“After almost 6 1/2 years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military — overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation — to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is a worse use of the U.S. military than ‘nation-building,’ it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples’ politicians.” – George Will

David Keene and the American Conservative Union offered to take sides in an NLRB dispute between rivals UPS and FedEx based on who would pay to play. FedEx refused to pay the bribe of $2 to $3 million, so ACU supported UPS. FedEx went public, turning over the letter outlining ACU’s extortion request to POLITICO’s Mike Allen.

Doubters can and should read the letter themselves.  Allen’s summary, though, is fair:

The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.

In the three-page letter asking for money on June 30, the conservative group backed FedEx. After FedEx says it rejected the offer, Keene signed onto a two-page July 15 letter backing UPS.

[...]

Just two weeks earlier, ACU had offered its endorsement to FedEx, saying in a letter to the company: “We stand with FedEx in opposition to this legislation.”

But there was a catch — an expensive one. ACU asked FedEx to pay as much as $3.4 million for e-mail and other services for “an aggressive grass-roots campaign to stop the legislation in the Senate.”

“For the activist contact portion of the plan, we will contact over 150,000 people per state multiple times at a cost of $1.39 per name or $2,147,550 to implement the entire program,” the letter says. “If we incorporate the targeted, senator-personalized radio effort into the plan, you can figure an additional $125,000 on average, per state” for an estimated 10 states. The total would be $3,397,550.”

I read this quickly earlier this morning, following a link from Taegan Goddard, but ultimately wasn’t sure what to make of it because I glossed over the nature of the difference in the FedEx and UPS position.

If ACU were simply offering to throw its weight and lobbying effort behind FedEx and asking that FedEx pay the freight, that wouldn’t be a big deal.  That’s how a lot of non-profits work:  Getting major corporations to pay to get their name on something the non-profit wanted to do, anyway.   And FedEx’ position in the dispute is consistent with ACU’s alleged principles:

FedEx currently has one U.S. union contract for its entire express business. Under a change passed by the House and awaiting action in the Senate, FedEx — like UPS — would have to negotiate union contracts for individual locations, which FedEx claims would make it much more difficult to promise worldwide regularity for deliveries.

I elided that part of the article on my initial read but got it figured out after a brief Twitter dialog with Teresa Kopec and Brian Faughnan.

UPS’ position is mere rent-seeking:  Trying to get government to impose a cost it already bears on a competitor.  For ACU to side with UPS would be outrageous enough; to do so after having been rebuffed on a pay-for-play bid is scandalous.  (George Will noted that yesterday in a column written before this scandal broke, but I hadn’t read that until after coming to the conclusion independently.)

It should be noted that ACU is claiming that, despite his use of their logo in the second letter, Keene was acting as an individual.  If so, Keene should be ousted at once if ACU is to retain even a shred of credibility. (Dan Riehl, who’s to my right on most issues, agrees.)

If not, however, ACU’s tax-exempt status should be pulled and conservatives should cease supporting it immediately.

UPDATE: An emailed ACU press release signed by Executive VP Dennis Whitfield is even more vehement:

Mr. David Keene’s name was on a letter prepared by another organization.  This was a personal decision on his part and he was not representing ACU at the time.  No permission was given by ACU, and no logo was provided by ACU, to the organization who issued the letter in question.

ACU’s policy position on this issue has not changed and it will not change.

ACU’s positions on important policy issues have never been for sale.

ACU does not support moving businesses under the jurisdiction of the NLRB or expanding the federal government’s power, reach or authority under the NLRB.

Keene, who has been its chairman since 1984, is the ACU from the standpoint of many.  If he’s not fired, it really doesn’t matter.

Since I check Memeorandum before Google Reader most mornings, I saw Hilzoy’s post “Bare-Faced Go-Away Bird” there first.  I glanced at it before going on to other posts but resolved to write something snarky about how it was quite likely that it was the first time the phrase “I’m going to Rwanda this weekend, on vacation” had ever been written.

It seems, however, that she buried her lede and that the real news of the post is that she is retiring from blogging Friday.  She’s been at it nearly as long as I have, joining Obsidian Wings in 2004.  You can read her lengthy explanation for yourself but the short version is that she was motivated to start because of what she thought was the insanity of the Bush era and that Obama’s taking over the White House means she can devote her time to other things.

Years ago, George Will told a story about his first coming to National Review and asking Bill Buckley how he managed to continue putting out commentary three times a week year after year.  Buckley replied to the effect that he never failed to be irritated by something at least three times a week.  While I go through periods where I’m less productive than others (indeed, I’m in one now) I’m seldom at a loss for something to write about.

