelling stories, but it lacks the geopolitical edge that Israel-Palestine possesses because of the previous and ongoing international uses of the conflict as a proxy for larger struggles.  Besides, Washington does not have and has not had the kind of close relationship with India that it has with Israel, and it likewise has no interest in drawing attention to Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir and the rest of India, since that would rather undermine the idea that we are opposed to state sponsors of terror. 

Now let’s turn the question around: why does the Israeli occupation of Palestine get so much more attention and more favourable coverage than the Chinese occupation of Tibet?  Pretty obviously, it is because outside audiences, and esecially Western audiences, have more of a political and psychological investment in the one than in the other.  (For instance, we don’t usually harangue our presidential candidates about their ties to figures who are supposed to be pro-Tibetan, and neither do we reward them for being zealously pro-Beijing.)  Conflicts that can be treated as representative of regional or global problems appear to possess more universal relevance, even if the assumption that the conflict is relevant to the rest of the world is false.  Certainly, there is some association of the Palestinian cause with other anti-colonialist movements of the post-war era that most outsiders do not usually see in the case of Tibet, perhaps because it was not/is not fashionable to think of the Chinese as colonialists–a fashion that Beijing is expeditiously working around the world to make outmoded.  The sacred geography of Palestine commands more worldwide attention, which makes issues of territorial concessions or talk of an independent state much more meaningful to people who would otherwise have no connection to the cause of either side.  Kashmir and Tibet have holy sites, but most of them mean little or nothing to most people around the world and few of them possess the kind of centrality or significance that the sites in the Holy Land possess for Christians, Muslims and Jews. 

In the countries directly involved, it simply isn’t true that Israel-Palestine receives more coverage, but because we take note of foreign news coverage mainly when it talks about things we are already talking about all the time Americans and Westerners may come away with the impression that the world is preoccupied with Palestine.  In fact, if you looked at Indian newspapers, you would probably find that the Indian public is much more interested in Kashmir and other questions immediately relevant to India.  It is to some degree the West’s preoccupation with this conflict that causes Westerners to wonder why other nations take a similar or even greater interest in it, as if the world’s attention to the Palestinians doesn’t have some fairly direct connection with the strong American and, to a lesser extent, European focus on Israel.

We call it a bad government, when it is administered on other principles, and directed to other objects either wickedly or weakly, either by obtaining new laws, which want this conformity, or by perverting old ones which had it; and when this is done without law, or in open violation of the laws, we term it a tyrannical government.  In a word, and to bring this home to our own case, constitution is the rule by which our princes ought to govern at all times; government is that by which they actually do govern at any particular time.  One may remain immutable; the other may, and as human naure is constituted, must vary.  One is the criterion by which we are to try the other; for surely we have a right to do so, since if we are to live in subjection to the government of our Kings, our Kings are to govern in subjection to the constitution; and the conformity or non-conformity of their subjection to it, prescribes the measure of our submission to them, according to the principles of the Revolution, and of our present settlement….Another thing to be considered is this: when persons are spoken of as friends to the government, and enemies to the constitution, the term friendship is a little prostituted, in compliance with common usage; for real friendship can never exist among those who have banished virtue and truth.  They have no affection to any but themselves; no regard to any interest except their own.  Their sole attachments are such as I mentioned in the last letter, attachments to power and profit, and when they have contracted a load of infamy and guilt in the pursuit of these, an attachment to that protection, which is sufficient to procure them appearances of consideration, and real impunity.  They may bear the semblance of affection to their prince, and of zeal for his government; but they who are false to the cause of their country, will not be true to any other; and the very same minister who exalts his master’s throne on the ruins of the constitution, that he may govern without control, or retire without danger, would do the reverse of this, if any turn of affairs enabled him to compound, in that manner, the better for himself. ~Bolingbroke