DrewM. passes on Michelle Malkin’s post and column noting that the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller by a white “Christian” got scads more media commentary and more intense presidential attention than did the murder of Private William Long and maiming and attempted murder of Private Quinton Ezeagwula by a black “Muslim.”

It’s a fair point and very much worth noting that there are craziest on both sides.

At the same time, the first shooting naturally fit into an ongoing storyline whereas the second seemingly comes out of the blue.  Malkin’s done yeoman work over the years in rounding up little-reported incidents by leftist extremists targeting American troops but it remains a tiny, disaggrated fringe movement whereas the anti-abortion movement is massive and even its extreme elements, like Operation Rescue, are rather large and public.

Nutcases aside, there’s been a loud and bitter debate over abortion going on since at least decision in Roe v. Wade some thirty-six years ago. So, naturally, when an abortionist gets murdered, there’s a ready frame into which to plug stories, sidebars, and commentaries.  Columns from 1986 can be dusted off and re-run by changing a few names and throwing in a new quote or three.

By contrast, those who genuinely dislike American soldiers are so far into the lunatic fringe that they’re not part of the public debate.  Just about every liberal male politician over the age of 50 — John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Charlie Rangel — served in the military.  Hell, so did Jeremiah Wright.

To be sure, there are liberals who hate the way our military is used.   Others hate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  But, by and large, those are handled as debates over public policy.  It’s presidents who are the object of that wrath, not American soldiers.  Indeed, when someone dares criticize soldiers — as in the General Betray Us flap — they’re roundly slapped down, even by other liberals.

All that said, I agree with Michelle on the much narrower points.  Yes, President Obama should have said something about the recruiting station incident, especially after his comments on the Tiller murder.  He’s commander-in-chief, after all.  And it would have been good politics, too, earning credit for taking on left-wing crazies without alienating a significant part of his coalition.

And, yes, the press should have used the occasion of the latest shooting to point out that this was not a totally isolated incident.  The press really needs to get beyond its tired story frames and do broader reporting more often.

Photo by Flickr user DRB62 under Creative Commons license.

Ezra Klein passes along word that “James Webb, it seems, will not be supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, and won’t even say if he’d support efforts to break a filibuster and let it get to the floor for a vote. That’s a significant blow to EFCA, and something of a surprise given Webb’s carefully cultivated image as an economic populist.”

To which I commented, “Maybe because EFCA is spectacularly misnamed? Taking away secret ballots and thereby allowing union organizers to bully workers into signing up isn’t exactly what the masses are clamoring for.” In less than two minutes, I was met with the rejoinder from commenter Steve LaBonne, “Fallout from yet another messaging war lost by the inept Democrats (as the wide prevalence of the kinds of lies retailed by Joyner indicates.)”

Um . . . no.

After some unsavory rumors that Sarah Palin faking a pregnancy to protect her daughter surfaced, Palin revealed yesterday that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant but scheduled to marry the 18-year-old hockey playing father, Levi Johnston.  One hesitates to delve into the story of candidates’ minor children, who are not public figures.  Now, though, the focus has turned to where it should:  The vetting process that yielded the unexpected selection of the relative unknown Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate.

There had already been reports that McCain and his inner circle decided on Palin outside the normal process set up to ensure that there would be no surprises.  This revelation — of what was apparently an open secret in Alaska would seem to vindicate that charge.  ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell both report that a bunch of GOP lawyers are now heading to Alaska for “a deeper vet.”  As  Josh Marshall puts it, “Face It: They Didn’t Vet Her.”

Team McCain insists this is nonsense and that they were fully aware of the situation with Palin’s daughter.   AP’s Liz Sidoti reports that,

Sarah Palin’s path to the Republican ticket started with her name on a list — and a team of some 25 people poring through public records searching for trouble spots without her knowledge. Then came the 70-question survey and a nearly three-hour interview.

[...]

Stoking the notion of a rushed examination, a timeline issued by the campaign indicated that McCain initially met Palin in February, then held one phone conversation with her last week before inviting her to Arizona, where he met with her a second time and offered her the job.

[...]

[Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., the lawyer who conducted the review] said Palin’s review, like others, began with a team of two dozen people culling information from public sources. The team reviewed speeches, financial records, tax information, litigation, investigations, ethical charges, marriages and divorces, for a number of potential running mates.

For Palin specifically, the team studied online archives of the state’s largest newspapers, including the Anchorage Daily News, but didn’t request paper archives for Palin’s hometown newspaper for fear the secret review would become public.   Among the findings: Palin had once received a citation for fishing without a license.

[...]

Culvahouse then conducted a nearly three-hour interview. He said the first thing Palin volunteered was that her daughter was pregnant, and she also quickly disclosed her husband’s two-decade-old DUI arrest.  The public search also unearthed details of the Legislature’s investigation into the dismissal of Alaska’s public safety commissioner, allegedly because he would not fire Palin’s former brother-in-law as a state trooper.

It sounds like, at a minimum, Team McCain valued maximum surprise and buzz from the announcement more than thorough vetting.  Similarly, they seemed determined to avoid further annoying social conservatives, given that pro-choicers Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge were clearly McCain’s preferred running mates.

Drawing comparisons with George McGovern’s disastrous choice of Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, Jeralyn Merritt has started a pool: “What Day Will Sarah Palin Drop Out?”  Given Palin’s popularity with the party’s conservative base and McCain’s own combativeness, I doubt it’ll come to that.

One wonders, though, why they chose Palin even with this story out there. ABC’s Jake Tapper asks the not unreasonable question, “What would the response be if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and his wife Michelle had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?”

