What's the matter with Obama?

Or, specifically, this doozy (given at a San Francisco fundraiser, no less):

"[People in economically struggling small-town Pennsylvania] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Rich Lowry's got a good column here, taking what I'd consider the appropriate amount of umbrage. For me, it's not so much that Obama's some kind of closet Marxist (though I'm sure it's still in the water at Columbia and Harvard). It's not even that he's an "elitist" -- at least as the word should be defined. And yes, I know this kind of unthinking condescension should hardly surprise me. Still, what the hell?

Lowry hits it on the head: "Obama prides himself on his civility, but it has to go much deeper than dulcet rhetoric. A fundamental courtesy of political debate is to meet the other side on its own terms. If someone says he cares about gun rights, it’s rude to insist: 'No, you don’t. It’s the minimum wage that you really care about, and you’d know it if you were more self-aware.' "

In other words, what makes this kind of thing so interesting coming from Obama is that it reveals so strikingly the false promises of "hope" and "change" and "unity" so central to his campaign. (Harvey Mansfield, tangentially, has plenty to say about the kind of civility we really need in politics. Hint: It has nothing to do with "disagreeing without being disagreeable.")

Or think of it this way: What kind of hope does Obama really have in America if he thinks Americans' first reaction to economic hardship is to get "bitter"?

Barack's Papal Brigade

Douglas Kmiec, dean of the Catholic University law school and a former Romney adviser, thinks that Barack Obama is a closet Catholic. Or at least that Catholics are closet Obama voters. It's a confused piece on several levels (I'll get to those), but I can't say I haven't been noticing much the same thing.

First, my colleague Robert George notices something particularly "Catholic" in Obama's recent (and worth watching) speech at the Virginia Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson dinner. (My response: Catholics can't preach that well.) Then my friend Paul Snatchko says nice things about the way Obama talks about faith in public discourse. Now Kmiec. That's three times in a week. And that's a pattern.

There are other datapoints as well: Several friends of mine just joined the "we really really wish Barack Obama was pro-life" facebook group. (Sorry, guys.) The wonderful JPII memoirist Peggy Noonan, as I've noted before, seems quite taken with the guy. And is it really a coincidence that the perpetual Obama buzzword "hope" just happens to be the subject of Pope Benedict's latest encyclical? (Move over, Deval Patrick!)

Okay, so what gives?

Kmiec's policy oddities (really: if Mitt Romney had any other anti-war, open-borders, global-warming-worried advisers, he didn't tell us about them) only serve to emphasize his broader point: It's all about the rhetoric.

There's no question that Obama's a brilliant speaker, and Kmiec hints at the interesting point that his community-organizing roots have steeped him in a kind of social-justice rhetoric that's friendly toward religion generally and resonates with Catholics specifically.

Plus, he says, Obama has a kind of Reaganesque optimism too him, the kind that "makes America feel good about itself" -- and the kind that attracted the largely Catholic "Reagan Democrats" in the first place.

And that's where I get off. Kmiec may be right about the short-term politics of it all, and Obama's speeches certainly have an inspiring aura to them -- but it's not Reagan. I don't want to speak beyond my competence on this one, but it strikes me that Reagan's and Obama's optimisms come from two very different places.

Just take a look at what Obama's optimistic about: "Yes, we can"; "We are the change that we seek"; "We can build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth"; (yes, he said that). This is a contingent optimism, a hope in the future success of (Obama-led) collective political action.

That hope may -- may -- be well-founded, and it can still be inspiring; one of the appealing things about Obama's rhetoric is its constant invocation of American history (albeit, mostly the parts where collective political movements for "change" have succeeded).

But as Michelle Obama is quickly proving, that kind of "hope" can have an ugly flipside. "This is the first time in my adult life I've been proud of my country," quoth she.

What?!?

I don't want to take this too far, but I think Mrs. Obama just distilled to its essence exactly what unsettles me about all this "change" stuff in the first place. My question is not so much, "change to what?" -- it's change from what? In other words, what does this cult of "change" ultimately say about the people who cluelessly let things get so bad in the first place?

Again, I'm dealing mostly in tendencies and temptations here, but it strikes me that Obama's brand of "hope" is a very different sort than Reagan's simple trust in the good sense of the American people -- which only needed to be unlocked by the kind of policies he was advocating, not beaten into them by an endless supply of lofty rhetoric.

