As I waited for Schwarzenegger in the lobby of the governor’s office, I studied the official portraits of former governors, including those of Ronald Reagan, Earl Warren and Jerry Brown (boldly colored and cartoonish and considered so bizarre at the time it was painted that the Legislature initially refused to hang it). Suddenly I heard Schwarzenegger’s unmistakable voice booming joyously as he led an entourage from his office.

The problem here, as anyone who’s been to the California State Capitol knows, is that those portraits are several stories above “the lobby of the governor’s office” — and several hundred feet to the west. If you’re looking at the portraits, you’re not in “the lobby of the governor’s office,” nor even close to it, and you sure aren’t going to hear anything from the Governor’s office — not even “Schwarzenegger’s unmistakable voice booming joyously.” Why would Leibovich include this obviously falsifiable and false detail? It’s a sloppy embellishment that illuminates no point he makes. It does, though, diminish them all.

The rest of the piece is a long exposition by someone writing a book report on California, and it contains the analytic errors one might expect from that exercise: Dianne Feinstein’s “presence” does not actually “hover over the Democratic field”; Tom Campbell does not matter overmuch; et cetera. It’s not the analytic flaws one holds against the author, though, but the falsehoods.

The American Future is a sort of ersatz companion book to a four-part documentary series by the same name that Schama is starring in for the BBC. As of this writing, it has only recently aired (and it will assuredly make its way to PBS in due time). The description offered by the BBC would be nice if applicable to the book: “Simon Schama travels through America to dig deep into the conflicts of its history as a way to understand the country’s contemporary political situation.” Perhaps the television series both digs deep and arrives at some understanding. In print, The American Future does neither. It is, in fact, the worst Schama book this reviewer has ever read.

This does not necessarily mean it is not worth reading. Simon Schama’s worst is better than most people’s best. Yet because he is such a sterling historian elsewhere, it is all the more disappointing to see him phone it in here. The structure of the book purports to examine the American past as a means of discerning its future, and he does this in ways that vary wildly from interesting to absurd.

Much of the book is taken up with a narrative history of the august and rightly respected Meigs family, who managed to participate in the whole sweep of American history, mostly with rifle in hand, from the colonial era to the present. (The most recent Meigs of note commanded NATO forces in Bosnia in 1998-1999.) Yet Schama’s implicit argument, that the Meigs family history is a reasonable metaphor for the American experience, falls flat. He attempts to transform Montgomery C. Meigs, the Union quartermaster-general in the Civil War, into an emblematic American figure of that era. It works in the most awkward way, inasmuch as it works best if you don’t know much about that war. If you do, you know that though that Meigs was a deeply interesting man, he was eclipsed by far more interesting men in a period suffused with them. Shelby Foote on several occasions stated that the two towering figures of that war were Nathan Bedford Forrest and William Tecumseh Sherman; and he makes a better case in a few sentences than Schama manages in an entire book.

Even as he strains — or doesn’t — to make a case for his chosen narrative set-pieces wrested from American history, the reader of The American Future is left with the troubling sense that Schama has perhaps not done his due diligence in sourcing and research. There are the odd, Edmund Morris-style digressions into first-person recollection that cannot possibly be anything but fiction: “Sonofabitch,” Schama has yet another Meigs think just before dying at the Battle of the Bulge, “if it was this cold then you think the mud would’ve frozen … Clean it out, get into Deutschland, finish them off, good guys win, bad guys, very bad guys, lose.” Did any soldier actually think this? It is perilously close to tinny Hollywood rhetoric — what a British expat professor thinks an American infantryman speaks like — and if Schama made it up, shame on him. And if he has documentary evidence that the fallen Meigs of World War Two expressed these thoughts, shame on him for presenting it as his own weird reconstruction.

The reader’s confidence in these episodes, strewn throughout the book, is further marred by the occasional factual error. “[T]he second president of the Texan Republic was a Tejano,” Schama writes, though depending on how you count it, Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar were not Tejanos of any sort. There never was a Tejano president of the Republic of Texas: Schama is probably referring to Lorenzo de Zavala, who was interim vice-president of the Republic during the Texas War of Independence. Or rather, one of Schama’s graduate students is probably referring to de Zavala. This is emblematic of the minimal attention the author appears to have given this work, which stands in such regrettable contrast to his earlier, justly famed efforts.

It should be acknowledged that there are some interesting ideas in The American Future. Schama highlights the contrast between the present-day American disavowal of nation building, and the explicitly nation-building purpose of the pre-Civil War American military. He does it in a ham-handed way, and obscures his point with a fondness for illustrative anecdote that illustrates very little, but it is there. Similarly, his treatment of the Cherokee removal of the 1830s (via another Meigs, of course) is moving and vivid. In these brief passages, The American Future shows us what it could have been: a moral argument about American history, or an exploration of contradictions in that history. Schama neglects both routes in favor of anecdote upon anecdote.

We are presumably to plow through these anecdotes as a means of arriving at what the BBC promises, “a way to understand the country’s contemporary political situation.” Nothing like this emerges. We go from a touching account of a colonial Meigs romance, to a dusty Texas chow hall, to Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, to a somewhat dubious recounting of the time the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan educated a young Simon Schama into the pageantry of American democracy. None of it is linear, and little of it is thematically coherent. Out of this great, wonderful mess of history, Schama tries to say, the American character emerges, and its contradictions are with us still. Well, yes: but Walt Whitman said it better, and briefer, and much earlier.

Lurking throughout The American Future is the specter of Barack Obama, not yet President-elect when the book was written. It is no surprise that Schama sees Obama as the culminating figure of all that history: the embodiment of what is good, true, and worthwhile about our country. No doubt he is, from the perspective of an expatriate Briton, celebrity academic, and longtime Manhattan resident. So be it: but the acknowledgement makes The American Future less an explanation of America, and more an explanation of what Simon Schama wishes America was.

What follows here, then, is not a developed argument, but evidence for one. If we define conservatism as encompassing anti-statist (though not libertarian) and pro-traditionalist (though not reactionary) tendencies, then the support for conservatism in the Obama era remains widespread and strong. I’ve taken the time to look through the post-Inaugural Rasmussen Reports polling, and some of the Gallup polling from the same period, and the results are reported below. This is dry reading; it is not narrative; and it is not decisive. It iscompelling — and it is the foundational data for a Republican return, if Republicans want it.

From most to least recent:

A May 6th Rasmussen poll reported 75% of Americans believing that “businesses do a better job than government agencies when it comes to handling customer service issues.”

A May 5th Ramussen poll found 52% of Americans asserting that “the University of Notre Dame should have … refrained from awarding an honorary degree to President Obama.”

Another May 5th Rasmussen poll asserted that 64% “of Americans say 17-year-olds should be required to consult a parent before taking the so-called ‘morning after’ pill”; that 58% believe “abortion is morally wrong most of the time” (this number jumps to 64% of women); and 52% “think it is too easy to get an abortion in America.”

An April 27th Rasmussen poll stated that 77% “of U.S. voters say that they prefer a free market economy over a government-managed economy.”

Another April 27th Rasmussen poll found that a plurality of 44% of Americans oppose “a government-run health insurance plan,” and that “a plurality of all Americans (49%) still believes a private health insurance company is likely to provide better service and more choice.”

On April 21st, Rasmussen reported that 60% “of Americans say the federal government has too much power and too much money.”

On April 20th, Gallup reported that 55% of Americans “view big government as the biggest threat to the country.”

An April 20th Rasmussen poll reported that the number of Americans fearing too much government intervention in the economy continued to rise, to 52%.

Another April 20th Rasmussen poll revealed a bare majority of Americans to be supportive of the April 15th “Tea Parties.”

An April 17th Rasmussen poll revealed three extraordinary data: that a plurality of Americans (48%) blame climate change on “long-term planetary trends”; that a plurality of 40% “believe there is a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection”; and that 58% “say the United States needs to build more nuclear plants.”

On April 9th, Rasmussen released its much-discussed poll revealing 53% support for capitalism in America.

Also on April 9th, Rasmussen reported a plurality of 44% of Americans supporting a flat income tax.

A March 30th Rasmussen poll reported three exceptional results, with Americans preferring tax cuts over spending on health care reform, energy initiatives, and education.

A March 27th Rasmussen poll showed “[o]nly 11% of Americans think a financial institution will run better if it’s run by the federal government.”

A March 26th Rasmussen poll reported “36% of U.S. voters now say[ing] tax cuts would help the economy.”

A March 19th Rasmussen poll revealed public approval of labor unions dropping below 50%.

Another March 19th Rasmussen poll showed half of Americans concerned about too much government intervention in the national economy.

On March 18th, a Rasmussen poll found a plurality of 40% of Americans supporting “cutting government spending [over] balancing the budget or cutting taxes.” The same poll “found that [a bare plurality of] 32% of voters believe cutting the deficit in half is most important” versus health-care reform and other priorities.

A March 11th Rasmussen poll reported 55% of Americans opposed to legislation like the just-passed stimulus bill.

A Rasmussen poll released on March 9th reported 63% of Americans believing that the government does not “reflect the will of the people.”

On March 6th, a Rasmussen poll found a bare plurality of Americans (37%) agreeing with a negative assessment of the effect of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

A March 5th Rasmussen poll found a plurality just short of a majority — 46% — disagreeing with Democratic strategist George Lakoff’s statement, “[N]o one can earn a living in America or live an American life without protection and empowerment by the government.”

