An ongoing review of politics and culture

Reform Fantasy

This post reflected a misunderstanding on my part. For history’s sake, it is still below, but I ought to write something more thoughtful on a difficult subject — whether Palin’s reputation as a reformer is deserved or not.

The Politics of Healthcare Post-2008

We still have to assume that Obama will win this race. But what we’ve seen is that the Republican coalition has a lot of fight in it left. What we’re seeing is the playbook for 2010. I’ve been talking a lot about how the environment issue will play, but healthcare will be key. Why? Among liberal progressives or progressive liberals or social democrats, the conceit is, Kaus-style: we’ll deliver a middle-class entitlement and we will have a solid majority for a decade or two. It isn’t crazy. But you see, it isn’t the delivery of a middle-class healthcare entitlement that does the work — it is the funding crisis that does the work.

Let’s say a plan is implemented, Medicare is expanded to include large number of non-old middle-class Americans, etc. And let’s say costs continue to spiral, as they most certainly will — Furman-style progressive cost-sharing is politically unpopular, and it won’t survive the political battle to come in any robust form. What happens next? It’s simple: a fight over adequately funding the system. The payroll tax won’t be enough. We could then impose a dedicated VAT on top of the existing payroll tax. That will be politically costly. We could instead impose a heavier tax on the golden goose — the entrepreneurs on the hamster-wheel who will magically materialize regardless of tax treatment. Or something. But a major expansion of Medicare to include middle-class workers will most likely be an irreversible ratchet.

The McCain plan is a solid one. I think it should be more expensive and should be more aggressive about cost containment and structural reform. I also think Obama was right to resist a mandate, as we’re seeing now — imagine what Palin would’ve done with a mandate. The problem is that Republicans don’t have a lot of credibility on this issue, which is why Republicans need to get smart. I’d love to see Jindal take the lead on this issue.

This post is way too brief to tackle this subject — I need to put on my thinking cap, fools.

The Nielsen News Re: Palin

Via Nielsen:

The Sarah Palin speech generated 37.2 million viewers, just a 1.1 million viewers short of Barak Obama’s record-breaking speech on Day 4 of the Democratic Convention. The Palin speech was carried on only six networks while the Obama speech was carried on ten (including BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo).

I wonder about how much overlap there was between the two audiences.

Ah, I should add this:

It’s a good thing Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris aren’t on the ticket!

Whoa! Reihan on Sarah Palin!

To my lasting embarrassment, I keep tabs on Grand New Party-related news, and I came across this blog post on Salad Ahoy!:

One advantage of listening to podcasts months after they air (this one is from July 16) is that I have a different perspective than I would have at the time. Check out the answer to Terry Gross’ question that that starts just after the 6:00 mark.

Intrigued, I decided to give it a listen — I figured we’d have said something really embarrassing. Terry Gross — who is mesmerizing — asked a question about John McCain’s remark concerning “getting on the Internet by myself.” At that point, I laughed somewhat creepily and said,

REIHAN: I think John McCain is an incredibly charming person. I also think that he absolutely doesn’t represent the future of the Republican party. I think that this is a highly unusual election in a lot of ways, but when you look at that demographic composition of the Republican party, and where the party needs to go in order to build a majority, I think the party really needs to look to figures like Sarah Palin, a mother of five, someone who was also the mayor of a fast-growing suburban small town, she’s now —

ROSS: She’s now the governor of Alaska

REIHAN: — now the governor of Alaska. I think it’s figures like that who don’t come from that tight, narrow demographic box of aging, cranky white men that has been a rich source of Republican politicians for, you know, a really long time now.

We’ve both been talking her up for a while now. Man, this is all really weird. It’s interesting — I think there’s a default assumption that Pawlenty would be our candidate, but he wasn’t (he wasn’t mine, certainly), though I do suspect his nomination might have piqued interest in GNP.

This is my last day here. Still have a lot of work to do. I’m eager to take a breather from politics, though it occurs to me that I’m going to the birthday part of one of my best friends on Saturday, in New Haven, and there is a real danger of, “I mean, can you believe it?” chatter re: Palin, and then I’ll go ape. Oh please, let it stop. My usual approach in such circumstances — entirely sincere — is to simply say, “Look, Obama should just ignore her. Attacking her won’t help.” But this will draw me further into a conversation I’d rather not have. My problem is that I’m uncomfortable with leaving assertions unchallenged, to the point where I’m playing devil’s advocate half of the time.

