Leonce Gaiter believes that ,”If Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his former disciple, Barack Obama were white, this would not be a story.” He contends that, “White pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations. But it’s white bile, and that makes all the difference.”

Ezra Klein disagrees slightly, arguing, “Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique, and any Democratic candidate whose personal relationships implied a sympathy for that worldview would have a tough time of it.”

But I read Gaiter as saying something different than that. If a white pastor were saying exactly what Wright did, it would be, frankly, really strange. Even in the most liberal circles, not many white preachers are likely to think that AmeriKKKa is deliberately infecting blacks with the AIDS virus and so forth. Rather, Gaiter is arguing that it would not be news if a white pastor proclaimed the white equivalent of Wright’s views.

There, I think, he’s wrong. Indeed, I think the backlash would be much, much stronger. We’re simply more tolerant of racism and anti-Americanism coming from an elderly black man than from a white man because there’s a sense that our history entitled them to a certain bitterness.

Gaiter is correct that “white pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations.” But we’re not talking about some random yahoo behind a pulpit but rather a close associate and mentor of a leading contender for the presidency. If a white presidential candidate had sat in a pulpit listening to this sort of nonsense for two decades — and the church put out videos — you bet we’d hear about it.

Look at all the controversy that ensues when, for example, Republican candidates make a speech at Bob Jones University. In those cases, the politician is merely giving a speech. Even the more mainstream nonsense put out by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson is heavily scrutinized — and rightly so — and candidates who are endorsed by these people are called on to renounce the more asinine comments.

Barack Obama has benefited tremendously by being a tabula rasa. His lack of experience and public record has mostly worked to his advantage until now. He’s a friendly, inspiring, fresh face upon whom people can project their own hopes, dreams, and values. Now, though, as he gets much closer to being the Democratic nominee, he’s coming under heavier scrutiny. And any damaging information is more powerful than it would otherwise be simply because people know relatively little about him.

My guess remains that he’ll mostly put this behind him and win the nomination and that it’ll have a marginal impact by the time the general election rolls around. If the race is close, with marginal outcomes in a handful of states deciding the outcome, this could be one of the things that decides it. But a dozen other issues and events will likely have a greater bearing on the outcome.

George Will closes a subpar (by his standards, at least) column on the silly populism of Mike Huckabee and John Edwards with this praise for Barack Obama:

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee — an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic “fights” against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

Will seems to be joining the growing chorus of Republicans, even conservative ones, who claim they would vote for Obama over Huckabee. Michael Totten is the latest blogger I’ve seen make that assertion. Stephen Green seems to be leaning that way (and may have stated so outright, although his archives are FUBAR as the moment). I’ve seen a handful of others in recent days, although their names escape me.

One wonders how many will actually follow through on this, in the unlikely event that Obama-Huckabee turns out to be the general election matchup? I suspect most partisans will ultimately find a way to rationalize holding their nose and voting for whomever gets the nomination.

Right now, Obama is drawing praise from the likes of George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Stephen Hayes. But Glenn Greenwald and John Cole figure that the Republican flirtation with Obama will dissipate and turn into rage quickly if he’s the nominee. While overstated, they’ve got a point: Both parties have a way of painting the opponent as devils and stoking the flames of fear.

Then again, there are plenty of small government conservatives in the Andrew Sullivan mold who aren’t wed to the GOP and plenty of libertarian-minded Republicans were already worried about the power of the Pat Robertson wing of the party before Huckabee’s emergence.

Tom Bernstein, a Yale classmate of President Bush who co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him and Matthew Dowd, Bush’s chief campaign strategist in 2004, jumped on the Obama bandwagon early — long before anyone took Huckabee seriously as a candidate. So, there’s rather clearly a draw there beyond Huckafear.

It’s also noteworthy that none of the Republican candidates last night did a particularly good job last night answering the question why, if Obama were to get the Democratic nomination, voters should pick them over him. Simply shouting “Liberal!” isn’t going to work after seven years during which elected Republicans demonstrated a combination of incompetence, disregard for civil liberties and the Constitution, and lost any claim to fiscal responsibility.

Recent polls have Huckabee as a double digit loser to any of the top three Democrats running; that’s mostly a function of name recognition, though. And Sully asks an interesting question: “If Obama is the Democratic nominee, many Republicans will cross over to vote for him. If Huckabee is the Republican nominee, will left-wing populists and blue-collar Dems cross over for him?” My guess is that quite a few will. Mark Steyn’s right, I think, about the Huckster’s homey appeal.