While there’s a decent chance Hilzoy will pull a Brett Favre — bloggers who are good at it for any length of time find it hard to stay away — she’s got other outlets for her writing in her other life as a scholar.  She’s been one of a handful of bloggers from the Loyal Opposition that I’ve read regularly because she thinks and writes well and mostly lives up to this:

And that was what I really wanted to do: to listen to people I disagreed with, to engage with them, and to try to show that it was possible to care deeply about politics without hating your opponents. Being civil doesn’t mean you’re lukewarm, and being committed to your principles doesn’t mean you have to be hateful.

That’s not the way to maximize pageviews, alas, but it is the proper attitude if your goal is to persuade and engage rather than vent.

Marc Ambinder has compiled a list of “The Six Top Conservatives Obama Listens To.”   As several of those who saw the link via Twitter have noted, arguably none of them are conservatives:

1. The Mainers, Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe
2. Dick Lugar
3. John McCain
4. David Brooks
5. Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith

A perfectly fine list of Republicans to whom I’m perfectly happy the president is listening.  But I’m not sure any of them are conservatives – and am quite sure some of them aren’t.  There are several on an “Others” honorable mention list but only George Will is inarguably a conservative.

UPDATE: Commenter Herb asks an interesting question:

For the sake of discussion: which conservatives do you wish Obama would listen to?

I’ll open that one up to the readers.

Jon Henke Twitters: “The California referendum proves that what voters want to spend is not well-connected with what voters are willing to pay.”

Quite right.  Californian Kevin Drum takes as a given that his state is “broken” but sees no solution in sight.  While he’s in favor of Governor Schwarzenegger’s idea of a constitutional convention to fix some of the institutional flaws that has the Golden State in this mess, he notes that the same institutions likely preclude said convention from working:

[I]n order to even hold a constitutional convention, it has to be put on the ballot and approved by a majority of the electorate.  And how does the question get put on the ballot?  It has to be approved by two-thirds of the legislature.  But this is the problem we’re trying to solve in the first place: to pass a budget or raise taxes takes a two-thirds vote of the legislature, and Republicans have enough votes to stop that from happening.  Votes that they use regularly.  So why wouldn’t they also stand in the way of a constitutional convention whose main purpose would almost certainly be to remove the two-thirds requirements for passing a budget and raising taxes?

No reason, really.

George Will is one of the few elite outlyers on this one, calling the rejection of the various ballot measures designed to cope with the present economic crisis “sensible,” noting that each Proposition had rather serious flaws (Drum calls them “mostly gimmicks“).  Still, even Will concedes that,

California’s voters are complicit in their state’s collapse. They elect and reelect the legislators off whom public employees unions batten. Also, voters have promiscuously used their state’s plebiscitary devices to control and fatten the budget. In November, as the dark fiscal clouds lowered, they authorized $9.95 billion more in debt as a down payment on a perhaps $75 billion high-speed-rail project linking San Francisco and Los Angeles — a delight California cannot afford.

Matthew Shugart notes that, while the needed measures managed to garner a mere one third of the vote, “the stupid one” passed “with nearly three fourths of the vote.”  He suggests that furloughs — i.e., simply sending state employees home without pay — is a likely consequence.  Megan McArdle, meanwhile, thinks California may be “too big to fail” and get a federal bailout.

Update (Steve Verdon): Just thought it is worth pointing out that if California had limited its budget increases to inflation plus rate of population growth the state would either have a much, much smaller deficit or even a surplus. When people complain about not being able to raise taxes they ignore the spending side of the equation. The implicit assumption is that the spending is just fine and not out of control, and it most certainly is out of control. For example, take former Los Angeles Police Chief Benard Parks.¹ He currently collects a salary of about $179,000 as a member of the City Council. However Parks also collects about $265,000 from his pension for being the police chief. That is a total annual income of around $444,000, and pension plans are generally considered “off the table” when it comes to looking at balancing the budget.

The California problem is the problem in with government that has tremendous discretionary powers: there is little in the way to ensure the state behaves in a responsible manner. Add to the mix special interest groups and rent seeking and you have the potential for big problems. Yes it is in part the fault of the voters for going down this road. But at the same time there are politicians and special interest groups that have been sucking up vast amounts of money too.
_____
¹Yes, as the former LA Police Chief and member of the LA City Council those are all Los Angeles issues, not state issues. However, Los Angeles is very much a microcosm of what is wrong with the State. Los Angeles is running a deficit, with few options in terms of raising revenues. There are powerful unions that have tremendous influence with the City Council and the Mayor. Los Angeles problems can be laid primarily at the feet of unrestrained spending. Sound familiar? It should, that is California writ large.