Jim Geraghty is not buying the notion that Wes Clark’s attempts to diminish John McCain’s military service was done without coordination with the Democratic Powers that Be.

After statements by a half-dozen high-profile Democrats and Obama surrogates, you cannot persuade me that there is not a concerted effort on the part of Obama Democrats to criticize McCain on his war record. George McGovern, Jay Rockefeller, Tom Harkin, Democratic congressional candidate Bill Gillespie, Ed Schultz, Tony McPeak, and now Clark. Way too many to be coincidence. We’re seeing a lot more derisive comments about McCain’s wartime service than we are about Obama’s race.

To those examples, I’d add the “McCain didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam because he was a POW during the worst years” meme that floated around recently.

OTB commenter Bithead isn’t buying Obama’s attempts to distance himself from Clark.

Obama’s been doing this all along; Surrogates end up saying the smears and other trash talk the campaign needs to spread, and when things get too hot because of what gets said, Obama simply tosses the speaker under the bus, and claims he’s running a ‘clean campaign’, and he’s shocked…. shocked… that any of his people would come up with such a comment.

Let’s leave Ed Schultz, a radio host who one reasonably presumes isn’t coordinating with anyone and Gillespie, of whom I’ve never heard, out of the mix.  Do the remaining attempts to dampen McCain’s trump card, his military experience, constitute a pattern?  And, even if they do, is doing this, as Dale Franks suggests, beyond the pale?

Pat Lang, a retired Green Beret colonel, is somewhat bemused at how much is being made of John McCain’s military experience.

John McCain is an admirable man. There are many such who wore the uniform of the United States in adverse circumstance. Jim Webb, Chuck Hagel, Daniel Inouye, Bob Dole… Shall I go on? How many names would there be? How many million names? In their new found love of soldiers Americans ascribe something almost sacramental to the experience of military service. This is unexpected. There has emerged a kind of reverence for those who have served which is unfamiliar to the veterans of earlier generations. I am old enough to remember the aftermath of World War II. Veterans of that war were treated with respect, but not with veneration. Perhaps there were too many of them for that.

McCain’s brief experience as a junior naval aviator and his extended suffering in North Vietnamese hands seem to be thought by many to be serious qualifications for the ultimate job of making national level policy decisions about the country’s security. Television newsies gush about his empathy with soldiers and understanding for the horrors of war. Sentimentality abounds in these discussions. Sentimentality is good in Valentine’s Day cards. It is bad in picking a president for the country and a commander in chief for the armed forces.

He notes, too, that we have had presidents who made excellent wartime presidents despite little or no military experience.

I’ve argued for quite some time that it’s a mistake for candidates to tout their wartime heroism as a major factor in selling their qualifications for higher office. First, as Lang notes, being a heroic junior officer doesn’t have much bearing on being commander-in-chief. Second, to the extent that military prowess is an asset with the voters, others will make sure that they know about it. Third, and perhaps most importantly, its simply unseemly to toot your own horn in that way. Real heroes don’t shout, and all that.

Moreover, it’s far from clear that it works. If did, George H.W. Bush would have been a two-termer and his son would have been a no-termer. Indeed, it’s rarer that the candidate with the most military experience wins. The match-ups over the last forty years:

2004: Bush re-elected over John Kerry, Silver Star recipient

2000: George W. Bush, National Guard bare minimum stateside flyboy beats Al Gore, Vietnam vet

1996: Clinton re-elected over Bob Dole, massively wounded WWII vet

1992: Bush loses to Bill Clinton, dope smoking draft dodger

1988: George H.W. Bush, Distinguished Flying Cross winner, beats Mike Dukakis, peacetime Army vet

1984: Reagan beats Walter Mondale, peacetime Army vet

1980: Ronald Reagan, wartime Army movie star beat Carter

1976: Jimmy Carter, distinguished peacetime Navy career, beats Gerald Ford, WWII Navy officer

1972: Nixon beats George McGovern, WWII hero

1968: Richard Nixon, WWII non-line Navy service beats Hubert Humphrey, no military service

Only twice did the candidate with the more impressive military record win and, really, only 1988 is a true example. Nixon was a Quaker whose Navy career was most distinguished for his skill as a poker player; he wins this by default to a man who “tried twice to join the armed forces [during WWII], but was rejected both times due to a hernia.”

McCain’s military service was distinguished and what he endured at the hands of the Viet Cong is unimaginable to most of us. Presumably, we can draw some conclusions about his character from how he conducted himself during those times. And, certainly, 27 years in the Navy (counting his time at Annapolis) should be factored in as important experience in weighing him for the presidency.

But banging us over the head constantly with the fact that he went to Vietnam won’t get him elected president. Citing experience and contrasting with his opponent’s relative dearth of same is fine. But he’s still got to sell us on his vision for the future. The election is about 2009 and beyond, not 1967.

Bill Clinton says his wife, Hillary, tried to join the Army in the mid-1970s but was turned down.

ABC’s Jake Tapper:

“I remember when we were young, right out of law school, she went down and tried to join the Army and they said ‘Your eyes are so bad, nobody will take you,’” he said, after heralding her record on issues of concern to the military, such as body armor and access to health care.

I assume this is a version of the “Hillary Clinton tried to join the Marines” anecdote that then-First Lady Clinton told in 1994 that we wondered about since it’s a story she never seems to have told again.

The original story was that in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1975, Hillary walked into a local Marines recruiting office. The Marine recruiter looked at her, she recalled, and asked how old she was. Twenty-seven, she said. “He looked at me, and in those days that was before I learned how to wear contact lenses,” Sen. Clinton told a crowd of women veterans in 1994. “I had these really thick glasses on. He said, ‘How bad’s your eyesight?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty bad.’ …Finally said to me, he said, ‘You’re too old. You can’t see. And you’re a woman.…But maybe the dogs would take you.’”