Ultimately, I don’t think either Huckabee or Obama will get his party’s nomination. That match-up, though, would be very interesting to see from a purely sociological perspective.

Photo: Ke Kehuki via Google Images.

John Cole wins Headline of the Day honors for his headline/lede couplet,

Maybe Patrick Ruffini is a Libertarian

Because I think he is smoking pot

It’s a pithy summary of Ruffini’s much-discussed blog post over at Hugh Hewitt’s place, “Ron Paul Has Won.”

He won’t win the nomination. He won’t win any primaries. But for Ron Paul’s quixotic bid for the White House, it’s “Mission Accomplished.”

[...]

In the past few months, Ron Paul has dramatically raised the profile of libertarianism inside the Republican Party. My small-l libertarian friends seem more comfortable describing themselves as such, even though they’ll go out of their way to disassociate themselves from Ron Paul and the big-L kind.

[...]

Some campaigns can win big without ever coming close to winning an actual contest. Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians. This is not a counterweight to the religious right per se, since Paul is identified as pro-life, but it does potentially open up a new army of activists on the right not primarily motivated by social/moral issues.

Cole and Andrew Sullivan offer cogent analyses of the problems with Ruffini’s triumphalism that a largely agree with.

I would only add that there’s no small irony in the use of the phrase “Mission Accomplished” here, which I presume was unintended. If someone wants to PhotoShop an image of Ron Paul in a flight suit for this, I’ll gladly post it.

Two pieces today give insights into the longshot presidential bid of Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and the role of evangelical leaders in the Republican Party.

Michael Gerson notes Huckabee’s irritation that demonstrably less conservative opponents are garnering endorsements that should rightly be his.

When I asked former pastor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee his response to Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, he paused for a moment. “Surprised” was his understated reply. But his frustration was quickly evident. “Our Web site went nuts with people saying they will never give money to Robertson again.”

“There is a disconnect,” he went on, “between past generational leaders in Christian conservatism and their own followers.” Note the word “past.”

Robertson’s endorsement of a pro-choice presidential candidate is a transparent attempt to remain on the Republican train, even as it chugs away from the priorities of the religious right. It also symbolizes a fragmented political movement, which has recently seen Paul Weyrich’s endorsement of Mitt Romney and Sen. Sam Brownback’s support for John McCain.

An unsigned piece in The American Spectator, though, notes that Huckabee is about to get a very big endorsement.

Dr. James Dobson, who has largely been made irrelevant to the 2008 Republican presidential race, has apparently found his man, and according to an adviser, is ready to change the landscape of the Republican nomination race. “He is the leader of the evangelical and social conservative movement in America, and he’s going to reassert that position and leave no doubt that he’s in charge,” says the adviser based in Colorado.

Sources close to Dobson say that within the next ten days he is coordinating an endorsement plan with the presidential campaign of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. According to a Huckabee insider in Iowa, the event would be staged in that state at a rally, followed by a bus tour across the state, and an appearance by Huckabee on Dobson’s radio show, which is heard nationally.

Dobson’s endorsement, according to the Huckabee source, could mean millions in fundraising to the campaign, allowing it to compete at the same level with the top tier candidates Huckabee has been inching toward in the polls after a series of strong debate and campaign appearances. “It would help us get to the Thompson-McCain level if not higher,” says the source. “Dr. Dobson’s endorsement means that much.”

Dobson’s endorsement might also create a domino effect, as other evangelical and social conservatives have largely been withholding their endorsements, in part out of fear of angering Dobson and his many supporters who also fill crucial slots in other social conservative organizations run by such prominent leaders as Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins. Both men have been assisting multiple campaigns, with Bauer recently saying that he was providing advice to just about every campaign that sought his counsel.

One wonders, however, how important these endorsements are these days. There was a time, certainly, when a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson could swing hundreds of thousands of votes. Is that true anymore? Hasn’t the fragmentation of media taken away much of their sway?

For sure, the path to the Republican nomination still goes through the Deep South and Middle America and, therefore, proper homage must be paid to the holy trinity of God, guts, and guns. Beyond that, though, the Moral Majority is long gone and the Christian Coalition is a shadow of what it once was. Are there that many people willing to brave the elements to caucus in Iowa because James Dobson or Gary Bauer tell them to?

A recent piece in The Economist suggests not.

The problem is that Mr Dobson is not all that good at politics. He displays all the characteristic weaknesses of evangelical politicos—overreaching hopelessly and then blaming failure on want of political courage. He was the prime force behind both the fight to keep Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube in place and the push for a gay-marriage ban. But a majority of evangelicals disapproved of the first and a large number of his fellow social conservatives warned, rightly, that the second was a waste of effort.