The juxtaposition of George Will’s latest column, “The Wreck of the Racial Spoils System,” and this odd appearance by Edward James Olmos and the cast of BSG at the United Nations (via Charli Carpenter) bitterly arguing that “there’s no such thing as race” except for, naturally, “the human race,” is startling.

Now, the idea that “race” is a social construct undefinable in biological terms is an old one and, frankly, irrefutable.  But, like “pornography” and “torture,” we know it when we see it.  While it would be great to get beyond discussion of race and treat people as individuals, it’s a concept that has real meaning and value sociologically.

Will’s column, for example, deals with a longstanding fight in New Haven, Connecticut about a firefighter promotion exam that found zero black candidates worthy of promotion and which, by sheer dint of that fact, the city deemed racially biased — despite its having been preapproved by independent authorities as racially neutral.

Now, I’m with Will in thinking that the fact that we’re still litigating these matters half a century after Brown and more than four decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is both tiresome and rather silly.   But are we at the point where we’re willing to declare that there’s no such thing as racial discrimination or disparate impact because there’s no such thing as race?

The Washington Post company continues its consolidation of the media universe with the hire of Ezra Klein.   Politico’s Michael Calderone breaks the news:

The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy, is heading to the Washington Post.

Rumors about Klein’s upcoming move spread on Wednesday night during a reception thrown by The Nation magazine in honor of D.C. bureau chief Chris Hayes.

A Post spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO this morning that Klein was hired as a blogger at washingtonpost.com and is expected to start in about a month.

Klein, a 24-year-old associate editor at the Prospect, writes frequently on health care issues. And he also runs JournoList, an off-the-record listserv of mostly left-of-center bloggers and academics, along with nonpartisan reporters.

Matt Yglesias offers his congratulations, which I second.  I also concur with Matt’s praise for recent acquisitions at the Post, most notably the superb revamping of ForeignPolicy.com into a blog megaverse.

Matt is, however, a bit leery:

After all, one thing all decent progressive blogs do is point out semi-regularly that the Washington Post opinion section is a pretty rotten operation. You have liars like Charles Krauthammer and George Will penning regular columns, alongside less-egregious but still pretty pernicious stuff like David Ignatius’ apologia for war crimes and so forth. [...] People don’t go after their bosses with hatchets. So while hiring Ezra makes the Post less hatchet-worthy, it also means that we’re down a hatchet-wielder. That’s the dark lining in my silver cloud.

The Washington Post is a newspaper, not an ideological journal like TAP.  Ignatius is a highly respected moderate-left commentator who, in this instance, has written something that many on the Left (and a few of us on the Right) disagree with. So?

As to Will and Krauthammer, the criticism is largely overblown.  Will has repeated some dubious assertions about global warming and written some silly things about denim; he’s nonetheless a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and still pens more excellent pieces than bad ones.  Krauthammer has written some truly brilliant pieces over the years along with some junk.  Again, so?

Will Ezra be doing a lot of anti-WaPo blogging while on WaPo’s dime?  Likely not.  But WaPo’s editors aren’t likely to log into his account and write embarrassing disclaimers, either.  Life is trade-offs and the Post gives Ezra a much bigger megaphone to write about health care and other issues he cares about.  If that means we’re denied the incredibly rare Ezra Klein anti-WaPo rant, the world will go on.

Photo by Flickr user electoralmath, used under Creative Commons license.

George Will hates the fact that Americans wear blue jeans.   So intense is his white hot anger that he’s recycled a two-week old WSJ column by Daniel Akst on the same subject.

Not only is denim a faux populism adopted by a decadent elite, it makes it impossible to distinguish parents from their children, what with them all decked out in jeans and sneakers.

Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults (”Seinfeld,” “Two and a Half Men”) and cartoons for adults (”King of the Hill”). Seventy-five percent of American “gamers” — people who play video games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six — so far — “Batman” adventures and “Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps,” coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy’s catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism — of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

This strikes me as a rather narrowminded existence.  I own a ridiculous number of suits and ties, which I wear to the office and various semi-formal events.  I even own a tux that I don two or three times a year  on appropriate occasions, including plays and whatnot where perhaps ten percent of the other men are wearing them.  I also own several pairs of jeans, which I find more appropriate for weekend errands, cookouts, and other very informal gatherings.   I even have chinos and slacks and sport coats for occasions and moods that fall in between.

Then again, I’ve been known to listen to Jerry Jeff Walker.

UPDATE:  One recurring criticism of Will that I’ve seen in my comments and elsewhere in response to this column is that he wears a bow tie.  Amusingly, while that’s my mental image of him as well, he’s worn standard four-in-hand neckties for years, at least in his television appearances.