Think of it another way: For all of Obama's rhetorical brilliance, could you really see him giving Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech? Could he speak so naturally of an America that already was and is, of ageless values that have little to do with changing our way of doing politics, as important as that sometimes is?

I haven't seen it.

UPDATE: Okay, looks like Peggy Noonan (author of the above speech, incidentally) isn't quite so enamored with Obama after all. And as one would expect, she makes my point far better than I ever could.

McCain & honor

Good news for my long-suffering readers: I'm officially giving up following the Republican presidential primary for Lent! ... Starting tomorrow.

But before then, please do check out Yuval Levin's take on John McCain's peculiar brand of "honor politics." It may just be the most insightful thing I've read this season. A sample:

McCain has made the most of his unusual approach to politics throughout his
career, developing his own special brand of honor politics, which in practice is
often a form of anger politics. It makes him terribly prickly and
self-righteous, but also determined and often successful. The substance of his
crusades has turned off a lot of conservatives, and rightly so, but the tone can
be quite effective. And when it is directed to a cause conservatives share —
most notably the war — the Right can take real pleasure in his
passion.

More important, it’s all McCain has got, and he needs to make the most of
it, and not try to pretend he’s something he’s not. To both his credit and his
detriment, McCain just can’t pretend. Rather than attempt a feeble imitation of
Ronald Reagan (the ubiquitous mistake of this campaign) and try to paint the
grand conservative vision of things, McCain needs to train himself at least to
oppose the things conservatives oppose — paternalism that corrupts the roots of
personal initiative and self-reliance, a callous disregard for the lives of the
innocent unborn, hostility to our cultural traditions, cosmopolitanism that sees
nothing special in America — and so to channel his anger in politically (not to
mention substantively) healthy directions. That can be his way of building
bridges, and it can also be an effective way of organizing his campaign’s themes
going forward.

By the by, here's McCain's speech at CPAC yesterday, which I thought was very good.

It's Mac for me

My friend Robert George explains why he voted -- begrudgingly -- for John McCain this morning. I did, too, though for somewhat different reasons.

In the end, my growing doubts about McCain's unsettling tendency to treat every single political dispute as a matter of deep personal honor -- or about the smallness of his "patriotism v. profit" attack on Romney during the last debate -- didn't quite sway me. Winston Churchill did.

If there's one dominant theme running throughout Churchill's vast historical corpus, it's that prosperous democracies, for all their advantages, are notoriously fickle when it comes to dealing with foreign threats. They can rise to meet them better than anyone once the threat becomes obviously existential, but as soon as it fades, they take their collective eye off the ball -- to the cost of a lot more blood and treasure a few years later.

This is something McCain, with his instinctual value for national honor, understands -- making him a needed candidate for a time when troop deaths in Iraq are down and a dubious National Intelligence Estimate has nudged Iran off the radar screen.

Romney, meanwhile, may be saying all the right things, but his manager's belief in "fixing" "problems" doesn't inspire confidence that he has the judgmental categories to fight a war, with its uncertain constantly changing jumble of human passions.

And while I've got my reasons to trust at least McCain's sincerity on judges and tax cuts, I've seen nothing to indicate that Romney would make the war a priority when push comes to shove. It's not where he's comfortable.

By the by, if there is such a thing as McCain Derangement Syndrome, this piece comes perilously close. McCarthy labels McCain a "multilateralist" for thinking that a president needs to be open to persuading our allies of the rightness of our actions.

Except that McCain's right. One of the great tragedies of 2003 was, in fact, Bush's indulgence of cheap -- though understandable -- anti-Europeanism. Old Europe, ultimately, was never going to come along on Iraq. But how much ill will could Bush have averted by simply going to Europe and reminding Europeans of our common struggles against tyranny? If McCain believes the best for the old Atlantic alliance, good for him; we may need it one day.

It shouldn't even need to be said that he would never bow to their sniping where he sees national security at stake. But a President McCain whose perceived "independence" could actually pull supporters back to our general FP viewpoint remains one of my big hopes -- especially if he picks a running mate who can talk a good game. Though I'm open to being disappointed.

Shakespeare's Politics, 2008 edition

"Shakespeare's Politics" was the name of one of my more fascinating college courses -- an independent study with the Ven. Dr. Harry V. Jaffa that combed the deep political wisdom of the Shakespearian cannon. Not that Shakespeare was an explicitly political writer (though there's much interesting in analyzing his plays in light of contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobian politics; we ignored that), but that the insight into the human condition that made his plays so rich can't help but speak volumes about our political nature. Especially (but not exclusively) when he's tackling the great figures of Roman and British history.

