“Well, conservative, conshmervative – even Karl Rove would pay good money to see Pelosi handcuffed to Dick Cheney.” – Kate McMillan responding to news that the then-Minority Whip and top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was briefed on the use of “enhanced interogation techniques” in the fall of 2002 and “gave it her stamp of approval.”

And, no, the fact that this is just corroboration of old news doesn’t make it any less amusing.

As everyone knows by now, Bill Kristol’s last NYT column appeared yesterday. Aside from the italicized footer “This is William Kristol’s last column,” it was unremarkable.  Which, most observers on the Left and Right seem to agree, was something it had in common with most of Kristol’s NYT columns and largely explains why the one year experiment was not continued.

There are some dissenters, with Noel Sheppard and Ace contending that Kristol was fired for having the temerity to criticize the NYT.  The latter points out that, while Kristol is being criticized for factual errors, “barely a Paul Krugman column goes by without a large error — and some of these are even noted by the Times’ Ombudsman.”   Then again, “no worse than Krugman” is hardly a banner one wants to fight under.

More interesting than Kristol’s departure — no worries, he still keeps his gig as editor of The Weekly Standard and as a permanent fixture on Fox News, so he’ll be able to feed his family — is the speculation on who might replace him as the NYT House Conservative.

Radley Balko writes,  “You know what would be great? If the Times could find a genuine advocate of limited government (or at least a bona-fide civil libertarian) to take Kristol’s place.”   The links provide subtle endorsements of Jacob Sullum, David Boaz, Dave Kopel, Gene Healy, and Nat Hentoff.

Kevin Drum suggests, “It shouldn’t be a “liberal’s conservative,” it should be a genuine, dedicated, smart, reality-grounded, conservative’s conservative — someone who will drive liberals crazy. Who best fits that bill?”

Glenn Reynolds suggests Ann Althouse.

Michael Tomasky offers some interesting musings ranging from David Frum to Chris Caldwell to Ross Douthat to Reihan Salam to Tyler Cowen to Kathleen Parker.    In another post, he suggests Peggy Noonan, Karl Rove, and Christopher Buckley.  His bottom line strikes me as inarguable:

A bad idea would be another neocon who’s name is well-known but whom events have discredited as a thinker. That would be the lazy and obvious thing to do (just like hiring Kristol was the lazy and obvious thing to do). I think the Times should have a second conservative (after David Brooks), but the editors should put more effort into the selection this time.

One intrepid commenter even nominates yours truly. Twice. While I appreciate the consideration, I’m rather sure I won’t be on the list of finalists.

Patrick Ruffini nominates Rush Limbaugh, prompting Daniel Larison to note that he’s “not a writer by trade or by training.”

If the problem with many of Kristol’s columns was the feeling that he was phoning it in, what are the odds that a radio host whose public persona is built to a large extent on mocking establishment media outlets would take the job more seriously? Were it offered to him, his audience would probably accuse him of “selling out” if he took such a position. He has no incentive to do it, and the last thing conservatives need at the moment is to have Limbaugh take an even more prominent place as one of their major spokesmen. There are no doubt many mainstream conservative syndicated columnists who should be considered, as these are people who already write columns professionally, have a well-established readership and frankly have better instincts for what most other mainstream conservatives want to read than various heterodox alternatives do. If the NYT’s goal was to expand its circulation and increase traffic on its site, while also regularly providing a conservative perspective on its op-ed page, it would look at columnists already familiar and acceptable to the broader conservative movement. If the goal is to find a more “safe” conservative writer who will not antagonize regular subscribers and readers, their options are very limited these days.