There have been other miscalculations. He wasted political capital supporting Harriet Miers’s doomed nomination to the Supreme Court. He strongly opposed the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative. He accused SpongeBob SquarePants of participating in a “pro-homosexual video”. He argued that “The Da Vinci Code” “has all the evidence of something cooked up in the fires of hell” (wouldn’t it have been better written if it had been?). He compared Bill Frist’s call for increased federal funding for stem-cell research to Nazi experiments.

The 70-year-old Mr Dobson (who has already suffered a heart attack and a stroke) is increasingly looking like a relic of an ancien régime rather than a harbinger of a new order. The average age of people on Focus’s mailing list is 52. Mr Dobson and his acolytes are rapidly being displaced by what Mr Gilgoff calls a New New Right—people who are concerned about international justice and climate change as well as abortion and gay marriage, and people who are willing to work with liberal pressure groups over issues such as Sudan and sex slavery.

And a goodly number of those folks don’t vote in Republican primaries.

Josh Marshall, somewhat obliquely, makes an excellent point about today’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid by televangelist Pat Robertson.

Giuliani’s claim to the presidency is based on his service as mayor during and immediately after 9/11. What stops him from being a shoo-in for the nomination is his track record supporting abortion rights and gay rights. But, Robertson is on record saying that 9/11 was America’s punishment for its sinful gay-loving, abortion permitting culture.

Upon reflection, this makes perfect sense:

God ordered the 9/11 attacks.
The 9/11 attacks helped revive Rudy Guilani’s stalled political career.
_________________________________________________________

∴ God wants Rudy Guiliani to be president.

QED.

UPDATE: Mark Ambinder presents a complementary explanation:

Both Giuliani and Robertson share an apocalyptic worldview about the clash with [radical] Islam; for Robertson, it is religious and based in biblical prophecy. For Giuliani, it is secular — but given his 9/11 experiences, just as personal.

Evangelical Christians cite the war on terror as their chief policy concern, and it is not that surprising that Giuliani, who is more identified with an aggressive prosecution of that war than any other candidate, is doing well among evangelicals. It’s not that they ignore his views on social issues; it’s that they see the war on terror like he does: black-and-white, good-versus-evil, a struggle for the soul of civilization.

Makes sense.

UPDATE: Blake Hounshell agrees.

What I think many political analysts are missing about Rudy’s enduring popularity among conservatives is that the war on terror is a religious issue to them, and it trumps all the others for many. Many religious conservatives view Islam as an existential threat to their faith and their way of life. Rudy speaks to their fears.

Sam Brownback is set to endorse John McCain for president.

Sam Brownback, a Kansas conservative and favorite of evangelical Christians, will endorse his former Republican presidential rival John McCain, GOP officials said Wednesday. The nod could provide a much-needed boost, particularly in Iowa, for the Arizona senator and one-time presumed GOP front-runner whose bid faltered and who now is looking for a comeback.

Republican officials said Brownback will announce his support for McCain later Wednesday in Dubuque, Iowa, and then travel with the candidate to campaign in two other cities in the state. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly pre-empting the announcement.

It’s uncertain how much weight the Brownback’s backing will carry; the Kansas senator dropped out of the race last month with little money and little support. While he is a favorite of religious conservatives, he failed to persuade them to embrace him as the GOP’s consensus conservative candidate. He spent months emphasizing his rock-solid opposition to abortion, gay marriage and other issues important to the party’s right flank, but left the race ranking low in national polls and state surveys.

Still, Brownback’s backing could signal to evangelical Christians that they can trust McCain and could help solidify McCain’s credentials on social issues. The endorsement could be especially important in Iowa, where McCain trails in polls. Despite a solidly conservative Senate voting record on social issues, McCain has a rocky history with cultural and religious conservatives who make up a significant part of the Republican base — and have proven to be influential in Iowa’s GOP caucuses.

At first blush, the endorsement would seem trivial, indeed. Brownback never got any traction in this race, staying well within the margin of error of me in both the national and early primary state polls. Still, it could indeed shore up McCain’s credentials with social conservatives and continue the momentum for McCain’s resurrection.

Most have written McCain off. I did so several months ago (see, for example, “McCain Done Before Primaries? and McCain Meltdown“) and many of his top staffers have jumped ship. He was recently trailing Ron Paul in cash on hand and seemed only slightly more likely to emerge as the nominee. He was trailing Barack Obama among Iowa Republicans!

Fred Barnes recently made headlines saying that only Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have a plausible road to the nomination. I’m no longer so sure.

