Hilzoy is tired of hearing about “socialism” and “class warfare” just because Barack Obama is raising the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.  After all, we had much higher rates under John Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan, two legendary tax cutters.  And rates are higher in most of the developed world, too!

There’s much truth in that.  To many Republicans, tax cutting has become something of a fetish.  But there’s a right way and a wrong way to frame the debate.

I came of political age in 1979-80 and Reagan was my first political hero.  I’m a firm believer in lower and flatter taxes but, at the same time, I recognize that:

• Some progressivity is fiscally necessary and morally justified

- Government would need a lot of money even if it were only to do the things that everyone agrees it must do

- People at the bottom of the wealth scale don’t have any money, so the rich will by definition have to pay more

- Money needed to meet basic human needs is more valuable to the individual than incremental money after that point

• Cutting taxes generates more revenue . . . but only up to a point

- The greater percentage of an earned dollar taken by the government, the less incentive there is to earn said dollar

- The lower percentage of all money collected as revenue, the lower the revenue collected

Once those points are conceded, as the old joke goes, we’re just haggling over price.

The top tax rate [PDF] has fluctuated wildly since the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913.  It began at 7 percent (no, that’s not a typo) on those earning $500,000 — a massive sum in those days.    It rose to 15 percent in 1916, 67 percent in 1917, 77 percent in 1918, went down numerous times before settling at 25 percent in 1925, jumped back to 63 percent in 1933, 79 percent in 1936, 81 percent in 1941, 88 percent in 1942, 94 percent in 1944.

It went down to 91 percent after the war and stayed there for years.  That’s where it was when John Kennedy took office and where it was when he was murdered.  Despite being constantly cited as a tax cutter, he left the top marginal rate alone.

Lyndon Johnson cut it to 77 percent in 1964 and 70 percent in 1965.  That’s where it stayed until Reagan cut it to 50 (1982) to 38.5 (1987) to 28 (1988).

It has gone up and down considerably over the two decades since but never back to that low after it went up to 31 percent under George H.W. Bush (1991). Nor has it gone up above the 39.6 percent we reached under Bill Clinton (1993 to 2001).* John Cole has created a graph with this data:

So, no, 39.6 isn’t some magical threshhold that catapults the nation into socialism (indeed, tax rates really have little to do with socialism).  Nor is it necessarily a road to financial ruin via the demoralization of the productive class; we’ve had boom and bust times with considerably higher and considerably lower rates.

But here’s the thing:  There are different ways of talking about tax rates and some are more useful than others.  In addition to the list above, I’d like to add in another thing the debate should recognize:

• It’s our money, not the government’s

People earn money by trading in their time, labor, energy, present enjoyment, and so forth.  While it’s not universally true, those earning more money tend to work more and have made better choices than those who earn less.  One generally doesn’t get rich without getting an education and putting in much more than 40 hours a week.  Indeed, few get rich working for someone else; most have taken the enormous risk of going out on their own and starting their own companies.

Recognizing that “the rich” have both earned their money and that they have more ability to pay, let’s debate where the tax rates should be on the needs of society and the logic of the market.  This will be an ongoing debate, as there’s “right” answer that applies regardless of circumstance.

One thing that’s obvious from a glance at the history of the top marginal rate is that it has typically gone up — sometimes skyrocketed — during crises.  Especially wars.   We went in the opposite direction during the Bush administration (partly out of ideology, partly because we went on a wartime footing during a recession and didn’t want to raise taxes and put a further strain on the economy).  So, I’m persuadable that going up to 39.6 percent is necessary.

Here’s how not to persuade me:  Using soak the rich rhetoric.   The constant, “hey, only the top five percent are having to pay for any of this, so it’s cool” talk.  That’s class warfare.

Via Jim Henley, I see that IOZ snarks,

In general I think it safe to say that people who display no outward indications of appreciating the distinction between business income, profit, salary, and taxable income are not, whatever their claims to the contrary, occupying the lofty brackets that Obama proposes we liquidate or nationalize or blast into space or whatever as we make the final transformation into the People’s Republic.

In addition to being untrue (lots of high earners have little knowledge of economics or tax policy) this is entirely beside the point.  Whether you’ll personally have to pay more taxes shouldn’t be a major consideration at all.

It’s dangerous for a republic to operate on the basis of the lower classes voting themselves a larger share of the earnings of the upper classes.  It’s one thing to appeal to a sense of noblesse oblige and quite another to treat others’ wealth as a piggy bank to be raided at will.

Image:  Retirement Council of America

_________
*Yes, I know presidents don’t set tax policy on their own and need Congress to cooperate.

My Palin Derangement Syndrome post got a number of thoughtful responses, especially for a weekend post.