A February 26th Rasmussen poll found a 59% of Americans agreeing with Ronald Reagan’s statement from his First Inaugural: “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

A Rasmussen poll released on February 24th found that, “[g]iven the choice between federal bailouts for the auto companies, the finance industry and financially trouble homeowners or no bailouts for any of them, 54% say no bailouts period.”

On February 4th, a Rasmussen poll found exactly half of Americans believing the Obama/Democrat stimulus legislation “is at least somewhat likely to make things worse rather than better.”

In a Rasmussen poll released on January 30th, mere days after Obama’s Inauguration, a solid majority of Americans — 56% — said “the Republican Party should return to the views and values of the iconic 40th president of the United States, [Ronald Reagan,] to be successful.”

A January 27th Rasmussen poll found that “[f]ifty-seven percent (57%) of voters nationwide say that tax cuts generally help the economy.”

As I’ve stated before: if the Republicans wish to return to power, they must overcome the perception of their incompetence, rather than the reality of their ideology.

The most notable recent expression of left-wing and Democratic secessionist sentiment must be the infamous “Jesusland map,” reproduced here and widely popular following George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection. Thought hardly a serious proposal for secession, the sentiments behind it are nonetheless distinguishable from actual secessionism only inasmuch as they did not coalesce into a serious effort to remove territory from the Union. They did, however, coalesce into individual threats (alas, too infrequently carried out) to leave the Union. These petulant exhibitions of conditional disloyalty in the face of political defeat differ from secessionism only as a function of cash available for relocation to a social democracy of one’s preference.

Beyond this, there are four territorial secession movements, each receiving varying support from left-wing and Democratic powerholders, active in the United States today. From least to most serious, they are:

Cascadia. This secession movement aims to split up two countries in favor of an imaginary third: the American Pacific northwest would be joined to British Columbia to form an environmentalist ecotopia. Its supporters tend to be folks who voted Green Party in the 1990s and 2000, and are are enthusiastic for Obama now.

Lakotah. This movement aims to carve out an American Indian homeland near the geographic center of the United States. The movement is the work of longtime Indian activists, but it’s not terribly hard to find (ill-informed) sympathy for it at Democratic/left strongholds like DailyKos.

Vermont. Back in 1991, the then-governor of Vermont led a series of public debates on his state’s membership in the Union. “At the end of each, [he] asked all those in favor of Vermont’s seceding from the Union to stand and be counted,” and he got solid pro-secession majorities each time. That governor was Howard Dean, Democratic presidential contender in 2004, and DNC chairman in 2005-2008. Since then, the movement for Vermont independence has spawned a think tank, a journal, and far more enthusiasm (in terms of proportion and efficacy) than exists in Texas.

Hawaii. Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI) reintroduced his Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act to the U.S. Senate this past February. It enjoys the support of the Congressional majorities and the President, and will likely pass in this session, thus giving native Hawaiians a sort of legal parity with American Indians in their relations with the federal government. Senator Akaka admits that his bill could lead “to outright independence” for the state of Hawaii.

The point here is not to pretend that these are all clear and present dangers to the territorial integrity of the United States of America. Cascadia and Lakotah in particular are barely more than jokes; Vermont’s secessionism will probably end up like that of Texas, as an aesthetic expression of pride more than a serious preference; and only the Hawaiian situation demands serious attention from those concerned about our federal union. Rather, the point is to note that secession talk has a live and active, even if minor, presence in American politics — and that it’s almost always expressed by perceived political losers. Conservatives have no monopoly on it, and it’s noteworthy that the only meaningful secessionist tendencies of the recent past have come from the left.

What this signifies, I’ll leave to others to discuss — even though it seems obvious from here.

Michael Grunwald’s Time cover story declares that “Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species,” and asks (one assumes rhetorically), “are the Republicans going extinct?” If you wonder what Grunwald’s answer is, think back to the last time a major newsmagazine ran a piece to express its optimism for the GOP. The author’s basic thesis is succinctly expressed in this passage:

The party’s ideas — about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else — are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it’s not a majority agenda.

This isn’t reporting: it’s editorializing. That’s not a bad thing if backed up with data, but Grunwald offers none. Instead, he delivers a lengthy exposition of the Democratic storyline that Conservatism Killed the Republican Party. It’s appealing to those who dislike conservatives and Republicans, and it’s false.

Grunwald is right that the Republican Party is deeply troubled, of course, but to posit this as a function of its conservatism demands several things, among them: that the Republicans governed as conservatives when last in power; that the Republicans were defeated in recent election cycles due to conservatism; and that the electorate at large displays a desire for Republicans to abandon conservatism.

These propositions are arguable at best. Republican governance in 2001-2007 may have been rhetorically conservative — as this former Administration speechwriter remembers well — but it was not particularly conservative in its policies. This was especially apparent in the fiscal sphere, as Grunwald notes, quoting a Concord Coalition official on the party’s “atrocious record” on the federal budget. The Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008 were not exactly indictments of conservatism either: there wasn’t a national Congressional campaign on the GOP side to speak of, and John McCain was no conservative standard-bearer, even with the accompaniment of Sarah Palin. As I discussed here and at TAPped, Republican conservatives actually preferred a very different ticket in ‘08, and that campaign can hardly be considered a reflection of, or on, their agenda.

Finally, there is little data suggesting that the electorate at large thinks the Republican Party is too conservative. This November 20th, 2008, Gallup poll — taken when partisan feeling was at its height, and Republican fortunes had suffered a decisive blow — demonstrates this well enough. In addition to losing the Presidency, GOP negatives were at a record high of 61%. And yet, when asked what ideological direction the Republicans would take, some curious data emerged: 37% wanted more conservatism, 37% percent wanted less, and 20% wanted the status quo. Put differently, Gallup found that Americans at large had no meaningful problems with the ideological content of the Republican Party.

Why, then, is the Republican brand so tarnished? Had Grunwald allowed data, rather than supposition and anecdote, to drive his reporting, he would have focused narrowly upon the actual causes of Republican decline, which have everything to do with pragmatic outcomes, and little to do with ideological content. Going through old Gallup data again, it’s noteworthy that (as noted here) Republican political fortunes displayed their first sustained downward movement around the end of 2005 — that is, after the twin blows of public disenchantment with the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The theory-driven proclamations of left-wing commentators and politicos aside, these were failures of competence and honesty, rather than ideology per se. This — not its ideas — is the root of Republican decline.

The good news is that the ideas remain viable, even if the party that advances them does not. Grunwald writes that the Republicans are “starting to look like the Federalists of the early 19th century: an embittered, over-the-top, out-of-touch regional party en route to extinction, doubling down on dogma the electorate has already rejected.” This is bad history: even as the Federalists went extinct, they were absorbed into the broader Democratic-Republicans, and then the National Republicans — and their principles disseminated throughout the American political system of the first half of the 19th century. The Americans of the late Federalist era did not reject its “dogma”: they rejected its aesthetic of pro-British, pro-urban, pro-mercantile, and pro-finance policy. Once the Federalists were gone, their policy program, stripped of its specific class and individual associations, was almost wholly enacted in successive Administrations.

If that’s the historical path the Republican Party now trudges down — and I don’t believe it is — then conservatives, far from despairing, may take heart.

On the first, I think not: whatever the likes of Specter and other “moderates” flee from in fleeing the Republicans, you may call it conservatism or High Church Whiggery, and the result is the same. Whatever X-factor the Republicans have, they’re getting more of it (though not necessarily more and better of it), and the flight of the “moderates” is a function of that.

An interesting corollary question is whether there is such a thing as a “moderate.” Politicians who identify as such wish you to believe so, but it’s difficult to identify a particular point of ideological or policy agreement common to them. “Moderation” here is much more an aesthetic or tactical choice than any sort of principled stand: even if a principled “moderate” exists, it’s likely that the point of principle is not common to “moderates” as a group. Furthermore, it’s revealing that “moderates” in the past thirty years all migrate in one direction — to the left. Democrats jumping to the Republican party are “conservatives” (this was especially notable in 1980-2000), but Republicans jumping to the Democrats are “moderates.” The validity of media and popular terminology here is therefore highly questionable.

The second question — whether conservative policy outcomes are the sole or major indicator of a conservative party — is more difficult to answer. Even a passing familiarity with the Republican party’s base reveals a deep and abiding conservatism within it. That same passing familiarity, as “Von” notes, also reveals a stupefying failure to achieve conservative ends when in (mostly) full control of the national government from January 2003 through January 2007. (As an aside, this further punctures Specter’s argument that the Republicans are now too conservative for him, and by extension for “moderates” in general. As Democrats are slowly realizing, most of the GWB-era policy outcomes suited him just fine.)

Whether this disconnect is a feature or a bug is still a live debate within conservative ranks. Interestingly, the proponents of the “feature” stance have shifted significantly in the past three years, from the corporatist and generally non-religious functionaries running the show in the George W. Bush Administration (who argued in favor of abandoning small government), to libertarian anti-religious ideologues now (who argue in favor of abandoning social conservatism). Despite the trope, trotted out regularly since c.1979, that the Republican party is now too rigidly conservative to govern, it is entirely possible to argue that the party is instead not rigid enough, in its actual governance if not its stated aims.

The implications of this are several, and include (but are not limited to) the following possibilities:

That the Republican party is institutionally unable to render conservative ideology into pragmatic governance.

