My goal was to have scandalized Daniel Koffler for his ludicrous and hasty comparison of Jeremiah Wright to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglass. In that, I seem to have succeeded given the epic two-part miniseries he has composed, directed and edited (complete with artist renderings of scarecrows) in reply. To begin with his many points in order of most bizarre and trivial to most important:

I was unaware that Andrew Sullivan's actuarial kindness to Susan Sontag in any way altered his double-bookkeeping in terms of batshit statements made by hard leftists. He has renamed his award for Michael Moore to encompass this tradition. Very well. My point remains. Daniel knows, for instance, that Sullivan downplayed the damning evidence compiled against his other doyen of doubtful conservatism, Ron Paul, when it would have been impossible to imagine the Sullivan of, say, 2001 finding excuses for those racist newsletters.

Daniel claims his original post about was designed to "exculpate" King and Douglass -- they need no exculpating, if you ask me -- and to "inculpate" Wright. Funny, then, that he should have begun by attributing the words of the first two men to the third as an act of forensic legerdemain. True, he later says: "Of course, the contexts in which Douglass and King spoke and wrote were very different from Wright's: slavery and pervasive legalized persecution, respectively. That discrepancy is what's objectionable about Wright's remarks." But then, as if to negate this observation, Daniel adds: "On the other hand, Wright lived through the latter experience, and was raised in living memory of the former." So does that mean that Wright is to be accorded more latitude after all? Which is it?

The keen reader will see that Daniel's original post tended toward equation and exculpation, as when he wrote:

"How much conceptual space is there, really, between thundering "God damn America for killing innocent people" and ventriloquizing a promise from God to "break the backbone of your power," between declaring America guilty of "practices more shocking and bloody" than any other country on earth and framing the 9/11 attacks as "chickens coming home to roost"? And which remark from each pair would count as more "incendiary" under the standards Wright... is being judged?"

Quite a lot, I would say. As I have tried to show, Wright's comments were not argued so much as emitted; he lacked eloquence (I thought one thing Obama has taught us is that "words matter"?) and sophistication; and, most important, he was talking insidious rubbish where MLK and Douglass had the moral weight and historical exigency in their favor. Wright is also guilty of actions and statements of which MLK and Douglass were plainly not:

a. Condoning terrorism against Jews;
b. Paying a friendly visit to a foreign dictator responsible for killing Americans;
c. Speaking unfairly and erroneously about U.S. actions abroad.

No, Daniel, I don't expect anyone who doesn't presume to condemn the bombing of the al-Shifa factory to know anything about it. But including it in a list of scattershot indictments from the pulpit before a congregation that likely knew nothing at all of the episode, and lying that "hundreds" of innocent third worlders were killed by a heartless American war machine -- this seems to be the work of a glib-tongued fraud, does it not?

After much exertion and many pyrotechnics of evasion and philosophizing, Daniel writes: "A dumb preacher hadn't read up on Richard Clarke material published years after the sermon? He got his numbers wrong?"

The numbers -- i.e., the fatalities -- were available within hours of the bombing, I should think. Anyway, after so much nuance, which surely has my rods and cones melting at the last, I'm glad to see Daniel at least provides le mot juste about the notorious Rev.

Am I guilty of the Fox News treatment? Did I not take one of his entire sermons and present the logic therein accurately and accordingly? Daniel has a problem of assuming that just because Sean Hannity has been driven to frenzy over something then it is automatically worth rehabilitating, at least in part, and coloring in various shades of "gray." (Daniel should take care to avoid crediting himself with "nuance" as against my and all of Wright's harsh critics' slobbering Manicheanism. I could have done without some of the sanctimony on display here but if I take anything away from his essay it is that I mustn't judge a friend by commissar standards of behavior.)

Daniel begins his rebuttal by calling Wright a "left-wing Falwell" and just another paltry rabble-rouser politicians are made to go before on bended knee and placate. All par for the course, see. They all do it.

Here is question: Without looking it up, can Daniel name John McCain's pastor? And is it just the fault of the right-wing news cycle that we can all name Obama's?

Those Daniel has certainly not been at a loss to name in these pages are all the unsavory prelates and shamans McCain has courted, the better to win the White House. Now Daniel knows as well as I do that McCain very probably thinks John Hagee is a reactionary hick, the type of evangelical he once got into so much hot water with Republicans for branding "agents of intolerance." Does this factor in, or mitigate Daniel's evaluation of McCain's cold politicking? Of course it doesn't. (Whither the "interpretive charity" from this Scrooge?) Yet when it comes to Obama's own, practically lifelong clergyman, we hear the whirr of the backpedal and witness wells of ink spilled to separate the obscene from the not-so-bad; the sixties from the aughts; the "hobby" from the "vocation." (Daniel has this backwards: Wright's job is to preach; it is his pastime to advocate condom usage.)

There are only two possible ways to account for Obama's relationship with Wright, and I'd be gratified to see Daniel state here which he suspects is the truth.

The first is the one I find more credible; namely, that having no religious belief whatsoever, Obama joined Trinity because he found it an easy and convenient access point to the slightly seedy, and heavily populist world of Chicago politics. He never left because he continued to draw political dividends from his association. He is a thoughtful, decent man by nature, but he is also ambitious and, perhaps driven by desire for "change," is willing to sacrifice certain principles in order to get ahead and accomplish it. Without resorting to equivalence -- and part of my beef with Daniel is that he can't say "Obama" without saying "Clinton" in the next breath -- we must judge the following by this set of circumstances: Obama is guilty of cynicism and calculation, and also dishonesty before his fellow churchgoers and the country to whom he presents the opposing explanation for his involvement with Wright. That is, as recent transplant from Hawaii to Chicago, Obama discovered Trinity and the hopeful, honied sermons of its head minister; he was so moved by them that they ignited in him the spark of the divine and encouraged his desire to do good in the community and beyond (titling his book after one of Wright's optimistic phrases). Obama never heard a word beyond what he deems "controversial" pass the lips of his beloved pastor in either a private or public forum. Withal, and despite a few admitted hiccups of poor judgment on Wright's part which were well known -- meeting with Gaddafi in '84 (some of my best friends met with Gaddafi; what of it, Torquemada?), extolling the virtues of Farrakhan, sounding like that uncorked uncle at the dinner table we can't renounce but simply roll our eyes at -- Obama remained in Wright's flock because, on the fundamentals, Wright was right.