The Tribal Party

David Roberts writes:

Tonight was a full-throated reversion back to what has become the default posture for the right: resentment, tribalism, nationalism, and fear. After Carly Fiorina’s bland and widely ignored remarks, the rest of the night was pure red meat. I was somewhat surprised — I thought they’d use Palin as a hook to bring in mild-mannered soccer moms, but her speech was just as hyperpartisan as the rest. Instead of taking her appeal to the center, they are using her to elevate the culture wars.

First,

I thought they’d use Palin as a hook to bring in mild-mannered soccer moms

One assumes that was the initial hope, but of course the news cycle complicated matters. I’m struck by this notion that there is only one side in the culture wars — or rather that only one side ever makes any transgressions, while the other side is saintly and invincibly innocent.

After Carly Fiorina’s bland and widely ignored remarks, the rest of the night was pure red meat.

Surely this is an enduring feature of American politics, richly on display during the DNC as well. But of course the politics of moral superiority plays a different, complicated role in both political parties. There certainly is a kind of social conservatives who embraces a stance of moral superiority — one rooted in rigorous adherence to traditional values, old-time religion, and that opens one up to a charge of hypocrisy. That’s a difficult stance for, say, Rudy Giuliani to embrace, and for the most part he doesn’t — his red meat comes from a different place.

The left has its own politics of moral superiority — of superior virtue, of a more broad-minded, more tolerant view of the world. Roberts invoked tribalism. And of course the opposite of tribalism is cosmopolitanism: the politics of no-place. This cosmopolitanism is a source of moral superiority. However, this cosmopolitanism can never be referred to by name — that is an ugly nationalist smear, yet another sign of the tribal right’s self-evident moral inferiority.

The politics of fear is real and it is potent. Sometimes fear is deployed against agents of economic change as well as low-wage workers struggling to get a foothold on the ladder of prosperity — people in places like my parents’ home country, Bangladesh. Sometimes the politics of fear involves invoking the threat posed by Al Qaeda terrorists. I think it is possible to exaggerate the danger posed by Al Qaeda, but surely it is also possible to exaggerate the danger posed by flourishing economies in Asia.

In fairness, Republicans are often invoking the danger posed by a liberal foreign policy — one based on a model of a world defined not by competition, but by cooperation, in which terrorist threats are more likely to recede in a more just, equitable world. There are aspects of this vision that are attractive. But you’ll be shocked to learn that conservatives also find this worldview a little naive, particularly as it regards a handful of states that don’t share our normative commitments. This seems like a pretty fair, reasonable argument to have, and it makes sense that it would be heated — the stakes are high.

Fear is also invoked on the subject of the climate emergency. But ah, you object: the climate emergency is real! Fear is appropriate. And I think that’s right. Surely, though, you can acknowledge that some believe that there are also urgent threats to our national security?

Moreover, given the threat posed by methane emissions buried in the Siberian permafrost, and given that the Kyoto Protocol was essentially devised by Gore and Chernomyrdin to serve as a massive transfer of wealth to the Russian state, it is at least plausible to argue that conventional solutions offered for the climate crisis are likely to be of limited utility, and extremely costly nonetheless.

As for resentment, well, I’m an extremely fortunate person: I have two parents, I have two sisters, I have modest expenses, and while I have professional responsibilities, I don’t have many personal ones. But yes, I resent the contempt that has been directed against Sarah Palin, I resent the deliberate misrepresentation of John McCain’s record, and I think I’m not alone in either regard. I imagine many people inclined to like Barack Obama feel a little resentful as well about what they see as misrepresentations of his past association with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, and other figures. And I think Democrats are fully capable of deploying that resentment to great political effect — Chris Hayes wrote a wonderful essay on the subject, referring to MoveOn’s appeal to today’s silent majority of the left — a group that, incidentally, I take to be a metaphorical majority in the manner of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority:

Though its politics are in many ways the opposite of the Nixon silent majority’s, they share a disposition. They are people not inclined to protest but whose rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness. For citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but unsure how to channel those sentiments, MoveOn provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil.