The Brownback nomination is barely worth mentioning in and of itself. It does, however, seem to be part of a trend. The schoolgirl crush conservatives had on Fred Thompson appears to be over. McCain is back at number two in the national polls and seems to be gaining on frontrunner Rudy Giuliani. He is, however, third or lower in all the early primary and caucus states.

Still, the support of all the top tier Republicans appears very soft.

Rudy Giuliani’s chief appeal, aside from the fact that he was on the scene at 9/11, is that he’s the candidate most likely to be able to defeat Hillary Clinton. While that may be strong motivation in the general election, I’m not sure it plays in the primaries.

Social conservatives continue to be wary of him, although he has managed to pick up the endorsement of Pat Robertson, for what it’s worth. And libertarian minded conservatives, such as myself, have a lot of concerns about him on both the domestic and foreign policy front.

Mitt Romney’s ability to self-finance commercials in Iowa and New Hampshire have given him a strong lead there but I just don’t see Southern evangelicals warming to a dog-abusing Mormon.

The Republican nominating electorate continues, as it has from the beginning, to look for someone else. It may well be that McCain, for all his flaws, winds up being that someone else, even though he began the race as the frontrunner.

Some influential leaders of the Religious Right are threatening to leave the Republican party and support a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination, David Kirkpatrick reports.

The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians, participants said. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the both the Council for National Policy and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the intend to publicize its resolution. These participants said the group chose the qualified term “consider” because they have not yet identified an alternative third party candidate, but the group was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani became the candidate.

A revolt of Christian conservative leaders could be a significant setback to the Giuliani campaign because white evangelical Protestants make up a major portion of Republican primary voters. But the threat is risky for the credibility of the Christian conservative movement as well. Some of its usual grass-roots supporters could still choose to support even a pro-choice Republican like Mr. Giuliani, either because they dislike the Democratic nominee even more or because they are worried about war, terrorism and other issues.

While I find the notion that Christian conservatives have been insufficiently pandered to by the GOP somewhat amusing, I can understand their trepidation over Giuliani. He would be, by far, the least socially conservative nominee since Richard Nixon.

Then again, I’d argue that the issues where Giuliani is off the reservation are completely irrelevant from a policy standpoint. Ronald Reagan, the first president to ride the Moral Majority wave, served two terms and had a Republican majority in the Senate his first six years. George W. Bush is in his second term and had a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress for most of his first six years. What difference did it make on the social issues?

The courts, not the president, decides most of the key policy debates. Abortion is still legal thirty four years after Roe v. Wade and twenty seven years after Reagan was elected. It’s almost inconceivable that a Justice who would be a sure bet to overturn could get confirmed. Prayer in the schools? Nobody even talks about that these days. Gay marriage? Inevitable.

So, what issues that matter to social conservatives would, say, a President Fred Thompson be more likely to affect in a positive direction than Rudy Giuliani?

A liberal blogger charges that Fred Thompson is breaking the law by raising so much money and still not formally declaring himself a candidate.

Lane Hudson, a left-wing blogger, filed a complaint against former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) on Monday, accusing the likely presidential candidate of breaking the law by violating the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) “testing the waters” clause. Hudson, known for posting e-mails from former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) in last year’s page scandal, said Thompson “has been presenting himself as a candidate, he has been raising large sums of money beyond what would be required to explore a possible candidacy and he has signed a long term lease on a headquarters for his campaign.”

In his complaint, Hudson lays out a number of examples ranging from Thompson’s extensive fundraising to quotes from the senator and his advisers. “Fred Thompson is breaking the law and it’s time somebody did something about it,” Hudson said in a statement. “So, this morning, I filed an FEC Complaint against him. For far too long, he has been ignoring the letter and spirit of Federal Election Law for his own political benefit. It reeks of the same disregard for the law that we have seen from the Bush Administration, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay [sic], and Mark Foley.”

In an e-mail, Thompson spokesman Jim Mills said only, “We’re following the law.”

The FEC Monday afternoon could only confirm that it has received the complaint. The complaint will be treated as a “matter under review.” Within five days of receiving the complaint, the FEC must notify the Thompson exploratory committee and provide it with a copy of the complaint. The committee then has 15 days to respond to the FEC and say in writing “why no action should be taken.”

A number of press reports have raised questions about the extent of Thompson’s early efforts and whether they run afoul of the “testing the waters” clause. The law is particularly vague in this area as there are no set dollar amounts a would-be candidate is prevented from raising. Thompson’s $3.4 million June haul as outlined in a report to the IRS does not meet or exceed any specific legal guideline.