I think that’s right.  Matt Yglesias is also onto something when he writes,

The goal in finding a conservative writer should be to find a writer who’s not a liberal but who liberals enjoy reading. That doesn’t need to be columns that make liberals feel good about themselves (e.g., conservatives writing about how brain-dead the GOP is, etc.) but it needs to be columns that liberals find not maddening but challenging. When I read Tyler Cowen’s skeptical notes on the stimulus, for example, I don’t become infuriated, I become better-informed about the issue. At his best, this is what David Brooks contributes on that page—he’s raised issues about public choice and so forth that liberals tend to neglect but that are genuinely important.

That’s the standard you should be reaching for, though, people who can take on strong liberal arguments and raise strong doubts about them.

That’s why I read Yglesias, Drum, Tomasky, Ezra Klein, and others.  It’s a good standard, I think, for judging opinion journalists.

I would also add to the criteria that it be someone with a track record in blogging or other rapid-response commentary, as that’s the wave of the future for punditry.  And, frankly, it would be good if it were someone who hasn’t already been a TV talking head for years.  Why not someone who has some ideas that will actually surprise people?

Larison would be an excellent choice as would Douthat, Salam, or Cowen.  There are probably a dozen others who meet the standards outlined above.

UPDATE: Orin Kerr offers a plan that’s simultaneously devious and efficient:

If I were at the Times, I would hire five columnists instead of one — paying them very little, because hey, they’re getting terrific exposure — and promise them that their columns would be posted on the Times website and then considered for inclusion in the paper version. I would then pick the best column written that week for inclusion in the paper version. Over time, a great columnist might emerge from the pack. And even if no great columnist emerges, at least you would avoid the problem of columnists who have the gig and are just coasting.

That would actually work.

Correction:  The original misattributed Radley Balko’s quote to Kevin Drum.  I’ve fixed it above.

Former Texas congressman and minor Reagan administration official Mickey Edwards claims his old boss wouldn’t recognize the modern GOP were he alive today. He believes modern Republicans are simply reflexively anti-government with no agenda otherwise.

What would Reagan think of this? Wasn’t it he who warned that government is the problem?

[...]

Reagan, who spent 16 years in government, actually said this:

“In the present crisis,” referring specifically to the high taxes and high levels of federal spending that had marked the Carter administration, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then went on to say: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work.” Government, he said, “must provide opportunity.” He was not rejecting government, he was calling — as Barack Obama did Tuesday — for better management of government, for wiser decisions.

But which Republicans are trying to do away with government?   Certainly, we didn’t see any attempt to dismantle any cabinet departments under the eight years of the Bush administration.  And the federal budget skyrocketed.   And we got the first installment of the almost-certainly-wasteful bailout boondoggle under Bush’s signature.

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

Hmmm.  But I thought all Republicans cared about was making government smaller?  How do you do that while simultaneously undertaking a “blind and narrow pursuit of power”?!

And, um, Bush was twice elected president of the United States.   Promptly at the stroke of noon on January 20th, he turned over the keys to a successor from the opposition party who had pledged to undo many of Bush’s signature policies.    If that’s a “blind and narrow pursuit of power,” Republicans really suck at it.

Stacy McCain notes, too, that the faces of the party Edwards names are a disparate lot, indeed.

So, on the one hand you have two politicians and a political strategist — people directly involved in the politics and policy of the Republican Party — and on the other hand you have a radio star and an author. Between these two groups, a vast chasm exists. Much that President Bush did, with the advice of Rove, was adamantly opposed by Limbaugh and Coulter, and sometimes opposed by Gingrich as well.

Trying to lump these five very different characters into a single category is not an answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the GOP?” Rather, it is a response to the question, “Can you name five famous people hated by liberals?”

Quite.   Edwards continues:

One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.

Umm, no, Joe the Plumber was a desparate symbol grasped by a desperate, floundering campaign to demonstrate elitist Democrats who didn’t understand how their policies would impact the little man; he was never going to be put in charge of anything and turned out to be a rather ridiculous symbol to boot.