Photo by Flickr user J.Ota under Creative Commons license.

Paul Waldman fleshes out a theme that many observers have made in passing: The young voters who helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency could create a “permanent” realignment in American politics.

In 1984, 59 percent of the nation’s Alex P. Keatons voted for Reagan, an extraordinary percentage for a Republican (and just over his proportion of the popular vote as a whole). What was going on? As E.J. Dionne, then a reporter for The New York Times, wrote near the end of Reagan’s tenure in the fall of 1988, “Academics and political consultants who have studied the youth vote have many explanations for their movement toward the Republicans, but the most powerful is the simplest: Young Americans have known only Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter as President, and Mr. Reagan is the overwhelming favorite. Similarly, many people who first voted in the Depression still see politics in terms of the Democratic President Roosevelt and the Republican President Hoover.”

It was a remarkable shift, and one that helped shape politics for the ensuing two decades. Currently, we are beginning an even more dramatic turn. Today’s young people — often called the millennial generation — could pull American politics even further to the left, and for a longer time, than the Reagan generation pulled our politics to the right.

Start with the obvious: 67 percent of voters under 29 cast their ballot for Barack Obama, a result unequalled since exit polling began. (If you’re interested, exit-poll data dating back to 1976 can be found at the Roper Center.) Despite periodic proclamations that young conservatives are poised for a comeback (see, for instance, this lengthy portrait in The New York Times Magazine only six years ago of the “Young Hipublicans” who were ready to take the country by storm), young people aren’t finding much to like about today’s GOP. And as a pair of new reports from the Center for American Progress on the present and future of American ideology show, those feelings are likely to run much deeper than a single election or a single candidate.

While they cover a great deal of ground, the reports contain some particularly interesting points about the millennial generation. In “State of American Political Ideology, 2009,”, we learn that young people are the most progressive age group overall and the most progressive on social issues, which might not be surprising. But they are also the most progressive age group in their opinions about the role of government, which might be. And as the other report, “New Progressive America,” points out, this generation’s share of the voting population will increase every year until 2020, when they will represent nearly 40 percent of the electorate.

[...]

To paint with a broad brush for a moment: They know plenty of gay people, don’t find anything particularly notable about people of different races dating, and see the traditional family setup (a two-parent heterosexual couple in which Dad works outside the home and Mom doesn’t) as the exception rather than the rule. This may not be true for all of them, but it is true for enough of them that it has become their generational norm.

This is simply a fact of life that even most under-50 conservative intellectuals are coming to terms with.  Indeed, even some of the older set.  George Will recently remarked on a “This Week” roundtable that, for this generation, being gay was about as remarkable as being left-handed.

The fictional Alex P. Keaton was my contemporary; indeed, we both graduated high school in 1984.  I’m now older than Michael Gross, who played dad Steven Keaton, was when the show started.  So, it’s perfectly natural that today’s teens have different political views than I do.  (For that matter, I’m much less socially conservative now, at 43, than I was when the show first aired 27 years ago.)

Waldman anticipated my ready rejoinder to his thesis:

But how much the generation of which she is a part will continue voting for Democrats, and whether her social progressivism will be joined to similar views on economics and foreign affairs, depends on how things go over the next four or eight years. Just as the views of the Reagan generation were shaped by the seemingly ineffectual Carter presidency and the seemingly successful Reagan presidency, the current generation will be shaped by the Bush and Obama presidencies — one an unmitigated disaster, the other a story still being written.

Of course, this presidency could be a disaster as well; who knows what crises await tomorrow or next month or next year. But if Obama accomplishes his grand goals — pulling the nation through the economic crisis, reforming health care, confronting global warming, transforming our relationship with the world — the millennial generation will belong to him and his ideological heirs. And conservatives will find themselves in a very deep hole for many years to come.

That’s quite right.  But, frankly, even if Obama is a miserable failure, the country’s social mores will have evolved in four or eight years.  Further, American politics will naturally evolve along with the American public, just as it always has.  Presumably, the Republican Party will eventually do so as well — just as it always has.

We’ll always have a strong “conservative” movement.  It’s just that Ronald Reagan and Alex P. Keaton wouldn’t quite recognize it.

UPDATE: See my follow-up post, “Democrats Can’t Win for Losing.”

The hottest story at memeorandum today is a remake of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” with Barack Obama in the Sidney Poitier role and George Will as Spencer Tracy.  Or something like that, anyway.    Obama had supper at Will’s Chevy Chase manse and Bill Kristol and David Brooks were on the guest list.   As John Kennedy might have observed, this was the greatest assembly of political minds since Jefferson dined alone.  The menu and details of the conversation were not disclosed.

