Against the Wind

I am going to go out on a limb and bet that Hillary will defy expectations and pull off narrow victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday. The wager is one drink per state at a venue of the loser's chosing. Sign up in the comments if you're feeling lucky.

My logic is very simple:

1. The polls have proven themselves as unreliable as ever, so Obama's narrow margin in TX and the closing of the gap in OH don't mean all that much. The same thing happened in NH.
2. Final tallies have broken down hard along tribal socio-economic and racial lines with few exceptions throught the race.
3. Demographics in both states favor Hillary's tribes.

I will grant the possibility that the polls are unreliably running in Hillary's favor--that is, vastly overstating her appeal--but I don't feel like this is the case. There's enough of an opportunity for turnout to throw this thing in either candidate's favor, though, so I'm not going to pretend to be super-confident about my guess.

If Hillary wins both states, it will be really interesting to see how the coverage plays out. My guess is that it will turn to how she still needs undemocratic, fatcat, Clinton holdover, disproportionately white male superdelegates to win, even though that is true about Obama as well, and in the Interest of Democracy and Fairness She Should Drop Out Don't You Think?

It is now amusingly clear that the press is covering Obama's campaign the same way US Weekly covers Tom Cruise, except in this case the fawning adulation was offered voluntarily. I can't criticize Obama for running a successful campaign. I can criticize the press for failing to draw attention to the stunningly vapid sloganeering and near-pathological refusal to commit to anything except to "belief that we can hope in," or "change we can finally be proud of."

Early on I admitted some warm feelings for her opponent, in large part because I felt that even if he was profoundly liberal, he was also sincere about overcoming some of the partisan rancor, and might even have some "Nixon goes to China" potential around issues like school choice. In short, I thought he had a lot of substance and maturity. The recent (and woefully under-reported) revelations that he's been feeding back-channel reassurances to the Canadian government that his anti-NAFTA talk wasn't all that serious is simply the latest example of why I now consider him a very, very bad idea. This isn't uplifting, hopeful, or honest.

The voters of Ohio and Michigan do have it rough--trade has overturned what were some very well-feathered nests for the previous two generations, and it's not clear that anything, not even withdrawal from NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO, would bring the Good Old Days back, or that Americans as a whole would be better off. There is no question that such a climbdown would have shocking effects globally, because it would economically hurt a great number of countries very directly, many (most) of them strong allies, which fortunately works to make it somewhat unlikely. Compare this to what John McCain said in a recent speech in Detroit:

But let's have one more piece of straight talk: globalization is here, globalization is an opportunity, but globalization will not automatically benefit every American.

There's a lot more to it than that, but it's also important to take the Santa hat off and say that some things just aren't going to be easy. McCain continued to say this when it mattered--when he was fighting against Romney to win Michigan--just as he spoke against crop subsidies in Iowa.  ¶ 11:14 AM 8 Comments

  Cryptoneoconservative?

The good thing about American liberals rebranding themselves as progressives is that it's that exceptional case of honesty in labeling. American conservatives would be called liberals in any other part of the world, while mainstream Democrats would probably be conservatives or Christian Democrats in continental Europe.

Anyway, this aside from a British reporter is a great example of how completely meaningless the term "neoconservative" has become:

The great conservative columnist William F. Buckley has died. We shall be looking at the legacy of the rare columnist who managed to make neoconservatism attractive in the liberal American media.

Calling Buckley a "neoconservative" is sort of like calling the Rolling Stones a disco group because they were playing popular music in the 1970s. Neoconservatism was a novel strain of thought that grew up around a small core of scholars led especially by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz in the 60s.

Where previous conservatives (even Buckley to a large extent) justified their conservatism by appeals to things like religion, tradition, and natural law, the neocons looked at issues like urban poverty through the lens of social science, and found utilitarian justifications for right-wing policies. The neocons were disproportionately but not even close to exclusively Jewish, and it's not clear that there was anything essentially Semitic about their philosophy. In fact, by crafting appeals to conservatism that even atheists or Wiccans might agree with on purely pragmatic grounds, the neocons were arguably among the most influential tent-enlargers out there.

The other defining characteristic of the neocons was that most of them were ex-leftists, in some cases ex-radicals. But their hawkishness and arch anti-communism put them squarely in the mainstream of conservatism of their day. You really have to come up to the late 90s to see the development of a unique school of thought around foreign policy on the right. With the end of the Cold War, some on the right (Pat Buchanan especially) saw the opportunity to finally return us to the imagined prelapsarian isolationism that preceded the second world war.