You can read the whole complaint at Hudson’s site.

Whether Thompson is within the letter of the law, he’s certainly violating its spirit. ABC’s Jake Tapper notes that there’s plenty of precedent for the FEC’s calling shenanigans on candidates who get too cute.

Previous pre-candidates who tried the “testing the waters” committee — including Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., Rev. Pat Robertson, and Rev. Al Sharpton — invited FEC scrutiny.

The rule is pretty simple. If you spend more than $5,000 on campaign activities, you’re a candidate, whether or not you’ve officially declared. The question is what constitutes “testing the waters” activity, and what constitutes “candidate” activity.

In 2004 the conservative National and Legal Policy Center filed a complaint with the FEC alleging Sharpton was using the “testing the waters” committee to run an “off-the-books campaign,” not declaring his candidacy officially while clearly a candidate, thus avoiding disclosure rules. The FEC investigated the matter, and arrived at a settlement with Sharpton.

The FEC ruled that Robertson had violated the “testing the waters” rules in 1988, fining him $25,000.

Practically speaking, however, it’s academic. As Chuck Todd explained back in May, the advantage of delaying formal declaration of candidacy is that it “allows Thompson to forgo filing a detailed report” on his spending with the FEC but “once he’s an official candidate, he’ll have to file retroactively.” On the other hand, as Tapper notes, “If Thompson waits until September 6 to formally declare his candidacy, he wouldn’t have to disclose any of the cash given to his campaign until January 31 — after many major contests are over, including the Iowa and Nevada Caucuses, and the New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida primaries.”

Despite all the attention paid to the meaningless Ames, Iowa straw poll, there has been almost zero coverage of the fact that Ron Paul dominated the Alabama straw poll Saturday, absolutely demolishing the competition:

Paul 216
Romney 14
Hunter 10
Thompson 9
Giuliani 7
Huckabee 6
McCain 2
Brownback 2
Tancredo 0
Cox 0

This is a stunning setback for Mike Huckabee, who is not only the only southerner in the field but coming up the momentum of his surprise number two showing in the meaningless Ames straw poll.

Now, granted, Alan Keyes won the last contested GOP straw poll in 1999, followed by Orrin Hatch, with eventual nominee George W. Bush coming in third. But Pat Robertson won the Iowa straw poll in 1987 and the press still pretends that contest is meaningful. Indeed, the winner in Ames has only gone on to win the nomination once. George H.W. Bush won the poll in 1979 and went on to lose the nomination to Ronald Reagan. Then, Bush lost the poll in 1987 (to Robertson) only to win the nomination. The other George Bush won in Ames in 1999, though, and also won the whole thing. So they’re 1 for 4!

Clearly, the MSM is discriminating against Alabama and Ron Paul in its coverage.

James Carville has an editorial in the Financial Times, of all places, explaining “How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans.”

He’s generous in noting that, “If we concluded our analysis in 2007 and confined our judgment merely to Mr Rove’s immediate electoral record, we would have no choice but to judge him a spectacular success. There is no doubt that Mr Rove won elections. He has perhaps one of the most remarkable win-percentages in modern American politics.”

From there, though, he touts a series of polls showing that the Democrats have made huge gains among young voters (which Carville surely knows is an oxymoron) and swing voters. Naturally, he blames Rove. So far as it goes, he’s got a point. There’s not much doubt that the divide and conquer strategy had its cost.

Still, Carville takes this well beyond its logical conclusions:

Mr Rove’s famous electoral strategy – focusing on the Republican base first – is also largely responsible for a shift in international public opinion against the US. It would not be fair to blame Mr Rove for the Iraq war. But it is clearly fair to blame his strategy for the Terry Schiavo fiasco and the Republicans’ adherence to the policies and doctrines of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The world and now most of the US are contemptuous of the theocratic underpinnings of the policy Mr Rove ushered into government.

I thought the Republican majority’s actions in the Schiavo case were outrageous and said so frequently. Still, I’m rather sure they’d have taken place were Rove to have retired after the 2004 election. But the idea that Rove — or anyone else — has ushered into government some sort of theocracy is absurd. What policies and doctrines have been adhered to, pray tell?

The irresponsible interventions of the former Republican majority in Congress notwithstanding, Terry Schiavo was allowed to die. Otherwise: Abortion? Still legal. Prayer in public schools? Still illegal. Gay marriage and civil unions: More legal than they were under Bill Clinton or ever before.

It’s likely true that the Republican Platform is out of step with the consensus on these issues, since the platform has been essentially static since 1980 and the public view has shifted inexorably leftward. But that’s hardly Karl Rove’s doing.