(”Dogs” being a reference to the Army.)

Perhaps she did so — and hence Bill Clinton’s Army story today?

Or maybe he’s conflating the two stories?

(Add that Bosnian sniper fire, and you might have something there that Julia Roberts would want to option.)

Does anyone really believe that, after graduating Yale at the top of her class, she wanted to join the military? Or that she was so dumb that she thought the way to do that was to go to a recruiting office (where they enlist privates)? Or that, in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war and the earliest days of the all-volunteer force, they were turning people away by glancing at their glasses?

Maureen Dowd was a bit skeptical, as well, when the Marine story broke in 1994. In that iteration, Hillary made her approach in 1975, when she was a professor at Arkansas Law and the year after Bill made an unsuccessful bid for Congress.

But, even given the fact that the nation has become accustomed to Mrs. Clinton’s intriguing shape-shifting — from liberal do-gooder to high-risk commodities trader, from power lawyer to cookie baker, from health care czar to housewife supervising the menu for the state dinner for the Emperor and Empress of Japan — the latest one is still jarring.

First, it presented a macho contrast to a President who had just visited England, where news reports recalled the letter he wrote from there to a representative of the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Arkansas, explaining why many members of his generation loved their country but still found themselves “loathing” the military.

And it did not seem to fit in with the First Lady’s own persona. After all, Hillary Rodham was an up-and-coming legal star involved with an up-and-coming political star. She had made a celebrated appearance in Life magazine as an anti-establishment commencement speaker at Wellesley College, where, as president of the student government, she had organized teach-ins on her opposition to the Vietnam War. She was a Yale law school graduate who had worked on the anti-war Presidential campaigns of Eugene J. McCarthy and George McGovern.

Mrs. Clinton told friends that she had moved to Arkansas for only one reason: to be with Bill Clinton. Years later, she would tell Vanity Fair that she had stayed because “I didn’t see anything out there that I thought was more exciting or challenging than what I had in front of me.” She and Mr. Clinton married on Oct. 11, 1975 in Fayetteville. So, if she was talking to a Marine recruiter in 1975 before the marriage, was she briefly considering joining the few, the proud and the brave of the corps as an alternative to life with Mr. Clinton, who was already being widely touted as a sure thing for Arkansas Attorney General?

The Clintons, Bill in particular, have a long history of telling stories about themselves — illustrating how they became so gosh-darned public service oriented and good — that couldn’t possibly be true. This seems to be another installment in that genre.

Photo credit: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: Marine Corps Sunset Parade

It’s been occasionally remarked in recent years that George McGovern, who lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon in a landslide because he was so ultra-liberal, became more conservative after leaving public life and starting his own business. A column in today’s WSJ, “Freedom Means Responsibility,” will certainly add another log to that fire.

His thesis is that, “Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior.” He laments that attempts to fix very real problems associated with subprime mortgages, the inability to afford health insurance, and payday loans could well make things worse for a lot of people in order to make things better for a relative few.

Since leaving office I’ve written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

Now, here’s my question: Has McGovern become that much more conservative? Or have the goalposts of our political discourse simply moved that much.

It’s an honest question rather than a rhetorical one. I vaguely recall going to the polling place in Houston with my parents in 1972 but, being as I was a couple weeks shy of my seventh birthday, I was less attuned to matters of public policy then than now.

From what I’ve gathered since, though, McGovern was a genuine hero during WWII and continued to serve his country admirably for decades. Meanwhile, even aside from his personal shortcomings, Richard Nixon would be a disappointment to most modern conservatives. He imposed wage and price controls, advanced affirmative action and environmental regulation, and appointed Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court.

At the same time, “conservative” is often a reactionary ideology famously, as the late William F. Buckley put it, “standing astride history yelling Stop!” Modern-day conservatives (and, indeed, modern-day liberals) are much further to the left now than in 1972 on social issues ranging from gay rights to the role of women to what’s appropriate to air on television.

McGovern’s view on Iraq is remarkably similar to his views on Vietnam, so that much hasn’t changed. But he’s more conservative on economic issues and governmental regulation than quite a few modern-day Republicans.

So, which has changed more: George McGovern or the definition of “conservative”?

Photo credit: OffOffOff Opinion via Google

Former U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton died Sunday at the age of 77.

He was a leading advocate of environmental reforms and a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam. Still, former three-term Sen. Thomas Eagleton had no illusions about how he would be best-remembered. “In my obituary, it will probably be, ‘Tom Eagleton, United States senator for Missouri, for a short time the vice presidential candidate on the McGovern ticket in 1972,’ so that will be in my first paragraph,” Eagleton told The Associated Press in a 2003 interview.

Eagleton, 77, who resigned as McGovern’s running mate after it was revealed that his depression had been treated with shock therapy, died Sunday of a combination of heart, respiratory and other problems, his family said.

His death brought an outpouring of praise from Democrats and Republicans alike, including from George McGovern, who made the difficult decision in 1972 to remove Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. “It’s a real loss to the country,” McGovern said in a telephone interview Sunday. “No. 1, people liked him personally. They liked his enthusiasm. They liked his stories. They liked his ribbing and kidding. Republicans seemed to like him as well as Democrats.”

Former Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., Eagleton’s longtime friend and fellow St. Louisan, called Eagleton’s death a great loss to Missouri and to him personally. “Tom Eagleton was an outstanding public servant throughout his career in elective politics and beyond,” Danforth said. “As a United States senator, he was highly respected on both sides of the aisle. He was a person of high principle and consistent good humor.”