Most commenters are not surprised and some, like Dan Riehl, is surprised that anyone’s surprised.   As Marc Ambinder observes, “establishment opinion matters to the Obama communications team.”    As well he should.  He’s never going to get good press from Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh but Will, Kristol, Krauthammer, Brooks and others who make their living as quasi-academic pundits can be counted on to give him a fair hearing.  And, besides, it’s harder to write mean things about people you’ve actually met and like.  And, as Steven Taylor notes, the tone the chattering classes take “is really going to matter in the coming weeks and months as the stimulus package is constructed and sold to the public.”

Sam Stein, debunking rumors that Limbaugh was in attendance, observes, “Obama has pledged to be a uniter once in office. He’s also said he is willing to take policy suggestions from any source, regardless of ideological affiliation, as long as they work. So far, he’s living up to his word.”

Riehl’s, right, too that, “If you believe Right versus Left down here on the Potomac is at each other’s throats the way the base sometimes is, you probably think professional wrestling is real, too.”   Dan thinks that’s why nothing ever changes, which is perhaps true.  But it’s also the only way anything gets done.  The Framers devised a system precisely aimed at making it very hard to do much of anything without consensus.

Indeed, even kos himself is fine with it.

Why wouldn’t he talk to conservative writers? It’s not as if he shied away from the other side during the campaign, even going on Bill O’Reilly to get yelled at by that old gasbag. Let him try to work his charm with that crowd. There’s little downside.

If highly educated elites can’t even have a civil dinner conversation across the political divide, we’ve got a problem.

Photo: Think Progress.

George Will has a column in today’s WaPo, “Making Congress Moot,” that I’ve been making about the Bush administration’s dubious use of TARP funds to bail out the auto companies.

Congress’s marginalization was brutally underscored when, after lawmakers did not authorize $14 billion for General Motors and Chrysler, the executive branch said, in effect: Congress’s opinions are mildly interesting, so we will listen very nicely — then go out and do precisely what we want.

On Friday the president gave the two automakers access to money Congress explicitly did not authorize. More money — up to $17.4 billion — than had been debated, thereby calling to mind Winston Churchill on naval appropriations: “The Admiralty had demanded six ships: the economists offered four: and we finally compromised on eight.”

The president is dispensing money from the $700 billion Congress provided for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The unfounded assertion of a right to do this is notably brazen, given the indisputable fact that if Congress had known that TARP — supposedly a measure for scouring “toxic” assets from financial institutions — was to become an instrument for unconstrained industrial policy, it would not have been passed.

This isn’t even slightly hyperbolic. The thing is, though, as Dave Schuler noted on Wednesday’s OTB Radio, Congress has the ability to stop this — and virtually every other bit of executive overreach that many of us constantly complain about — at any time it musters up the will to do so. That it hasn’t means, essentially, that it doesn’t want to.

Two reports in the British press indicate that Barack Obama has shunted aside key campaign advisors and given the back of his hand to his most ardent supporters in the liberal wing of his party. Leonard Doyle of The Independent reports on the machinations necessary to get Hillary Clinton on board as Secretary of State.

The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady’s foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world. In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department. She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.

The first victims of Mrs Clinton’s anticipated appointment will be those who defended Mr Obama’s flanks on the campaign trail. By mocking Mrs Clinton’s claims to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia or pouring scorn on her much-ballyhooed claim to have visited 80 countries as First Lady they successfully deflected the damaging charge that he is a lightweight on international issues.

Most notable are Greg Craig, who was apparently in line for a major role at State but who instead will be White House Counsel, and Susan Rice, the  Obama campaign’s main foreign policy advisor, who may yet wind up at the NSC.

The Telegraph’s Tim Shipman writes of a backlash from the Netroots.

[H]is preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.

The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.

Chris Bowers of the influential OpenLeft.com blog complained: “That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding “tone deaf” to the views of “the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies.”

Oh, and there’s this:

On Friday night, Mr Obama and his wife Michelle revealed that they will send their two daughters Malia and Sasha to the private Sidwell Friends school in Washington, once attended by Chelsea Clinton.

It’s not totally unfair to ask, if this is what they’re going to get, why Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have been the nominee.   At the same time, there’s a Machiavellian shrewdness to all this.  Obama can afford to alienate the Hard Left, especially this far from 2012, so cementing his reputation as a serious person and avoiding the youthful amateurism that many moderates fear is smart politics.

Sure enough, thus far at least, the Netroots are mostly keeping their powder dry.