As for Goldwater and Reagan, they were outsiders railing against the system.  And Goldwater’s philosophy was soundly defeated at the polls by a lifelong machine politico.   Because Republicans had been in the ascendency since Reagan, they’ve been running on his fumes ever since.  (Yes, Bill Clinton won two elections but he did it as a “New Democrat” who promised that “the era of Big Government is over” and to “end welfare as we know it.”  Further, Newt Gingrich — another one of those conservative intellectuals with Big Ideas — led a resurgence in the party’s fortunes in Congress two years after Clinton’s election.)  It’s a good bet that the next Republican president will be a leader with a convincing message that speaks to the future.

Those eagerly awaiting Barack Obama’s taking over the reins will have to wait just a bit longer, as the Navy has just added an extra second on to 2008.

The world’s official timekeepers have added a “leap second” to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth’s slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon’s master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world’s atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (23:59:59 GMT), when an extra second will tick by — the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.

I’m sure Karl Rove was involved somehow.

This NYT Magazine interview with Karl Rove is rather amusing, especially for the terseness of his responses.

Do you like Joe Biden?
I think he has an odd combination of longevity and long-windedness that passes for wisdom in Washington.

Do you regret anything that happened in the White House during your tenure?
Sure.

You’ve been booed off stages recently.
No, I haven’t. I’ve been booed on stages. I’m a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.

Do you think the era of negative politics is over?
No.

[...]

Do you have any advice for [President Bush] at this point?
With all due respect, I don’t need you to transmit what I want to say to my friend of 35 years.

While one can’t help but admire Rove’s skills as a politico, I’ve never liked “Rovism” in terms of running the White House in such a way that everything was about partisan advantage and the next election.  One does get the sense from reading the interview, though, the he’s prepared to take it as well as dish it out and that he can take losses without whining or throwing allies under the bus to bolster his own rep.  There’s something admirable about that, too.

Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain’s campaign: “It’s what he’s saying, not how he says it.”

Jeremy Rosner observed,

A lot of people have noted he’s just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and $300 million prizes for new electric batteries. … He just hasn’t figured out a strategy for being a presidential candidate. My advice is that he needs to sort of place a clear bet on whether he’s trying to do another Karl Rove base consolidation strategy or whether he’s truly trying to gun for the middle and change the Republican party — he just hasn’t figured that out.

Michael Cohen added,

If I were to ask all of you here ‘What is Barack Obama’s key message for his campaign?’ most of you could probably could answer pretty quickly, I’m assuming you would say change. If I asked you all the same question about John McCain’s campaign message I’m seeing a lot of blank faces.

I’d say McCain’s bumper sticker message is “Elect a grown-up.” And I don’t think wanting to drill for more oil while simultaneously trying to end our need for it in the longer term is at all problematic; it’s essentially a right-of-center answer to Bill Clinton’s “third way.”

I do, however, agree with the overall assessment: McCain isn’t running a focused, message based campaign. “Change” and “Hope” continue to strike me as an incredibly weak platform on which to seek the presidency but there’s not much doubt that we could use some of both. McCain’s got an uphill fight if he wants to convince people to vote to keep the White House in Republican hands and trust the cranky, old guy rather than the exciting, young one. Continually showing us videos of himself in a POW camp won’t get it done.

via Hal Hildebrand

John McCain has reshuffled his top campaign staff for the second time is a less than a year, elevating Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt to the top post.

Responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, Mr. McCain put a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign in charge of day-to-day operations and stepped away from a plan to have the campaign run by 11 regional managers, Mr. McCain’s aides said Wednesday.

The installation of Steve Schmidt, who worked closely with Karl Rove, at Mr. McCain’s headquarters represented a sharp diminishment of the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been Mr. McCain’s campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.

The shift was approved by Mr. McCain after several of his aides, including Mr. Schmidt, went to him about 10 days ago and warned him that he was in danger of losing the presidential election to Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, unless he revamped his campaign operation, two officials close to the campaign said.

