The Horse-race After Iowa

The glorious thing about presidential politics in the US is that it really is an open process.  An outsider really can come in and change the politics of the United States.

Last night two outsider candidates came in and beat the establishment, politics-by-the-numbers candidates.

Of course, Harvard-educated Barack Obama isn’t really such an outsider, and neither is Governor Huckabee.  But they certainly cleaned the clocks of insiders Clinton and Romney.

In an NRO Roundtable Richard Brookhiser pointed out that Mike Huckabee is not a religious-right candidate in the mold of Pat Robertson.

In one important respect, Huckabee’s supporters have made a wiser choice than their soul-mates 20 years ago. Their man has been a governor and a lieutenant governor.

Of course, as Daniel Casse remarks, the left thinks that they’ll make hamburger out of Mike Huckabee.

I don’t know what Huckabee means for conservatism. But it promises a helluva party for the angry Left. Since Thanksgiving, the New York Times has been positively giddy about the possibility that the GOP was firmly in the hands of a genuine Bible-thumper.

If the Left thinks that, they had better be careful.  The Democratic base may be violently secular, but the moderate general election voters are not.  Mike Huckabee is a wily politician, and very good at negative politics.  He could eat the Angry Left for lunch.

Going forward, I am reminded that for most of us, what matters most is that the candidates we don’t like lose.

On the Democratic side, I can live with Obama, but I really don’t like Edwards and Clinton.

On the Republican side, I can live with Huckabee, Romney, or Giuliani.  But I really don’t like John McCain.

So I’m rooting for the independent voters to pile on for Obama in New Hampshire.  Don’t disappoint me, fellas!

Conservatives Need Not Apply

The august New York Times has decided to give conservative William Kristol a column on the editorial page.  Not a bad idea, you’d think. Kristol represents a fairly centrist big-government conservatism that ought to go down fairly well with the big-government liberals that read the Times.

But you’d be wrong.  The NYT readers are beside themselves. Writes Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined the Right-wing Conspiracy, the reaction was

Sputtering fury. Vicious name-calling. Denunciations of the Times for this unspeakable act. Threats to cancel subscriptions and otherwise exact revenge.

Editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal was surprised.

Kristol “is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?”

Er, yes.  Intolerant.  And liberals are experts on that.  But maybe Rosenthal doesn’t really understand his readers.  Not like we right-wingnuts understand ’em.  Because, you see, we get to experience the incoming rounds from them, every day of our lives.  Says accidental conservative Stein:

Can Rosenthal truly be so unaware of the character of his own core readership? Does he actually believe that they’re open to challenge, or even reasonable back-and-forth? Doesn’t he read his own paper’s letters page? “David Brooks can write the mildest column in the world,” Bernard Goldberg observes, “and the letters to the editor act like he’s Hitler.”

I know.  It’s all too delicious for words.

But I blame Al Gore.  It was he who stirred up the party faithful after the contested 2000 election and, characteristically, never really conceded the election.  Democrats decided it wouldn’t hurt to keep their partisans in a frenzy.

In my judgement, this was a strategic error, one that prevents the Democrats from making sensible course corrections from their left-wing orthodoxy.

But first, they get to win in 2008.  Then watch it all fall apart.

On the Day Before

Tomorrow, Friday, January 3, 2008, they will start counting the first votes in the 2008 presidential election. All the hype will start converting into Ws and Ls.

In the Republican race it seems that the most professional candidate, the guy who has spent the money and built the organization, and plotted the most detailed strategy—Mitt Romney—is challenged by two candidates without much of either.

In Iowa, Mike Huckabee has come to challenge Mitt Romney, but lacking money and organization has had to rely on stunts like announcing that he’s not going to run his negative ad. Now he’s off to Burbank, CA, to appear on the Tonight Show.

In New Hampshire John McCain has been working the local media and has come up in the polls.

Can stunts and media attention beat organization and ground game? We’ll soon know the answer.

My guess is that organization and strategy will win out and that after Iowa and New Hampshire Mitt Romney will be in pole position.

But what do I know? We should never forget the first rule of wisdom. It applies also to politics: Nobody knows nuttin’.

What about the Democrats? I’m not sure that I care. I don’t have a dog in that fight. But at least Democrats have a decent choice. They have a Lover in Obama, a Hater in Edwards, and a Clinton in Hillary!

Misunderestimated Again

President Bush seems to understand what President Reagan understood before him. A president has a chance to make only two or three moves on the chessboard of history. So he’d better make them good ones.

Alternatively, he can engage in fancy footwork like Third Way dancers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, serving up eye-catching initiatives every week.