That the Republican party is institutionally unwilling to render conservative ideology into pragmatic governance: that is, the party perceives the American electorate as fundamentally hostile to conservatism in governance.

That conservatism is intrinsically incapable of translation into pragmatic governance in the American system.

That conservatism is not meaningfully advanced through electoral governance.

The conservative movement — including me — is mostly going with the thesis that the party is broken, though we do not all agree on where the point of fracture is. We’ll see how long that consensus, superficial as it is, lasts.

According to NRO’s Mark Hemingway, it’s Ayn Rand.

Hemingway writes that BB&T CEO John Allison “navigated through the overheated mortgage market and the ensuing banking crisis by relying, in large part, on a philosophy that many others are now turning to” — Rand’s self-titled Objectivist creed, which endorses unregulated capitalism as the sole moral system of economic and, indeed, societal organization. Objectivism is best understood on the pragmatic level as a sort of mishmash of libertarianism and vociferous atheism, leavened with a cultic devotion to the woman who thought it all up. (Typical of the convinced Objectivist devotee is the high-school English teacher who challenged me to find a single factual or grammatical error in any of her works.) Rand hated the association with libertarianism, less because of any meaningful policy differentiation than her intolerance for variation on what she considered her themes: like the religious “mystics” she claimed to hate, she expended far more vitriol on perceived heretics than actual unbelievers.

This conflation of rigid social ideology with individual virtue was married to a belief that both expressed themselves in the most minute preference of the total person. With Ayn Rand the arbiter of rectitude, one must love the things Ayn Rand loved: a petty megalomania satirized by Murray Rothbard in Mozart Was a Red, from which comes this essay’s title. (For a more wrenching and appalling tale of Rand’s inability to separate ideology — or as she would have it, philosophy — from herself, see the appealingly soap-opera-ish The Passion of Ayn Rand.) This exclusionary vision easily elides into an exterminating one, as Whittaker Chambers noted in his famous review of Atlas Shrugged:

Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”

Here, it is useful to turn to a major essay by the man whom Ayn Rand designated her “intellectual heir” — a formalism unique outside cultic structures, which perhaps this is not — Leonard Peikoff. (I’ve written about him before.) In casting out a “heretical” movement which held that Rand did not, in fact, discover the whole of truth, and that disagreement with Rand was not an inherent moral failing (details from the putative heretics may be found here), Peikoff wrote the following:

Now take the case of Ayn Rand, who discovered true ideas on a virtually unprecedented scale. Do any of you who agree with her philosophy respond to it by saying “Yeah, it’s true”—without evaluation, emotion, passion? Not if you are moral. A moral person … greets the discovery of this kind of truth with admiration, awe, even love; he makes a heartfelt positive moral evaluation. He says: Objectivism is not only true, it is great! Why? Because of the volitional work a mind must have performed to reach for the first time so exalted a level of truth—and because of all the glorious effects such knowledge will have on man’s life, all the possibilities of action it opens up for the future.

The arrogance of assumption that one who differs is either evil or stupid may be a hallmark of the political blogosphere and frustrated corners of academia, but it does not commend those who purport to defend and embody a putative holistic philosophy.

All this brings us full circle to John Allison, BB&T, and Mark Hemingway’s assertion that Objectivism has saved the company from (comparative) financial ruin. Allison is a longtime and public supporter of Randian ideas, and has given a great deal of money to promulgate them. All this is perfectly fine, and a matter for Allison, the BB&T board, and the recipients of their largesse. Where the narrative becomes problematic is in the place Hemingway takes it: to an assertion that Ayn Rand and her ideology have, via Allison, “saved” BB&T.

The evidence for this, as presented by Hemingway, is thin. Allison credits his Objectivist beliefs with three things that benefitted BB&T in the past year: he believes in capitalism; he was wary of exotic mortgages; and he is against altruism, which he identifies as the flaw “that got us into the current financial crisis.” The first two items have no necessary connection with Randian teaching whatsoever. An overwhelming majority of Americans endorse capitalism, despite an underwhelming minority adhering to Objectivism; and unease over the strange financial instruments that helped precipitate this crisis is a familiar theme to anyone who followed the financial press (or Paul Krugman) in the past few years. As for Allison’s denunciation of “altruism,” he is certainly right that well-intentioned (by conventional, not Objectivist, lights) government interventions aggravated and perhaps even helped cause the market crash: but what Hemingway does not bother to explore is what the term means in Objectivist thought. Again, it’s instructive here to turn to Peikoff, who serves a useful purpose in illustrating the deeply strange moral turn that Randian ideology demands:

Q: During the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech College, there was a professor, a holocaust survivor, who blocked a door against the shooter so that his students could escape safely. And although he died in the process, the students did escape. Is this an act of altruism that Objectivism classifies as immoral?

A: No. As you present it, it was a heroic act in defense of the professor’s values.

Assuming a professor does not have reason to despise his students, then they are a value to him…

By contrast, and assuming no special personal attachments among the students, if one student decided to risk his life to save the others, I would regard that as highly dubious morally; in fact, I would think him weird. (Emphasis added.) If he has no grounds, personal or professional, to value the lives of these students so highly as to risk self-destruction, then, according to Objectivism, his action is altruistic and, as such, immoral.

In Hemingway’s piece, Allison says that in place of “altruism,” “[w]hat you really need to do is run your life in relationship to other people in context to what [Rand] calls the trader principle.” This sounds reasonable till, instead of doing something noble, you find that Objectivism demands you abandon your terrified classmates — who have nothing to trade in that moment — to their deaths. What Hemingway allows his subject to present as a jewel of enlightened self-interest is, upon what should be ordinary journalistic examination, a chilling and dumb bit of moral juvenilia.

Finally, Hemingway errs in presenting BB&T as a uniquely good and noteworthy bank in these troubled times. Indeed, the entire piece could be a commissioned bit of puff-PR from BB&T corporate communications. The truth is that BB&T, though markedly better off than many of its institutional peers, is nonetheless enduring the loss about a third of its market capitalization — and Wells Fargo is doing almost exactly as well as BB&T is, without recourse to Objectivist corporate leadership. Hemingway intones that the example of BB&T and the crisis of capitalism together mean that “Rand’s perspective is suddenly so valuable.” But it’s not. It’s as valuable as it’s always been, in good times and bad: as a personal validator of businessmen, and a moral fantasy for teenagers. A pity that National Review, which once printed apt condemnations of this enduring absurdity, now issues de facto press releases on its behalf.

This is not good news in itself, but neither is it awful. The defection of Arlen Specter, his statement notwithstanding, has little to do with his convictions, and much to do with his probable loss to Pat Toomey in the forthcoming Pennsylvania Republican primary. Senator Specter’s core principles will remain in the Democratic party what they were in the Republican party: that is, focused upon the interests and well-being of what Senator Specter sees in the mirror. The Democrats, for their part, now own Washington, D.C., outside the judiciary. If they accomplish great things, they will deserve the credit for it — and if they don’t, they will own the failure in full. It’s not difficult to guess which outcome is likely. Either way, the American people will have the grace of clarity in 2010.

This said, Specter’s party switch is the latest in a long trend of ideological party-sorting, in which the Republicans get the conservatives, and the Democrats get the leftists. It’s arguable which of the two actually offers more objective scope for dissent and range, and it’s arguable whether more scope is inherently good. The party coalitions are not mirror images of one another, and so the Republicans, with their modern roots in ideological struggle, are probably more cohesive than the Democrats, with their modern roots in plain power partnerships. This cohesion seems either a tremendous strength (there being power in unity) or a risible weakness (there being exclusion in strictures), depending on whether you’re a partisan, and on what year it is. A Republican party bound by common principles and shared goals seemed a crushing threat to its foes from late 2002 through early 2005; now, its detractors argue that its tent is too small, and its ideals too narrow.

Well. The proper response is that this is indeed true for some, but the long-term benefits of losing the likes of Specter (or Jim Jeffords, or perhaps, in the future, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) outweigh the short-term costs — at least in political calculation. The truth is that the Republican party has been shedding “moderates” — a much-abused term, that — for the past generation. If we take the 1976-1980 era as the decisive span in which the Republican party became the party of conservatism, it seems clear that it has only become more conservative since — and that this process must entail the end of Republican careers like Arlen Specter’s.

The conservatization, so to speak, of the Republican party is not an unmixed blessing, not least because uniformity brings the danger of intellectual complacency. Yet to see in Specter’s defection the knell of a too-narrow, too-exclusive movement is to badly misread events. No party will ever be broad enough to accommodate an endangered office-seeker. More to the point, that process has yielded both the modern Republican identity, and several periods of Republican dominance — at least one stretch of several years in each of the last three decades. To abandon what the party is, and has been becoming over the past generation, just because a “moderate” defects, betrays an ignorance of recent history: and it makes as much sense as abandoning capitalism over the latest recession, centuries of prosperity notwithstanding.

Yet meaningful numbers of people do want to abandon capitalism, and even more do want to abandon conservatism as the Republican mark. If they believe the likes of Arlen Specter a prize worth having, they are welcome to him. Certainly he agrees.