He has been assistant to the president, senior advisor and deputy chief of staff. Mr Rove was the architect of social security reform, immigration, the hiring and firing of justice department officials and the placement of literally thousands of ideologically driven buffoons throughout the US government. As deputy chief of staff he was also responsible for handling the White House post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. On these actions, history has already rendered its judgment on Mr Rove. And, as we say in Louisiana, “it ain’t pretty”.

This ascribes too much to Rove, I think. Certainly, it’s absurd to lay Katrina at his doorstep. Social Security reform barely made a blip on the radar screen;surely, it’s not responsible for the GOP’s poll standings.

The McCain-Kennedy immigration bill was bipartisan and the opposition was almost entirely from the Right. That issue, more than perhaps any other save the Iraq War, has hurt the GOP. But it goes against the thesis that Rove was pandering to the base at all costs. Indeed, politically speaking, the president and the party would have been far better served adopting the Rovian strategy.

To the extent that the under-25 cohort is permanently alienated from the Republican Party — and I’m more than a little dubious that it’s so — it has much, much more to do with the war than with a polarizing political strategist. And, ultimately, it’s decision-makers, not advisers, who get the blame for that. To paraphrase Rove’s predecessor, “It’s the President, stupid.”

Patrick Hynes, who I’m relieved to see isn’t one of the McCain staffers let go yesterday, sends along a David Brody piece entitled, “Is John McCain the Next Ronald Reagan?” He cites a 1979 AP story about Reagan’s fundraising woes and a 1980 WaPo piece noting that “Reagan had to overcome doubts about his age and ability, an ill-advised Iowa strategy, a major staff shake-up in the middle of the campaign and serious money problems” to win the GOP nomination.

The problem, though, is not so much that John McCain isn’t Ronald Reagan (although, I should hasten to add, he isn’t) but that this isn’t 1979. The hyper-frontloaded primary schedule now in place makes catching up much harder. And McCain isn’t just trailing Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson in the polls and Giuliani and Mitt Romney in fundraising: he’s trailing all three in most of the early states. He’s got an incredible amount of ground to make up.

Further, while McCain has grown on me substantially vis-a-vis Giuliani and I have yet to take Romney or Thompson seriously as presidential prospects, it’s hard for me to see a path for his resurgence. He started off unpopular with the hard right and his attempts to curry favor with Pat Robertson and company have alienated the moderates.

He’s courageously leading on immigration and the Iraq War, taking hard stands despite the polls. That’s admirable. On the other hand, championing incredibly unpopular issues months before the ballots are cast is not likely to win many votes.

David Adesnik wonders,

To what extent does criticism, no matter how harsh or how justified, only build [Michael] Moore up into a bigger celebrity? If one wanted to completely marginalize a public figure, how would one go about it? The answer is not that if you ignore him, he’ll go away. Rather, I think the challenge is to ensure that liberals are the ones who are bashing Moore.

[...]

To marginalize Moore, he must become someone who mainstream liberals are embarrassed to identify as one of their own. But that’s no small task. The extremes often generate a devoted audience. And then the rest of the party either pays lip service or avoids unnecessary conflicts with the base. (It’s the same with conservatives, of course.)

Quite right.

Invariably, when I write about the latest outrages of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Pat Robertson or other figures on the right who say outrageous things, I get several comments either telling me that our kooks aren’t as bad as their kooks or that I am just playing into their hands by giving them attention.

The problem, though, is that these people have huge followings. They are not, therefore, strictly speaking a lunatic fringe. As I observed when I live-blogged Ann Coulter’s “faggot” incident at CPAC,

I would note that, an hour after the speech, people are still lined up around the block for autographed copies of her book. Granted, most of them are young kids of college age. Some of them are older than I am.

Somehow, I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan being pleased.

It’s true that these people thrive on controversy. At the same time, though, they appeal to the baser instincts of large numbers of people. Elizabeth Edwards is right: “It debases political dialogue. It drives people away from the process. We can’t have a debate about the issues.”

And, as Adesnik notes, the only way for that to end is for these people to lose their legitimacy as spokesmen for the cause. People on my side of the aisle can criticize Michael Moore and those on the other side can declaim Ann Coulter until the cows come home and it’ll simply be dismissed as people not being able to stand their ox being effectively gored. When respectable people on their own side continually denounce them, though, a line gets drawn.

I don’t know that it’ll matter in the end. The appetite for venom against the so-called traitors in our midst is strong. But decent people can at least make it known where they stand.