However even the best chess moves don’t necessarily look good at the time. Many people are more impressed by fancy footwork.

In his end of year piece Michael Barone reminds us why he is the dean of pundits. He just has a solid judgment. And it shows.

Before you count President Bush out, he writes, don’t forget that the first few years of every war are years of blunders and mistakes.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes.

And now that President Bush has found the right generals, we can affirm that &ldquoAmerican troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.”

Another important lesson to learn from Iraq is that social transformation works easiest from the bottom up. Our media elites are obsessed with top-down politics. They would be, that is their job: to report the doings of high politics.

But the impetus for change [in Iraq] has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Why be surprised? That’s the way it works in the US.

At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible.

Today, people seem to have forgotten that crime and welfare were once intractable problems. That just shows how successfully we reformed welfare and crime fighting. And how wrong the folks were who wailed about millions of children thrown into the streets.

Now it seems that President Bush has learned from the fumbles of the first years in the War on Terror Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t the US famous as a nation of can-do optimists?

What Presidents Wear

When the Duke of Wellington fought the Battle of Waterloo, he did not wear a resplendent uniform. He wore, as Paul Johnson reminds us, “dark blue civilian dress.” He was, you may say, sending a message about military might. Victory in battle is all very well, but after it’s over, we are going home to peacetime pursuits.

At the Potsdam Conference immediately after World War II, he relates

[Prime Minister Churchill] appeared in Royal Air Force uniform, one of his favorites. Marshal Stalin, as he liked to call himself, appeared in the white full dress uniform of a Marshal of the Red Army. But... Harry S Truman... wore a neat blue civilian suit.

Harry Truman served in World War I and in the reserves thereafter, but US Presidents do not wear uniform while in office. It sends an important message about the role of the commander-in-chief. The president is a civilian, and the United States believes in civilian control of the military.

But when the president visits the troops theses days, he does wear uniform. It is interesting to realize what that uniform is. Typically, it features a baseball cap—often emblazoned with the insignia of the unit or the ship he is visiting—and a baseball warmup jacket.

When the president visits the troops, he dresses like a baseball coach.

That’s an interesting message to send to the world. Think of the President of the United States as a kind of jumped-up baseball coach.

Liberal Fascism. So?

The liberals are already reaching the tipping point on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Someone already vandalized the product page at Amazon. (Would that be an inside job?)

But what’s all the fuss about?  Liberalism comes from the same stable as communism and fascism?  Of course.  They are all reactionary movements trying escape from an alienation towards the modern age.  They are beset, as Roger Scruton writes in Modern Culture,

by those ancient and eradicable yearnings for something else — for a homecoming to our true community.

You see this in German Romanticism, in Marx, and in the “reactionary nationalism of Fichte and Gierke for whom the Volk and the Volksgeist where the primary objects of social hope.”

Our liberal friends believe in their special version of this.  They will lead us to safety in a true community of educated people, the rule of the altruistic educated middle class over the hopelessly compromised commercial middle class.

How will our liberal friends deal with the challenge of Liberal Fascism?  Probably by ignoring it.  It’s the best way.

But we can read all about it.  First, check into Jonah’s thoughts on The Glenn and Helen Show.

Is There a Conservative Future?

In this time of conservative discontent, seers and pundits are peering into the future. Will there be a conservative coalition in the future, they wonder?

Conservative pundit Tony Blankley takes a look, and wonders what it would take to keep a majority coalition going.

It would have to hold almost all of its Reagan coalition plus gain the support of at least 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote.

And that is a tall order, considering that it usually takes at least a generation for US immigrants to become unhyphenated Americans that vote for the American party rather than the Identity party.

All that assumes that the conservatives can keep the Reagan Democrats and social conservatives. And that is pretty uncertain. If economic hard times come then expect the economically insecure to return to the Democratic Party. Says Blankley:

Although the economy remains strong, the public’s economic anxiety about the future has been building steadily during the past half-decade.

Gold stars all round to the MSM for that.

It is precisely these kinds of economic fears that Mike Huckabee is talking to... I think it is highly likely the Republican Party (as the presumed continuing vehicle for a right-of-center coalition) will have to talk persuasively to the growing economic anxiety.

Can we do it? Can we persuade the economically insecure that the worst thing they could do would be to throw in their lot with the economically Neanderthal Democrats?

It’s a challenge, at the very least.

At least history in on our side. The last two times the economy went south, in the 1930s and in the 1970s, the Democrats completely screwed up the economy (with help, it must be admitted, from the Republicans.)