My fellow Jacksonville State alumnus Stacy McCain, a Palin fan, thinks the internal debate on her role in last week’s defeat and her future as a Republican Party standard bearer is one we should have.  He objects strenuously, though, to the tone of some of her opponents.  His difference with me is that he thinks I place too much emphasis on foreign policy wonkery, both because the wonks are often wrong and because foreign policy debates are a moving target and a dicey strategy for building a winning coalition.

Domestic politics is permanent. The economy is always relevant. The ceaseless growth of the Washington bureaucracy continues to intrude into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Department of Education is still an unconstitutional travesty that ought to be abolished. Social Security is still a disastrous Ponzi scheme. The entitlement mentality is still an insult to the Tocquevillean spirit of the nation. These arguments may not be as popular in the short term as pointing at a mustachioed foreign dictator and screaming “Hitler!” but they have the basic virtue of being true.

From a center-left perspective, Kevin Drum believes more of my fellow conservatives should share these concerns about Palin but, alas, he thinks I’m clinging to an old view of Republicanism, writing, “For a movement that decided long ago that slogans and shibboleths mattered while serious policy discourse was merely a distraction, a candidate who showed no interest in domestic policy before the age of 44 is the perfect public face.”

Mark Lilla expands on that view at some length in a must-read WSJ piece, “The Perils of ‘Populist Chic.’”

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on “The New American Right” that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter’s influential “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963).

But over the next decade and a half all that changed. Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

[...]

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that “populist paranoia” was “subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government.” But by the mid-’80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people — and I include myself among them — who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

Stacy jokes that Jax State grads shouldn’t be siding with the elites.  Recently, Ace had a lengthy diatribe against self-anointed elites in a memorable comments thread.  But Lilla identifies the elitism with which I side:  a meritocratic, intellectual one rather than one of birthright and pedigree.  A movement built on know-nothingism — indeed, outright hostility to higher education — is bound to fail.

The Republican Party will be consigned to permanent minority status if it continues down its present course.   It is increasingly becoming a white, Southern party.  Even though I’m both white and Southern, it’s obvious to me that we have to expand our appeal beyond hard-core Evangelicals and anti-elitists that to get back Virginia, North Carolina, the Midwest, and West.

I’m not advocating turning the GOP into a centrist party.  For reasons John Hawkins identifies and others, it won’t work.  Rather, I’m calling for a return to Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Big Tent that offers enough to attract a broad coalition.   It’s not 1980.   We can’t simply dust off Reagan’s platform.   The bottom line is that, however unappealing it is to die-hards, Social Security and the Department of Education are here to stay.

Quite likely, so is legal abortion.   Roe v. Wade was seven years old when Reagan ran.  When Bill Clinton came to office after twelve years of Republican control of the White House, it was twenty years old.  George W. Bush is leaving, after eight more years of Republican control, with Roe still largely intact and 36 years old.  The younger generation, then, have grown up with abortion as a simple fact of life and have no interest in changing that.

Nor is the boogeyman of homosexuality going to do it.  Despite another string of victories last Tuesday for anti-gay marriage amendments, the fact of the matter is that for those under 50 — certainly, under 40 — homosexuality is normal.  While a majority still oppose granting gays the right to enter into an agreement with the name “marriage,” most support gay unions under a less sacred label.  A decade from now, the debate will seem silly and running on the issue will further marginalize the party.

A majority Republican Party, then, is going to have to figure out a way to keep social conservatives without abortion and gays as shibboleths and without alienating libertarian-minded right-of-center voters.  It’s inconceivable how it’s done so long as the Democrats are winning among college graduates.

A return to fiscal sanity is perhaps the best rallying cry in the short term, one that’ll be made easier in opposition.  (After all, it’ll be Democratic priorities that we can be frugal about rather than our own.)   Beyond that, though, there will need to be a lot of spade work in rebuilding an intellectual rationale for conservatism beyond cutting taxes and anti-elitism.

Note:  An outline form of this post was inadvertantly published earlier. My apologies for the confusion.

Chris Cillizza compares Barack Obama’s apparent victory over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination to various “upsets” in sports and pop culture history and wonders if this is the biggest upset in American political history.

He cites Harry Truman’s win over Thomas Dewey in 1948, Jimmy Carter’s come-from-nowhere win in 1976, and then-upstart Bill Clinton’s capturing of the Democratic nomination over the likes of Jerry Brown, Bob Kerrey, and Tom Harkin in 1992 as contenders for the title.

Truman over Dewey would seem the obvious choice here but, then again, he was the sitting president of the United States. Carter was an unknown but that was a huge advantage in the Throw-The-Bums-Out post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era. And the 1992 Democratic field was more known for who didn’t run than for who did.

While I predicted Clinton would capture the nomination, going with the safe choice, others, including my colleague Alex Knapp, forecast an Obama win. So it wasn’t totally unexpected.