I. Democracy’s presumptions.

The fundamental presumption of our sort of democracy is that the people, in aggregate, are competent to receive, assess, and act rightly upon information. James Surowiecki has written a great deal on this, mostly in the contexts of markets, but even he cautions that the existence of this sort of aggregate is, in itself, insufficient to yield the positive outcomes assumed by democracy. Three years ago, I spoke with a Claremont Institute scholar who, in critiquing the assumptions undergirding the Iraq war, remarked that “democracy requires a demos.” A demos, in turn, requires what Surowiecki posits as the characteristics of a “wise crowd”: diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. (I don’t wish to rely on Surowiecki overmuch, as he is not the final authority on these things — his book sold well less because of its ideas than its affirmation of market mechanisms in good times — but those ideas are nonetheless useful here.)

The existence of information classification implies at least one of two things: first, that there exists an enemy for whom the information is useful; and second, that the people at large do not possess the “wise crowd” characteristics to usefully act upon the information. The first implication is generally non-controversial in war, and I believe this non-controversial nature may easily be an example of a bad crowd decision.

II. The things we should not see.

Explaining this requires an examination of the second implication, on the unsuitability of the general public to rightly assess and act upon information. The rationale asserting this unsuitability is neatly summarized in the famous courtroom monologue of Marine Colonel Jessep from “A Few Good Men”:

We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns … I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom … You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

Stripped of its patina of arrogance and belligerence, this argument — that death awaits in the things one should not see — is strikingly similar to the Straussian concept of the “noble lie” that makes the polity possible. Contrary to what popular-media discussion of Strauss exists, it does not necessarily follow from this that a Straussian is an agent of a restrictive national-security state. It does follow, though, that the “noble lie” concept lends legitimacy to the idea that a democratic people are not, in fact, suited to full self-governance — if we accept that full self-governance must include full access to the information possessed by one’s leaders.

Information classification on this premise therefore comes dangerously close to a denial of the foundational premises of American governance. If governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed,” it is difficult to argue that this consent may be anything less than fully informed. Even if that argument is accepted, it defies credulity to assert that the agent controlling the information ought to be the very government to which the people are consenting. To put it mildly, this is a tremendous conflict of interest.

In his outstanding “What Hath God Wrought,” Daniel Walker Howe writes of the salutary effect of religious revival in 1820s America: “[T]he revivals expanded the number of people experiencing an autonomous sense of self. They taught self-respect and demanded that individuals function as moral agents.” But a moral agent must have the tools of agency. Howe does not argue that faith alone sustained the young American republic: the title of his history (which covers the period 1815-1848) refers to the first message sent by telegraph from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. — and thus to the transformative, equally salutary, and equally necessary effect of information on the creation of our democracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in that same era, “To suppose that [newspapers, the primary means of mass information dissemination] only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization.” (Emphasis added.)

III. The face of the enemy.

How do we reconcile the free informational dissemination necessary to both consensual governance and the “maintenance of civilization” with the aforementioned second implication: that the people at large do not possess the “wise crowd” characteristics to usefully act? Set against the principles of the American founding, and information’s needful role in the type of society we wish to have — as demonstrated in history — the case for information classification is rendered weak. The primary remaining argument for it, then, is in the first implication above: that there exists an enemy for whom the information is useful.

In identifying this putative enemy, it is useful to proceed backwards from the information classified, to the meaningful groups from whom it is thus denied. I use “meaningful groups” here in the sense of “groups that may be expected to care about and act upon” the information. (Madagascan militants may be denied the same stuff we are, but they hardly matter.) Therefore, the classifications of NATO plans and dispositions in eastern Afghanistan are likely meant to deny information to the Taliban and al Qaeda; that we are denied this information is secondary. Presumably, if citizen of the Western nations could keep a secret, we’d all know. This much is easy.

Where the identification of the enemy gets difficult is in other cases, such as the former ban on the photography of soldiers’ caskets at Dover AFB. Who then is the object of active denial of information? Surely al Qaeda doesn’t get the photographs — but we, the American public, and the media apparatus we patronize are the real and obvious objects. Inasmuch as this makes us “the enemy,” the implication here is profoundly troubling. This is a comparatively stark case, but the “torture memos” and the to-be-released Abu-Ghraib-style photographs differ only in their marginal utility as propaganda for the battlefield enemy. Again, the primary object of denial would seem to be the people at large.

IV. Worth the fighting for.

What is to be done? Deeply unpopular as it is to say so — at least on my side of the partisan aisle — the Obama Administration is taking tentative steps in the right direction in its slow and halting release of information. This is not to credit it with unsullied intentions, or to assume that it values governmental openness for its own sake. The evidence for either is thin. Still, as the bias toward withholding information did not yield demonstrable, pragmatic policy gains — to say nothing of strengthening civil society — in the preceding Administration, we might hope for an opportunity to urge a contrary policy bias toward openness.

That this is wartime need not obscure this possibility. The man who declared truth so important that it should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies meant to deceive the Nazis first, and his own people as a regrettable consequence. Inasmuch as modern America seeks the deception of its own people as a primary intent, it is not an America worth the fighting for.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

Charles Johnson’s disenchantment with a movement he did much to create is more likely a function of his contrary nature than his active conscience, but it would be ungracious to pry overmuch. The sad truth is that the self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.

The list of major sins looks something like this:

Enthusiastic and uncritical identification with right-wing politics and policies.

Inability to distinguish critiques of Islam from critiques of Muslims.

Willingness to associate with racists.

Credulity in subscribing to conspiracy theories. (Viz.)

Inability to formulate and advocate meaningful public policy.

In this light, the anti-jihad movement is something far less than a considered intellectual tendency. Instead, it is an attitude of inchoate belligerence, with its only consistent focal point being hatred of the Muslim. “The Muslim,” depending on what that means, may give one much to hate; but to hate him (and her) per se is to commit a grave error. The first and most compelling reason for this is, of course, that each individual (of any stripe) deserves to be judged as such. On a broader level, post-9/11 rhetoric and sentiment may be as they are — and I’ve indulged in both in full measure — but we are not in fact at actual war with Islam or Muslims at large. As such, to adopt a stance of conscious and deliberate hate is to indulge in the mental precursor of genuine and terrible crimes.

Whether we are at metaphorical war with Islam is a different question, and even an arguable one; but the effect of the war metaphor is, I believe, generally toxic — and even causative of the basic frivolity of the anti-jihadists. It should be enough to acknowledge that Islam in nearly every form contains within it certain doctrines and traditions inimical to our classical liberal traditions, our concepts of rights, and our assumed freedoms. (Indeed, I have reported on this threat firsthand.) This said, there are a number of things that do not follow from this understanding, including:

That any given Muslim is inimical to the same.

That Islam cannot exist within the context of the same.

That Islam must necessarily threaten the same.

That only Islam poses this manner of threat.

The anti-jihadist movement generally believes all of these propositions, and it is difficult to see that belief as anything but a lazy intellectual shortcut. From a plain movement standpoint, this is understandable: who wants to rally to the banner of, “Islam is deeply problematic, but not necessarily fatal?” Far better to guard the gates of Vienna, or shrug like Atlas, or stoke the fires of 9/12, or whatever last-stand-of-the-West rhetoric strikes one’s inner Charles Martel. This is the stuff of a short-term movement, and perhaps a stirring read, but it is not, to borrow a phrase, reality-based.

Lost in the shrill din of the anti-jihadists is the woeful truth that there is such a thing as jihad, and it does demand a policy response. What would responsible anti-jihadism look like? The wish list flows from the indictments:

It would embrace the whole of the political mainstream, as anti-Communism once did.

It would hold no animus for the individual Muslim.

It would reject all trafficking with racists.

It would reject conspiracy theories and anything too easily sliced by Occam’s razor.

It would seek the implementation of meaningful and realistic public policy.

The last point is perhaps the most important, from the pragmatic (though not the moral) standpoint. As a rule of thumb, the policy preferences of the anti-jihadists range from thoughtless support of neoconservatism at best, to strange and unworkable schemes of Muslim exclusion at worst. A basket of responsible anti-jihadist policy preferences might encompass human-rights advocacy in the Muslim world, support for liberal education, support for religious minorities, and similar measures. (I personally favor the conceptual approach of Georgetown’s Thomas Farr.) My intent here is not to imagine or present a full list of idealized preferences, but to illustrate possible alternatives, and to make a point: that responsible anti-jihadism requires more engagement with the Muslim world, not less.

If and when this responsible alternative emerges, it almost certainly won’t be called an anti-jihad movement. For now, that label is sullied by the “bunch of kooks” who took the notion and ran it into the ground. The irony is that in seeking to defend the West — or their idea of it — they have managed to discredit, with their immoderation and insensibility, what should be a given in our politics. That’s real damage that will be difficult to fix, and impossible to forgive.

Filkins’s essay begins with a classic Holbrooke vignette: the canny, craggy, competent Ambassador establishing a constructive rapport with an ex-Taliban imam. “It’s difficult to imagine such a conversation” under the George W. Bush team, gushes Filkins. But it’s not, really: not merely because the reported exchange is actually quite banal, but because George W. Bush himself went to Iraq’s Anbar province and met with sheikhs of the former Sunni insurgency. If you watched what actually happened during the previous Administration, though there was much to criticize, the absence of civilian control and a failure to reach out to former enemies were not among them. If you believe what Richard Holbrooke peddles, on the other hand, and not your lying eyes, what he brings to the foreign-policy scene now is something radical and new. The difference between these two is the difference between writing for the New York Times and not.