Anger is a powerful force in political life. A unifying grievance, as Jon Henke calls it, has motored the spectacular rise of the Democrats — the war in Iraq — and unifying grievances have also mobilized the political right. “But grievances mobilize the right more!” I’m not so sure. Really, though: isn’t it a silly conversation?

My politics of moral superiority is right. You are a rootless cosmopolitan who doesn’t put country first, and your moral fecklessness will send us all to hell. What do you expect us to do — defend out country with spitbaaaaaaaaaaalls?

No, mine is. You are a mean, nasty nationalist-tribalist, while I am an enlightened citizen of the world. How dare you call me a cosmopolitan! I am also a pork-rind-chewing populist. Except I hate pork-rinds, as evidenced by my visible distaste.

The Democrats have more esprit de corps this year. They are the happy warriors. The pendulum will swing. But let’s lay off on the “You’re resentful! I hate you with a virulent passion and will now stab you in the heart!” “No, you’re resentful! I will tear you limb from limb with my bare hands.” It’s unedifying.

Getting Your (Culture) War On

From frequent-commenter Consumatopia, posted as a comment on Freddie’s blog:

What’s particularly galling about the difficulties reasonable conservatives and reasonable liberals are having over discussing Sarah Palin is that this is all part of John McCain’s plan. Seriously. The whole point of her selection and her speech at the convention was to divide the country. Those cosmopolitan elitists hate people like us, so we should hate them back. That sort of thing. . . . [Palin’s] convention speech is the exact opposite of Obama’s “Little League in the Blue States, gay friends in the Red States.”

I could point out that, whatever McCain’s secret plan might have been, choosing Sarah Palin as such was not firing a shot in the culture war, but waving a flag. The first shots were fired by those attacking Palin, particularly when the attacked her family. The Obama campaign seems to have understood this from the beginning, to its credit.

But Consumatopia still has a good point. This election is about many things, and the whole “one nation” theme of Obama’s always struck me as more of a service to the Democratic Party than anything that should motivate me to vote for him. But if McCain wants to run on “we’re real Americans and they aren’t” then count me out. This was a missed opportunity to pocket the support of the crowd and reach beyond it. Good delivery, great zingers against the top of the ticket. But a missed opportunity nonetheless.

Gaming the Palin Speech

James Fallows writes:

One, of course, was Barack Obama’s keynote at the convention in Boston four years ago. The other, which I remember watching as a schoolboy Goldwaterite, was Ronald Reagan’s speech supporting Goldwater at the San Francisco convention in 1964.

I don’t think Sarah Palin’s speech will be in that category.

One wonders how an ardent anti-Goldwaterite would have reacted to Reagan’s speech supporting Goldwater in 1964 — I’m guessing there would’ve been at least one reference to Bedtime for Bonzo, don’t you?

The speech was surprisingly negative and mocking. You can see why Rush Limbaugh has been such a fan of hers: if these words were delivered by someone older, less attractive, and male, they could have come straight from a Limbaugh radio monologue. The upside here is making “the base” much more enthusiastic than it was before. Potential drawback: having taken this tone, she’s exposed herself to more direct, aggressive attack by the Dems than she has received so far. (So far, the Dems have been able to stand back and let the press do the anti-Palin work.) No more Mr. Nice Guy from Joe Biden or anyone else.

Indeed. Now, how this will help the Democratic ticket remains an open question. I’ve stressed the dangers involved in attacking Palin, and I think those points still stand.

Palin’s mockery clearly struck a chord. One observer — not Fallows, I should stress — has essentially called Palin a liar for suggesting that The Audacity of Hope, which contains lengthy autobiographical passages, is a memoir. Of course, the Chicago Tribune published a story headlined “First Glimpse of Obama’s New Memoirs.” Time published an excerpt under the heading “From the senator’s new memoir, The Audacity of Hope.” Perhaps the news media was guilty of mendacity in both instances. It does seem entirely possible to me that a book can be both a campaign book and a memoir. The genres are not mutually exclusive. My understanding is that they tend to overlap.

Fallows apparently doesn’t believe that the governor of an oil-rich state would have heard of Abqaiq. I am not the governor of an oil-rich states and I am familiar with Abqaiq because I read the newspaper. Is it hard to imagine that civic-minded Alaskans might also be familiar with the vulnerability of energy supplies — particularly familiar, even? I also gave a talk yesterday morning on how stagnant refining capacity and regulations concerning sulfur emissions are shaping the strategic environment. It was really exciting.