If I were to choose a biggest upset in recent presidential politics, I’d go with 1992. Not, though, Bill Clinton’s win in a thin primary field but rather George H.W. Bush’s loss in November. A sitting president was at 90-plus percent approval in the aftermath of cruising to victory in a popular war. Most of the big guns in the Democratic Party sat the race out, figuring Bush’s re-election a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, Clinton had to go on “60 Minutes” to lie about the Gennifer Flowers scandal to save his candidacy. For a brief moment, independent novelty candidate Ross Perot was ahead of him in the national polls and there was even talk that Clinton would come in third and that the Democrats might have to engage in a petition drive to get on the ballot in 1996!

The biggest non-presidential upset, probably, was wrestler Jesse Ventura’s third party win to take the Minnesota governorship.

Really, though, I’m not sure that there’s such a thing as an “upset” in American politics. Political campaigns aren’t like sporting events, where teams show how good they are during a long regular season so that we have something to base the odds on. The idea that there are “upsets” in politics comes from the mistaken belief that polling in the year before an election has much to do with how people will actually vote when it matters.

Obama’s win this year is somewhat akin to the New England Patriots’ 2002 Super Bowl win. Nobody predicted, when the 2001-2 season started, that the Pats had a shot. Then again, who knew that Drew Bledsoe would go down and Tom Brady would come from nowhere to emerge as an elite quarterback? It took some luck — like a fumble against Oakland in the playoffs that was ruled an incomplete pass — and a good team surrounding him, but the unknown quantity got the job done against a better known field.

Clinton started this race with enormous name recognition and Obama was merely a “clean African-American” who could give a good speech. Given who the candidates turned out to be over a long race, it’s not surprising that he eeked out a narrow victory in the primaries.

Of course, as Jimmy Johnson noted once upon a time, there’s still one more game. Brady’s Patriots narrowly beat the heavily favored St. Louis Rams, on the strength of an Adam Vinatieri field goal rather than heroics from the quarterback. McCain will be the underdog in this one, though.

Yesterday’s exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts based on links from elsewhere and fill in the blanks based on pre-existing biases.

When I saw a post entitled “The Autumn of Wingnuttia” atop the page at memeorandum, with firedoglake as the venue, I expected the worst. Encountering an insult and expletive laden post*, I was not disappointed. I responded with “Conservatism’s Safety Net,” arguing that such hubris and contempt coming from the progressive camp would ultimately ensure a conservative comeback.

Thers responded with “Lose Its Appeal Over Years,” which noted that his first post was “not especially intended to please a ‘conservative’ ear” and explains that, while taking glee in the problems of the conservative Republican coalition, he’s under no illusion that the Democrats won’t make the same sort of mistakes. Instead, his “Wingnuttia” post was about Movement Conservatism.

In turn, Thers makes a reasonable but false set of assumptions about what I think based on my residing in the conservative camp. Obviously, I must fundamentally disagree with George Packer’s “The Fall of Conservatism — Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” the essay that started this round of discussions. And of course I blame the bad things that the GOP does on heretical leaders who have strayed from the One True Path, not on the movement itself. Two posts from last week, “Rebuilding the Republican Brand” and “Going to War with the Ideology You Have,” address those concerns.

What we’re left with, then, is one fundamental disagreement which I have with Packer and Thers: the motivation of the founders of Movement Conservatism.

Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.

[...]

[T]he brute fact is that without accusations like, say, that Barack Obama is an un-American socialist, well, the GOP might as well just concede the election immediately. And everyone knows it. The right just cannot win if it renounces the politics of resentment, and that’s all there is to it.

The adornment was an illustration of the hubris and contempt for the opposition that was at the core of the post, not a commentary.

Yes, there is a sizable contingent on the Right who think those on the Left are, as many warbloggers put it, “Not anti-war, just on the other side.” And, yes, there’s a strong element of resentment at work in conservatism. But, as I wrote in response to Packer’s statement that “[The Nixon] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few,” “A more charitable characterization would be that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw their culture under assault from an urban elite and a sympathetic Supreme Court” and Nixon’s campaign responded to that.

Frankly, there’s plenty of resentment to go around. After all, it’s not just conservatives who exploit the divide between “Real Americans” and an undeserving Other. John Edwards used Packer’s phrase, “two Americas,” to exploit the resentment of lower middle class voters for those higher on the economic ladder. Hillary Clinton is currently touting her success among “working Americans” in an attempt to exploit the same resentments.

Liberal Democrats try to win by pretty much the same tactics as conservative Republicans: exploiting class resentments; recalling a vision of the past that never existed; and just generally spreading fear, doubt, and uncertainty. It’s just a different set of resentments being stoked. Republicans hate people of color and want to see old people starve. They don’t want your kids to be educated. All they care about is the rich! It’s all nonsense. But let’s not confuse the divide-and-conquer tactics by which campaigns are run with political movements. Conservatism isn’t “the Southern Strategy” any more than liberalism is “triangulation.” Much of politics is about exploiting fear and “Who gets what, when and how.” But, to the extent that people vote ideologically, it’s about more than that.