The truth is that Holbrooke is well known as a preening egotist in DC circles. This is no rarity within those circles. What sets Holbrooke apart is a remarkable ability to feed his ego via media, and actual substantive accomplishments to his credit. You may guess this easily enough when a careful interviewer asks Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the task of managing a man who “can break a little crockery in the process of doing some very noble things.” And such noble things: chief among them the conclusion of the 1995 Dayton Accords that brought a temporary peace to Bosnia-Hercegovina. Whatever the sort of man Holbrooke is, this is the sort of thing that does him credit in history.

The problem with Richard Holbrooke is that he is quite ready to remind you of the things that do him credit in history — and he is utterly convinced that more credit will be due him if, and only if, he is allowed to speak. I saw the ugly side of this conviction firsthand in late 2003, when I helped advance and then administer HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson’s 100-person delegation to Africa. Holbrooke participated in his capacity as the president of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which we took as his prestigious-office-in-waiting till he became a Democratic President’s Secretary of State in January 2005.

When the delegation hit Rwanda, the security detail received information on a terrorist threat in Kenya, which was to be its next stop. After much discussion, the Secretary gathered the hundred or so persons together in a Kigali hotel ballroom to announce that we’d be skipping Kenya. I was in favor of simply presenting it as a fait accompli — preferably by announcing the new destination of Uganda while in the air — and my preference was justified when one of the business leaders present took the opportunity to announce that he was not afraid of Osama bin Laden. He would fly on his own private jet to Kenya! Predictably, several other persons present seized the moment to declare their own fearlessness, and to attempt to bum a ride off the brave corporate honcho.

Richard Holbrooke asked for an opportunity to address the group, and the Secretary — who had no real choice — agreed. The Ambassador was in fine form. He regaled all present with a harrowing tale involving an overturned armored vehicle, a Serbian minefield, and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Suffice it to say that the first was saved in some manner by the third from the second. Holbrooke then called the American chief of security on the carpet before everyone, and demanded details of the terror threat. These details were, quite sensibly, classified, and so the security chief merely affirmed what the Secretary had already said — that the threat was credible, and a change of plans was strongly urged. Here, Holbrooke lost his marbles, and berated the security chief in a thoroughly shameful fashion for his refusal to divulge classified information to a non-governmental civilian in public view. Holbrooke questioned the validity of the information (which he knew nothing about); Holbrooke questioned the professional judgment of the security detail (which he also knew nothing about); and Holbrooke affirmed his own willingness to go in harm’s way (which he knew a great deal about, and was willing to share thereof). The chief, a man whom I knew back in DC as having long experience with blustering civilians, took it with equanimity.

When Richard Holbrooke was done, some few persons rallied to him, and they bravely went to Kenya together — where nothing whatsoever happened to them — and the vast majority spent a few unplanned days unwinding as a lackluster hotel near Entebbe.

Filkins’s hagiographic essay concludes with a strange and revealing anecdote: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells a group of Afghan clerics that he’s “come to the region nine or ten times,” at which Holbrooke quips, “And each time, things have gotten worse.” Filkins writes, “Admiral Mullen, Mr. Holbroooke, and all the clerics laughed,” and it is a ridiculous thing to write, especially as he offers the incident as an example of “the new cooperation between the uniforms and the suits.” This is no more an example of Richard Holbrooke’s new “civilianized” way forward than the earlier vignette was an example of his new touch with former enemies. Instead, it’s just another example of a very old story with the Ambassador: the willingness to ridicule and deride someone unable to fight back, for the benefit of Richard Holbrooke — and journalistic credulity in reporting it Holbrooke’s way.

There is a curious contrast between Barack Obama and his predecessor, though not the one the supporters of either think. A left-wing academic of my acquaintance declared today that he is “glad that his son will grow up in an age of tolerance, competence, and pragmatism … rather than an age of exclusion, cronyism, and torture”; and of course my right-wing friends are united in their disdain for the charlatan who succeeds the “affable, likable, [and] profoundly decent” George W. Bush. Both are wrong. The ignorance that assumes that the new President will overturn human nature (or economics) finds its match in the false appreciation of the outgoing Executive as fundamentally competent or principled.

George W. Bush was, at bottom, a tremendous mediocrity, born to privilege but never quite deserving it. He had one war thrust upon him that remains unfinished; he started another that also remains unfinished; and his fiscal stewardship was disastrous. The One Big Thing that his defenders repeatedly invoke is the lack of terror attacks in the United States since 9/11. This defense is indefensible: al Qaeda has engaged in more successful attacks in more places worldwide since 9/11 than before it, it has killed more Americans since 9/11 than before it, and its mastermind remains alive and free. By this standard, we would have declared victory in the Second World War after clearing the Atlantic seaboard of U-boats. Having worked in the former Administration from 2001 through 2004 as a Presidential appointee, I know a little of its mind and aims. There were deeply principled and admirable men in the employ of George W. Bush, and I worked for and with several of them. But they were rarely the men at the top, and seldom the men who gave the orders. These good men could have truly changed America and its governance. Instead, they were subsumed by a White House focused upon the acquisition of power, and the myopic pursuit of discrete ends. A signal tragedy of the Administration of George W. Bush was that it brought together the finest collection of conservatives in a generation — and set them to work on explaining and advancing things antithetical to their ideological creed.

If the former President was something tragic and sub-par, the new President is nothing at all. This is unfair to him if the view of his public record is limited to a Presidency that has produced nothing yet beyond festivities and oratory. Let us therefore expand our view to the whole of his public life, and find — festivals and oratory. I have written on this before, and there is little point in recapitulating it in full. It is enough to note that today’s speech, which I finally saw after the fact, and was in itself quite good, adds nothing to the plate. Barack Obama is our President now, and he may find greatness, or better yet, goodness, in the being. Yet as we are now ruled by a second Amory Blaine figure in succession, we do well to recall that a life spent in the becoming is no preparation for that.

To illustrate this, we must look to the terrible numbers from the field of battle — or rather, the alleyways and gutted apartment blocks wherein Hamas chooses to fight. For all the grief and horror at the deaths of “civilians” in Gaza (and the word must be in quotes, not because there are none, but because apart from the young they are so tremendously difficult to definitively identify), the cold fact is that the IDF has done an admirable job of safeguarding the lives of the Gazan population. If, after nearly two weeks of modern war, only a few hundred out of just under 1.5 million, in a region with an average density of over ten thousand persons per square mile, are dead — and if the number of dead includes combatants — this is nothing short of extraordinary. To state this is not to belittle or dismiss the very real and legitimate horror of the dead, nor the grief that their loved ones endure. A keening mother in Gaza is comforted by the assiduousness of the IDF no more than the grieving mother in Colorado is soothed by our historically low casualties in Iraq. In acknowledging the commendably few deaths in Gaza, we must also acknowledge the lonely black pit of loss that renders the death of one indistinguishable from the end of the world.

The careful restraint of Israel at war is not a regrettable thing, except in the realm of amoral power politics: indeed, it is a signal reason we of the non-Jewish, non-Israeli world ought to prefer Israel to its neighbors in sentiment and policy. However much the Muslim population of Israel and Palestine might resent its fate under Jewish rule, it nonetheless enjoys a better existence than Jewish populations under Muslim rule — which is to say, it has a meaningful existence to speak of. Again, this is not to ignore the baleful realities of that existence, which is, after all, rife with petty humiliations ranging from the insensate bureaucracy of movement controls to the banal abuse of fanatic Zionists. Yet if the Xhosa have not exterminated the Afrikaners, nor the Southern blacks the Southern whites, why demand or expect less of the Palestinians? Are they not, to borrow a phrase, men and brothers? Why, then, the peculiar degradation of culture and impulse that compels a relentless violence? The notion, so fondly adhered to by so many, that both sides in this war are moral equals, or at least equally morally degraded, is a fiction that rests upon an invincible ignorance of history.

There are a thousand illustrative anecdotes to call upon, but one suffices: that of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem’s center in 1967. For the preceding twenty years of Muslim rule, Jews were barred from their holy sites therein, and the majority of the Jewish graves in the millennia-old cemetery on the Mount of Olives were destroyed or paved over. By contrast, when the Israeli infantry drove the Jordanians from the medieval warren of the Old City, the conquering General Uzi Narkiss refused a clerical plea to reclaim the Muslim Dome of the Rock — and Moshe Dayan ordered its administration handed to the Muslim Waqf. To imagine that Israel’s enemies would treat it as well is to indulge in fantasy. We have little data on the fate of Jews and Jewish sites in Muslim hands after 1967, but what have seen — notably in the 2000 ransacking of Joseph’s Tomb — justifies no hope.

If we prefer Israel, then, it falls to us to ensure that its deficiencies in the amoral realm of power politics are not fatal. The long-term survival of the Jewish state is a factor neither of righteousness nor morality, except inasmuch as that survival is righteous or moral. We may forgive Israelis for believing this, but we ourselves need not. Rather, it befits Americans to enable Israel to survive and flourish without subsuming its behavior to those imperatives. Precisely because we do not wish for Israel to conclude, as it rationally might, that its survival depends upon the end of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim habitation of old Palestine, we should conduct our policy now with an eye toward precluding that conclusion.

This is easier said than done, and it may not be do-able at all, but it has the virtue of being the moral course. We can do our best to make the coming ersatz peace something more than it will be; we can foster economic development for the great masses of idle Palestinian labor; we can cooperate in the strangling of fanatic movements like Hamas; and we can demand more of Palestine than it demands of itself.