In either possibility, I find myself asking the same question: What kind of judgment does this show in a man with aspirations for high office, an obvious intellectual, an avowed "uniter"? Are we to believe that religion and charity could only be found in such pulpit-pounding, vulgarian form? And here I must resort to equivalence: where other politicians might be mercenary in forging alliances of convenience with people they have only met a few times, and whose catechism they never claimed occupied such great power and urgency in their own lives, Obama failed to take the full measure of a man he and his family have known intimately for twenty years. This is bothersome on its face. Why it required a lesson plan on race hostility in America is another question.

I don't know what percentage of Wright's sermons over the years can be counted in the nutbag category, and what percentage are more of the harmless "Audacity of Hope" variety. Neither does Daniel, who nevertheless concludes that the total picture of this multifaceted, self-contradictory, complex man is "unsympathetic."

I am then offered the challenge (and so are you): "If anyone can find a reference to one of the horrific white evangelicals McCain has courted committing to tolerance for people different from them, I'll stand corrected."

Sen. Sam Brownback is not a man whose sinister role in American politics I would find myself racing to explain away or complicate overmuch. But there is one area in which I would be honorbound to give this pious devil his due: It was good, decent and courageous of him to bang on about the genocide in Darfur when no one else was doing so. Why do I say it was courageous? Because part of the reason for the Bush administration's foot-dragging in addressing this atrocity was its fear of destroying the gains made in southern Sudan, where a civil war between Muslims and Christians had been just been concluded. (The facilitation of which is still widely cited as the Bush administration's finest hour in foreign policy.) The evangelical right, of which Brownback is so stridently a part, clearly understood that such an infant and tenuous peace agreement could be jeopardized by Darfur interventionism, since both were at the mercy of the horrific Khartoum regime. Nevertheless, he stood on principle and screamed bloody murder.

Sen. Brownback has endorsed John McCain.

Daniel accuses me of "absurd, incongruous, reductive balancing, which is not even so much a false equation as an inequality with the sign pointing in the wrong direction. The McClurkin factor is the only one he takes to matter."

Donnie McClurkin, for what it's worth, is an "ex-gay" gospel singer who performed at three of Obama's "Embrace the Change" rallies. Speaking in October before a crowd of 2,000 in South Carolina, a state Obama went on to win in the primary, McClurkin had this to say: "I don't speak against the homosexuals. I tell you that God delivered me from homosexuality. No matter what blog you read, let me tell you, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature!" The Obama camp didn't repudiate this philosophy either; it merely added an openly gay man to take part in the morning prayer as a way of assuaging angry gay activists.

Now go back to my original post and please tell me where I get into any of this (the name McClurkin is merely quoted by the commenter at Queerty in the course of his broader indictment of James Meeks.) The real "McClurkin factor" in this debate was confined to private correspondence with Daniel, and so I would ask that, in re-pasting his letters to me for public consumption, he at least make it a point of etiquette not to speak out of turn like this, or to attribute points and assertions to me in print that I have not yet published. He also quotes words ("probity," "suasion") I had not written here, only to him. This is all in the way of providing the reader with badly-needed context. (See, I'm not such a binaristic baddie after all.)

However, since he brought it up, allow me to knock away this dangerously imbalanced equation and with it, needless paragraphs with which Daniel -- a bit high on his own supply, I must say -- alights his own overstuffed straw man and begins to grow self-pitying:

I don't accuse Obama of homophobia, only opportunism. He is an advocate of gay rights, to be sure (though Daniel's wrong: Dennis Kucinich was the best candidate for president, according to this criterion.) Yet Obama seems not at all reluctant to allow crass, bigoted members of the black community to stump for him now that they might produce greater electoral draws for him in November. Is it really so pardonable to tussle with homophobes and then invite them to make you president, or at least acquiesce in their willingness to do so? Daniel lauds his own utilitarian credentials, and yet a simple search through the Jewcy archives will show that he also knows how to call out a low campaign style when he sees one -- so long as it belongs to Clinton or McCain.

"Is Michael honestly prepared to suggest that [Obama] was trying to court anti-gay sentiments? While simultaneously denouncing them? Having spent a career fighting them in his own community? That Obama's profound break with precedent and conventional political wisdom count for zero?"

One rubs the eyes. Do not politicians routinely court those whose opinions they have elsewhere denounced?  And is this really such a staggering concept for a political commentator to grasp? 

It's not a negligible point to ask what even a moderately pro-gay rights stance has cost McCain politically. The backing of James Dobson, for one thing, and the enmity of other movement conservatives, who couldn't abide by McCain's opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment in the Senate. On points of legislature, and owing to his longer tenure, he has amassed more material results on behalf of the gay community than Obama has done. (And oh what heartbreak will ensue when the former state senator accustomed to voting "present" must make law-law and not just jaw-jaw.)

On a related note, I broke one of my earlier rules. This should have gone up top in the response-to-triviality section: I'm accused of lifting evidence against James Meeks from a commenter at Queerty, in which said commenter was responding to an article defending Obama on gay rights. Gotcha. Or mea culpa, if you like. Worse still: James Meeks must be a figment of my imagination because his resume was recounted at that site by a (cover your ears, darlings) Hillary Clinton supporter! Mea maxima culpa.

The interested will find that all that evidence about Meeks -- from his place on Obama's presidential exploratory committee, to his appearance in TV ads for Obama, to his prominent campaign appearances with the candidate -- can be substantiated. The Chicago Sun-Times piece referring to "Fright Night" is available here. An excerpt from Cathleen Falsani's book on Obama's spirituality, which mentions the Meeks connection, is available here. See also David Ehrenstein's brief against Meeks in the Chicago Tribune, here.

I have more: According to the Southern Poverty Law Center,

The Rev. James Meeks is a key member of Chicago's "Gatekeepers" network, an interracial group of evangelical ministers who strive to erase the division between church and state. A stalwart anti-gay activist, Meeks has used his House of Hope mega-church to launch petition drives for the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), a major state-level "family values" pressure group that lauded him last year for leading African Americans in "clearly understanding the threat of gay marriage."

With over 22,000 members, Meeks' congregation was large enough to buoy his successful 2002 campaign for state senator. Last year, he ran for governor as a virtual single-issue candidate, drawing national support from Christian fundamentalists by boldly vowing to fight marriage equality at every turn. Meeks eventually dropped out of the race.

Meeks and the [Illinois Family Institute] are partnered with Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defense Fund, major anti-gay organizations of the Christian Right. They also are tightly allied with Americans for Truth, an Illinois group that said in a press release last year that "fighting AIDS without talking against homosexuality is like fighting lung cancer without talking against smoking."