And that got me thinking...

It's stuck me for some time that the current presidential race has a certain Shakespearian quality to it; if anything, it certainly has its fair share of potentially tragic heroes. There's McCain's Coriolanus-like "Straight Talk"; his ancient and noble warrior's disdain for the degree of pandering necessary (and appropriately so) in any democratic society. (Full disclosure: This is hyperbole -- I like McCain.)

Fred Thompson: The honorable Brutus-like senator poked and prodded into assuming a higher political role, only to be undone by his lack of ambition.

Ron Paul: Any number of crazy-like-a-fox fools.

Bill Clinton: Ever toeing that fine line between Prince Hal and King Lear.

Barack Obama: Come on, you were thinking the same thing.

But in all seriousness, it remains to be seen: MacDuff? Or Banquo?

As I see it, the only candidate Shakespeare wouldn't have any interest in is Mitt Romney. But I'm open to being proven wrong. Anyone?

NY Post endorses...

Barack Obama!

No, no one hacked our website; and yes, it's just for the primary.

Romney in Michigan

A decisive victory for Mitt tonight -- makes the race a lot more interesting. Here's his speech. It still fascinates me how quickly Romney's transformed himself into the populist anti-Washington crusader. You can almost tell from the speech how new he is to it -- "but hey, it's working, and I kind of like it too." People who know and like Romney say he's got a solid core -- that he really believes what he says, even on the positions he's come to recently. I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'll still have to think this through some more, but I'd say the greater problem with Romney's slickness is that it indicates not a fundamental lack of conviction, but rather a lack of political shame. He repackages himself far too easily -- even if it's the same Mitt inside -- which makes me suspect that he's got a businessman's impatience for the emotional pathos necessary for true statesmanship, especially in a time of war (notice the lack of nearly any reference to terrorism in his speech). Rich Lowry -- presumably a Romney guy himself; his magazine certainly is -- gives evidence (not online) in the latest issue of National Review.

Along those lines, Romney's constant denunciations of "Washington" this and "Washington" rubbed me the wrong way. One wonders whether "Washington" would fare any better at the hands of a 15-part PowerPoint presentation than with some Obama-esqe incantations of "hope" and "unity."

And then there's this line, by far the most awkward of the speech:

"I take my inspiration from Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, who took their inspiration from the American people."

George Herbert Walker Bush? Nothing against the guy, but that's the first time I've heard him mentioned as a source of conservative inspiration. Unless Romney's very obviously trying to leave someone out.

Not that there's anything wrong with criticizing Dubya, either, but it strikes me that there's something deeply unserious about the way Romney does it. Bush isn't optimistic enough? Please.

--------------------------

To be fair, if Romney lacks pathos, McCain's fault probably lies at the other extreme, as John Podhoretz contends:

"Romney may not have won in Michigan so much as McCain lost it. And he lost it because of a characteristic tendency that makes him Romney’s opposite — political rigidity based on a sense of his own personal rectitude. Having said jobs in Michigan were not coming back, he went to Michigan and praised efforts to mandate an increase in fuel-mileage standards, which auto executives claim will raise the price of a car fully $6,000 — a job killer, in other words. And he spoke against drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which is the only realistic way for the United States to increase its own domestic oil supply.

"McCain’s line is that he is a straight talker. But there are moments he seems to make a fetish of his own honesty, and asks others to support him solely because of it."

Hmm... Pathos plus Prudence -- anyone? I'm starting to think that Shakespeare would have a field day with the tragic flaws of the current field.

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Only caught the final half-hour of the Democratic debate tonight, but was instantly impressed by how boring it seemed. The nice thing about still having a diverse jumbled Republican field is that it leaves room for serious and contentious policy debates -- many of which the current candidates still need to have. Clinton and Obama, by contrast, don't seem to have much more of anything to say. All the policies are on the table, with widespread similarities. All that remains is a contest of likability and tactics (i.e., hope v. experience). And as we're already seeing, that kind of race can get ugly real fast.

McCain and Obama

A none-too-daring prediction, and a pre-primary appetizer. Here's a really smart David Brooks piece on the pair. Brooks makes the important point that despite their common appeal to independent voters (and reputations for positiveness and honesty), they're really very different men in the kind of vision they offer -- and not just policy-wise.

My hope for an Obama-McCain general election (though that's still far to early to call; given this primary season, we could just as easily see Edwards-Thompson) would be that this precise dynamic -- similar general appeal, vastly different ideas -- could elevate the debate to a level we've been conditioned not to expect.