Mr. Schmidt’s elevation is the latest sign of increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation. Nicolle Wallace, who was communications director for Mr. Bush in the 2004 campaign (and in his White House) has joined the campaign as a senior adviser, and will travel with Mr. McCain every other week. Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Mr. Rove’s operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of the presidential advance team in the Bush White House, was hired by Mr. Schmidt last week after a series of what Mr. McCain’s advisers acknowledged were poorly executed campaign events.

[...]

Mr. McCain’s advisers said that Mr. Davis would continue to hold the position of campaign manager, but that Mr. Schmidt had taken over every major operation where Mr. McCain has shown signs of struggling: communications, scheduling and basic political strategy. Mr. McCain’s aides said Mr. Davis would focus now more on longer-term campaign efforts, including helping with the selection of a running mate and planning for the Republican National Convention, which is now just two months away.

[...]

Mr. Schmidt, who is 37, is one of the most intense, hard-driving figures in his party today: when he worked for Mr. Bush, his nickname in the campaign was “The Bullet,” a reference to the shape of his shaved head.  He has been at the center of some of the most politically significant Republican operations of the last 10 years. In working with Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Schmidt has become immersed in the use of data-driven methods to find and turn out Republican voters.

He also ran the campaign’s war room, which was responsible for capitalizing on mistakes of opponents; Mr. McCain’s advisers said that one sign of Mr. Schmidt’s increasing influence in the campaign’s rapid response operation was the quickness with which it seized on a remark by Gen. Wesley K. Clark questioning whether Mr. McCain’s years in Vietnam gave him the experience he needed to be president.

Mr. Schmidt also ran the successful re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Republican who won in a Democratic state by embracing moderate positions on issues like the environment and gay rights.

This sort of thing is too inside baseball even for me.  There’s not much doubt that the McCain campaign seemed rather unfocused.  On the other hand, he’s remarkably close to Obama in the polls (currently trailing by an average of 5.4 percent), which is phenomenal given the current state of the Republican brand and the incredible amount of attention Obama has gotten owing to his prolonged primary battle with Hillary Clinton.

Then again, somebody has to be running campaign scheduling and strategy. That person can’t be the candidate.

“Somebody asked, ‘what’s the strategy behind this?’ ” Mr. Black said of the foreign travel. “It’s simple. McCain says he wants to go to these places, and we say of course.”

AllahPundit has more thoughts along those lines.  If Team McCain is going to be run by people who know what the hell they’re doing, it’s a good thing.

The principal objection, of course, will be the Rove angle.   Karl Rove is “an example of how not to do it,” the conventional wisdom now tells us.  But the “it” is decidedly not “running a competent campaign.”  Schmidt has risen to his current position with success.   Further, with McCain, the logical approach is to take the angle Schmidt successfully used in rebuilding Schwarzenegger’s appeal in California rather than the divide-and-conquer strategy for which Rove is infamous.

Marc Ambinder tells us that, “In the year and a half since McCain and Schmidt first got to know each other, the two have grown close, almost like father and son; each very deferential to the other. Schmidt has taught McCain how to be John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate — a different creature from just plain ol’ John McCain.”  That’s pretty much the definition of a good campaign manager.  For McCain to have any chance of winning this thing, he’s going to have to do it as McCain. But any candidate needs to be disciplined to focus on what matters rather than simply doing what interests them.

Photo: Charles Dharapak / Associated Press (Via Andrew Malcolm, LAT)

Remember the good old days when everyday events were coordinated by Karl Rove? Today could have counted as one but, alas, Karl Rove is nowhere to be found.

Child rapists can’t be executed, Supreme Court rules
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists cannot be executed, concluding that capital punishment for crimes against individuals can be applied only to murderers.

Patrick Kennedy, 43, was on Louisiana’s death row after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

The ruling stemmed from the case of Patrick Kennedy, who appealed the 2003 death sentence he received in Louisiana after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that execution in this case would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, citing “evolving standards of decency” in the United States.