A key player in the Obama campaign has more in common, then, with James Dobson than McCain does. No matter -- fodder for debunking the myth of the maverick on another day is smoke and mirrors today because Obama is against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and for bolstering civil unions. Or who knows. We learn the truth about his positions when he fires or chastises an adviser for speaking it; whether it pertains to his unconditional policy of withdrawal from Iraq immediately until he becomes commander-in-chief and "reserves the right" to reassess the situation, or to a sung trade policy that applies only to working-class Democrats in Ohio. On Sundays. During a full moon.

Anyway, as to the minutiae of my quoting a commenter, Daniel did not give us the full speech from Frederick Douglass; he linked to a reader's email (and that, presumably, of a fervent Obama supporter) sent to Sullivan and citing just the one extract. There. Are we even now?

As for a profound tu quoque: a McCain maneuver that Daniel would have sniffed out in a millisecond finds him wielding his "nuance" brush with abandon all over Obama's chief political liability. He grows defensive when I suggest he is acting out of partisanship, and he falsely attributes demands I never made of him: "But Michael says that's not enough. That I must go further than a nuanced though ultimately condemnatory appraisal of Wright. That I must go further in drawing conclusions about Obama."

No, I'd have settled for nothing at all. What pissed me off was Wright = MLK = Douglass. (Except of course when one of them was being "inculpated" and the rest "exculpated;" though only Daniel and I guess Demosthenes knows which is which and when to use what.)

Evidently, though, I've been deceitful, too. According to Daniel, I've been implying, never asserting "Obama shares Wright's views of white people or foreign policy," all the while asserting "Obama is an imperfect man who joined a black-liberation church to assuage his psychological qualms and remained partly out of expediency."

Goodness. Well, I should think that by saying the second the first would be rather difficult logically to imply. But then Daniel says my game is to intermix the two by "osmosis," so now I'm just confused as to what my Machiavellian chem-lab intentions were in the first place.

I'm also accused of having ice water in my veins, or acting as if all my friends were the very picture of intellectual salubrity and moral rectitude. "I wouldn't end a friendship with someone who turned out to be a pacifist (or a Christian), nor would that friendship imply anything about my views on foreign policy any more strongly than Wright's simplistic swords-into-plowshares, chickens-coming-home-to-roost talk implies anything about Obama's views."

Nor would I. Yet I would also not take communion from such a person, compare my voluntary friendship with him to an involuntary family relation, or try to convince the world that, after twenty years of knowing each other, I had never heard him utter anything beyond "controversial" -- if only because this would make me appear and feel foolish.

Obama is only human, was what he supposed to do? I don't speak for my fellow osmotic n'er-do-wells here, but I'd have been satisfied with Obama's profession of complicated loyalty to Wright, inflected with admission of strong disagreement with him, without the further imputation -- and I know I made this plain in my post about his speech -- that all black men of Wright's generation have the ghost of such a worldview still to exorcise. I found that objectionable and demeaning, and also narcissistic because it does smack of an all-too-Christian and all-too-fallible moral axiom rejiggered to serve a political purpose: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Well, as against Wright, I know of plenty of people who are as innocents before the Fall, so: "Incoming!"

Many died in the 60's fighting institutional racism without collapsing into a void of fear-mongering, paranoia and conspiracy. I don't say that out of some sickly-sweet deification of figures like King. (As it happens, I agree with I.F. Stone that the "I Have a Dream" speech was "saccharine." I much prefer "Letter from a Birmingham Jail.") Elevate Wright, and do we not lower others and their legacies? Extrapolate from his one-man scandal of a persona a national discussion about race, and do we not create a snare for ourselves when next confronted with an oily charlatan with a bill of goods to sell and a trail of tears for us to follow?

We have been talking about race, ad nauseum. Imus, Richards -- oh so much nuance and healing proffered on their gutter-mouthed behalves. We cannot escape the topic, and nor will black comedians white people can't imitate at the office fail to remind us of the raging id beneath the thin integument of civility and decorum. Had Jeremiah Wright been webmaster of "Stuff White People Like," we'd have all laughed and looked away. Instead, he is who he is: a "dumb preacher," to use Daniel's elegant variation, who thinks the answer is not hosting dinner parties but murdering civilians out of Biblical bloodlust. For shame.

Are you a South Carolinian worried about illegal immigrants pouring over the border between Mexico and your fair state? (And why shouldn't you be? Hispanics are almost 3% of South Carolina's population!) Never fear: Help is on the way. Buddy Witherspoon, proven conservative Republican, is challenging liberal incumbent Senator Lindsey Graham.

Think calling Lindsey Graham a liberal makes absolutely no sense? Well, doubting Thomas, take a look at this: images of border crossings and people speaking Spanish. No one knows for sure what "trabajar" and "gracias, Lindsey Graham" mean, but it's probably some sort of terrorist plot -- superimposed on top of salsa music.

Are the stakes in this election clear now? Like Buddy says, it's time for a senator with South Carolina values.

After three weeks of struggling mightily to code, encrypt, and in general repress any direct public expression of their mutual antagonism, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama finally made it clear how much they simply dislike one another last night. In the nastiest debate of the primary campaign so far, Clinton had apparently come prepared with reams of oppo research committed to memory and went to the well so many times with it that she was eventually, loudly booed. Obama, meanwhile, turned out not to be so above it all, after all; he only had one particularly gratuitous swipe, but it was a doozy:

I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.

Clinton's response was a tactical, if not a moral masterpiece --- accusing Obama of having been a consigliere for a slumlord in Chicago. The real story here, unsurprisingly, is basically benign, if a bit convoluted. But the point of levelling a charge like that has nothing to do with its truth or falsity. The point is to convey the message: "Everyone knows I'm crooked like the next politician. You're dreaming if you think Barack is any different." That's why Obama can't win in an exchange like this: No ethical indictment of Hillary Clinton, however true, tarnishes her already disreputable public image; no comparable indictment of Barack Obama, however false, fails to dull the lustre of his reputation somewhat.

Continue reading...

Last week, Barack Obama told the Reno Gazette editorial board that Ronald Reagan built a broad coalition and realigned American politics, and Bill Clinton didn't. This is a true fact. Another true fact is that for Democrats to build a broad coalition at any point in the near future, they'll have to win the support of a lot of people who voted for and admire Reagan. 

Paul Krugman apparently prefers the Mondale model of electoral politics. "Where in his remarks," Krugman asks plaintively, "was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?" Got that? The Party says Reagan was bad; therefore, one must not mention Reagan without mentioning his badness, even in a completely unrelated context. To do so is to license the inference that one is a deviationist. So, what is to be done with the Renegade Obama?