Especially on Iraq. If this election is going to be some kind of referendum on where we should go from here (it probably should be, though I'm far from convinced it actually will), what better two candidates than the guy who opposed the war from the beginning, and the guy who supported the surge three years before Bush did? Serious debate between likable guys, all at a distance from the visceral passions conjured by names like Clinton and Bush.

But we'll see. Pronouncements like this one still seem scandalously premature.

Caucus night with the Dems

One of the nice things about a one-party city like New York is the political class's jolly bipartisanship. Basically, I've learned, because there are so few of us Republicans around, the Democrats see little problem in occasionally letting us crash their social happenings.

So that's where I was for caucus night: the 2nd floor of a crowded midtown Irish pub full of rowdy Democrats.

Some thoughts:

--Very few Biden or Dodd supporters (although I did meet one girl who liked Richardson). Which made a fun game of cheering loudly whenever their vote counts ticked up -- or in Dodd's case, when he got his one. Sad day.

--The Democrats' victory/concession speeches say droves about where they're headed. (Here's Obama, Edwards & Clinton.) Obama's was masterful on so many levels. Uplifting, even as if he was already running in the general (a friend pointed out), yet still with plenty to rally his volunteers into New Hampshire. Contrast that with Clinton, who could only gush about how happy she was that everyone voted for a Democrat. A guy at the party put it well: "Say I'm a volunteer in Iowa, working my ass off for the Clinton campaign. And I get that in return?" I've never been too much a fan of Obama's squishy "hope" message, but it looks a lot better coming against a Clinton campaign that doesn't even want to fight. Also compare Obama's seemless personal touches with Edwards' heavy-handed "example-example-example" of people suffering from evil corporate greed. If I hadn't sworn off predicting anything this election cycle, I'd say Obama wins the nomination.

--Obama and Huckabee. I think it'd make an interesting general election. Obama, the candidate of "hope," and Huckabee, the candidate of "faith." Throw in Ron Paul as a third-party candidate of "love," and you've got all your theological virtues covered. Now pick one.

--Still had a bit of a black eye, which prompted a fun guessing game. When someone asked about it, whose campaign do I say beat me up. Edwards was typically a safe bet.

--A good night for McCain, who I've been known to have leanings toward. But as it's important to recognize, he's not without risks. Rich Lowry sums them up forcefully. And Victor Davis Hanson doesn't care.

Mormons, Part II

Just watched Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech again. I was significantly more impressed the second time around, mostly because I made peace with the idea that its wooden style and staccato argumentation is just the way Romney talks. And then it didn't seem nearly as awkward.

Actually, it was quite good -- a fitting, if imperfect, response not only to evangelical Iowa voters who may be creeped out by Romney's Mormonism, but also to secular types who are especially wary of someone like Huckabee.

One hears the complaint more and more these days that there's too much religion in politics, a complaint driven not only by genteel horror that someone would act as if their religious beliefs actually influence their lives, but also by reasonable wariness of religion's power, and hence its power to pollute if corrupted. (Religious conservatives should always remember that the first modern mainstream presidential candidate to talk about his faith in the way we've come to expect nowadays was world-class scold Jimmy Carter -- a man I've heard invoked more than once in conversations about Mike Huckabee.)

And yet: It seems only commonsensical that (1) if one's religious convictions were a major part of one's life, one would seek a natural, honest way to talk about them with people who may not share them, and (2) to the extent to which those convictions govern one's actions and values, the voting public has every right to be interested in them.

Come to think of it, I'd be very interested to see whether the members of the NY Times editorial board -- in such top form as they berated the intolerant Iowa evangelical for daring to be curious about Romney's Mormonism -- would be completely neutral to a candidate who professed a religious conviction that, say, the earth is 6,000 years old.

But quite understandably, Romney had neither the time nor the inclination to convince voters that nothing in Mormon doctrine was the slightest bit antagonistic to either good sense or the American political order. A lot of people wanted him to give that speech, but it would have been a fool's errand from the beginning. For one, he'd have had to bring up a lot of the exotic things Mormons actually do believe.

By talking much more generally -- and with evident feeling -- about religion in America, however, he made a very strong argument along these lines: "Trust me." And he promised to return the favor:

"Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience."

I would only note that if Romney does lose the nomination, there will be plenty of explanations other than that Americans, in fact, do respect believers of convenience. But I digress.