FBI arrests hundreds in child sex crackdown
In a series of raids, authorities have arrested more than 300 members of prostitution operations and removed 21 juveniles from sex-selling rings, the FBI announced Wednesday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announces the arrests of hundreds suspected in child sex rings.

The sweeps were conducted in 16 cities nationwide over the past five days, authorities said.

“Our top priority in these cases has always been to identify children victims and move swiftly to remove them from these dangerous environments,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

Mueller said this week’s sweeps bring to 433 the number of child victims recovered in the five years since the FBI began its Innocence Lost initiative. The program was designed to combat a growing problem of underage prostitution.

That makes for an interesting contrast: the executive branch (currently controlled by Republicans with an FBI head appointed by President Bush) is busting up child sex rings and protecting children while those latte-sipping libruls on the Supreme Court are sparing the most gruesome child rapists. Sadly, the left is but a shadow of its old self these days without Rove to play off of, so this story is not getting the exposure it deserves.

As far as the death penalty goes, I’m mildly against it. I don’t favor it and would vote against it at a state level if given a chance, but am strongly opposed to SCOTUS getting involved and overruling the desires of state residents. Allah goes into more detail about that here.

GOP strategist Ed Rollins opines, “I think the legacy is that Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it.”

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on what the meaning of “it” is.

If we’re talking of Rove as a campaign runner, it’s nonsensical. Getting George W. Bush elected governor twice and president twice is certainly more likely to be looked at as a positive model than, say, the career of Ed Rollins.

If, on the other hand, we’re speaking of Rove the domestic policy adviser, Rollins is on more solid ground. The politicization of everything, up to and including national security policy, had already been raised to odious heights under the Clinton administration. But Rove helped take it over the cliff, destroying the administration’s credibility and ability to govern.

Two related questions come to mind:

• How much of the blame goes to Rove, how much goes to Bush and other senior administration figures, and how much was simply the continuation of a trend? There’s no way of knowing how much of this would we have seen under a President Gore or a President Kerry.

• What lessons will be learned by those who follow? My suspicion is that will be one of optics rather than substance. That is, the focus will be on doing what Rove did but doing it more cleverly.

Ultimately, Rove’s name is likely to be forgotten and the failures of the Bush administration will be the president’s alone. Aside from the occasional cabinet secretary, presidential advisers simply disappear into the ether of history.

Quote via Andrew Sullivan. Photo via Climate Progress.

The Swell Foop Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

REUTERS/Denis Balibouse(SWITZERLAND)

✰ THE WINNERS ✰

First: William d’Inger – Aero-Prius?

Second: Bithead – “I will not encourage others to fly.” – Bart Simpson on the blackboard, later that day

Third: Gollum – Tower to Ghost Rider, um, your . . . umm, your tailhook is still out.

HONORABLE MENTION

charles austin – The search for the last kangaroo continues.

Elmo – eBay … An Air Force of one.

elliot – I really don’t know how this thing works, I’ll just have to ‘wing it.’

Dennis – Woohoo! Man this is really fun isn’t it Bob?…. Bob?…

Wyatt Earp – Karl Rove continues his controversial bald eagle hunt.

ℛODNEY’S BITHEAD’s BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Jane! Jane! Stop this crazy thing!!! Jane! JAaaaaaannnneeee!

Q branch has really outdone themselves this time.

Supplying this many feathers to commuters, though is a problem given the economy. Even Down is up.

I love the smell of burnt feathers and gunpowder and cordite!”

Charlie developed the rather nasty habit of picking his nose gear

The Monday Contest has already become pandemic.