It’s a shame when one incident, especially an unfavorable one, overshadows all the contributions of one’s life. It’s especially tragic in Eagleton’s case, because it was merely a health problem that people were not ready for psychologically.

Rudy Giuliani was on H&C tonight to weigh in on the news of today’s foiled terror plot and the war on terrorism in general. And one thing is for sure, unlike lots of politicians, Giuliani isn’t running away from President Bush or the war in Iraq; he calls the President’s decision to go on the offensive after 9/11 “brilliant” and unequivocally argues that engaging the enemy abroad is what has kept us safe and that’s why winning in Iraq is so important.

And I have to say, I was a little bit shocked. This is first time in recent memory that I have seen anyone–especially someone with presidential ambitions–so forcefully defend President Bush and the war in Iraq. Kudos, Rudy.

Money quote:

You can not negotiate with [terrorists]. These are not people…they have demonstrated to us that they despise us, they hate us, and they want to kill us. They want to kill us because we’re a modern society. They want to kill us because we give women rights. They want to kill us because we have freedom of religion. They want to kill us because we have elected officials. They want to kill us because we’re moderate. And we can’t give that up. What are we going to negotiate away? The rights of women? Are we going to negotiate…set up an Islamic state to make them happy?

By the way, stay until the end of clip where you’ll hear Giuliani discuss the Lieberman race and drop one of the best lines on it that I have heard yet: “On this particular issue, he believes we have to be on the offense against terrorism. And I don’t know why his political party won’t allow him the kind of flexibility to have the view point.”

UPDATE (James Joyner): Kevin Drum argues that,

Democrats have to make it absolutely clear, every single time somebody spouts this rubbish, that supporting the Iraq war doesn’t mean you’re “on offense against terrorism.” Nor does opposing the war also mean you oppose fighting jihadism.

While Kevin and I disagree on the role of the Iraq War in the fight against the jihadists, I agree that one can oppose the war and still want to mount a robust offensive against the jihadists. Giuliani’s zinger is a good talking point and no worse than the Democratic line that opposition to abortion means you don’t care about women’s rights or that opposition to quotas makes you a racist. But it doesn’t drive the debate in a useful direction.

As to the particulars of the Connecticut primary contest, though, he may well right. Despite a large number of posts on the netroots insurgency and the national implications of a Lieberman loss, I haven’t followed the issues side of the race very closely. I haven’t taken Lamont seriously because he has always struck me as an empty suit recruited as a one-issue stalking horse.

Looking at the Issues page of Lamont’s campaign site hasn’t much allayed that suspicion. What does he say about the fight against terrorism? Not a blessed thing. How about his cornerstone issue, the war in Iraq?

That the war in Iraq has diverted far too many of our dollars, and too much of our attention, from our needs back home. The crisis in health care, lack of progress towards energy independence, and struggling public schools are examples of how our government is not leading, but allowing lobbyists and special interests to write the rules.

Now, these are perfectly honorable views. But notice that he doesn’t say “The war in Iraq has diverted far too many of our dollars, and too much of our attention from our fight against the jihadist terrorists who threaten our security” or “The war in Iraq has created a breeding ground for terrorists, turned potentially friendly Muslims against us, and diminished our crucial soft power in the world community.” Those are the arguments that Democrats who are serious about fighting terrorists–guys like Kevin Drum or Joe Biden, say–are making. Instead, he’s spouting George McGovern’s campaign literature. (I kid; McGovern was much more serious about the fight against Communism.)

To be fair, the site has a separate War in Iraq page. But even there, the only mention of terrorism is a silly talking point left over from the Kerry campaign: “Today, America is no safer, Israel is no safer, Iran is more dangerous, Osama bin Laden is still at large, and our brave troops are stuck in the middle of a bloody civil war.” Now, all of those things are either true or debatable. But, other than the nonsensical implication that we would have captured bin Laden if only we hadn’t gone to Iraq, where’s the discussion about jihadists?

UPDATE: I have to disagree with Kevin and James here for a moment. First, to Kevin’s points. He writes that “supporting the Iraq war doesn’t mean you’re ‘on offense against terrorism.’” Well, to some of us it does. And perhaps that’s why this debate has become utterly redundant. Regardless of how one feels about the way we got into Iraq and the threat it posed pre-invasion, it is the central front in the war on terrorism now. To abdandon Iraq is to surrender the most critical front in the war on terrorism and possibly allow the country to become a haven for the ideology we are trying to defeat. These are arguments that you either believe or you don’t. Which brings me to Kevin’s second point in which he writes that, “nor does opposing the war also mean you oppose fighting jihadism.” This is generically true, however, opposing the war does mean you oppose fighting jihadism in Iraq. Like I said, there is plently of validity in arguments that Iraq shouldn’t have ever happened. But aren’t these arguments better suited for history books rather than the basis for future policy decisions?

In regard to Giuliani’s comment about what happened to Lieberman, James writes that his “zinger is a good talking point and no worse than the Democratic line that opposition to abortion means you don’t care about women’s rights or that opposition to quotas makes you a racist. But it doesn’t drive the debate in a useful direction.” Respectfully, I disagree with that completely. In the context of the discussion, Giuliani was specifically referring to Lieberman’s position on the war in Iraq. How is anything Giuliani said a mischaracterization of what happened to Lieberman? Did his party allow him the flexibility to hold his view on Iraq or not? In terms of the whether this remark pushes the debate in a useful direction, it certainly helps to draw a distinct line in the sand that seperates where the Democratic party and where the Republican party stand on the war in Iraq. And I think most liberals agree with Giuliani’s thesis that Lamont’s victory represents a clear signal to the rest of the Democrats that the base wants out of Iraq immediately and aren’t willing to tolerate politicians that don’t accept this. Isn’t that what Kos has been saying publicly about the “people powered movement” since Lamont won?