In the American context, there’s a remarkable consensus on politics combined with heated rhetoric. We’re essentially all descendants of Enlightenment Liberalism and the disagreements are on the margins. We pretty much agree on the goals; the disagreement is about how to get there and in which direction trade-offs should go. Conservatives prioritize military power, liberals emphasize diplomacy. Liberals push for diversity and change while conservatives fight for the protection of cherished cultural institutions. Conservatives emphasize private property rights while liberals emphasize fairness and community.

The campaign rhetoric used by the two parties, however, is about putting together a 50 percent plus one coalition to achieve power. Campaigns are usually about whipping the ideological base into a frenzy to increase turnout and trying to persuade the non-ideological mass that it’s too risky to vote for the other side. None of that has much to do with a “movement,” on the Left or the Right.

“Intellectual movements” that end up unable to cope with empirical scientific data (global warming), that end up making excuses for torture, that depend upon self-flattering fantasies such as a belief in a partisan “liberal media,” that delight in the sort of race-baiting nonsense we’ve already seen in this election season, have nowhere to go. It is eminently reasonable to draw the conclusion that there is just nothing to “movement conservatism” except a dead end. “Conservatism” as it is currently embodied just cannot handle the truth. It can’t afford to.

I’d note that most of the “race-baiting nonsense we’ve already seen in this election season” has come from the Democrats. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been positively hamhanded on the subject and the Obama camp has been masterful in crying “racism” even where none exists, essentially casting any vote by a white person against him as only explainable by bigotry.

Yes, a large number of conservatives are skeptics of global warming and especially the proposed solutions. They see environmentalists as an elite who are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of jobs and economic progress to save some fish they’ve never heard of, so they’re naturally suspicious. Then again, John McCain made doing something about global warming a major plank of his campaign and got the Republican nomination.

A sizable number of us have opposed the administration on torture. Again, McCain has been among us. But we’ve been largely overruled by a mass, bipartisan consensus that we have to use any means necessary to protect ourselves against the terrorist barbarians. The liberal stalwart Alan Derschowitz has been leading that charge for years and the popularity of “24″ and its protagonist Jack Bauer isn’t owing to some conservative fringe. It’s the basic human instinct for self-protection kicking in.

The “liberal media” trope is overblown but its origin is hardly a fantasy. A generation ago, when the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS were the entirety of the national media, there was a legitimate sense that a liberal, urban elite set the agenda and skewed the conversation. This was especially the case on the hot button social issues, where reporters and commentators with a metropolitan perspective simply couldn’t understand how anyone could disagree with them on so many issues. Why, they’d never even met anyone who’d voted for Richard Nixon.

The view was furthered by Watergate and its new culture of sensational “investigative journalism” and “speaking truth to power.” That the advent of this took place under a Republican administration and the culture spread during a period of GOP dominance of the presidency didn’t help, because it always seemed that the press was taking the liberal/Democratic side. It became rather obvious during Bill Clinton’s tenure, though, that the bias was toward “gotcha” rather than against conservatives.

And, of course, the spread of multiple media outlets rendered much of this moot. While Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather and Katie Couric still had a lot of power, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other outlets were now available to conservatives to get news and commentary from people who shared their perspective. But old resentments die slowly.

In any given election cycle, one or both parties will be using an old playbook. The Democrats were still fighting the battles of the 1960s in 1988 and the Republicans are still far too reliant on Ronald Reagan’s script from 1980. Meanwhile, the issues are either overtaken by events or co-opted by the other party.

Interestingly, Barack Obama and John McCain are both genuinely trying to change themes and forge new coalitions. That’s fairly rare. Bill Clinton pulled it off in 1992, running as a “New Democrat,” and Ronald Reagan did it in 1980, putting an optimistic, forward-looking face on conservatism. If the race doesn’t turn into a blowout, though, we’ll likely see quite a bit of the standard, divisive language.

_______________

*As an aside, I mostly disagree with Rick Moran’s contention that prolific use of the F-word and the spewing of insults renders the author a half-crazed ignoramus. Thanks to my Army training, I can employ colorful language with the best of them and do so more often than I should in oral communication. I choose not to do that at OTB for a variety of reasons, though, not least of which is that it makes conversation with those not already disposed to agree with you much more difficult.

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.

David All argues that most of the talk about Rebuilding the Republican Brand is too focused on the past. Instead, the party should take its cues from Internet success stories like Netflix and iTunes.

Gone are the days of Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America, a plan which every Republican got behind and backed. A unified agenda back in 1994 was possible because of Newt Gingrich’s intoxicating personality and strong leadership style; but it was also a different time, a time before the Internet inspired a culture of choice and information.

Today, thanks to the Internet, each Member of Congress can and should be fighting in the trenches for the hundreds of issues which drive their voters to the polls under the banner of the Republican Party. The Internet provides a medium to distribute our message like never before. We can fight on thousands of fronts.