Kevin Drum, responding to Jonah Goldberg’s argument that George Packer’s “The Fall of Conservatism” erroneously conflates conservatism with the Republican Party, retorts:

No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has implemented it. That’s how you judge movements: by how their real-life adherents put them into practice, not by reference to a utopian vision of how they should be implemented if only we lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Nonetheless, now that the Republican Party has been brought low, an awful lot of conservatives are jumping ship, claiming that it really doesn’t represent them at all. But look: when the GOP made common cause with evangelical extremists, conservatives cheered. When the GOP accepted Grover Norquist’s tax jihad as sacred writ, conservatives cheered. When Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay all but declared the GOP the party of corporate welfare, conservatives cheered. When George Bush declared war on the Middle East, conservatives cheered. Somehow Burke never really entered the discussion. But now that it turns out these positions have been pretty much played out, Burke is back in and Karl Rove is out. That’s just a little too convenient.

That’s exactly right. Especially when, in the same three-paragraph piece, Goldberg does exactly what he accuses Packer of: “[L]ast I checked liberals are not exactly churning out a lot of policy brilliance either. Their rising fortune has almost entirely to do with the political failures of the GOP and the natural cyclical nature of politics generally.”

Goldberg, incidentally, hits the nail on the head with that one. Even though Democrats control Congress again, the American people have been trained to view both history and current events in presidential cycles. We’re in a down cycle right now so, naturally, George W. Bush and, by extension, the Republican Party, get the blame and the opposition party’s calls for change naturally have tremendous appeal.

It’s true, too, that there’s not a perfect overlap between conservative/Republican and liberal/Democrat, although it’s much closer now than it was even ten or twenty years ago. For example, the highly touted Democratic pickups in recent special elections were achieved by finding conservative candidates to wear the Democrat label. Still, the parties, especially the Republicans, brand themselves by their ideology. (The Democrats have shied away from “liberal” in recent years, as Ronald Reagan successfully turned that into an epithet. But they’re still selling the same soap in a “progressive” wrapper.)

Modern American conservatism is a strange coalition between social conservatives motivated by a fear that they’re losing the cultural wars, national security hawks of various stripes, and economic libertarians. With the right standard bearer and set of external circumstances, that’s a winning message at the presidential level. All three groups are necessary for Republicans to win in the Electoral College even though they (especially the first and third group) tend not to like each other very much.

The social conservatives are in the most trouble of the three groups. First trimester abortion will never be illegal; indeed, the ability to terminate pregnancy safely at home will continue to increase, making it a moot point. Homosexuality is rapidly mainstreaming and gay marriage will achieve the status of interracial marriage through some combination of judicial action and social change within the next 10-15 years. Women’s equality is long established now, with the remaining battles taking place over relatively small issues. Prayer in school is a dead issue. It’s not clear what’s left, really, of the movement as it existed when Ronald Reagan was its secular standard bearer.

The economic libertarians continue to carry the day on the macro level but lose on the margins. Institutionally, rent-seeking behavior is all but impossible to eliminate. And, as Kevin suggests, we’re near the end of the days where calling for tax cuts is a sure-fire winner. Not because people don’t like low taxes, incidentally, but because, relatively speaking, we already have them. Cutting the top marginal rate from 90 to 70 to 35 all make sense. It’s hard to morally justify confiscating the lion’s share of a person’s income, regardless of their ability to pay. But arguing about the difference between 35 and 33 just isn’t very sexy. And the demand for government programs is increasing, not decreasing, and somebody has to pay for it.

Despite the incredible unpopularity of the Iraq War, the hawks are in the best shape. They dominate both parties, with the difference being what the legitimate reasons for military intervention are. And even that difference has been blurred with the rise of the neocons and their “national greatness” agenda. Rhetorically, it’s light years from the liberal interventionists; practically, they’re all but identical.

All that said, I’d put the odds at John McCain nonetheless winning the presidency in November at something like 40:60. He’s fighting an uphill battle because of Bush, the war, his age, and Obama’s enormous personal charm and charisma. Despite many conservatives’ distaste for him, McCain will run under the conservative banner and sell soft versions of all three pieces of the movement. The fear of further losses under Obama will motivate an enormous number of people but McCain will need some help from external events for that to be enough this go-round.