I can’t recall any spectacle comparable to Baby Trig being passed from Cindy McCain, to Trig’s 7-year-old sister, to Palin herself when she ended the speech. Her husband looks charming, I have to say.

When was the last time a major presidential candidate had an infant child? Surely this plays some kind of a role. Cindy McCain, lest we forget, is a woman sentimental enough to have adopted a small child from Bangladesh because she couldn’t bear to part with her. Surely it’s not so outlandish that she would want to hold the baby. My mother, who is in her 60s, also likes holding babies. My guess is that my mother — a Democrat, incidentally — would enjoy holding the baby of friendly acquaintances, even if she was sitting in a stadium. Honestly, I find this to be a truly unusual line of criticism. Perhaps Trig should have been left at home? Well, perhaps. It was pretty loud in there. But it might have been odd considering that the Palins were presumably proud of Sarah. One assumes they wanted Trig there as a family. And it can be pretty tiring to hold a baby. I know. I have a nephew. Your arms might fall asleep after too long. As for Piper holding the baby and spit-smoothing his hair, well, perhaps she should have been restrained somehow, but that seems needlessly cruel considering that the kid was otherwise pretty well behaved. Should the shotgun husband have been excluded from the event? Well, he is part of the family, isn’t he?

So: the spectacle would have been less of a spectacle had Trig been kept in a bassinet the entire time, preferably concealed from view; the shotgun husband-to-be had been kept conspicuously absent; etc. Because none of these road rules were recognized, the Palin family can now be subject to withering attack and robust investigation concerning intimate details that aren’t relevant to Palin’s experience and effectiveness.

One assumes the Edwards family doesn’t feel the same way. I was very glad the Times and other respectable organs steered clear of the tabloid gutter and said so. But newspapers and newsmagazines are commercial enterprises, and they need to serve their constituencies.

I have to assume that ardent Republicans hope that Democrats do indeed “take the gloves off” with regards to Palin, and that the media starts to “ask questions” about Piper’s penchant for spit-smoothing hair: I fully expect a rigorous expose concerning the deadly dangers posed by cooties.

The Forgotten McCain Angle

I don’t have time at the moment to present my manifesto on this election and its place in the culture wars, but for now I just want to ask: why have the tributes to McCain failed to mention one of the most interesting and commendable aspects of his career, that being his involvement in normalizing relations with Vietnam? It’s the rhetorical and moral capstone to the whole POW narrative, and ought to be cited more frequently by his supporters as an indication of his strength of character.

clear lines

B.P. (before Palin) this was already a campaign with pretty clear lines: the Experienced Warrior versus the Post-Sixties Uniter, yadda yadda yadda. But those were largely politics-and-policy lines: what Palin brings to the situation is a personality and a background that highlight the cultural lines, and (I would argue) the inability of the “cosmopolitan elites” — that’s what we’re supposed to call them now, right? — even to imagine, still less understand, the values that govern the lives of people in Flyover Land. (A polity of which Alaska is an honorary member.)

Thus many commentators could only see Todd Palin’s statement about his wife’s decision to fly back to Alaska rather than have her baby in Texas — “You can’t have a fish picker from Texas” — as a frivolous throw-away line, when in fact it was a wry way of affirming a very deep commitment to place, to being rooted somewhere and wanting one’s children to be rooted there too.

This incomprehension is going to be revealed over and over again in the coming months, but I don’t have much confidence that it will be remedied. This morning Alessandra Stanley, writing in the Times about Palin’s speech last night, comments on Palin’s “disarmingly flat ‘Fargo’ voice” — which says pretty straightforwardly, “All I know about non-Californians from west of Chicago is what I’ve seen in Coen Brothers movies.” Stanley and many others now have the opportunity to learn a little more, should they choose to take it.

The Palin Speech

P.S. Alex Massie is more insightful than yours truly.