Rather than being forced to to pick a few, limited set of agenda items, House Republicans should change the game and act more like iTunes and NetFlix — offering conservative, libertarian, and independent voters a lot of different choices — all of which can only be found under the larger brand — Republican.

This is a recipe for diluting, rather than rebuilding, the brand. One subscribes to Netflix for entirely different reasons than one aligns with a political party.

Most go to Netflix to get a wide variety of movies in a convenient manner. Most choose a political party as a shortcut to candidate selection. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to spend hours researching candidates, especially for down ballot races. But, in a contest you really haven’t paid much attention to, you’re reasonably sure that you’ll get what you want by picking the candidate of the same party as your choice for governor or president. That sense makes the Democrat and Republican brands very important; to the extent this is not the case, the brands are diluted.

One could argue that both parties are already doing too much of what David prescribes. Partly, this is inevitable. Our institutional design essentially preordains a two party system and our geographic diversity makes it even more likely here than elsewhere that we’ll have catch-all parties. A Mississippi Democrat is almost always going to be more conservative than a Massachusetts Republican. And, in the House especially, local interests are going to skew Member voting behavior considerably.

At the same time, however, there ought to be some common principles that members of a party roughly agree upon. Otherwise, frankly, why have parties at all? Why not just adopt a Louisiana-style system where candidates run in a free-for-all and the top two vote getters square off in the general election?

Photo credit: Mr. Guybrarian

It’s not exactly news that the Republican Party is in the doldrums at the moment. It lost control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, its president is at historic lows in the polls, it has lost a string of special elections and its incumbent Congressmen are retiring in droves, and the odds are better than even that they’ll lose the White House in the Fall.

As usually happens when one of the two major parties is in a down cycle, the pundits and activists alike come out of the woodworks proposing a plan to save the party — invariably by making it more suitable to their own particular preferences. The latest entrants in this fray are a superb long piece in the New Yorker by George Packer, “The Fall of Conservatism — Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” (via memeorandum) and a call by moderate California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for a “rebranding” of the GOP (via Glenn Reynolds).

Packer provides a look at the rise and fall of the modern Republican Party, which begins with Goldwater’s massive defeat in 1964 and a quick turnaround leading to Richard Nixon’s stunning blowout victory four years later.

[The Nixon] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.

A more charitable characterization would be that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw their culture under assault from an urban elite and a sympathetic Supreme Court. But the battle lines are about right no matter how one looks at it.

Political tactics have a way of outliving their ability to respond to the felt needs and aspirations of the electorate: Democrats continued to accuse Republicans of being like Herbert Hoover well into the nineteen-seventies; Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era.

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, “both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics,” the Times columnist David Brooks told me. “McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he’s a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don’t resonate with the sixties at all.” The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.

[...]

After Reagan and the end of the Cold War, conservatism lost the ties that had bound together its disparate factions—libertarians, evangelicals, neoconservatives, Wall Street, working-class traditionalists.

This isn’t a new observation — after all, the Soviet Union fell seventeen years ago now! — but it has in fact been difficult to keep that coalition together without a common enemy. Then again, the GOP has won two of the four presidential elections wrested control of the Congress for several years during that span. So, clearly, they must have had something to offer besides warmed over 1960’s bromides.

Rcently, I spoke with a number of conservatives about their movement. The younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party. Most of them predicted that Republicans will lose the Presidency this year and suffer a rout in Congress. They seemed to feel that these losses would be deserved, and suggested that, if the party wins, it will be—in the words of Rich Lowry, the thirty-nine-year-old editor of National Review—“by default.”

[...]

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

I tend to agree with both Lowry and Buchanan. The party became the enemy it preached against for so many years, embracing big government solutions, a moralistic foreign policy, and a huge appetite for pork. The K Street Project, the cover-up of the Mark Foley scandal, the Duke Cunningham mess and similar events demonstrated that holding on to and capitalizing on power was more important to some of the party’s leadership than the principles they had campaigned on.

At the same time, though, young activists are always disappointed in their leaders. Even when there’s no corruption involved, politicians naturally engage in compromise, logrolling, and the other distasteful but necessary facets of governing.

Packer also engages in some unfair jibes, such as:

By the end of the century, a movement inspired by sophisticated works such as Russell Kirk’s 1953 “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot” churned out degenerate descendants with titles like “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).”

Rather obviously, these aren’t aimed at the same audiences. The former was for the elites, the latter for the masses. Surely, there was plenty of nonsense in the 1950s (say, the various tracts of the John Birch Society) and plenty of quality nowadays (including some books cited elsewhere in Packer’s piece). A mass political movement will always have both highbrow intellectualism and populist red meat.

Schwarzenegger, campaigning last week with John McCain, had some advice: The party should be, well, more like Arnold.