Ronald Bailey argues that those who favor small government should vote for gridlock this November. That is, they ought to vote for Democrats.

Today I’m going to do something that I have never done—I will vote in Virginia’s Democratic Party primary. Oh sure, I’ve voted Democratic—once. That was for George McGovern back in 1972. I was 18 years old. Since then it’s been a mix of Libertarian and Republican candidates for various local, state and federal offices. What is motivating me to do this? It’s not the platforms of the Democratic primary candidates. Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb is protectionist-minded and his opponent businessman Harris Miller wants to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies. So my attraction is not to the candidates or their proposed policies, but to the idea of gridlocked government.

[...]

How would gridlock benefit the country? First, Democrats and Republicans might stymie each others spending proposals, thus reducing the budget deficit. It’s not a complete fantasy. During that blessed era of gridlock of the 1990s, total discretionary spending fell by more than 8 percent. We might also be spared disgusting exercises in political posturing on issues like gay marriage and flag-burning. Second, whichever house of Congress is controlled by the Democrats could investigate various Bush Administration assertions of executive authority. With regard to the Iraq war, I don’t think that gridlock will hurt or help much. The situation in Iraq is so badly screwed up now, it’s hard to see how a good conclusion can be reached, though I still hope for one.

I’m inclined to agree. The health of the Republic is much better served by having as much power spread out as possible. Partisan politics and gridlock are an extra-Constitutional separation of powers that helps to minimize government intrusions–mostly.

Unfortunately, it’s also true that sometimes gridlock backfires and you end up with monumentally stupid policies that are heralded as “great compromises.”

Still, divided government, for all its faults, is certainly much better than having one party in charge of the whole thing.

Robert Kagan, whose foreign policy analysis I take seriously, has an interesting but wrongheaded op-ed in yesterday’s WaPo arguing that a Democratic president might be good for the country. While there are reasons why that might be the case, the ones he adduces are quite odd, indeed.

The Democrats need to take ownership of American foreign policy again, for their sake as well as the country’s. Long stretches in opposition sometimes drive parties toward defeatism, utopianism, isolationism or permutations of all three. What starts off as legitimate attacks on the inevitable errors of the party in power can veer off into a wholesale rejection of the opposition party’s own foreign policy principles. Republicans in the 1990s, after supporting an expansive internationalism under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, drifted toward quasi-isolationism against the Clinton administration’s quasi-internationalism. During Woodrow Wilson’s two terms, the internationalist party of Theodore Roosevelt began transforming itself into the isolationist party of William Borah. During the Nixon-Ford years, the party of John F. Kennedy became the party of George McGovern.

Eight years of Bill Clinton brought the Democrats mostly out of their post-Vietnam trauma and revived liberal interventionism. But the George W. Bush years have driven many back. Buffeted between the administration’s failures and their party’s left-wing critics, the Clintonites either disavowed what they once believed or kept their heads down. Lately they’re starting to show signs of life and could still take the reins again if the right Democrat won in 2008. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing. No one can claim any more that the old Clinton foreign policy team is less competent than the Republicans who succeeded it. But what happens to these Democrats if their standard-bearer loses in 2008?

By this logic, two term presidencies are simply a bad thing. Again, there’s plenty of evidence that presidents are seldom as effective in their second term as their first. But swapping the party in power every election to avoid the opposition party’s getting too nutty is a recipe for paralysis.

Further, the examples Kagan sites are dubious at best. The isolationist Republicans that arose in reaction to Wilson did so, not out of Wilson Derangement Syndrome but because the naive policies of Wilsonian internationalism were bad for the country. Ditto the “no nation building” Republican reaction to Clinton’s erratic interventionism. Indeed, the much-derided neocons stuck by Clinton in all these endeavors and urged him to go much further. It should be noted, too, that there was no comparable reaction from the Republicans after twelve years of Roosevelt-Truman, from the Democrats after eight years of Eisenhower, or the Republicans after eight years of Kennedy-Johnson. Not to mention that the McGovernites arose after only four years of Nixon (he was nominated in 1972, well before Gerald Ford ascended to the VP slot) and arguably were a response to the failed Vietnam policies of their own party and that, while McGovern was quite liberal domestically and an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War, he was still a Cold Warrior internationally.

While I believe there’s some truth to Kagan’s premise vis-a-vis modern Democrats and coming to terms with the post-9/11 world, most of what we see now is legitimate opposition to the Iraq War that has morphed into something more virulent as the casualty count mounted and the premises of the invasion have been called into question. The foreign policy platforms of the major Democratic presidential hopefuls are unclear at the moment but the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, is a supporter of the Iraq War and sounds like a hawk.

The case for electing a Democrat is not only to save the party’s soul, though that’s a worthy task, but to pull the country together to face the difficult times ahead. The last time the Democrats were in office, the world seemed a comparatively manageable place. They have not yet had to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. Since the only post-Sept. 11 foreign policy Americans know is Bush’s, many believe — especially many Democrats — that if only Bush weren’t president, the world would be manageable again. Allies could be easily summoned for the struggle against al-Qaeda or to bring pressure on Iran or to replace American troops in Iraq. Threats could be addressed without force, through skillful diplomacy and soft power. Maybe some of the threats would disappear.