Andrew Sullivan concludes his live-blogging of Sarah Palin’s speech with an exasperated sigh: “Reality television has become our politics.” Perhaps. More likely, politics has been a reality TV show since before John Logie Baird invented the damn goggle box. Because, yes, you choose the candidate you like best or the one that has impressed you most after a long, painfully drawn out period of interrogation, speculation and hype. Just like on American Idol. That is the way it works. Talent matters, but it’s not enough without personality, authenticity, charm, something else…

Of course Andrew’s so committed to Obama that it’s unlikely Palin could have done anything to convince him she’s not painfully out of her depth. There’s lots to like about Obama, but let’s not pretend that he’d be favourite to win this election – or have Andrew’s backing – if he were a first term Irish-American Senator called Barry O’Bama.

This race has been framed in terms of personality and biography from the beginning. Sure, Obama’s opposition to the war was vital to him gaining traction and yes he has tremendous political gifts, but, really, the Democratic primary was a Reality TV-style beauty contest and November’s election will be as well. That’s why people are tuning in.

For my money, Alex is one of the best, most insightful observers of US politics out there — he has some distance, yet he also has a keen eye and a level of self-awareness that is very valuable.

For a more critical take, Ezra Klein writes:

Over the past week, Palin had begun looking like a character from Twin Peaks. Tonight, she looked like an up-and-coming Republican politician. It was an auspicious debut, the sort of address that would be judged a success if she were a newcomer keynoting the convention. She landed clean punches, temporarily silenced some of her critics, and retold John McCain’s story with a keen sense for the drama of his experience. But I expected more. As delivered, the speech was effective as theater but curiously hollow as an enduring campaign argument: It contained the seeds of a medal ceremony for McCain, and marked Palin as a politician to watch, but it said nothing about the presidency she hopes to be part of.

Ezra’s basic take is that Palin’s speech would have been more effective had it been more specific — I hesitate to say more substantive, as I don’t think the post-Clinton Democratic trope of a laundry list of micropolicies (clean-coal-powered American-made supercars, V-chips, etc.), is substantive, exactly — and I can see where he’s coming from. But as Chris Hayes writes, there is an enduring logic to “political cant”:

So the rhetorical trick that convention speechwriters try to pull off is to have just enough substance within a statement that it seems to carry some semantic force, but remains nearly impossible to disagree with. The result? cant. “Families that work hard and play by the rules” Cant. “We honor his service.” Cant. “The choice is clear.” Cant. “This election isn’t about the past it’s about the future.” Cant, cant, cant.

What did I think of the speech? Well, I thought it was dynamite, but I just instinctively like this woman and her family, so I’m hardly the harshest judge.

The Giuliani Speech

Matt writes:

Speaking as a native New Yorker, may I say there’s perhaps nothing more absurd than watching a former mayor of New York City sneer at people who like cosmopolitan towns.

Well, I disagree — Giuliani was sneering at people who sneer at towns that aren’t cosmopolitan enough, and he can do this comfortably because he is so closely identified with America’s biggest, (arguably) most cosmopolitan city. The message: wait, you think Wasilla isn’t cosmopolitan enough? Funny. I think you’re a snob and an ass. But at least Matt is referring to the speech that I saw.

Andrew, on the other hand, seems to be referring to another speech entirely:

The one moment that stays with me tonight, oddly enough, was not Palin’s speech. It was a line from Giuliani, a New York mayor with a young second third wife and gay friends, mocking a “cosmopolitan” who was brought up by a single mother. It was that Barack Obama’s rise could “only happen in America.” And it was designed to mock him, the first African-American candidate for the presidency of the United States.

This strikes me as a misreading of the “not cosmopolitan enough” line. I find the second sentence perplexing. Yes, Giuliani has a colorful personal life and he is tolerant of lesbians and gays, to his great credit in my view. But given that Giuliani never referred to Obama’s upbringing as the child of a single parent, I don’t get how he was “mocking a ‘cosmopolitan’ who was brought up by a single mother,” rather than the media elite.

The post also implicitly suggests that one is not permitted to poke fun at the first African-American candidate for the presidency of the United States. Or you can’t poke fun at someone who was raised by a single mother. Which is convenient.

Third Ways

I recently read Allan C. Carlson’s Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies—And Why They Disappeared — it’s always nice, isn’t it, when a subtitle is so long that it obviates the need to describe the book? I started reading it because I wanted to know a little more about Distributism, the small-is-beautiful, cottage-industry, a-man’s-home-is-his-castle model of political economy promoted by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc; but the other Third Ways Carlson describes are pretty interesting too. (By the way, a PDF of the chapter on Distributism is available via the link to the book.)