The ultimate success of these efforts, though, is out of our hands. In the end, the Palestinian polity is the creation of Palestinians. This is simultaneously as it should be, and the most dreadful portent for the future. Yielding the great dream — of the end of Zionism, of the destruction of the Jews, of the ravaging of their holy places — makes sense only in the definitive demonstration of its unattainability. The enemies of Israel are unpersuaded, having seen the Zionist state yield mile upon mile in the past decade, having seen Israel lose a war in Lebanon, having compared the raw facts of demographics, and having seen the world weary of this Jewish statelet and its inconvenient struggles. They rightly believe they will be a majority in time. They rightly believe their material weakness is not perpetual. They rightly believe that Israel wants to stop playing this game: and so they play to win it.

This argument deserves note, not only on its factual merits, but because of the policy aims it advances. The former are less compelling than Whitman and Bostock believe. They correctly note that “values voters” — on whom more shortly — “made up a larger proportion of the electorate this year than in 2004 — 26 percent, up from 23 percent,” and that these votes went overwhelmingly to the Republican ticket. They also correctly note that the Democratic advantage in self-identified moderates expanded from 2004’s 9-point spread to this year’s 21-point spread. Yet their leap from these observations to their conclusion — that the deepening “value voter” and “social fundamentalist” attachment to the GOP causes, or is symptomatic of the cause of, the moderate aversion to the GOP — is wholly unsupported. (As an aside, it’s unclear what data set the authors refer to: but the CNN polls, which I will use here, yield similar results.) Furthermore, at least one element of their conclusion is directly contradicted, rather than merely unsupported, by the facts: available data indicates that a majority of voters who considered Sarah Palin a major factor in their vote voted for the Republican ticket.

This is the long and the short of the Whitman/Bostock argument. It masquerades as a serious analysis of a serious problem, but examination of the facts reveals it instead a reflexive prejudice that would, if acted upon, end the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a viable force in public life. The fact is that the self-reported ideological breakdown of the American voting public, as discerned by the aforementioned CNN polling, is 34% conservative, 44% moderate, and 22% liberal. Ignore that Whitman and Bostock don’t support their argument, and ignore that a major part of that argument is negated by the data: these numbers alone put the lie to their contention. No single segment is commands a majority, and the weakest of them is the liberal. It therefore makes the most sense, from a purely electoral perspective, to lean right — and that won’t happen without the “values voters” and “social fundamentalists” whom Whitman and Bostock denounce. Consider, too, that roughly 22% of conservatives deserted the GOP ticket in this cycle — and that had McCain cut that defection rate to just under 10% (roughly what Obama suffered from liberals), he would have won a national popular majority.

But, Whitman and Bostock might say, those defectors were people like us: Republican “moderates” opposed to “values voters” and “social fundamentalists”! Wrong again. The conservative defectors to Barack Obama were of all stripes — and the “values voters” and “social fundamentalist” demographic segments actually outstripped the rate of defection of conservatives at large. Whereas 22% of conservatives deserted the GOP, 26% of white Protestant born-agains and evangelicals did, and 32% of voters explicitly concerned about “values” did. All told, the numbers more readily demand a Republican shift toward “social fundamentalism” than away from it. Tellingly, Whitman and Bostock neglect the most compelling numbers of all: the decisive victories of popular referenda defending traditional marriage in Florida, Arkansas, Arizona and California. That’s two McCain states and two Obama states — and one of the latter is among the nation’s most liberal. Social conservatism alone is no panacea for the Republican Party’s ills, but it has the virtue of winning, and without it, what remains is mere administrative technocracy.

It is on this last point that we must move from criticizing this essay to understanding its implications. The policy vehicle for Whitman, Bostock, and company is the misnamed Republican Leadership Council, which appears dedicated to stripping the Republicans of any hope of leadership for the foreseeable future. (Notably, the RLC appropriates its name from the DLC, which attempted to wrest its party from its own ideological roots, and now finds itself well outside the incoming Obama power structure.) The RLC claims that it is “[i]nspired by a drive to get back to the fundamentals of the Republican Party … [and] the historic Republican principles of liberty, individual responsibility, and personal freedom”; and it asserts it “is NOT defined by one issue.” Both claims are false. The “one issue” that animates the RLC is an indifference or antipathy toward the protection of the unborn; and “the historic Republican principles” that created the party militated against this indifference and antipathy. Republicanism, properly understood, coalesced in the 1850s as a political movement affirming an expansive definition of humanity in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence; and in its best form, it continues to make that argument today. I’ve written before on how the politics of slavery and abortion display distressing parallels, and in this light, to abdicate now where our party forefathers did not would reduce Republicanism to a mere collection of power holders, banded together for their own perpetuation and no higher cause. Christine Todd Whitman and Robert Bostock do not merely fail on their own terms, though they do: they and the RLC fail on the most basic moral tenet of their own party’s existence.

Finally: why do we care about the RLC? Because one of its founders, Maryland’s Michael Steele, is a contender for the leadership of the RNC. Steele is a good man with many good qualities. And so long as he advances the RLC line, he must be stopped.

Yet that is the beginning and the end of the historic import of the ascent of the President-elect. His race, or rather, his races aside, there is little that sets him apart as a public figure, and still less as a public servant. His is an absorbing tale for its own sake, which may be why he is so absorbed in writing and re-writing it; but the pity of his memoir-genic journey is that it yielded a man who is, by all accounts, personally decent — once he got past not wanting to marry his wife — and politically banal. Unlike his defeated opponent, Barack Obama has never displayed public courage of any sort. Unlike his defeated opponent, Barack Obama has never crossed a single person wielding power over him. Unlike his defeated opponent, Barack Obama has only once submitted to self-parody, lampooning, or humor — at the Al Smith Dinner, where it’s mandatory. (A life yielding two memoirs by 45 is doubtless above all that.) Is this the stuff of a new era? America has elected the self-regarding before. America has elected the relentlessly ambitious before. America has elected creditable orators before. America has elected machine politicians before. America has elected glittering mediocrities before. Despite this — despite the appalling ordinariness of Barack Obama — friends and fellow citizens react as if they are suddenly blessed by the guidance and protection of one wise and strong, when that one has never shown particular wisdom nor strength.

There is a good reason for this. Dull and depressing as the adulation for the President-elect may be, it cannot be viewed in isolation. If a majority of Americans adore a man who has done precisely nothing to deserve their adoration, it is not because they are stupid. (Not all of them, in any case: the cheerful, chubby and naked girl squealing our next President’s name in the streets of midtown Sacramento, whom my wife and I encountered walking to our car on election night, probably is.) It is because the alternative has been so thoroughly bad. The conservative movement and its vehicle, the Republican party, managed to botch national governance to a degree that, all things being equal, would discredit both for a generation. The litany of failures retains its power to astonish: one war half won, one war half lost, one city half gone, one terrorist mastermind still free, one economy half dead, et cetera, et cetera, when does it end? And who is this charming man with the big smile and the funny name who will make it all go away? In this light — the light of stark reality — enthusiasm for Barack Obama, however thoroughly insipid, is also thoroughly rational.

All things, of course, are not equal — and so my movement and my party will be back in power of some sort long before a generation passes. This is a problem. The fundamental flaw of the conservative movement and the Republican party — for they are wedded, and their fates joined — is that it is a good and powerful machine for achieving power. This remains true even now, in the wake of a national defeat that was not so crushing as the electoral-vote tally suggests. (Look, for example, to the popular vote split; and look to the resounding success of social-conservative propositions in several states.) If we roughly gauge that movement’s ascendancy in the party as starting in the late 1970s, we see that it has since won five of eight Presidential elections, six of 14 Congresses, and nearly overturned the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. This is a fairly good record, and there is no reason to believe that the interlocking apparatus of money, ideologues, media, activists, and officeholders will not regain its balance and efficacy in time.

If it seems counterintuitive that a knack for the acquisition of power is a flaw, consider that achieving power is distinct from exercising it. Conservatism, as constituted in its movement, has a record of exercising power that is as bad as its record of acquiring power is good. “[B]efore he fell asleep,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, “he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” This is the tragic flaw of the conservative movement, and hence the Republican party: we are the Amory Blaine of American public life, dreaming of becoming, and thinking of being far too late.

And so the wheels turn, and my fellow conservative leaders — those who deserve the title, and those who appointed themselves to it — begin their plotting and maneuvering to seize power again. This time, we’ll do it right, we assure ourselves. We won’t do what we did when we ruled unchallenged for six years. What an aberration that was! How un-conservative! So much so, that when the voters rejected us, they weren’t actually rejecting us.

Well.

Today, a conclave took place at the Stanley, Virginia, home of Brent Bozell III. Conservative movement luminaries of all sorts gathered. “[The American Spectator] Publisher Al Regnery and editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell were on hand,” wrote Philip Klein. “Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, pollster Kellyanne Conway, and direct mail guru Richard Viguerie were among those present.” Indeed, it would be difficult to assemble a more powerful group of movement-conservative leaders. They spoke amongst themselves, and agreed upon a statement of principles, and a course of action. Shortly thereafter, I and several dozen other lesser lights of the movement received an e-mail:

CONSERVATIVE LEADERS MEETING IN STANLEY, VA TO HOLD TELENEWSCONFERNCE AT 4:15.
Call in details follow.