This is fantasy. The next president, whether Democrat or Republican, may work better with allies and may be more clever in negotiating with adversaries. But the realities of the world are what they are, and the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy are what they are. The diffuse threats of the post-Cold War world simply don’t unite and energize our European allies as the Soviet Union did, and even a dedicated “multilateralist” won’t be able to get them to spend more money on defense or stop buying oil from Iran. A smarter negotiating strategy toward Iran might or might not make a difference in stopping its weapons program. Soft power will go only so far in dealing with problems such as North Korea and Sudan.

This argument is more compelling. Parties grow up somewhat when they are in charge. For example, Bill Clinton soon adopted Haiti and China policies almost identical to those of George H.W. Bush that he’d ridiculed during the 1992 race when the cold hard reality of responsibility overwhelmed the talking points. Ditto, George W. Bush and his absolute objection to nation building.

In fact, the options open to any new administration are never as broad as its supporters imagine, which is why, historically, there is more continuity than discontinuity in American foreign policy. If the Democrats did take office in 2009, their approach to the post-Sept. 11 world would be marginally different but not stunningly different from Bush’s. And they would have to sell that not stunningly different set of policies to their own constituents.

This was certainly true during the Cold War. I still recall attending a roundtable discussion at the Carter Center of all the living former Secretaries of State, of which Al Haig had just become the newest member, as an undergraduate. The near-total agreement of men who’d worked for LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan on most issues was stunning.

In this respect 2008 would be another 1952. The Republican Party had been out of power for 20 years when Dwight Eisenhower took office, through Munich, World War II and the first years of the Cold War. Many Republicans imagined that everything that went wrong in the world during those two decades was the fault of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats. FDR “tricked” us into war with Japan. Then he gave away Eastern Europe at Yalta. Then Harry Truman adopted the disastrous strategy of containment. These were the years when Joe McCarthy, Robert Taft and anti-containment “realists” such as Walter Lippmann flourished. But when Ike and the Republicans finally took over management of the Cold War, years of railing against “cowardly containment” gave way to broad if shaky acceptance.

The country could benefit from a similar passing of the baton in the 2008 presidential election. At the end of the day, of course, a president’s personal qualities and worldview are usually more important than the party she or he represents. The Democrats, like the Republicans, could nominate a candidate no sensible person would entrust with American foreign policy. For that matter, the Republicans could nominate someone capable of winning broad Democratic support, which would partly address the debilitating national divide on foreign policy. But eventually America’s post-Sept. 11 foreign policy will probably be better if both parties have a shot at shaping it.

Of course, the fact that presidents learn the hard way does not necessarily translate into national consensus. The Iraq War, especially coming after a generation of quick military conflicts producing few American casualties, has been particularly divisive, to be sure, but most of our disunity is over domestic issues that go deep into the cultural level. The bitterness that marks the Blue/Red divide is seemingly hard set, only temporarily ameliorated by national traumas like wars and terrorist attacks.

Let’s conduct a little thought experiment. Had Al Gore gotten another thousand votes in Florida six years ago and decided, as he may well have, to go to war in Iraq, would he have broad national support? Would most of the Democrats who despise the war now support it because there’s a Democrat in office? Or would a Howard Dean type have emerged in the 2004 primaries to take him on? Further, would most of the Republicans now supporting the war instead be against it because Gore was in charge rather than one of their own?

My guess is that we’d still be a country divided on foreign policy issues and moreso on domestic issues. Yes, some Democrats that now rail against the war would instead be rallying around their president. And some Republicans now begrudgingly supporting the war would revert to their 1990s form and be condemning the post-Saddam part of the operation as useless “nation building” that’s diverting us from hunting down and killing terrorists. The net result, though, would be about the same as it is now.

Like “South Park Republicans,” the concept of “conservative rock songs” is rather counterintuitive. Nonethless, the editors of the venerable National Review of compiled a list of the top 50.

The New York Times lists all 50 and provides NR’s reasoning, some of which is rather strained. And a few of the songs are by no means “rock,” even by the expansive new definition that includes Aretha Franklin.

Some examples and analysis below the fold.

1. Won’t Get Fooled Again,” by The Who.
The conservative movement is full of disillusioned revolutionaries; this could be their theme song, an oath that swears off naive idealism once and for all. “There’s nothing in the streets / Looks any different to me / And the slogans are replaced, by—the—bye. . . . Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.” The instantly recognizable synthesizer intro, Pete Townshend’s ringing guitar, Keith Moon’s pounding drums, and Roger Daltrey’s wailing vocals make this one of the most explosive rock anthems ever recorded — the best number by a big band, and a classic for conservatives.

I’m not sure cynicism and an acknowlegement that Leftist causes eventually become conservative staples is a conservative viewpoint–although it’s generally correct. Surely, this isn’t the best example of a conservative rock song?

2. “Taxman,” by The Beatles.
A George Harrison masterpiece with a famous guitar riff (which was actually played by Paul McCartney): “If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street / If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat / If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat / If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.” The song closes with a humorous jab at death taxes: “Now my advice for those who die / Declare the pennies on your eyes.”

More populist than conservative. But yes.

3. “Sympathy for the Devil,” by The Rolling Stones.
Don’t be misled by the title; this song is “The Screwtape Letters” of rock. The devil is a tempter who leans hard on moral relativism — he will try to make you think that “every cop is a criminal / And all the sinners saints.” What’s more, he is the sinister inspiration for the cruelties of Bolshevism: “I stuck around St. Petersburg / When I saw it was a time for a change / Killed the czar and his ministers / Anastasia screamed in vain.”