“The Republican idea is a great idea, but we can’t go and get stuck with just the right wing,” Schwarzenegger said. “Let’s let the party come all the way to the center. Let those people be heard as much as the right. Let it be the big tent we’ve talked about. Let’s invade and let’s cross over that (political) center,” he said. “The issues that they’re talking about? Let them be our issues, and let the party be known for that.”

He observed that his own political opponents, including former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, tried to define him in much the way McCain is being defined by Democrats – as joined at the hip with Bush. “It didn’t work,” he laughed. But “how does (McCain) beat the Democrats? By offering a better future. He needs to offer hope, he needs to go in and show he can solve the problem in Iraq and have better relations with other countries again … and bring the economy back.”

But Schwarzenegger didn’t need rebranding; his “brand” is a larger-than-life persona he created over the years. McCain can’t very well run as an action hero. Packer ends his piece, though, by noting that McCain might just well manage to win as, well, John McCain.

McCain appeared to a warm reception. I had seen him in New Hampshire, where he gave off-the-cuff remarks with vigor; when he is stuck with a script, however, he is a terrible campaigner. Looking pallid, he sounded flat, and stumbled over his lines—and yet they were effective lines, ones that Obama would do well to study. “I can’t claim we come from the same background,” McCain began. “I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and, after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours—it isn’t nearly as hard as yours. I had an easier start.” He paused and went on, “But you are my compatriots, my fellow-Americans, and that kinship means more to me than almost any other association.”

That’s the right message and a powerful one. But, really, it’s not as different from Nixon’s as Packer’s revisionism would have us believe. McCain is trying to forge a common definition of what it means to be “American” and identifying himself as the candidate most able to protect those values. He’s got an uphill fight, going against a younger man with a lot less baggage, but he’s got a puncher’s chance.

What’ll be interesting, whether McCain wins or loses in the Fall, is what lessons the GOP takes from his campaign. If he loses, one suspects we’ll see calls for a return to a harder line conservatism, which could well relegate the Republicans to regional status for a while. If he wins, I suspect we’ll still see calls for a harder line conservatism, since McCain will have run under the conservative banner, but there will also be more push for a bigger tent.

Today’s WaPo has a short feature on Clear Cards, whereby travelers get to bypass TSA security lines at select airports for a small fee.

Fast-pass security lanes officially opened at Reagan National and Dulles airports Wednesday for travelers with special clearance.

Heres how it works: Fliers undergo a Transportation Security Administration background check and have personal data, plus iris and fingerprint scans, put on a card. Although the fliers still have to remove their shoes and get carry-ons X-rayed, at certain airports the cards let them skip the lines that everyone else endures.

As of Wednesday, 3,500 Washington area travelers had signed up for a Clear card, which costs $128 a year.

My wife and I flew out of Reagan Thursday afternoon and noticed the new lines which, for now at least, are noticeably shorter. Given that we fly quite often and can afford the $128 we’ll almost certainly get them, although enough people in the DC area fit that description that I wouldn’t be surprised if the standard lines don’t soon become shorter.

It is, however, a questionable concept. The government requires that people give up their 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches in order to fly on commercial airlines on the grounds that they have no idea which of us are potentially terrorists. The government then charges a fee to allow people to prove that they’re not criminals and skip part of the line. There’s something vaguely un-American about this.

This is compounded by the fact that the government doesn’t allow people with military ID or who otherwise have actual security clearances to bypass said lines, which leads me to think that this is about collecting the $128 rather than ensuring security. That view is enhanced by the fact that no security check that could be accomplished for $128 will do anything other than demonstrate that the person in question is not a wanted felon or on a terrorist watch list. That’s a screening that all of the 9/11 hijackers would have passed.

Billy Hollis joins Rush Limbaugh, Peggy Noonan, and other conservative commenters in trying to figure out who is responsible for destroying the Republican Party and which of the potential nominees would destroy it even more.

He thinks that nominating Mike Huckabee would likely lead to “a loss of Goldwater-McGovern proportions.” I’m inclined to agree, especially if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee; I think it would be closer if Hillary Clinton is his opponent. At any rate, Huckabee isn’t going to be the nominee.

John McCain might, though, and that scares the hell out of Hollis:

Nominating McCain signifies the end of the GOP as it’s been envisioned by many since the Reagan years, and only a serious rebuilding effort or a dramatic realignment of political parties will bring back any significant emphasis on freedom, the free market, individual responsibility, and the other principles most of the folks who come around here believe in.

But there’s no point in blaming McCain. He’s just following the pattern laid down by the Bush pair. Talk a good game, pander, arrange “grand compromises” which inevitably lead to expansion of government, and get your place in the history book. Limited government principles? Who needs ‘em?

And the GOP faithful are still out there attempting to scare folks with “What? Any Republican is better than Hillary! If you small-government types know what’s good for you, you’ll get behind the GOP nominee, whoever it is. Otherwise, it will be a disaster!”