Karl Rove has an op-ed in today’s WSJ entitled, “The GOP Must Stand for Something.”

I followed the link to it from memeorandum mostly so as to make a “now he wants to stand for something” comment. After reading the piece, though, the thing that stands out is that it doesn’t tell us what the GOP should stand for. Or, indeed, talk about public policy in anything but the most tangential way, such as, “John McCain and Republicans will prevail only if they convince voters that there are profound consequences at stake in Iraq, and that more and better jobs will follow from the GOP’s approach of lowering taxes, opening trade, and ending earmarks and other pro-growth policies.” So, what’s important isn’t actually standing for something but, rather, drawing vague contrasts.

The string of defeats [in recent congressional elections] should cure Republicans of the habit of simply shouting “liberal! liberal! liberal!” in hopes of winning an election. They need to press a reform agenda full of sharp contrasts with the Democrats.

But, of course, Rove’s legacy is precisely the opposite of that. Indeed, the editorial advises a continuation of Rovism while denouncing it.

Andrew Sullivan fears that, whatever the outcome of tonight’s primaries, the press will frame it as about race.

[W]hat Obama has been subjected to is a classic pincer movement: the Clintons have attacked from the right, subtly and not-so-subtly framing Obama’s candidacy as a racial one, and evoking Bill’s own Bubba identity and Hillary’s totally fabricated working class white credentials. And Jeremiah Wright has attacked from the left: desperate for attention, alternately demonizing Obama for selling out and projecting his own clownish-left sensibility onto the first serious black contender for the presidency. Wright has given white voters permission – and an alibi – not to vote for Obama on racial grounds. The Clintons have given the same voters a Fox News-approved, Rove-blessed alternative to racial transcendence.

There’s not much doubt that the Clintons have deliberately injected race into the equation. Why, though, is such as attack considered as coming “from the right”? The Clintons aren’t conservatives. And, certainly, conservatives have no monopoly on racial demagoguery.

The Clintons are simply exploiting a perceived weakness of an opponent in a baldy shameless manner. That’s the sine qua non of Clintonism, frankly, and is explicitly apathetic to ideology. That was the essence of the triangulation campaign that Bill Clinton and Dick Morris cooked up, after all, well before anyone outside of Texas had ever heard the name Karl Rove.

Taking a page from Christopher Hitchens’ book, Jim Henley admits that he was right on the Iraq War.

Predicting ahead of time that a given war is a bad idea isn’t particularly hard, frankly. It’s a bimodal choice (War/No War) and wars are almost always “bad” in some sense that would be defensible down the road even if the political objectives used as justification for the war are achieved. Getting it right for the right reasons, though, is much harder and Henley did that.

His prescription for doing so in future cases, though, is a mixed bag.

War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually. Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime. War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time.

The opener — “War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually.” — is quite right. Because we have an awesome conventional military advantage over any conceivable opponent, too many people think war is an easy call and should be the first best choice for dealing with bad foreign policy situations. It isn’t.

That said, the extreme conclusion — “Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime.” — is unjustified. The United States has never fought a war that couldn’t legitimately be called a “war of choice.” Without having chosen war, however, we would not have achieved our independence, ended slavery, of defeated European fascism. Wars are almost always tragic and they seldom produce a short-term gain that exceeds their toll. Sometimes, though, they’re worthwhile.

Had I known what I know now about Iraq’s WMD program, I wouldn’t have supported the invasion. Democracy promotion is not a reason to chose war. The goals we set out to achieve were worthwhile but the odds of reaching them were so slim that it wouldn’t have been worth the cost in blood and treasure to try. Sometimes, though, longshots pay off and, had we managed to quickly replace Saddam with a stable, democratic government, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

The pop psychology of “War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying” strikes me as unworthy of the piece. To be sure, the clinical nature of televised high tech warfare can seem too much like an action movie. And it’s easy to cheer when a building thought to contain Saddam Hussein gets hit by a missile. But it’s silly to suggest that we chose wars for the thrill of it.