Carlson traces these histories well, but I found the book somewhat disappointing, because it did not help me to answer the chief questions that I brought to it. To be fair to Carlson, I don’t think it was his chief purpose to answer these questions, but they’re in my mind all the same. Here’s what I’m wondering:

We all know that, in this country anyway, there is no chance of any such Third Way model succeeding — in the sense of its proponents actually coming to power or even having a significant role in national government (forty Distributist congressmen, that kind of thing). Given that reality, what should a person who is attracted to these Third Ways do? Can their values be successfully promoted on the local level, if not on the national? Can the recommending of such alternatives be a sort of public service, an ongoing reminder to people that there are alternatives to business as usual? Or is this just quixotic tilting at windmills?

These questions are much on my mind as I face yet another election season with no parties or candidates I want to vote for. I need a Third Way I can believe in, even if I’m its only adherent.

More on Experience and Presidential Performance

Like David Frum, I’ve gotten almost a hundred emails on my prior post on Sarah Palin’s experience and its relevance for predicting her potential future performance as president. To reiterate, I addressed only this question, not the broader questions of whether she helps or hurts McCain politically, how she would do as vice president and so on. I made the not-so-crazy-seeming-to-me observation that the experiences that tend to be associated empirically with strong presidential performance are either serving as governor of the largest state or serving as supreme military commander in war.

I’ve made hiring and/or firing decisions for thousands of people for complex, demanding jobs (though none, to put it mildly, as complex or demanding as POTUS). As regular readers of my posts will probably not be surprised to learn, I’ve always put in place detailed systems to track predictions for future employee performance made at the time of hiring vs. actual subsequent performance over a period of years. I have developed the very unromantic view that prior relevant performance is the best single predictor of future performance. Of course, when hiring someone into a new job, the trick is defining “relevant”. It seems to me that running the largest state or the armed forces in war are the closest available analogies to being president. This is why my empirical result didn’t surprise me a whole lot.

Consider the list of 20th century presidents with one of these two qualifications (WSJ 2005 rank in parentheses): Theodore Roosevelt (5), Franklin Roosevelt (3), Eisenhower (8), Reagan (6).

Now consider the list of those without either qualification: Taft (20), Wilson (11), Harding (39), Coolidge (23), Hoover (31), Truman (7), Kennedy (15), Lyndon Johnson (18), Nixon (32), Ford (28), Carter (34), George H.W. Bush (21), Clinton (22).

Which deck would you rather draw from?

Lots and lots of things matter beyond objectively-measurable experience, and there are many circumstances in which people with such qualifications are not available (e.g., the Governor of California is not eligible, and there have been no recent major wars), but for conservatives to argue that Sarah Palin has the experience that indicates she is likely to be successful as the President of the United States is a suspension of critical faculties.

Further, while personal judgments about candidates are also useful in predicting performance, any empirical analysis of hiring practices that I have ever done indicates that there are some important caveats to using judgment in this way: (1) it should be exercised in the context of intensive interactions of varied types that are validated as predicting performance, (2) these interactions should be well-structured to maximize comparability across candidates, and (3) while some people can be shown empirically to be better at making such judgments than others, the idea of “a nose for talent” that trumps all other predictors is always a self-serving delusion. I have seen no good evidence that the McCain campaign has pursued such a process, and I refuse to believe that I can read some press reports about her, see her give a good press conference, and have some mystical ability to have anything other than a wild guess about Sarah Palin would perform as president.

Of course, just as I ended my prior post, I’ll note that none of McCain, Obama and Biden have these specific executive qualifications either, and in fact have exactly the kind of legislative-dominated experiences that have tended to be associated with our worst-performing presidents.

Welcome to the Palin-drome

Wow! I step away from the computer for Labor Day weekend and when I come back the fans are choked with fur. I’m pretty sure nothing on this site has generated the level of interest that the Palin nomination has – not even links to Steve Sailer. So thank-you, John McCain! She may not be the best for the ticket, or the best for America, but she’s been great for traffic!

And now, upon reflection, three serious points.

First, I think Ross’s correspondent has a point. To the extent those of us who are excited about the Palin pick are excited about Palin, there’s a real risk that by bringing her national in this way McCain ruins her. If all one wanted was national exposure for Palin, the keynote spot would have made more sense than VP. If she performs well, and the ticket loses (as I still expect it to), she’s got a future. But if she performs poorly, because she was shoved onstage too soon, she probably doesn’t, and that’ll be a shame.