For bonus points, guess which prospective Democratic candidate for president said that "Reagan's policies…certainly accelerated the trend [of victory in the Cold War]."  Guess which Democratic candidate advertises her evaluation of Reagan as one of her favorite presidents on her website. (Whoops, gave that last one away.) Guess which New York Times columnist won't be denouncing the Clintons later this week.

This is more than a week old, but it has inspired a new feature. Ladies and gentlemen, blog-prodigy Ezra Klein on Barack Obama's victory speech in Iowa:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

So Obama's not Jesus; he's awesomer than Jesus!

as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it 

I think that's what OT-VII feels like. 

Ezra Klein's finest blog posts do not excite, and they certainly don't inform. They enmesh you in an ego-stroking, hallucinatory interpretive dance to Das Kapital, the Port Huron Statement, and the Gospel of John.

Well done indeed.

At Pajamas Media, Michael Ledeen gives an absolute barracking to Jonah Goldberg's new book. Ledeen, who learned about fascism from Italy's greatest historian of fascism, Renzo De Felice, stays fastidiously polite while noting that it's difficult to write cogently about fascism without understanding what fascism is:

“Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state.” That is not fascism; it’s absolute monarchy, it’s the Sun King in France, it’s the great enlightened despots like Frederick the Great. But it’s not Mussolini or his imitators, and certainly not Hitler, whose vision was global, not just national. The issue is “the same goals,” not just the methods of rule, and here’s where Jonah’s eccentric thesis, for all its provocative value, leaves history behind and strides into…vision, I suppose. Just a few lines later, he claims that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator,” and that’s just silly.

There's a fairly extensive literature out there on the origins and varieties of totalitarianism. Some of it's left-wing. Some of it's right-wing. Left-wing totalitarianism has a property in common with right-wing totalitarianism: being totalitarian. Left-wing totalitarianism has a property right-wing totalitarianism doesn't have: being left wing. And vice versa. By Leibniz's Law, they're not the same!

There was a bizarre moment in the Democrats' Nevada debate, in which Tim Russert asked all three candidates if they would enforece legislation that's been on the books for years depriving funding to academic institutions that don't support ROTC programs. And who could be against that? So all three candidates, predictably, answered yes.

Neither Russert nor anyone else at the debate even hinted at the subtext to this question, namely, the reason that many schools, including essentially every prestigious school in the country, do not have ROTC programs, is the prohibition on gays serving openly in the military. The original incarnation of the legislation Russert mentioned, the Solomon amendment of 1996, merely blocked federal funding to any sub-element of a university that disallowed ROTC or military recruitment, and only to such a sub-element. So Yale Law School, for example, could have lost funding if it chose not to allow military recruiters access to its careers website. But the Yale chemistry department, where a lot of important cancer research goes on, which relies heavily on government grants, and which has nothing to do with military recruitment, would not suffer.

After George W. Bush came to office in 2001 with two houses of Congress in Republican control, the Solomon amendment was revised so that an entire university would be deprived of all federal funding if any sub-element within it did not acquiesce to military recruitment. Both the intent and the effect was to blackmail law schools. The upshot is an absurd game of chicken, with the federal government prioritizing Don't Ask Don't Tell over both national security --- dismissal of, say, gay linguists makes us objectively less safe --- and important scientific research.

That's what the Democratic candidates just signed onto.     

Richard Cohen, the most useless columnist in America this side of Maureen Dowd, had a hit piece out on Barack Obama today, which noted that Obama's church's pastor's daughter's magazine gave an award to Louis Farrakhan, and managed to splutter out this pants-soilingly embarrassing bit of incoherence: "I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man." Try plugging that conjunction into a truth-table.

Obama has responded:

I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.

So, that should clear up Richard Cohen's fog, shouldn't it? Meanwhile, it's possible to play six degrees of Louis Farrakhan with anybody who's been active in black politics, however peripherally. So the Cohen logic would disqualify any black politician from the presidency.

UPDATE: Excellent point from Henry Farrell. Billy Graham and Richard Nixon used to tickle each other into euphoria exchanging their shared hatred of Jews. Billy Graham is also what some credulous people call a "spiritual adviser" to Hillary Clinton. The rap on Hillary Clinton is that she's a fog of a woman: out there for all these years, but we still don't really know her. So until HRC explicitly denounces anti-Semitism generally and Graham specifically, we can't know for sure where she stands.

She's not happy he's gone, perish the thought. She just sees the silver lining in his passing:

Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me.

And this is merely a closing rhetorical flourish. Who among us wouldn't be moved by the death of our parents to ponder how much we hate Ted Kennedy, how abortion is infanticide, how Ted Kennedy isn't a good Catholic, how unions are corrupt and how John Edwards is a faggot?

What a strange person.

Christian Right leaders generally insist that the Constitution isn't a secular document, and that separation of church and state, as Pat Robertson inimitably put it "is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore." Well, Mike Huckabee disagrees. He thinks the Constitution is an artifact of heathenism. Fortunately, the Huckster intends to do something about our founders' moral laxity:

I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards.

Non-Christian Right apologists for the Christian Right often complain that charges of theocracy and coinages like "Christianism" are simplistic and unfair. This epistle would seem to resolve the matter, at least as far as Huckabee is concerned, would it not? 

Here's the backstory: NBC came up with a set of criteria for admission to the Democratic debate in Nevada tomorrow that they hoped would exclude the lovable little gremlin. Unfortunately for them, he qualified. So, naturally, NBC changed the criteria to ones Kucinich couldn't meet, and disinvited him.

Well, Kucinich took his case to court and won. So tomorrow night, in addition to Obama's audacious hope, Clinton's audacious sense of entitlement, and Edwards' audacious egomania in staying in the race, we can expect a few entertaining sermons on "the rejection of war as an instrument of policy" --- because wars are better fought without any policy goals in mind.

As Andrew Sullivan would say, money quote:

Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

That's about right. But let's add, willing to throw any vulnerable group under the bus --- from the Ricky Ray Rector photo-op slaughter to the Dick Morris-inspired DOMA to the last few weeks of innuendo suggesting Barack Obama was a crack dealer --- purely for self-aggrandizement. As for her vaunted experience, let's just say she was a reverse Eleanor Roosevelt: amplifying and exacerbating all the ugly features of her husband's administration.

With Roger Clemens due to testify before Congress in February over his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs --- because what could be more appropriate for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee than to spend its resources on a headline grabber having nothing to do with reform or oversight of government --- the New York Times brings word that it's not just athletes who've been hitting the needle. Actors, musicians, and general "show business celebrities" apparently enjoy the occasional prick in their hindquarters as well.