Well, it will be a disaster – for the political insiders and those whose life revolves around winning. The Democrats already suffered through theirs. In 1994, the entire Democratic political establishment was shell shocked when the GOP took Congress, by a big margin. The GOP has not yet faced their own disaster, mostly because they’ve been blessed with stupid enemies.

But I think it’s coming, sooner or later. Sooner, if McCain or Huckabee are the standard bearer. Later, if the GOP squeezes out one more victory, but just can’t internalize the need to stop selling the spending, stop the earmarks, and get serious about their core small-government principles.

You would think that their most successful president of the last century showed them the template they need to succeed, and that they would therefore adopt it. Apparently not. As the old saw goes, they might do the right thing – after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.

First off, McCain is the fiercest opponent of earmarks and runaway spending in the field by a rather wide margin. He’s the guy who opposed the Bush tax cuts, for example, because they weren’t offset by cuts in discretionary spending.

More importantly, though, I reject the idea that McCain — or Bushes 41 and 43, for that matter — are amoral politicians who simply tack in whichever direction the polls tell them to go. Hell, McCain’s positions on immigration, campaign finance, taxes, global warming, torture and a variety of other hot button issues would certainly seem to provide plenty of evidence for that. Rather, he’s an 82 percent conservative (if you take the American Conservative Union’s rating system as the proper measure) who simply disagrees with the Movement on some issues.

We have only two political parties in this country and even its leaders don’t agree with everything in the platform. Every deviation from the Holy Writ isn’t apostasy; it’s life under the big tent.

Ronald Reagan last ran for president 24 years ago. A lot has changed since then — partly thanks to his policies. We’re not fighting the commies any more. We don’t have marginal tax rates of 70 percent. It’s now been 35 years since Roe v. Wade rather than 11. It stands to reason, then, that the policy prescriptions of 1980 are going to need some updating.

And, frankly, Reagan’s record — as opposed to his rhetoric — isn’t exactly what those who pine for the Good Ole Days seem to think it was. Reagan did virtually nothing to advance the socially conservative agenda he talked about. He appointed Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, two moderate swing votes, to the Supreme Court to go along with Antonin Scalia, his lone conservative appointee*. And he signed the biggest illegal immigrant amnesty bill in the country’s history. He allowed spending to skyrocket under his administration, leaving the country saddled with historic debt.

It’s 2008, not 1980. Most women work outside the home. There hasn’t been a military draft in more than a generation. There are significantly more than three television channels. We’ve completed the shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Our political climate has, understandably, changed a little. Goodness, there’s a serious chance that a woman or a black man will be our next president; that was the stuff of stand-up comedy routines in Reagan’s day.

The campaigns of Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Tommy Thompson, and Fred Thompson never got off the ground. If you thought they’d be great presidents, you were virtually alone. Sorry for your loss but it’s time to move on.

The president represents 300 million-odd Americans and is selected through a grueling process that ensures he’s vetted by widely varying constituencies. The primary process runs potential nominees through a gauntlet and then the general election requires appealing to pluralities in enough states to get at least half of the votes in the Electoral College.

Not surprisingly, this means it’s pretty rare for a truly ideological candidate to win the thing. Most Americans aren’t particularly ideological, for one thing, and different parts of the country have very different concerns. So, yes, pragmatism and compromise tends to win the day. That’s not very exciting, to be sure, and it can be frustrating for those of us who have very strong ideas about government. But that’s life.

Unless something very odd happens, the winners of the Romney-McCain and Obama-Clinton fights will emerge to duke it out during the summer and fall. Nobody on that list inspires me to do cartwheels. Nonetheless, I’ll pick from among them and live with the outcome.

____________
*Well, he did appoint Robert Bork. Kennedy was actually his third choice for that seat after Bork was, well, Borked, and Douglas Ginsburg was found to be an active dope smoker.

Steve Bainbridge is preparing to sit out the 2008 election rather than vote for anyone but Fred Thompson.

If the choice is between choosing the lesser of 4 evils and teeing up a process by which the GOP reinvents itself for the 21st Century, I’m inclined to opt for the latter. Coupled with losing Congress in 2006, losing the presidency in 2008 will provide a pair of defeats that surely will prompt “attentiveness” on the part of the GOP leadership and the intellectual base of think tanks and academics who helped lay the foundation for the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

If only Fred Thompson were a better candidate, the party and the Republic could have survived. Pity.

Alternatively, I suppose, one could argue that the intellectual base of the party is fine. Rather, its politicians are abandoning principle for expediency in pandering to an electorate that constantly demands more government subsidies. Traditionally, conservative Republicans embraced tax cuts and small government. Now, the movement’s elected leaders, with very few exceptions, embrace tax cuts and big government.