We dutifully called in. We waited and chatted a bit on the line, as Bozell and his august house guests roused themselves to join us. Presently, someone decided to place a call on an open line, connected to ours, and we heard the line begin to ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. “Could you mute your lines?” asked the moderator. Everyone did except the unattended, infinitely ringing line. Ring. Ring. Ring. “I hear ringing,” chimed in several voices. “You need to disconnect everyone and have us all call back in,” I said. “Mr Bozell is coming,” said the moderator. Ring. Ring. Ring. Mr Bozell arrived.

“Hi every-”
Ring.
“This is Brent Boz-”
Ring.
“I’m joined by Grover Norq-”
Ring.
“We’re going to fight for conserva-”
Ring.

Thus, for tedious, ringing minutes. The ringing was shortly joined by intermittent clicking, as listeners dropped off the incomprehensible call.

“Our movement is stronger than ev-”
Ring.
“So we call on all conserv-”
Ring.

The last click I heard was my own. It is unfair to see a metaphor in this, but I will. Until we exercise power with the same alacrity and skill with which we acquire it, the conservative movement is this: a useless gathering of old men. We who know better cannot therefore blame those who flock to the vapid appeal of the likes of Barack Obama. If I did not know better, I would too. But I do, and so I struggle to not despair.

This is a generalization, and as such there are numerous counterexamples. Yet even those skew toward what may charitably be described as libertarianism. This is not necessarily a purely political libertarianism: the principle of absolute personal liberation extends much beyond. So, from personal experience, a dot-com millionaire who funds a campaign for limited government may abruptly shift his money toward the development of his personal space pod; or an industry eminence may maintain simultaneous memberships in a stodgy financiers’ lunch club and a free-love cult; or a noted telecom expert may refocus his efforts on achieving physical immortality. These things actually happen, and they speak to the fundamental premise of much of Silicon Valley — a belief in the power of smashing and revolt, so long as those things may be bought.

All this is by way of explaining the (on the surface) perplexing decision of Google toendorse the defeat of California’s Proposition 8. (In brief, Proposition 8 restores the state’s recognition of traditional marriage, which was overturned by judicial fiat some months ago. I will vote for it, but here’s the other side.) Google needs no introduction — you’re reading this online, so you know of it — except in the policy sphere, where it comes as a surprise to some that it is a decidedly left-wing organization. There is no need to document this in full here; readers are urged to check out Google’s own public-policy blog, wherein the company’s goals are laid forth to varying degrees of clarity. I was privileged to have an extended exchange with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, courtesy of RedState, at the RNC several weeks ago, and we sparred a bit over one of Google’s most prominent excursions into leftist policy advocacy — its endorsement of a regulatory framework to enforce “net neutrality.” Schmidt, as per the company line, argued that this was a purely altruistic endeavor of Google’s; and I argued that it was pure self-interest designed to head off future Google competitors. Neither convinced the other.

The truth is that we were both right to a certain extent. I have no doubt that Schmidt, as a canny and accomplished businessman, grasps Google’s self-interest in statist advance quite well. The extension of regulatory power on issues like net neutrality, public broadband, et al., tends to solidify existing market positions, which is extremely appealing to Google’s business-minded leadership for obvious reasons. Also of note is that as a major advocate of the new regulatory structures, Google would play a major role in shaping them, inevitably redounding to the company’s benefit. Had Microsoft been able to accomplish something similar circa 1995, the IT world would be quite different. Fortunately for Google, though less fortunately for our technology sector, Google’s leadership now is vastly more savvy and appealing than Microsoft’s leadership was then.

On the other hand, there is also the strain, represented by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — and probably the majority of Google’s technical community — that genuinely believes in the company’s social mission, as exemplified in its vapid “Don’t Be Evil” maxim. The likes of Schmidt may be too canny to buy into this mode of thinking, but they understand that it provides moral and media cover for their aims, and tout it accordingly. That’s the upside: the downside, of sorts, is that the company becomes a vehicle for the satisfaction of whatever half-formed moralistic impulse Page, Brin, & Co. may be afflicted with at the moment.

Thus the public opposition to Proposition 8. Brin, in justifying Google’s decision to weigh in, writes that its passage would have a “chilling and discriminatory effect … on many of our employees.” It’s putting it kindly to say there’s no evidence for this, and a more vigorous response might involve an assessment of the actual data on homosexual employment and social satisfaction at Google before and after the California Supreme Court invalidated traditional marriage in the state. Again, to put it kindly, the strong probability is that there is no meaningful difference. But this is window dressing: the Google founders do this because the Google founders wish it — and because they see Google not as a technology company as such, but as a motive force for revolutionary change in multiple spheres.

Thwarting these ambitions is not as daunting as it seems. Contrary to the call of some conservatives, there is no need to boycott Google. (One might as well boycott products from China, or things with plastic in them, for all its ubiquity.) Google’s starry-eyed leftists may see it as a motive force for change, and its clear-eyed corporate leadership may see it as an emerging monopolist, but what is objectively true is that Google is a market entity subject to market forces. Google’s products are often the best on the market, and they are just as often free — the time bomb in its business model, and a direct result of “Don’t Be Evil.” In time, the contradiction will resolve itself.

If you want to assess the “winner” of a campaign debate, the only data that matters is the post-debate polling — not the pronouncements of the pundits. It will be some days before we see what effect the McCain-Obama debate at Ole Miss has on the national polls, but in this first 24 hours following the meeting, we already have several data points to consider. All of them bode poorly for McCain. A CBS News/Knowledge Networks poll has Obama winning a plurality of uncommitted viewers. A Frank Luntz focus group of undecideds gave the edge to Obama. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll of viewers nationwide yielded a majority for an Obama victory. (Commentary’s Noah Pollak and RedState’s Jeff Emanuel rightly note a partisan skew in the CNN/ORC sample, but do not explore what this may signify: a significant edge in Democratic enthusiasm, manifesting itself in audience composition.) Most shocking is the Democracy Corps survey which, though a Democratic outfit, stacked its focus group 2-1 with ‘04 George W. Bush voters — and yielded a plurality for an Obama win.

The bottom line is that John McCain did not accomplish what he needed to: discredit Barack Obama as a responsible steward of America’s fortunes abroad. A major theme of his campaign is Obama’s callowness and consequent unfitness to lead in wartime. The failure to expose this posited shallow grasp of the wider world — a remarkable proposition about a half-Kenyan raised in Indonesia anyway — is a serious erosion of credibility for McCain. To find a foundational proposition of one’s candidacy rendered ineffectual is a tremendous blow.

There is no need to recount the debate in full. It was a dull affair that amply exposed the mediocrity and conventional thinking that mars American politics and policy on both sides. It is enough to note the moment when things went decisively south for John McCain. That point came when Obama went on the offensive in what is, I believe, the key passage from the whole ninety-minute event. I’ve noted before that Barack Obama is one of the great rhetoricians of our era, even if he loses his eloquence when shaken and unscripted. Prodded and mocked over the better part of an hour by his opponent — through the whole debate, McCain derided his “understanding” seven times, and his “naivete” three times — he finally let loose with a brutal and effective exercise in rhetorical parallelism, made the more cruel by its basic truth:

“John,” said the Democratic nominee, “you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003, and at the time when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shiite and Sunni. And you were wrong.”

In one swoop, the superiority of John McCain on foreign affairs was laid waste. An effective debater would have responded with a series of his foe’s own grievous errors in the same sphere — and despite his thin public record, Barack Obama has several. Instead, McCain lamely replied, “I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy,” and segued into a non sequitur about General Petraeus. To paraphrase Tallyrand, this was worse than a crime — it was a mistake. Assaulted on the very pillar of his candiacy, John McCain yielded.

To add insult to injury, this may well turn out to be McCain’s best debate of the campaign. The subject matter was as favorable to him as it will get — the other two debates, on October 7th and 15th, will have a town hall and domestic-policy format, respectively, and as such will not be so decisively tilted toward the Republican’s putative strengths. We may therefore reasonably expect that McCain will turn in substantively weaker performances, with the caveat that he may do unexpectedly well in the informality of a town hall setting. Sometimes he shines in give-and-take with ordinary citizens; but that is a thin reed upon which to rest hope.

The larger story here is not the debate. Rather, it is the story of which the debate is merely the culminating chapter: the three-week-long implosion of the McCain campaign itself. At the end of the first week of September, that campaign boasted its first lead in the national polls, a surprisingly successful convention, and an energizing vice-presidential nominee. At the end of the last week of September, the lead is gone, the convention is forgotten, and Sarah Palin is more disaster than delight. How this happened demands exploration, and we’ll get to it next.

This is good news, of course, but observers of the region understand that it is all quite fragile. Among the malign developments of the recent past is the fate of the “mainstream” of Northern Ireland politics in the wake of peace: contrary to hopes and expectations, the moderate (of sorts) Catholic and Protestant parties — the SDLP and the UUP respectively — have been pushed aside by their more historically radical cousins. (Readers may recall that the leaders of those parties shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize.) The latest Northern Ireland executive is led by the DUP and Sinn Fein, which is a bit like a cohabitation of Malcolm X and George Wallace. In fairness, it’s not been the catastrophe that one might have reasonably expected — and there is a case to be made that the old hard-line parties have reformed toward the mainstream, rather than the mainstream having gone hard-line. Still, the fact remains that the motive forces in the war on both sides are now in the driver’s seat — or rather, the drivers’ seat.