• Jerome Armstrong: “My expecations of Obama are pretty much just what he is delivering. If Clinton had been the nominee, she would have chosen Obama as her VP, and we’d probably be seeing Biden as the SoS choice. Despite campaign projection from a lot of progressives that Obama was different in regards to foreign policy, these are centrist Democrats on such matters that are going to be in the White House. Anyone that didn’t realize that was deceiving themselves. [...]  I think the strongest progressive hope for Obama remains with more domestic concerns: universal healthcare, new energy priorities, fairer taxation, liberal judges. That’s reason enough for Obama as President. But as far as foreign policy goes in the mid-east, expect more of the same in the short term, with the long term change still a possibility.”

• Jane Hamsher: “Many people managed to convince themselves that Obama was a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool progressive at some point during the primaries.  For no reason as far as I could tell — his voting record in the Senate was pretty much identical to Hillary Clinton’s, and the people he surrounded himself with weren’t exactly ‘outsiders.’ [...] Look, for people who convinced themselves that Obama was the second coming of Saul Alinsky — wake up.  He never was.  He may, however, be the most progressive person we could have possibly hoped to elect as President of the United States.”

The Right, by contrast, is mostly impressed.

• TigerHawk: “I admit, so far his cabinet picks are better than I had dared to hope. That is not the end of the story by any means. There are thousands of executive branch positions that we rarely hear about, many of which have enormous influence over important matters of policy. Plenty of those will go to very left wing people. Still, the first-string cabinet is a lot more centrist than I would have guessed on November 3, which is good news for the country and probably bad news for those Republicans who are banking on stupid lefty policy blunders to return them to power.”

• Tom Maguire: “[S]oon enough he will be pulling the rug out from under the ‘anti-war’ Dems by making clear the already obvious, namely, all his talk and posturing about deadlines and forced troop withdrawals from Iraq is no longer operative.”

• Moe Lane: ” A very common criticism of President Bush is that he is too loyal to his people, often protecting them at the cost of his own personal political capital. I don’t think that this is ever going to be said about President Obama.”

• DRJ, though, thinks there’s some hope:  “Politicians want to be re-elected but I’m sure it’s disappointing for those who think Obama is a different kind of politician. It’s early — Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated — but the media and blogs are already reporting on campaign promises Obama hasn’t kept. That makes me wonder:I can’t think of any campaign promises Obama has kept. Can you?”  Then again, he’s two months away from inauguration.

George Will, on last Sunday’s “This Week” roundtable, said, “the fundamental attribute of leadership is capacity for robust disloyalty.”  Obama seems to be bearing that out thus far.

via Memeorandum

Andrew Sullivan, who was editor-in-chief of The New Republic when he was 12 and now works at The Atlantic, notes that the websites of conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard get no more traffic than the top conservative blogs.

So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of individual bloggers with relatively no overhead and free content will surely undermine the clout of such magazines over time.

It may be that the blogosphere will kill off opinion journalism as we have known it. In so far as that might mean less groupthink, less control by a few big money machers, and lower barriers to new talent and expertise, that strikes me as pretty good news overall. Or maybe the print magazines will hang on as appendages to the online debate, as a way of milking those email addresses for money and offering a luxury product that will still be worth it.

The main advantage magazines have over blogs, it seems to me, is institutional gravitas.  Television and radio bookers, publishing houses, opinion columnists, mainstream journalists, and other influence leaders are far, far more likely to turn to someone with the imprimatur of an institution that to a self-published blogger.

There are exceptions, of course.  Markos Moulitsas, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, and others have managed to become regular talking heads almost exclusively through their blog-gained fame and at least three of them got book deals, too.   I can’t off the top of my head think of a conservative counterpoint, though — maybe Glenn Reynolds?

Ultimately, it’s television that matters if you’re trying to get the word out.  Bill Kristol, George Will, Bob Novak, and others have had much more impact with their on air commentary than for their written work.  Indeed, most viewers are only casually aware that these people have columns at all.

Influence, not pageviews, is the ultimate goal.

George Will argues that the 2008 election demonstrates precisely what the Framers sought to prevent with the Electoral College.

In a Presidential contest replete with novelties, none was more significant than this: A candidate’s campaign—for his party’s nomination, then for the presidency—was itself virtually the entire validation of his candidacy. Voters have endorsed Barack Obama’s audacious—but not, they have said, presumptuous—proposition, which was: The skill, tenacity, strategic vision and tactical nimbleness of my campaign is proof that I am presidential timber.

[...]

Under their plan, the nomination of candidates and the election of the president were to occur simultaneously. Electors meeting in their respective states, in numbers equal to their states’ senators and representatives, would vote for two people for president. The electors’ winnowing of aspirants was the nomination process. When the votes were opened in the U.S. House of Representatives, the candidate with a majority would become president, the runner-up would become vice president. If no person achieved a majority of electoral votes, the House would pick from among the top five vote getters. Note well: The selection of presidential nominees was to be controlled by the Constitution.