Not sure Jagger and company were going for a conservative theme. Douglas Cruickshank provides an excellent literary take on it for Salon.

4. “Sweet Home Alabama,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
A tribute to the region of America that liberals love to loathe, taking a shot at Neil Young’s Canadian arrogance along the way: “A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”

Definitely a Southern anthem but not sure there’s much “conservative” about it, aside from vague pro-Wallace sympathies and the line “Now Watergate does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you?”

7. “Revolution,” by The Beatles.
“You say you want a revolution / Well you know / We all want to change the world . . . Don’t you know you can count me out?” What’s more, Communism isn’t even cool: “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” (Someone tell the Che Guevara crowd.)

This is a classic case of liberal values become conservative over time. The Lads were pretty liberal even by the standards of 1960s era twentysomethings. They were just also anti-violent and anti-Communist. So, incidentally, was George McGovern.

16. “Get Over It,” by The Eagles.
Against the culture of grievance: “The big, bad world doesn’t owe you a thing.” There’s also this nice line: “I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass.”

This one deserved to be much higher on the list. Again, though, Henley and company are hardly conservatives.

20. “Rock the Casbah,” by The Clash.
After 9/11, American radio stations were urged not to play this 1982 song, one of the biggest hits by a seminal punk band, because it was seen as too provocative. Meanwhile, British Forces Broadcasting Service (the radio station for British troops serving in Iraq) has said that this is one of its most requested tunes.

An inspired choice, although a case of a song being seized upon people with radically different sympathies than the songwriter.

31. “Small Town,” by John Mellencamp.
A Burkean rocker: “No, I cannot forget where it is that I come from / I cannot forget the people who love me.”

Mellencamp will cringe if he finds out conservatives are glomming onto his music.

35. “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Written as an anti—Vietnam War song, this tune nevertheless is pessimistic about activism and takes a dim view of both Communism and liberalism: “Five—year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains . . .”

Again, cynicism is not conservatism.

50. “Stand By Your Man,” by Tammy Wynette.
Hillary trashed it — isn’t that enough? If you’re worried that Wynette’s original is too country, then check out the cover version by Motörhead.

Wynette ain’t rock and roll, gents.

Gone Hollywood

Phillip Longman sees dire consequences flowing from the fact that conservatives have more children than liberals.

It’s a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.

Today, fertility correlates strongly with a wide range of political, cultural and religious attitudes. In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.

[...]

This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and ’70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children.

[...]

Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as often happens. But when they look for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

Many will celebrate these developments. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment. Either way, they will find themselves living through another great cycle of history.

Leaving aside whether these results are desirable, the logic here is quite strained. Most notably, while it’s true that the fastest growing churches are the most conservative ones, the overall trend in society is toward much more secularity and breaking down of traditional norms.

Take the language. Profanity that would have earned a film an “R” rating in the mid 1970s is now routinely heard on broadcast television during prime time. Words that got guffaws when Richard Prior or Eddie Murphy said them, simply because of their shock value, have become punctuation. Comedy Central’s “South Park,” which would probably have been given an NC-17 rating if released in the theaters in 1975, is now acceptable fare for teenagers. Indeed, there is such a thing as “South Park Republicans.”

The views on homosexuality have rapidly changed over the last thirty years; indeed, the last ten. To take one example that I cite with some frequency, Arlo Guthrie’s 1966 counterculture anthem “Alice’s Restaurant” contains the line, “And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.” One can’t imagine Pat Robertson using the term “faggot” today.

Even conservative, churchgoing women who are married have careers. It’s probably true that somewhat more of them who can afford to do so make the sacrifice of staying home and raising–or even home schooling–their children than their progressive peers. But the overall trendline is unmistakeable and quite unlikely to reverse.

Indeed, society’s answers to the test question that Longman suggests, “Do you find soft drugs, homosexuality and euthanasia acceptable?” is moving in a progressive direction. It’s true that there is a reactionary wave against gay marriage at the moment. But, then, the very idea of gay marriage would have been considered ridiculously radical twenty years ago. Indeed, one can scarcely imagine George McGovern–considered a radical left winger when he was the Democratic nominee in 1972–even conjuring the notion, let alone embracing it.

Longman can relax, methinks. It’s the conservatives, not the liberals, who are losing on cultural issues.

________

Related:

Democrat Pundits Don’t Get It
WINNING THE PUBLIC DEBATE

OpinionJournal editor James Taranto is excited about the prospects of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s presumed bid for president.

Mr. Romney could be an attractive presidential candidate. His sunny disposition puts one in mind of Ronald Reagan–he laughs easily and smiles almost continuously. He is a governor, as four of the past five presidents were; but he can claim more international experience than most state executives. In addition to his work on the Olympics, he has served on the federal Homeland Security Advisory Council, chairing its working group on intelligence and information sharing.

Massachusetts, the only state George McGovern carried in 1972, is an unlikely place to find a Republican presidential candidate. The last Bay State Republican to seek the presidential nomination was Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964; the last to win it was Calvin Coolidge 40 years earlier. All 12 members of the state’s congressional delegation are Democrats, and Republicans who win office here tend to be liberals like former senator Edward Brooke and former governor Bill Weld.

Not Mr. Romney, whose views put him well within the mainstream of GOP conservatism. A self-described “fiscal hawk,” he takes credit for staving off tax increases, no mean feat given that the Democrats have a veto-proof legislative majority. When he took office, the state had a $3 billion budget deficit. “We held the line on taxes, we did not borrow more money, and instead we cut back on state programs,” closing the gap. He hopes next year to persuade the Legislature to cut the top income tax rate to 5% from 5.3%.

[...]