Marc Ambinder has two pieces in Hotline on Call today that strike me as interrelated. This morning, he wrote about a memo from Brent Seaborn, Rudy Giuliani’s strategy director, arguing that his candidate can win California in 2008, a feat no Republican has accomplished in the twenty years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis. The memo is poorly written and rather fact-challenged but the thesis, that Giuliani is attracting across-the-board support and could be Clinton in California and other states not traditionally in play, is plausible.

This afternoon, Ambinder cautions Republicans not to worship too much at the alter of Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan pulled the spokes together: anti-communism, traditional moral values, strong nat’l defense and lower taxes. Those ideas survived, but without Reagan to sell them, they proved incapable of producing a governing majority themselves.

By and large, the GOP has rejected “compassionate conservatism” and is looking for something new. But the GOP candidates all seem to want to channel Reagan, as if his spirit alone can save the party. Some lace their speeches with “optimism” — literally, the word. Others wonder what Reagan would do in the face is Islamic terror. Still others go so far as to compare their political journey’s to Reagan’s. None comes close to capturing Reagan’s essence.

The reason no post-Reagan Republican has managed this is rather obvious: The end of the Cold War removed anti-Communism from the equation. Further, the Reagan tax cuts, which took a confiscatory top bracket down from 70 percent to 38 percent, made further reforms less urgent.

Post 9/11, national security has resumed its prominence on the national agenda and is arguably the reason George W. Bush managed to get re-elected despite a mediocre first term. The unpopularity of the Iraq War, not to mention its mismanagement under Republican governance, makes that a harder sell in 2008.

The key, then, is finding a leader who can both energize the Republican base of fiscal and social conservatives while not alienating — or, heaven forfend, actually appealing to — moderates and the slightly-left-of-center.

This partly answers the question, “Why Fred Thompson” that Alex Knapp and Kevin Drum have posed. He’s a likable, charismatic fellow who comes across as honest and strong. He’s also a virtual unknown from a policy sense and has little real experience unless one counts move roles.

Giuliani, on the other hand, is charismatic and experienced. He’s likable on the stump. He’s sufficiently centrist, or even left-of-center, on the most divisive social issues that he doesn’t scare away the moderates and his stances on security issues seem, so far at least, to dampen the concerns of all but the most ardent members of the Jerry Falwell wing of the base. And, frankly, they’re not voting for Hillary Clinton.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has managed to twice win election as governor of California under the GOP banner. It’s not inconceivable that Giuliani could pull it off, especially against Clinton.

Twenty years ago, the Republicans were said to have a “lock” on the Electoral College, having won every presidential election but one over the previous twenty years — and the exception, 1976, was a narrow loss that took Watergate, an accidental nominee, and a Democrat who was arguably more conservative than the Republican. As Ambider notes, that suddenly changed in 1992: “Thanks to Pete Wilson, illegal immigration, migration, cultural politics or something else entirely, Democrats don’t worry about the state.”

California is no doubt a much more liberal state than it was in 1988. Still, Giuliani is arguably to the left of Clinton on illegal immigration and he’s certainly not under Pat Robertson’s thumb. He’s more popular than she is among virtually every segment of the community. Why couldn’t he win?

It’s quite conceivable, though, that Giuliani’s support — like Barack Obama’s — is as high now as it’s ever going to be. People don’t know him as well as they do Clinton and what most of them do “know” is good. There are plenty of ugly stories about heavy-handed police tactics that will get more fully aired. People will be reminded of his divorces and the unseemly circumstances surrounding them. On the other hand, it may simply be that nobody will much care what he did before 9/11. That may have wiped away all past sins.

If so, he’s got a shot.

One of the latest examples adduced of President Bush’s tendency to appoint ideologically agreeable hacks rather than traditionally-qualified people to the administration has been the revelation that 150 graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University are among their ranks, with Monica Goodling the most (in)famous.

While Paul Krugman and other reliable anti-Bush pundits have been leading the charge, even Jonah Goldberg finds this troubling. He deserves Line of the Day honors for this backhanded defense of Goodling: “She may be brilliant, I’ve just seen no evidence for it.”

Mickey Kaus is among the lone defenders of the administration here, arguing that this is just elitist, anti-Christian bias on the part of the pundit class. Because “there’s always been a market for anti-hick editorializing in the New York Times, especially anti-Southern-hick editorializing,” there’s not even any pressure to demonstrate that Goodling and her Regent cohorts are actually less qualified in any way that matters than appointees to similar positions in previous administrations.