The Founders’ intent, [UVa political scientist James] Ceaser writes, was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the “popular arts” of campaigning, such as rhetoric. The Founders, Ceaser says, “were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction.” That deployment would invite demagoguery, which subverts moderation. “Brilliant appearances,” wrote John Jay in The Federalist Papers 64, “… sometimes mislead as well as dazzle.” By telling members of the political class how not to get considered for the presidency, the Founders hoped to (in Ceaser’s words) “make virtue the ally of interest” and shape the behavior of that class.

As Will notes, however, that rationale collapsed almost immediately. Once George Washington left the scene, the aspirants to the presidency were aligned with political parties and the 2nd place finisher as VP notion became absurd. Indeed, the system has evolved radically since then:

Subsequent systems included: The selection of presidential candidates by the parties’ congressional caucuses (1796–1820); nonpartisan selection (1824–28); national nominating conventions controlled by parties’ organizations (1832–1908); a system of such conventions leavened by popular choice through a few state party primaries and caucuses (1912–68)—in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without entering any primaries; since 1972, selection of nominees entirely by popular choice. Thus have conventions been reduced from deliberative bodies to mere ratifying bodies.

Not to be overly trite, but good and bad presidents have been selected under each system that lasted long enough to produce at least two presidents.  Obama has less experience and more campaign acumen than most who have won the office but, certainly, we’ve had mediocre presidents with great resumes and good ones with weak ones.

Further, there’s a case to be made that the Electoral College actually rewards campaigning skills more than would a national popular vote.  Rather than having to appeal to the broad swath of voters, one can cobble together a strategy that relies on getting out the vote in key states.

Quite a few reports came out yesterday buttressing rumors that there were tensions between John McCain and Sarah Palin which caused a feud within the campaign team.   It’s only fitting, I suppose, since the selection of Palin has highlighted and exacerbated a growing fissure within the Republican Party itself.

Fox New’s Carl Cameron dished last night about rumors that Palin was even more unprepared than we thought, like not knowing that Africa was a continent rather than a country or being clueless about which countries were in NAFTA:

Cameron continued the assault on Bill O’Reilly’s show, continuing to use the word “knowledgability” to describe what she lacked:

In “Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps,” NYT corespondent Elisabeth Bumiller details some of the petty squabbles and disputes over such things as the prank Sarkozy call and the wardrobe brouhaha but this section puts it all into perspective:

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.

“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etcetera,” Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”

Quite right.  Had McCain somehow managed to win, we’d be hearing about all the Obama staffers who couldn’t believe Joe Biden was so boneheaded as to promise a grave national security crisis if his guy won and Biden staffers complaining about Obama’s ill-considered remarks to Joe the Plumber or Obama’s diva qualities being demonstrated by his penchant for giant outdoor rallies with Greek columns.  Since they won, however, the mistakes are minimized.

Regardless, these revelations about Palin are embarrassing, if true, and seem petty at this juncture.   Michelle Malkin and Ace are absolutely right that it’s cowardly for these rumormongers to be dishing anonymously.

Palin, for her part, is being extraordinarily gracious, at least in public, saying all the right things about McCain and about letting president-elect Obama have his moment.

RedState honcho Erick Erickson says his team is “tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others.” Fair enough. He then goes on:

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

[...]

Don’t make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?

I was about halfway through a draft of this post which decried a New McCarthyism and a witch hunt against those Republicans who dared speak out against Palin when it occurred to me that I’ve had more than one adult beverage with Erick and that he couldn’t possibly mean that.  Either this was a late night rant that he’d walk back in the morning or I was reading too much into the whole thing.

So I emailed him asking, “Is it your intention to sabotage candidates you’d otherwise support for hiring staffers who say mean things about Sarah Palin?  And perhaps anyone else who says anything mean about Palin?   Not sure how else to take Don’t make us add you to our list.”  He assured me that, “We’re just trying to rattle cages.  It’s pretty clear there are four staffers and one former staffer in the McCain camp who are out to save their own reputations by throwing Palin under the bus.  Just trying to get them to back off.  I’m positive, because i have my own campaign sources, that the vast majority of what they are saying is B.S.”

Fair enough.

The whole Palin thing, though, worries me.  I take people like George Will and Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell at their word when they say the selection of Palin was very troubling to them.   And, to the extent Palin did lack “knowledgability,” it’s not her fault that she was jumped directly from Rookie League ball to the World Series.   Michelle Malkin is absolutely right here:

Let’s assume the rumor-mongers are telling the truth for a moment. Who does it damn more: Sarah Palin or McCain and his vetters who green-lighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

Indeed not.