It is in the light of these outcomes that Tim Pat Coogan’s The Troubles must be read, both to understand how Northern Ireland got here, and to understand how extraordinary it is that Northern Ireland is here at all. The book covers a discrete 30-year period, from 1996 to 1996, and though that may seem inadequate — the Good Friday Agreement that yielded the present peace settlement was signed in 1998 — a late-edition epilogue covers the developments up to just prior to Tony Blair’s ascent to the UK Prime Ministership in 1997. Inasmuch as what exists now is mostly an outcome of pre-1996 events, it remains the best single-volume history of the Irish war in print.

Being the best, though, does not mean that it is as good as it ought to be. Coogan is probably the single most comprehensive author on modern Ireland, with a prolific output that focuses upon the island’s political development in the 20th century. As the son of an IRA man, and a noted journalist throughout the tumult of the past generation, he is uniquely placed to make sense of the interaction of ballot and bullet that drives his country’s society and politics. It is a pity, then, that he brings his massive knowledge and extraordinary access to bear in a manner that veers stylistically from dense, to turgid, to compelling — and back. The major flaw of The Troubles (shared with the other book of his I’ve read, his biography of Michael Collins), is his propensity for taking a rich and tragic subject, and relating it as a journalist would. Perhaps this seems an unfair critique, as Coogan is, after all, a journalist. Nonetheless, in reading The Troubles, one is struck by how badly Coogan needs an editor. Perhaps an editor’s hand was present in the writing; if so, one shudders to think of the state of the original manuscript. Opaque narrative digressions and baffling assumptions of readers’ prior knowledge mar the text, and misspellings — especially of American politicians’ names — jar the eye to distressing degree.

For a purported history, The Troubles is not much of one: roughly one-third of the way through the book, historical narrative is abandoned for a series of subject-specific chapters. (For example, a whole chapter on “The Media War” covers nearly 25 years.) A reader looking for a structure of the progress and regress of the situation in Northern Ireland is left to make sense of it all on his own, correlating the events of one chapter with the situation in another. This is aggravated by Coogan’s practice of referencing his own work, even within the book at hand. Often, the reader is asked to return to a previous chapter, or flip to a forthcoming one, for an explanation of a subject under discussion. The reader yearns for a strong editor who would have put a stop to this, and imposed a narrative flow on what should be the definitive work on its topic.

If nothing else, one walks away from The Troubles certain that Tim Pat Coogan has a grasp of the Northern Irish conundrum that exceeds even its most involved partisans. He has a bias, to be sure — he’s an Irish Catholic, after all — and it shows through at points where perhaps it ought not. A glaring omission in The Troubles is a moral examination of Republican atrocities. British and Unionist evils receive no such reprieve. Perhaps this seems an absurd complaint, especially given Coogan’s convincing case that Catholic resentment in Northern Ireland — as opposed to IRA terrorism — was thoroughly justified. Nonetheless, one expects a history to be as evenhanded as possible. Coogan does not write propaganda, but the reader ought to be aware of his decided perspective.

Is The Troubles worth reading? If you’re a fan of engrossing history that thrills and informs, no. The pity of Coogan’s work is his reduction of a generation of blood, strife, war, and romance to a dry and factual work. Irish history and Ireland itself demand more. If you wish to research either, you’ll probably end up at Coogan’s oeuvre anyway — and, in fairness, you’ll doubtless learn a great deal from him. But you will not, alas, be entertained.

A 2004 Pew Research Center survey on foreign policy attitudes revealed that 64% of Americans at large could conceive of situations — differing only in frequency, from rarely, to sometimes, to often — in which torture is justified. A 2005 Pew Research Center survey, conducted after the Abu Ghraib scandals, revealed that this total dropped by a full one percent, to 63%. Finally, a February 2008 Pew Research Center survey revealed a significant increase in situational support for torture in the American public at large, to 68%.

Referring to the actual survey (PDF) that Sullivan complains of, which he does not appear to do, reveals that the comparable number for white Southern evangelicals is, in fact, 73% — not “nearly six in 10.” This is, at first glance, a decent five percentage points higher than the figure for Americans at large. But a reference to the margins of error in the respective surveys reveals the numbers to be functionally identical. In other words, the white Southern evangelical support for torture is not meaningfully distinct from that of the country at large.

Add in the place of Southern evangelicals in the American social tapestry, and it becomes difficult to argue that they are the “mainstay of the torture regime in this country,” or any other regime of any sort. Approximately 26% of Americans are evangelicals, and though they are concentrated in the South, they are by no means restricted there — decidedly non-Southern states such as Pennsylvania, California, and Illinois claim nearly one in five residents as evangelical Christians.

A decent bit of time and research could be saved by simply declaring a priori that Andrew Sullivan is wrong. This may seem unfair, but it is increasingly justified by his own erratic behavior. On this topic alone, he veers away from reason with alarming consistency: to pick one example, in a prior post, he claimed without evidence that “evangelical Christians are now the greatest supporters of doing to prisoners what was once done to Christ,” thereby revealing a somewhat unfortunate incomprehension, for a self-proclaimed reformer of basic Christian teaching, of the nature of “what was once done to Christ.” That post was provoked by a survey on “world public opinion” (PDF) so methodologically shoddy — and so at odds with the previously-referenced Pew findings — as to be useless except as a propaganda piece.

Yet this is what Sullivan is now: a propagandist. He’s not so much a propagandist for any particular side — it was neo-conservatism yesterday, it’s an imaginary “conservative” Obama today — as he is a propagandist for whatever seizes Andrew Sullivan’s id. It is indeed a pity for a man who once showed such promise — and for the august publication that employs him. Andrew Sullivan, blogger and noise machine, is going strong. Andrew Sullivan, thinker, is done.

In answering the first question — whether the disparities between Obama mentioning McCain, and McCain mentioning Obama, hold true outside their respective convention addresses — I decided to conduct a rough survey of their posted remarks from August 1st and after on their campaign websites. The date was arbitrary — long enough after each wrapped up their respective nominations, and within a reasonable distance of the conventions. (On the latter, I assume that August was a month of honing themes for the conventions themselves.) Using campaign websites as a source is a risk — they do not, in fact, have every speech the candidate has given, and they tend to display prepared remarks rather than as delivered — but I assume they do reflect what the candidates want the public to read, and as such are a reasonable source that will yield relevant data. Finally, I only counted explicit, named references as mentions. Again, a rough survey indeed.

The results were illuminating. Though the three-to-one ratio of Obama’s mentions of McCain to McCain’s mentions of Obama does not hold, Barack Obama nonetheless does mention his opponent far more often than his opponent mentions him. Since August 1st, Obama has mentioned McCain approximately once every 347 words; McCain has mentioned Obama approximately once every 607 words. That’s about a 1.75:1 ratio. When the numbers are run as proportional per-speech averages, we find Obama mentioning McCain approximately once every 574 words, and McCain mentioning Obama approximately once every 560 words. This is about a 1.025:1 ratio — much closer indeed. Finally, when you average the mentions without reference to their proportion of total words, we find a per-speech average of 7.75 remarks by Obama about McCain, and a per-speech average of four remarks by McCain about Obama. This is just below a 2:1 ratio. (You can find the full dataset here, but be warned it’s an MS Office 2008 .xlsx file.)

The bottom line here is that Barack Obama is indeed talking about John McCain more than McCain is talking about him. The extent to which this is true depends upon how you look at the data — the mismatch is smallest when you calculate the average frequency of mentions according to total words per speech — but the mere existence of the disparity is constant.

Definitively answering the second question — what is the logic behind this phenomenon? — requires access to the Obama campaign that we won’t have for some time. Nonetheless, a reasonable hypothesis is possible. In politics as in war, there is a tendency to re-fight the last battles instead of the one at hand. This came to mind when I watched Barack Obama’s DNC speech two weeks back, and I was reminded of it again when I read Markos Moulitsas invoke 2004’s Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as a rationale for not “ignoring the other side.” The alternative to “ignoring the other side” is, of course, talking about it a great deal, and this appears to be the Democratic reflex in this election cycle. Those watching the American left over the past decade know that the narrative has taken root, especially in its activist class, that Democrats lose because Democrats don’t fight — or don’t fight dirty, or don’t fight as hard as Republicans, et cetera. This narrative has two beneficial effects for those promulgating it: it spurs the necessary masses to action, and it acts as a moral palliative. Losing feels a bit better if one loses for being too good. With this in mind, the fight-dirty, fight-hard Democratic impulse truly took off in 2006, where it was brought to bear against Joe Lieberman, who is still nonetheless a United States Senator. It continues now, in 2008, and it seems that Barack Obama himself — or at least his speechwriter — has bought in to its logic.

Finally, the third question demands to know whether this practice is working: does attacking John McCain often and by name yield results for Barack Obama? It is difficult to argue that it does — the RCP national poll averages have him behind, and for the first time, the RCP electoral-vote averages are not decisively in his favor. That said, it is difficult to argue that it doesn’t: we are barely a week past the RNC, and just four days past the presumed maximum post-convention polling bounce for McCain. Assuming that the disparity holds, and that it is deliberate on the Obama campaign’s part, it will be some time before its efficacy is known. The most that can be said thus far is that at the point of its maximum application — Obama’s DNC address — it helped yield a national-poll-average maximum of only 0.9 points above what John McCain achieved one week later. That’s not much, and it bodes ill for what is almost certainly meant as a decisive departure from Democratic campaigns past.