Second, it is really striking how angry the anti-Palin voices are. I’m not going to link to Andrew Sullivan) because you know where to find him, but if you’re so inclined, check him out. It’s tempting to say the Obama partisans are angry because the pick is politically brilliant, and they are scared. I don’t think that’s most of it, though. I think most of it is refracted Bush hatred. Palin isn’t much like Bush, as far as I can see. (She’s more like Huckabee, another candidate who is manifestly not yet ready to be President but who I thought would make a great VP pick – and if Palin crashes and burns because she’s not ready for prime time, we’ll all have reason to regret McCain not picking Huckabee instead.) But I still think that’s the basis of the fury – she reminds too many people of how (they think) Bush was able to hoodwink a majority into voting against its own interests, and how they (the Democrats) were unable to counter that appeal.

If that’s the case, and if the Democrats want to win, they really, really need to get control of their anger. The strategy of the anti-Palin forces is incredibly and obviously self-destructive, and the Obama campaign, at least, seems to have figured this out within a day of the announcement. I eagerly await the day his fans come to the same conclusion.

Finally, there are other detractors (e.g., Charles Krauthammer) who are strong supporters of McCain who are aghast that McCain is throwing away the experience argument. As all these folks voted for Bush in 2000 (who was somewhat more qualified to be President than Obama is, but not enormously so), they can’t believe that the more experienced candidate always ought to win. Nor can they believe he inevitably does win (1960, 1976, 1980, 1992, 2000). Rather, the argument is that, in these perilous times specifically, we cannot afford a chance that a political novice like Palin ascends to the Presidency. With Palin on the ticket, it’s harder for McCain to say: you can’t risk a neophyte like Obama given the existential threat from Islamofascism.

To my mind, this is a feature of the pick, not a bug. And I don’t mean because the experience argument is overrated (and it is: Roosevelt replaced the much-more-qualified Henry Wallace with the unknown and totally unready Harry Truman in the middle of World War II, and thank God he did). Rather, I don’t want McCain to be able to run an “indispensable man” campaign because I reject both premises: not only are the cemeteries full of indispensable men, but the kinds of threats we face are basically normal, and not some kind of national emergency through which only a certified American hero can lead us.

I said before that I’m still undecided in this election. Foreign policy looms exceptionally large for me this time, and so far while I find Obama disappointing I find McCain genuinely alarming. Whether deep inside him he still harbors the “old McCain” who opposed the Lebanon intervention, supported the Powell Doctrine, and led the way on normalization with Vietnam, as a candidate McCain clearly wants to run on the permanent emergency, with a subtext that only a real American can be trusted to defend America, and real Americans can be identified by their reflex hawkishness in all circumstances. A campaign of that character would have to be defeated, for the good of the country. And, as noted, Palin makes it somewhat harder to run such a campaign. He can still say that you can only trust 100% real American Americans in a time of peril, a pitch aimed right at the gut that I expect him to keep making, and Obama just has to deal with it ‘cause politics ain’t beanbag. But he would have done that no matter who he picked. If the plausibility of the “existential peril” pitch is lower with Palin at his side than with any other choice, that’s a good thing in my book.

Especially given that, as I understand it, McCain really wanted to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, and began looking at second choices only when he was persuaded that he’d have a revolt on his hands if he did so. A Lieberman pick would have been politically disastrous for the GOP because it would signal that there are no Republicans running in this election, and a lot of the base would have revolted over the fact that Lieberman is pro-choice. That wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker for me, as I’m in the mushy middle on abortion, and don’t vote on it one way or the other. But I would have revolted because Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman as the GOP’s #2 could only be comprehensible at all in a national emergency context. And we just are not in a national emergency. So if the choice was Palin or Lieberman, my preference is clear.