But here’s the thing: As Stacy McCain has argued eloquently for some time, the grassroots of the party love Sarah Palin.  His sentiment that, “We need more grass-roots activists and fewer intellectual elites” is surely widespread.   It’s also a path to permanent minority party status.

My political awakening occured in late 1979, with the Iran Hostage Crisis, and grew steadily over the next year as Ronald Reagan battled Jimmy Carter for the presidency.  At that point in time, the Republican Party was said to have an “Electoral College lock” on the White House — California was a solid GOP state at the time — and it took extraordinary things like the combination of Watergate, an energy crisis, and runaway stagflation to get a Democrat elected.  At the same time, though, the Democrats were overwhelmingly the dominant party.  They had majorities in most state legislatures, held most of the governorships, had been in control of the House of Representatives for decades, and were ensconsed as the majority party in the Senate.

Reagan changed all that.  He managed to build a coalition of anti-communists, fiscal conservatives, and social conservativesthat swept Carter off to build houses for the poor, brought in a wave of Republicans on his coattails, and started a national realignment that culminated in the 1994 Republican revolution.

The social conservatives, mostly Southern evangelicals, took over the party, starting with the school boards and county commissions and eventually the state legislatures, the breeding ground for future Congressmen and governors.   The result, for a time, was a majority party or, at least, one on par with the Democrats in party ID and more easily mobilized on election day.

The coalition has long been an uneasy one, with the social conservatives disdained by the Rockefeller Republicans and vice versa.  The demise of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War made it harder to keep the coalition together but it has more-or-less held together.   All the while, though, moderate and liberal Republicans have gradually been driven from power.  Olympia Snowe is all that’s left of them in the New England states, now a one-party region.

The frontrunners for the 2012 nomination are Palin and Mike Huckabee.  I don’t see how either gets beyond 40 percent of the national popular vote, let alone takes back any state that Obama won this go-round.   Not only will they not appeal to independent voters, they’d both alienate the Crunchy Cons, South Park Republicans, Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, and essentially everyone else outside the hard core evangelical base.

There’s got to be a better way.

UPDATE: Along these same lines, Steve Benen reminds us of Jim Nuzzo’s recent remarks that,

There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?

Matt Yglesias‘ response at the time is apt:

I’m actually one who thinks that the occasional ideological purge can strengthen a movement, but this would be a seriously odd basis for conducting such a cleansing exercise. Nuzzo is talking about a blind test of loyalty, not any kind of substantive demarcation of conservatism.

A GOP where the likes of Brooks and Noonan aren’t welcome would be a fringe party, indeed.

UPDATE II:   George Will makes similar arguments in his column today, although his view of what’s happening is a bit more, well, conservative.

As this is being written, Republicans seem to have lost a total of 55 House and 11 Senate seats in the past two elections. These are the worst Republican results in consecutive elections since the Depression-era elections of 1930 and 1932 (153 and 22), which presaged exile from the presidency until 1953. If, as seems likely at this writing, in January congressional Republicans have 177 representatives and 44 senators, they will be weaker than at any time since after the 1976 elections, when they were outnumbered in the House 292 to 143 and the Senate 61 to 38.

After the 1936 election, when the Republican nominee against FDR, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, carried only two states, both in New England (hence the jest, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”), there were 29 congressional seats in New England and Republicans still held 15. With Tuesday’s defeat of Connecticut Republican Chris Shays, Democrats hold all 22 New England seats. As recently as 1996, when New York had 31 House seats, Republicans held 14; after Tuesday, they have just three of 29. With the loss of the seat on Staten Island, Republicans will hold at most one urban seat.

Since John Kennedy was elected from Massachusetts in 1960, all of the elected presidents (leaving aside Gerald Ford), before Tuesday, came from Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and Southern California. In 1960, there were no Republican senators from the South. (In 1961, John Tower of Texas became the first since Reconstruction.) But when the next Congress convenes, 19 of the probable 44 Republican senators — 43 percent of them — will be from the South, understood as including Oklahoma and Kentucky. The South is beginning to look less like the firm foundation of a national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one.

Still, the Republican Party retains a remarkably strong pulse, considering that McCain’s often chaotic campaign earned 46 percent of the popular vote while tacking into terrible winds. Conservatives can take some solace from the fact that four years after Goldwater won just 38.5 percent of the popular vote, a Republican president was elected.

True that.  But it took some extraordinarily bad governing and an unpopular war to do it.  And it would be another three decades before the GOP won a majority in the House of Representatives.