Mr. Romney’s background as a businessman leads him to think of government in pragmatic terms. “I tend to be more analytical than I think the average politician [is]. I tend to look for a lot of data, and don’t reach conclusions based on . . . political doctrine, but instead based on analysis. . . . I look at each issue and try and evaluate what I think the right answer is.”

Taranto thinks Romney’s biggest liability is his faith.

A crucial question will be whether Mr. Romney’s religion is a handicap. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is indigenous to America, but many Americans view it with suspicion. In a 1999 Gallup poll, 17% of those surveyed said they would not vote for a Mormon for president, far more than said the same of a Jew (6%) or a Catholic (4%).

In 1994 Sen. Kennedy made an issue of the LDS Church’s tardy embrace of racial equality (it did not allow the ordination of blacks until 1978). “I don’t think that’s the reason I lost to Ted Kennedy,” says Mr. Romney, and he’s surely right. In any case, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t seem to have any problem today answering to a Mormon Senate leader, Harry Reid.

Mr. Romney also says religion wasn’t a problem for his father: “When he was running for president . . . he was the front-runner. His faith just didn’t factor in. . . . His statement on Vietnam–that put him under, but certainly not his faith.”

The trouble is that much of today’s anti-Mormon sentiment is found on the religious right, a constituency that looms much larger in the GOP now than it did in 1968, or than it ever has in Massachusetts. Ask a conservative Christian what he thinks of Mormonism, and there’s a good chance he’ll call it a “cult” or say Mormons “aren’t Christian.”

Taranto is not alone in his concern. A not-insignificant number of Evangelicals view Mormonism as a cult. (A quick Google search reveals THE MORMON CULT, Cult Conspiracy by the Mormon Church, Mormonism – Christian or Cult?, MormonsSuck.com: The truth about the Mormon cult!, Mormons Claim They Are Not a Cult, and The Plain Truth about the Mormons.)

As Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan explained in “Mitt Romney’s Evangelical Problem, ” this is not just the view of some isolated kooks.

Evangelicals don’t have the same vague anti-LDS prejudice that some Americans do. For them it’s a doctrinal thing, based on very specific theological disputes that can’t be overcome by personality or charm or even shared positions on social issues. Romney’s journalistic boosters either don’t understand these doctrinal issues or try to sidestep them. But ignoring them won’t make them go away. To evangelicals, Mormonism isn’t just another religion. It’s a cult.

The first time I ever heard about Mormons was in fifth grade, sitting in a basement classroom of my Baptist church, watching a filmstrip about cults. Our Sunday school class was covering a special month-long unit on false religions; in the mail-order curriculum, Mormonism came somewhere between devil worshippers and Jim Jones.

[...]

Evangelical opinions about the LDS Church haven’t changed so much since I watched that filmstrip more than 20 years ago. In 2004, Mormons were specifically excluded from participation in the National Day of Prayer organized by Shirley Dobson (wife of James Dobson, leader of the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family) because their theology was found to be incompatible with Christian beliefs.

Mormons believe that they are the fully realized strain of Christianity—hence the “latter-day saints.” They acknowledge extra-biblical works of scripture (such as the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants), follow a series of prophets who claim to have received divine revelations, and teach that God inhabits an actual physical body. This is all blasphemy to evangelicals; they argue that “the Bible explicitly warns against adding to or detracting from its teaching” and refer to the revelations as “realistic deception[s] by the Devil himself.”

[...]

Southern Baptists have been particularly vocal about labeling the LDS Church a “cult.” In 1997, the denomination published a handbook and video, both with the title The Mormon Puzzle: Understanding and Witnessing to Latter-day Saints. More than 45,000 of these kits were distributed in the first year; the following year—in a throwing down of the proselytizing gauntlet—the Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting in Salt Lake City. Around the same time, a speaker at the denomination’s summit on Mormonism declared that Utah was “a stronghold of Satan.” When Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary, tried to repair relations with the LDS community by apologizing on behalf of evangelicals during a speech in the Mormon Tabernacle last year, his conservative brethren lashed out. Mouw had no right, they declared in an open letter, to speak for them or apologize for denouncing Mormon “false prophecies and false teachings.”

In the wake of Romney-mania, one prominent evangelical has sung a slightly different public tune. Charles Colson told the Weekly Standard in June that he “could in very good conscience support Romney” as a fellow “social conservative on most of the issues we care about.” As recently as late February, however, Colson reminded his radio listeners that “while Mormons share some beliefs with Christians, they are not Christians.” “I respect Mormons and work with them,” he said, “but we can’t gloss over our fundamental differences.” Asked about Colson’s apparent change of heart, Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) told me, “I think Chuck was probably saying the politically correct thing.”

Sullivan concludes,

The tragedy—or, depending on your point of view, the irony—is that Mitt Romney may just be the most appealing candidate Republicans can field in 2008, the one most likely to win the White House by shoring up social conservatives and rallying business interests without frightening swing voters. Yet the modern GOP’s reliance on evangelical voters and its elevation of personal religiosity—strategies which have served the party so well in recent years—may doom the chances of this most promising candidate. Or, to put it in evangelical terms, it might be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination.

While I agree that the “Mormon question” would be a factor, I believe the fact that Romney is a virtual unknown on the national stage is the more serious issue. (For a less serious take on the Mormon angle, see Steve Bainbridge’s discussion. )

John McCain, George Allen, and others have a more natural fundraising base. While it’s true that he would be a geographic favorite in New Hampshire, McCain has already established a political operation and demonstrated that he can win there. Aside from a handful of pundits, I don’t think there’s much clamor for Romney out there.