Buckley at this point largely represented the mainstream view, which was pro-trade, and pro-direct engagement in global affairs, which is to say, in line with the American mainstream. It is true that at this time you had a core of more aggressive activists forming around folks like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and a some other guys who weren't hook-nosed bankers, if you know what I mean. In any case, by the time "neoconservative" became an epithet, Buckley was on the record as being largely opposed to the war in Iraq, which is now the defining issue that some people use to decide whether your opinion is worth considering, or if you should just be liquidated at the first possible opportunity. So no matter how you define "neocon," Buckley wudn't one.  ¶ 1:31 PM 0 Comments

  The King Is Dead

No matter what the years ahead hold for me, I am fairly certain that in all my life to come, I will not likely make the passing acquaintance of a more singularly important person than William F. Buckley, Jr. WFB is a singular figure on so many levels, and yet, it would be an immense category error to praise him by saying that they broke the mold after making him. In fact, he is the archetype, the master copy from which one of the most important political movements of the 20th century was built. I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions at alumni events at our high school, and I will always remember his answer when I asked him what a conservative, encamped as I was within the heart of enemy territory, ought to do. "Counter-revolution," he said, with that inimitable panache and cheer.

Without Buckley there is no National Review, without NR there is no modern American conservatism, and without that there is no Goldwater and certainly no Reagan. After WWII, Western Europe was a shambles, Japan was under occupation, and Great Britain was heading into what would be a solid 40 years of decline before finding firm post-imperial footing under Thatcher. Buckley played a central role in creating and maintaining the anti-communist consensus at a time when it looked to many like a losing proposition, or worse still, the wrong one. If the Right seems divided and demoralized today, it need only look back to 1954 to see how much worse it could be. It is only against the sweep of a decade or more of history that a clear picture of the present truly emerges. The movement that Bill founded remains as vital and central as ever.

If there is any aspect of WFB that now seems anachronistic (well, besides that sonorous accent of his), it is that he counted among his friends the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and probably most of the profoundly left-wing intelligentsia of the upper east side of Manhattan. This was due in no small part to his charm, but also to the kinder sort of partisanship, particularly on the part of liberals, that prevailed throughout his time. To be sure, we have our Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys, whose attack-dog antics operate on a level far below Bill's lofty erudition.

But even those good-humored, metropolitan, and ecumenical conservatives--Jonah Goldberg comes foremost to mind--are increasingly dismissed in the same breath. The present hour has its exceptional qualities, and the fact that both parties' presidential frontrunners are known for being willing to at least say nice things about the other team's mothers makes me hopeful that we will soon see an end to a solid decade of vitriol. For the Right, at least, we do not need to look far for an example to follow.  ¶ 9:40 AM 0 Comments

  Caution: Door Swings Open Without Warning

Of course Deval Patrick is going to say he wouldn't leave the Commonwealth for DC if Obama wins. Things look bleak for Hope Jr. at this moment, but a lot can change in a year. If Obama loses in the fall, then Obama beta still has two years to get his governorship back on track and position himself as a contender for 2012 or 2016. But if he said "I'll be outta here" today, then he's virtually ensuring himself a lame-duck administration and contested primary in 2010.

But if Obama wins, Patrick will leave a contrail behind him on his way out of the state. No matter how an Obama administration plays out--Carter, Clinton, or FDR--it's unlikely his immediate successor will be a liberal black Democrat. There's at least 5 cabinet offices Patrick could take in a first term, and that lets him Romney the tab for his mess onto Tim Murray, who will last about as long as an armadillo on a Texas interstate.  ¶ 10:15 AM 0 Comments

  Gogonowski

John Kerry's spokesperson David Wade has given the best argument I've read yet for why people should support Jim Ogonowski's bid for his boss's Senate seat this fall. Thus wrote the Herald:

"These Republican Senate candidates should spend their time in Washington
lobbying FEMA to declare the Massachusetts GOP a federal disaster area and
pushing the Interior Department to declare Massachusetts Republicans an
endangered species," David Wade said in a statement.

This statement is so smarmy, so smug, so dismissive of the very idea of an genuine election--you know, the kind where there's more than one viable candidate--that it makes me wonder if deep down, he isn't actually a little worried.

For those who forget quickly, Ogonowski came within 5 points of defeating someone named Tsongas in the 5th district congressional special election just a few months ago. Given that there are probably as many public works named after Paul Tsongas in Lowell and Lawrence as there are named after Washington or Lincoln, that's no small accomplishment. The issue which carried him that far, and which may yet carry him into John Kerry's former office, is immigration.

No matter how the presidential race shapes up--I'm not ready to count HRC out just yet--there's going to be a lot of unrequited anger on the immigration issue, which is in the eyes of many middle and lower-class voters not merely an economic injustice but a cultural offense. Free trade may send jobs to China but it does not directly change the culture of a city the way unchecked immigration does. Immigration causes middle- and lower-class workers direct economic pain, it also threatens to turn their neighborhoods into foreign countries. Between economics and culture, it's the latter people usually feel most strongly about.  ¶ 10:17 AM 0 Comments