UPDATE: You know, I wrote this post, and made my little points, and then I started working back through some of the comments (not on my posts, actually – I haven’t gotten back that far, and I’m not sure I will). People are seriously losing their minds here, in a way that I’ve never seen before on this site. And not just people who have obviously wandered over here for the first time: regular readers are going off their rockers. I’m really not sure what we all ought to do about this. I wrote a little sermonette but I just deleted it because I can’t imagine anyone who’s gone off their rocker reading it and doing anything but getting angrier. I’m open to suggestions on what to do. Myself, I swear my next post will about Canadian theater.

a public service announcement

As I write these words, Andrew Sullivan has produced nineteen posts about Sarah Palin’s pregnancy — or lack thereof. (Many more about other aspects of the Palin candidacy, of course.) By the time you read this that total is likely to have risen. Sullivan’s claim is that “the circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise – questions anyone with common sense would ask.”

So what is this circumstantial evidence? Sullivan raises three major points. First, he questions why Palin flew home to Alaska as her time of delivery neared rather than having the baby in Texas. Second, he wonders why, upon arrival in Alaska, she failed to go to the largest nearby hospital, in Anchorage. Third, he notes that a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines said that, on that flight from Texas, Palin didn’t look as though she were very pregnant.

So, let’s sum up.

In Sullivan’s view, anyone with common sense would find it weird that a woman would prefer to have a baby at home, surrounded by her family, rather than several thousand miles away, or that she would want her child to be born in the family’s home state.

Also, anyone with common sense would find it weird that a woman would choose anything other than the largest possible hospital in which to have her baby — since, presumably, there couldn’t be any relevant factors in choosing a place to give birth other than the size of the facility.

Third, anyone with common sense would find it weird that flight attendants on a flight would fail to discern accurately the precise stage of a female passenger’s pregnancy — since, as we know, all pregnant women “show” to exactly the same degree, and there’s nothing any woman could do to disguise her state of pregnancy.

It’s perhaps worthwhile to add that a person of common sense will not think the matter resolved just because there exist photographs of an evidently pregnant Sarah Palin taken several days before the child’s birth. Nor will the current pregnancy of the same daughter who is suspected of having given birth to Trig Palin just four months ago resolve the suspicions of the said p. of c. s. Rather, the p. of c. s. will demand the production of medical records and will not stop posting on the subject until said records are released. Whether the p. of c. s. would accept that validity of the records, should they be profferred, or would instead suspect forgery, is a question that at this moment I am not prepared to answer.

Now that we know what people with common sense think weird, and what they consider to be great circumstantial evidence, I invite you all to test yourselves and take appropriate remedial action if necessary. This concludes a Public Service Announcement brought to you by Andrew Sullivan and The American Scene.

The Real Sarah Palin Issue

… is she a Canadian sleeper agent? You heard the speech. While she never said “eh?,” I did notice strikingly Canadian intonations in her speech.

As for Palin’s daughter, I think this is another case where Democrats need to tread lightly. I’d rather not sound polemical, so I won’t delve deeply into this.

The Obama campaign, incidentally, has been smart so far — they’ve kept the focus on McCain.

Farhad Manjoo is speaking the truth

Before purchasing the iPhone, I used both a work-issued BlackBerry and a cheapo Motorola handset. Both were dowdy but reliable. Now, at precisely the time I need it most — in an unfamiliar city, trying to keep appointments — it has died.

Thanks guys.

Farhad digs deeper.

I’m here in St. Paul for various convention-ish events, staying with the Martin family, friends and readers of The American Scene. TAS readers really are unusually cool people.

A friend of mine noted that the tone around here has gotten harsher and more partisan, and I regret that. Or rather my tone has gotten harsher and more partisan. The truth is that I’ve grown very frustrated by the race, and particularly by the state of the foreign policy debate. I talked to a friend of mine the other day, a foreign policy scholar and also an avid Democrat and Obama partisan, and the conversation quickly spiraled into uncomfortable territory. It was more than a little depressing. As a general rule, I am a post-statist, i.e., I tend to be more interested in 5GW, the power of systems disruption, and the general weakening of states and how that’s shaping the political and economic landscape. But I’m increasingly convinced that strong states and power politics still matter, and that the Ikenberryan argument from strategic restraint and strategic magnanimity is, while valuable, not one that has limitless utility.

Also, some people don’t seem to get the idea that Russia has interests that dovetail with ours at some points and that clash at others. Being “nice” to Russia when its government behaves badly won’t eliminate conflict and friction (it might actually do the opposite), and being “mean” to them won’t make them want to arm terrorists with nuclear weapons — they have an interest in survival.