Since the steroid hysteria isn't likely to pass any time soon, it would be helpful if reporters covering the 'roid beat knew what the hell they were talking about. For example, upon hearing that Mary J. Blige was named in the investigation, her spokesindividual Karynne Tencer proclaimed:

“Mary J. Blige has never taken any performance-enhancing illegal steroids.” Ms. Tencer added that Ms. Blige had not taken any antiaging steroids either.

Well, fine, except that there is no such thing as an "antiaging steroid." The only substance she could plausibly be referring to is growth hormone, which is a peptide hormone, not a steroid. (The former is a chain of amino acids, the latter is a completely different chemical type related to cholesterol.) In other words, this isn't a relevant denial, and one shouldn't have to have background knowledge of chemistry to realize that.

Incidentally, this is just as much a dog bites man story as the news that athletes take performance enhancers. Did Brad Pitt get in shape for Fight Club exclusively on his own? Maybe, but there's also this chemical called clenbuterol --- neither a steroid nor growth hormone, and more useful to actors than either of them (see how it's helpful to know these distinctions?) --- that would have made things a lot easier. Is it possible that Christian Bale lost and then gained something on the order of 75 lbs. between The Machinist and Batman Begins without any chemical help? Well it's possible, but there were easier ways. Did some of the guys in 300 employ chemistry as well as barbells in prepping for the film? Undoubtedly.

What's more, the market has spoken. We like our actors juicing. Almost as much as we like pointless and empty moral posturing.

At the GOP debate I didn't see last night, Mike Huckabee said this:

“The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.”

Matt Yglesias has a chuckle and responds:

This is basically a form of affirming the consequent. If you're over the target, you'll catch flak and Huckabee is catching flak "therefore" he must be over the target.

Except, no it isn't. Affirming the consequent is reasoning if p then q, q, therefore p, which is a corrupted form of modus ponens: if p then q, p, therefore q. That's not what's going on here. Let's say p = x is not catching flack, and q = x is not over the target. Huckabee is denying the antecedent: if p then q, not p, therefore not q; this is a corrupted form of modus tollens: if p then q, not q, therefore not p.

Incidentally, the Air Force is wrong. Not taking flak doesn't imply not being over the target: for example, you could be over the target when the flak cannon malfunctions, in which case you'd be not taking flak, but over the target. Huckabee, it turns out, is accidentally right because of a true modus ponens argument: if you're catching flack, you're over the target; he's catching flack, therefore....

The moral: If you want to make fun of hillbilly logic, it's probably a good idea to doublecheck your own work. Just saying.

From the Tampa Tribune undorsement of Rudy Giuliani:

In a conversation with this editorial board, he said the way to end terrorism is: "You get rid of the nation states that support it," opening the door to a host of possibilities.

That's Rudy Giuliani of New York, running for the Cthulu Party presidential nomination --- because why vote for a lesser evil?

Matt Yglesias posts an email from a reader pointing out that Ron Paul's obsession with gold-backed currency was a sure indicator of conspiracist nut-jobbery, long before the newsletters came to light. Matt asks how the gold standard went from being conventional wisdom to a fringe lunacy.

Good question! The Bretton Woods system, the international monetary regime set up after World War II, began as a means of stabilizing the global economy by pegging all currencies against the dollar and preserving dollar convertability to gold. Over time, Bretton Woods evolved into an increasingly non-fixed system of exchange, and by the time it was dismantled, the last vestiges of the gold standard were known as "paper gold."

At the same time, Bretton Woods involved every hobgoblin that keeps the paranoid up at night --- a secretive monied elite, wide-ranging international institutions, homosexual and Jewish financiers, etc. So when Bretton Woods turns out to be the key transition from fixed to floating currency, what's someone who knows the truth about the new world order to do, but stock up on gold bullion and guns and head out to Montana.

The British government is building a nuclear power infrastructure, and environmental ideologues are whining. There are several reasonable objections against the plan, but some are echoes of the anti-nuclear hysteria that has obstructed the building of nuclear plants in the US, as well as the UK, for decades.

Might America follow Britain's example? It's a technology that produces reliable energy, serves as a tremendous boon to the economy, and doesn't exacerbate global warming. But many environmentalists feel that technology should neither make a profit nor emerge from military research -- which is never beneficial. Of course, Soviet mismanagement caused a disaster, but compare this with the entire nation of France.

Either you believe that we should employ all feasible strategies for combating global warming, or else you're just posturing for attention.

The nation of Thailiand is the latest to enact a comprehensive ban on smoking in any area smaller than a football field. Brushing aside complaints from bar owners and restaurateurs, the Thai Health Ministry is confident that banning smoking is a money-making proposition for private entrepreneurs. So if you're smoker who's always had a hankering for a ping-pong show or sex with a kathoey, you've got until the end of January to make that holiday happen --- otherwise you'll have to pack Nicorette.

Meanwhile, over here in the land of the free, a suburb of St. Louis is mulling a proposal to ban swearing, table-dancing and "profane music" in bars. No word on whether the enforcement mechanism would be a swear jar, posting nuns with rulers on a continuous APB, or just calling in SWAT teams whenever there's a complaint. Next up for St. Charles, MO: No talking, smiling, or laughing in an enclosed public area.

In the course of defending his Ron Paul reporting against a criticism from Virginia Postrel, David Weigel calls me "excitable," and claims:

[T]he Paul pile-on is starting to get ridiculous. You can blame Paul and the ghostwriters for some of this, for keeping what was in the newsletters so quiet, but simply because so many of them are now out I'm seeing "damning" quotes that pad the lists without making Paul look out of line...[some of the quotes] wouldn't sound out of place, frankly, in a conservative blog or in National Review. For example:

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country.

This is something Herman Cain says once or twice every hour.

The Earth Summit is the creepiest meeting of politicos since the first gathering of Bolsheviks. Officially known as the UN Conference for Environment and Development, it will be held in Brazil in June; bad guys from all over the globe will attend.

Silly, but sounds like something John Bolton would say.

Well, here's the thing. Not all the Paul quotes are equally repulsive, and there is nothing objectionable about taking exception to the earth summit, nor necessarily about observations of black political uniformity. But the former comes in the context of heaps of crazy rambling about one-world government conspiracies --- indeed, in the context of speculating that a literal "Trotskyite-Maoist" conspiracy is poised to take over the world. Therefore it seemed fairly clear to me that the term "Bolshevik" was not merely a hyperbolic rhetorical point, but another datum of paranoid conspiracy-mongering. In context, remarks about secretive one-worldist meetings are not benign.