That’s actually a fair point and one not easily rebuttable, given that we don’t have handy dandy metrics at the ready. Still, a conservative Goldberg emailer echoes the sentiments of many:

Call me an elitist, but if we are going to have devout christians in the Justice department, I would prefer they went to Chicago or Stanford Law. I think there is something to be said about high LSAT scores and going to one of the best schools in the country. And I have never bought the canard that there are no conservatives at the best law schools. Robert, Alito, Scalia?

I’m sympathetic to both sides on this one, in that I’ve got a PhD and many of the academic biases that come with that but have my degrees from universities without an elite national reputation. Certainly, the possession of a degree from Harvard is not a prima facie case of being smarter and more capable of one with a degree from Purdue or Iowa State. On the other hand, it strikes me as highly unlikely that a competitive process would result in 150 graduates of Regent coming out on top, even factoring in the a preference for people that broadly shared the president’s ideological and spiritual outlook. There are simply too many smart, religious conservatives out there with more prestigious credentials.

Via Radley Balko is this story of about how people were appointed to fairly high positions in the Justice Department based on little more than their religious views.

A 1995 graduate of Messiah College, an evangelical Christian school, and a 1999 graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School, Goodling is an improbable character for a political scandal. Her chief claim to professional fame appears to have been loyalty to the president and to the process of reshaping the Justice Department in his image (and, thus, His image). A former career official there told The Washington Post that Goodling “forced many very talented career people out of main Justice so she could replace them with junior people that were either loyal to the administration or would score her some points.” And as she rose at Justice, a former classmate said, Goodling “developed a very positive reputation for people coming from Christian schools into Washington looking for employment in government, always ready to offer encouragement and be a sounding board.”

[...]

Goodling is one of 150 graduates of Regent University who have served in this administration, as Regent’s Web site proudly proclaims. Pretty impressive for a 29-year-old school. The university says that “approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work.” And that’s precisely what its founder desired. The school’s motto is “Christian Leadership to Change the World.”

[...]

Jeffrey A. Brauch, the law school’s dean, urges that students reflect upon “the critical role the Christian faith should play in our legal system.” Jason Eige (Class of ‘99), senior assistant to Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, puts it pithily in the alumni newsletter: “Your Résumé Is God’s Instrument.”

This legal worldview meshed perfectly with that of Ashcroft — a devout Pentecostal who forbade use of the word “pride,” as well as the phrase “no higher calling than public service,” on documents bearing his signature. No surprise that, as he began transforming the Justice Department, the Goodlings looked good to him.

One of Ashcroft’s most profound changes was to the Civil Rights Division, started in 1957 to fight racial discrimination in voting. Under Ashcroft, career lawyers were systematically fired or forced out and replaced by members of conservative or Christian groups or folks with no civil rights experience. In the five years after 2001, the Civil Rights Division brought no voting cases — and only one employment case — on behalf of an African American. Instead, the division took up the “civil rights” abuses of reverse discrimination — claims of voter fraud or discrimination against Christians. On Feb. 20, Gonzales announced a new initiative called the First Freedom Project to carry out “even greater enforcement of religious rights for all Americans.” In his view, the fight for a student’s right to read a Bible in school is as urgent as the right to vote.

This article also suggests that Kyle D. Sampson, Alberto Gonzalez’s Chief of Staff, was also picked due to his religious views as well.

Religiosity. A Utah-born Mormon, Sampson first came over to the Justice Department as a top aide to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. “Some people think you should never talk about religion and politics, and, like me, General Ashcroft thinks those are the two most interesting things to talk about,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune in 2005. “So, that’s what we talk about–doctrinal things. What’s your belief in God?” Upon Sampson’s appointment to the Bush administration, the Mormon Church’s website reported: “Sampson said President Bush is a committed follower of Christ, which makes him a great boss.”

Ideology. Among the reasons Sampson was apparently angry with some of the ousted U.S. attorneys was a special obsession of the Christian right: prosecuting pornographers. Brent Ward, head of the Justice Department’s obscenity task force and a veteran of the smut wars of the Ed Meese era, e-mailed Sampson in a rage about the failure by two of U.S. attorneys, Las Vegas’s Dan Bogden and Phoenix’s Paul Charlton, to prosecute obscenity cases he had brought them. When the Reagan administration wrangled with pornographers in the 1980s, it failed to win many cases but drove several firms out of business by dragging out the legal proceedings. “What do you suggest I do?” Ward asked Sampson. “If you want to act on what I give you, I will be glad to provide a little more context for each of the two situations.” Both men wound up getting fired.

It looks very much like the hiring/staffing decisions at the Dept. of Justice are based more on one’s religious background and not on one’s qualifications to actually do the job. Kind of explains all the bungling and stupidity.