The closer — “Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time.” — is essentially just a restatement of the opener. Yes, we should be more skeptical of bold claims of quick, easy victories. Yes, we should be more demanding of answers on exit strategies and contingency options. Yes, we should be skeptical of hype and fight against the emotion of the moment.

I’m not absolutely sure that doing those things would have stopped us from going into Iraq five years ago. We had been, as Jim himself was reminding people more than five years ago, in a state of war with Saddam’s regime since August 1990. There was a longstanding, bipartisan consensus that he was a bad actor, trying to development nuclear weapons, and needed to be removed from power. Despite more than a year of public debate leading up to the war, we ultimately concluded, as evidenced by sweeping votes in both Houses of Congress, that war was our best option.

The initial aim of war — the removal of Saddam’s regime — was achieved much more easily than all but the most naive proponents believed. It was the post-”major combat operations” transition phase that went horribly wrong. That might have happened even if we had done everything right, which we decidedly did not. The planning was inadequate, critical decisions were bungled, and the strength and size of the ensuing insurgency grossly underestimated.

None of the failures in the stabilization operation can be attributed to the lust for violence, the sense that war was business as usual, or the manipulation of Karl Rove and company. Mostly, that’s a combination of hubris and the sweet but misguided sense that people everywhere are just like us and that, liberated from their oppressors, they’ll immediately transform into Sweden.

RealClearPolitics‘ John McIntyre reminds us that the 2004 convention gave President Bush a large bounce in the polls, while the Democratic convention did next to nothing for John Kerry. He’s got an interesting theory on why that was:

Who did Karl Rove and the GOP strategists chose to put front and center on prime-time television for the American people? Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Zell Miller.

These prime-time speaking slots were not an accident. For a President who was struggling with sub-50% job approval ratings (ratings that many pundits felt would ensure his loss) these four speakers were meant to send a clear message to Independents and moderate Democrats that they were welcome – and wanted – in a big tent, majority Republican Party.

Starting Tuesday in the state that delivered George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and in California yesterday and today with the Giuliani and Schwarzenegger endorsements, the Bush/Cheney baton has been passed to John McCain.

Many on the more conservative side of the Republican Party are balking now that the Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, McCain faction looks likely to be the standard bearer in 2008. But with President Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the low 30’s (as opposed to the high 40’s of 2004) and after the wipe out in 2006 where the GOP was annihilated in the Northeast and basically everywhere outside of the South, the Republican party is putting forth – either through luck, serendipity, or design – its most competitive general election candidate, by far.

With the country screaming for change and very ready for a Democratic president, George W. Bush would not win a third term. But if the Democrats nominate the divisive Hillary Clinton over the inspiring Barack Obama, John McCain will be in a very strong position to keep the White House in Republican hands, with one caveat.

Without Schwarzenegger, Giuliani and McCain voters in 2004 George Bush would have lost to John Kerry and without Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and evangelical voters in 2008 John McCain does not have a chance against Hillary Clinton.

He’s right on both counts.

With Michelle Malkin saying she wouldn’t vote for McCain over Hillary Clinton and the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Bob Novak questioning McCain’s conservative credentials, McCain clearly has a lot of work to do to persuade staunch conservatives that he has far more in common with them than they think.

At the same time, though, McCain’s strength as a general election candidate is that he’s not viewed as an extremist. The hard-line Republican platform on torture, immigration, and the environment is a sure-fire loser in November. Not only does it ensure the GOP will never again be a strong contender in places like California and New York but it means that purple states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Ohio, and elsewhere are likely to slide into the blue column.

McCain needs the support of staunch conservatives to win the election. They’re a critical part of his base. But they’re a damned sight short of a majority.

Photo: Charles Dharapak, AP