Likewise, the claim about black political uniformity comes in a discussion of the feral qualities of blacks and how they are brainwashed by their leaders to commit violence. Furthermore, the repetitive incantation of the word, 'black' this, 'black' that, 'black' the other thing, is indicative of an attitude in the same way that saying 'Jew,' 'Jew,' 'Jew' would be.

In any case, there are pages upon pages of damning material --- the stuff I posted at Jewcy isn't any less disgraceful than what I posted at PJM (arguably more), it's just that I didn't yet have access to all the documents --- and what we've got represents a very small tranche out of twenty years of Ron Paul Freedom/Political/Survival Reports. Somehow, because a few of the pull quotes, interpreted a certain (incorrect) way, would not be terribly damaging, it's a pile-on to interpret them in context and grasp their full noxiousness?

I'll be on a radio show in Texas, I think in Paul's home district, to discuss this stuff at 11:20. You can listen here and decide if I'm excitable.

John Kerry has decided to endorse Barack Obama, the wine-track candidate running against the Democratic establishment, rather than his own running mate of four years ago, John Edwards. Is this eerily familiar to anyone else of Al Gore deciding to endorse Howard Dean, the wine-track candidate running against the Democratic establishment, rather than his own running mate of four years earlier, Joe Lieberman? The latter event, as I recall, preceded the complete collapse of Dean by a few weeks. Here's hoping that induction fails in this case.

Like John Kerry on election day in 2004 -- when the exit polls first came in until around 7:30-8:30pm EST -- Barack Obama had fun being president for a few days; and I hope he'll get to be president for a few more.

What happened? The last Zogby poll had Obama ahead by 13; Rasmussen 7; Keith Olbermann says the internal Obama polls showed him winning by 13, and the internal Clinton polls showed him winning by 11. He lost by three. Could it really be that Hillary Clinton sort-of crying (see Mike's post below) vaulted her to victory?

I'm listening to Eugene Robinson on MSNBC going over the exit polls, and as it turns out, among voters who decided in the last three days, Obama actually came out ahead 37-36. So Hillary's anti-Muskie moment didn't decide things. Was Obama (shudder) a victim of the Bradley effect? But then why would only white women lie to pollsters? If anybody's got an idea how the polls were so far off, I'm listening.

There seem to be some increasingly cemented fissures in the Democratic electorate: men, young voters, wealthy voters, and educated voters for Obama; women, old(er) voters, poor voters, and uneducated voters for Clinton. It's beer track vs. wine track, plus a gender split, and neither bodes well for Obama. On the other hand --- and do re-read the last sentence before you accuse me of Hewitt-like denialism --- I can't see how the Edwards campaign continues. (His support would presumably go to Obama.)

Next up are Nevada and South Carolina. Nevada was going to be a cakewalk for Obama after the Culinary Workers Union decided to endorse him. Until, who would have guessed it, the CWU got cold feet. Oh well, si se puede.

Jamie Kirchick's devastating article on the occluded history of the Ron Paul Freedom/Political/Survival Report is rebounding all over the web. I published a complementary digest of some of the Paul Report's most egregious quotes at PJM, which got linked at Drudge, within a few minutes got more traffic than probably everything I've ever written combined, and several hundred comments, mostly from pissed off Paulites.

I think it's worth taking a moment to put all this in context and say why it's important. When the initial controversy over donations to Paul from white nationalist groups first surfaced, I defended him, largely on the grounds that, from what I could tell, there was no evidence that Paul himself harbored any sympathy for racism or anti-Semitism. That analysis turns out to have been badly wrong. The evidence that Paul has spent decades trading in virtually every historic trope of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-gay bigotry, and conspiracy theorizing, is so overwhelming as to beggar any further defense or denial on Paul's behalf. (The Paul campaign claims that the congressman did not write these articles, but they did appear in his newsletter.)

Since I'm a libertarian, there ought to be, in theory anyway, some significant overlap between Paul's views and mine --- though his fixation on gold-backed currency, opposition to abortion, free trade and immigration, and creationism have been worrying signs for some time. But now that the full extent of the hatreds Paul has associated himself with is out there, we libertarians, especially those of us who have defended Paul in the past, need to say, definitively, this is not what we believe. This man is not our spokesman.

And if the reaction at Reason is any indication, libertarians are going to take the high road. Good.

After the jump, I've included an extended compendium of the choicer material that Jamie dug up, that didn't make it into the PJM piece. The original documents are available here.

Continue reading...

The Clinton machine certainly seems to get ugly as it gets desperate. Let's set the stage. Obama won Iowa on his "audacity of hope" theme. Hillary Clinton replied by accusing him of offering false hope, and words rather than action. Obama retorted that words can inspire, and the hope that, say, Martin Luther King offered was anything but false. So HRC thought it meet to respond:

"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done."... "The power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president" capable of action, Clinton said.

I've seen this before.

Last week, after the New York Times announced Bill Kristol as the newest addition to its roster of columnists, prompting a predictable (though not necessarily unjustified) mix of outrage and bewilderment among liberals, Jack Shafer rose to the Grey Lady's defense. No need to recite Kristol's many, many faults, we all know what they are. Shafer argued they shouldn't be disqualifying:

Pundits shouldn't lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy...

I can't promise that he'll be good, but he'll be different, he'll be interesting, and I guarantee he'll never be as bad as Roger Cohen.

Fair enough, I thought. I don't read op-eds in order to agree with them, and who knows, maybe time will pardon Kristol for writing well --- or at least interestingly.

Well, as you may have seen, Kristol's first offering from atop his new perch is out today, and as it turns out, Kristol, in addition to not being good, wasn't interesting, wasn't different, and was worse than Roger Cohen. Take a look at Kristol's opening paragraphs:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

Even if you agree with the sentiment, ask yourself, if you read these lines without knowing their source, would you be more likely to attribute them to (a) a New York Times columnist, or (b) a branch office of the College Republicans? Kristol employs precisely two modes of expression here, the cliched ("a nation turns its grateful eyes," "inquiring minds want to know," "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory") and the hackneyed ("[insert name here] is a liberal Democrat"). The cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the gilding of the lily, the coup-de-grace --- or so you might call it --- is Kristol's discordant clunker, "After all, for all...." Did anybody read this thing out loud before it went to print?

The column is an even more embarrassing failure in content than in style. As James Fallows points out in the midst of making a writing workshop out of the Kristol piece, "the subject -- how the GOP should run against Barack Obama -- is one on which readers would want to hear a well-connected Republican's views." And the best this well-connected Republican has got is "Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat." The reason this is risible is not that the GOP won't use that as an attack line (they will), and it's not that it will necessarily be ineffective (it's worked before), but that it's no different from what a poorly-connected Republican party functionary would come up with just ad-libbing.

Even Kristol's effort to be a contrarian is phoned in. The larger point of the column --- an argument for not writing off Mike Huckabee's viability as a general election candidate --- is certainly counterintuitive, and the reason it's counterintuitive is that it's fantastically implausible. Which raises (N.B.: doesn't beg) the question of whether it's plausible to think Kristol actually believes any of this.

Consider: Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses by winning most of the support of the evangelicals who made up 60% of Iowa's Republican electorate, and losing most of the rest of the Republican vote. Kristol, does, presumably, know that the conditions that give Huckabee a leg up in internal Republican politics cap his general election prospects well below 50% (if not, he really ought to read the writers under his aegis). Moreover, since Kristol is discussing Huckabee's viability in the context of a campaign against Obama, let's not forget that a Huckabee nomination would neutralize Obama's only real vulnerability, namely Obama's relative inexperience in national politics. Finally, is it at all believable that Kristol wouldn't have heard about Huckabee's profound cluelessness on foreign policy --- an issue which Kristol is known to care about somewhat, and which, in the very same column, he suggests would be a liability in an Obama candidacy? (Last we heard from Huckabee, he was pushing for a foreign policy triangulation between Tom Friedman and Frank Gaffney.)

Several weeks ago I noticed that before the rise of Huckabee, in the course of touting Joe Lieberman as a Republican vice-presidential candidate, Kristol promoted (among other possibilities) a Huckabee-Lieberman ticket. I couldn't believe then that this was anything other than a Straussian sop to the Christian right, just as I can't believe now that Kristol's Huckabee boosterism is sincere. I thus readily confess to having no bleeding idea what Kristol is trying to achieve with this column --- and neither do you.

Bill Buckley might have been a fine New York Times columnist. Christopher Caldwell would be an excellent one. Pat Buchanan would at least pass Shafer's interesting, different, and better than Roger Cohen test. If the Times needed an insightful neocon, they could have called Eli Lake. As for Kristol, Matt Yglesias is right, somebody whose writing takes a decoder ring to decipher --- even if the comprehensible bits weren't lazy and insensible --- doesn't need to be wasting column inches anywhere, let alone a paper whose editors he feels should be prosecuted for committing journalism. Heckuva job, Pinchy.

Coda: Kristol also managed to misattribute a Michael Medved quote to Michelle Malkin. Now that's lazy. 

The Republicans are having a seminar-room style debate in New Hampshire, and they've just concluded a good 10-20 minutes on health care reform. The only one who seemed to know anything about healthcare policy other than "socialism bad" was Mitt Romney, who --- for possibly the first time in a major public event since the beginning of the campaign --- gave a detailed defense of the health care plan he enacted in Massachusetts, a kind of public-private hybrid that's supposed to provide universal coverage. That sounds interesting --- I'd like to hear a lot more about it.

At last, we got to see a bit of the competent, managerial, innovative liberal Republican platform I had hoped Romney would have run on from the beginning. To be sure, Romney's exposition of his health care policy probably didn't score very well with Republican primary voters, but it's not as if pretending to have had a Damascene conversion on every position he held prior to 2006 is working all that well for him either.

UPDATE: Bill Richardson (slight paraphrase): "When I was Energy Secretary, I worked on securing fissionable material with the Soviet Union...One of the first things I would do as president is sign a non-proliferation treaty with the Soviet Union." What the hell? At least when Fred Thompson goofs like this, he has senility as an excuse. Somebody give Richardson the hook.

UPDATE: As Josh Marshall notes, there was one moment of emotional pique in the Democratic debate, all three main contenders seemed to spar pretty well, it's not clear who got the best of it, and from there the debate drifted into a dying fall. For what it's worth, Obama has now jumped ahead of Clinton at Intrade:

Clinton: 42.5/42.6 (-8.6)

Obama: 53.1/54.0 (+8.3)

N.B. to David N. Friedman: There used to be a lot of liberal Republicans, like, for example, George Romney. Go here and search "Conservative vs. Progressive Republicanism" to see a clip of Jacob Javits and William F. Buckley discussing what a liberal Republican is --- and Javits explain why he likes the term "liberal." A liberal Republican isn't the same thing as a liberal simpliciter. That tradition is basically moribund today, but Romney Jr. governed Massachusetts as a liberal Republican, and the staggering phoniness and clumsiness with which he presents himself as a National Review cover boy today underlines the implausibility of his having had a genuine conversion coincide neatly with the beginning of his national ambitions. The fact that, for one moment tonight, Romney finally expressed himself fluidly and naturally belies the idea that his only mode of expression is a phony and clumsy one. Which is to say that the Romney campaign, to date, has been a months-long, shameless eruption of bullshit.

UPDATE: More Intrade movement, this time on the Republican side:

McCain: 33.1/33.9 (+0.5)

Giuliani: 31.2/32.0 (+4.5)

Huckabee: 14.5/15.7 (+0.1)

Romney: 10.2/12.0 (-4.1)

Two observations here: First, Romney is bleeding confidence like a punctured artery. That big bid/ask spread suggests traders with stock in Romney are doing their damnedest to preserve a little value before they sell, but nobody's buying. Romney's on his way to becoming a penny stock. Second, Giuliani is bouncing back, and is basically even with McCain. Currently, however, the media have written off Giuliani (myself included) in much the same way they wrote off McCain a few years months ago [odd slip --- it was very late when I wrote this --- DK].

How to explain the Giuliani mini-rally? It might just be an epiphenomenon of the Romney collapse, but here's one potential story of a Giuliani comeback: The Republican debate tonight was a pretty ugly pile-on of Romney --- McCain was frankly immature, cackling like Victor Von Doom as David Weigel put it --- and if Romney is going down, he's got the money and organization to stay in a long time and do his best to take down his opponents if he wants to, and I think he does.

If Romney stays in through South Carolina and Michigan, that splits the non-dogpatch vote going into Super Duper Tuesday. If John McCain crushes Romney and gets the GOP establishment behind him, there won't be any oxygen left for Giuliani. On the other hand, if Romney stays in and can fight at least to an indecisive result in New Hampshire and Michigan --- that is, if there isn't a clear anti-Huckabee before Feb. 5 --- Giuliani may still be viable. It's a long shot, but the logic dooming every single Republican candidate also means it's premature to count any of them out.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting the prediction markets are anything but a measure of conventional wisdom on how things will play out. On Thursday, a trader with some money to invest could have made a very safe and very profitable bet arbitraging the discrepancy between Obama's winning-Iowa price and his winning -the-nomination price (well, it's not a true arbitrage, but you get the idea).

It won't come to readers as a particular surprise that Barack Obama is my candidate for 2008, but at Mike's invitation, I'll lay out the reasons why. After all, as I've acknowledged, a lot of the good press Obama receives, fueled by and fueling the rationale the Obama campaign puts out for itself, trades in uplifting, but seemingly insubstantial qualities. "Stand up for change" sounds great. What does it mean?

In fact, underneath the rhetorical flourishes --- and by the way, when was the last time a Democratic crowd was moved to spontaneously break into "USA! USA!" cheers? --- there is a great deal of substance, which represents concrete and promising change from both orthodox liberal and orthodox conservative approaches to foreign and domestic policy. This fact is obscured by the media's focus on judging candidates' positions, especially on domestic issues, exclusively in terms of campaign pledges and proposals, when in reality, very few if any policy or position commitments can be translated from the campaign to governing in unchanged form. A far better proxy for judging where a candidate stands is looking to his or her advisors --- these are the people who are going to craft policy if the candidate wins, and their predilections are a lot more salient an indicator than campaign posturing. On this score, Obama shines.

His lead economic advisor is Austan Goolsbee, a behavioral economist from the University of Chicago, who is at the forefront of a movement in economics and public policy away from traditional welfare state liberalism, and towards market-oriented policies that expand the scope of personal choice, while at the same time being structured so as to create rational incentives for individuals to address long-term and systemic concerns like low-income financial insecurity, disparate access to education, etc.

Call it left-libertarianism if it needs a name. This is the root ideological difference between Obama and Clinton that leads to the quarrel they're having over whether or not to include mandatory subscription in their health care proposals. Both of them are sensitive to the problem of having 45 million or so citizens without health care; Obama is also sensitive to the need to preserve personal freedom, not to mention the futility of proposing orthodox liberal welfare policies that have a decades long track record of failing to deliver results, and of being repudiated at the ballot box.

Similarly, here is George Will's gloss of Goolsbee's position on free trade:

"Globalization" means free trade and various deregulations that supposedly put downward pressure on American wages because of imports from low-wage countries. Goolsbee, however, says globalization is responsible for "a small fraction" of today's income disparities. He says that "60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition." America's 18.5 million government employees have little to fear from free trade; so do auto mechanics, dentists and many others.

Free trade: a good thing at home and abroad. Likewise, I would assume, with the free movement of labor. Compare that to John Edwards presenting himself as the love-child of Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, recoiling in horror from a free-trade agreement with Peru, a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica if there ever was one. Let's not even mention the nativist lunacy sweeping through the GOP.

Similarly, in foreign affairs, Obama stands for something new and different from all the other candidates, along with his top foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, about whom it's difficult to say enough good things. Alone among all the candidates, Obama grasps the dangerous uselessness of the hawk/dove dichotomy as an analytic tool. Those trapped on one side of that conceptual framework see a disposition to be belligerent as a token of "seriousness" about foreign policy and a disinclination to make war as an indication of foolish naivete and idealism; those trapped (admittedly a much smaller and less influential cadre) on the other side simply will not engage with cogent cases for the utility and occasional moral necessity of military interventions under certain circumstances, as in the Balkans, Rwanda, and today Darfur. Obama's rightness on both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, and his attention to Darfur, place him in a league of his own among all the candidates on foreign policy questions.

"Stand up for change"? Sounds good to me.

So, Obama and Huckabee have won the Iowa Caucuses. Here's how Intrade is reacting in the nomination stakes (bid price; ask price; change):

Hillary Clinton: 56.0; 57.9; -9.6

Barack Obama: 36.0; 36.8; +10

John Edwards: 3.1; 3.2; -4.1

John McCain: 30.0; 30.2; +10.0

Rudy Giuliani: 24.0; 26.8; -4.6

Mike Huckabee: 13.1; 16.3; +5.3

Willard M. Romney: 13.0; 15.0; -10.8

Fred Thompson: 2.9; 4.0; +1.0

The only result here that looks odd is the McCain boom. He came in a distant fourth, losing to the narcoleptic Fred Thompson. However, the media have decided that McCain would win simply by showing up --- even I can feel for Hillary Clinton when Chris Matthews declares that a 33% result for Clinton would be a monumental defeat, while a 18% result would make McCain a conquering hero --- and so he has. It's hard to see how Romney regroups after this, and even though Romney is my preferred Republican, the horse-whipping he got affords me the consolation prize of watching all that money he spent coming to nothing. Turns out winning an election is not the same thing as executing a leveraged buy-out. Amazing!

On the Democratic side, the upshot of the Iowa Caucuses will likely be the end of all the second-tier campaigns, and I'd be surprised to see Edwards stay in very much longer. Obama is starting to pull away from Edwards and Clinton --- a 7+ point victory is not close, considering the size and resources of the Clinton machine, and the four years Edwards has spent camped out in Iowa. Andrea Mitchell is describing the mood at Hillary Clinton HQ as "dirge-like," and so it should be.

On the Republican side, the contest appears to be one between two candidates the Republican establishment loathes, Huckabee and McCain. More specifically, the contest is between, on one side, the tribune of the yokels the GOP establishment has been conning and laughing at for thirty years, and a man whom the GOP establishment made a concerted effort to destroy eight years ago. I can't wait to watch.

In minor candidate news, Rudy Giuliani is going to finish 6th, well behind Ron Paul. I think that means that a national crisis, and indeed an international crisis, has been averted.

UPDATE: I'd been wondering how Hugh Hewitt would put a positive spin on Willard M.'s throttling. Here it is: "Shades of 1976 --the long march begins." That's it. You know things are looking bleak for Romney if Hugh Hewitt can't convince himself that Romney won. Hey, remember this?

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece. The staging and Romney's delivery, the eclipse of all other candidates it caused, the domination of the news cycle just prior to the start of absentee voting in New Hampshire on Monday --for all these reasons and more it will be long discussed as a masterpiece of political maneuver.

UPDATE: I almost forgot to mention Joe Scarborough's well thought-out and cogent analysis of the impact of Benazir Bhutto's assassination on the primary races. Is it possible for a pundit to spout so much shameless bullshit that his mainstream credibility gets revoked (and I'm not just referring to Scarborough)? My guess: nope.

UPDATE: Shorter John Edwards concession speech: "I won by coming in second."

UPDATE: Shorter Hillary Clinton: "Congratulations all around, it was a good night for Democrats." She was very gracious, but went on forever.