Hagiography aside, that trend started with Ronald Reagan. He wanted tax cuts, huge increases in defense spending, and big cuts in domestic spending. He settled for the first two, however, along with massive public debt. It proved to be a very popular platform. Aside from the Ross Perot boomlet in 1992, fiscal responsibility turned out not to be a very salient electoral strategy.

The idea that Fred Thompson represented a major reversal of this course is a testament to his status as a chimera upon whom one could impart one’s wishes for an ideal candidate rather than any reality. As an actor, he often played the sort of no-nonsense, gruff talking, straight shooting leader that conservatives love; as a senator, though, he was rather ordinary.

Indeed, as the Washington Times pointed out last summer, his voting record put him to the left of Bill Frist. His lifetime ACU rating of 86 is barely ahead of John McCain’s 82 — and he was a consistent supporter of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation that earned its namesake so much enmity. As the Washington Post put it, “the two shared remarkably similar voting records in the Senate.” John Little links a now-no-longer-online Congressional Quarterly study which “found that Thompson and McCain voted the same way on 83 of 102 CQ-defined ‘key votes’ (81.4 percent) during the eight years the two men served together.”

For reasons mostly of style rather than substance, though, the conservative establishment pined for a Thompson campaign and has done whatever it can to derail McCain, as a front page piece in yesterday’s WaPo explained.

[Rush] Limbaugh led the way with a verbal blitz, not just against McCain but against his closest rival in South Carolina, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

“I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party. It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it,” Limbaugh fumed on his radio show Tuesday. It was a line of argument that he kept up all week long.

[Former House Majority Leader Tom] DeLay resurfaced on Fox News Friday to excoriate McCain for working with “the most liberal Democrats in the Senate,” for passing an overhaul of campaign finance laws that “completely neutered the Republican Party,” and single-handedly thwarted oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of,” said DeLay, the former House majority leader, who was personally damaged by McCain’s Senate probe of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a probe that implicated numerous DeLay associates.

Conservative blogger Patrick Ruffini, on the Web site of popular radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, implored South Carolina Republicans on Friday to vote for Huckabee, simply to extend the nomination fight in hopes that another candidate could derail McCain.

And Jim DeMint, South Carolina’s ardently conservative senator who is backing Mitt Romney, issued a message Friday to “fellow conservatives,” warning that “Washington experience is the problem, not the solution. We cannot afford to have a President who has fought for amnesty for illegal immigrants, voted against the Bush Tax Cuts, and curtailed our First Amendment rights in the ill-conceived campaign finance legislation.” He never mentioned McCain’s name, but his meaning was clear.

The irony that so many of these people are lining up behind Mitt Romney, a guy who was a Massachusetts liberal until he started running for president, is simply bizarre.

Ruffini has set up an unscientific online poll aimed at Thompson supporters and they overwhelmingly (2,404 of 3,304, or 73%) say they’d switch to Romney. As of this writing, 2024 of 2302 wouldn’t be swayed even if Thompson were to endorse McCain.

This just goes to show that politics is largely irrational. People say that issues, judgment, and experience matter but, in reality, personality and style are what drive attitudes about candidates.

Nothing shows that better than last week’s Pew study on public perceptions of the ideology of the 2008 candidates. Republicans see Hillary Clinton as decidedly more liberal than Barack Obama, for example, while the general public and Democrats (correctly, in my view) see the two as rather similar ideologically with Obama somewhat further to the left. Regardless, all the candidates are much closer together on important public policy issues than the graphs would indicate.

We don’t choose candidates, though, based on a blind examination of their policy papers. Rather, we weigh them as personalities for “gravitas” and “leadership” and “toughness” and the degree to which they “care about people like me.” Fred Thompson is folksy and affable and therefore must be just like Ronald Reagan.

The beauty of long, grueling campaigns, though, is that they reveal people for who they are. Thompson doesn’t have the passion to do what it takes to be president. That probably just proves that he’s sane, really, but presidents have to spend four years working ridiculously long hours under constant scrutiny. People who want semi-normal lives, therefore, are unsuited for the job.

McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani are still in the running. One of them will ultimately win the nomination and run against the winner of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama playoffs in the Democratic Conference for the presidential championship.

None of them are my ideal candidate. It’s quite possible that Huckabee is far enough from my ideal that I’d prefer one of the Democrats; thankfully, it’s looking like I’m not going to have to make that version of Hobson’s choice. Otherwise, as distasteful as I find aspects of their agendas and personalities, I can’t imagine that Hillary Clinton would be my preferred alternative.

Photo: BlogTheNews via Google.

Major Andrew Olmsted, a longtime blogger and Army Reservist, was killed in action yesterday when his unit was ambushed.

His Obsidian Wings colleague Hilzoy had the sad honor of posting his final blog missive. Her lead-in:

Andrew Olmsted, who also posted here as G’Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq. Andy gave me a post to publish in the event of his death; the last revisions to it were made in July.

Andy was a wonderful person: decent, honorable, generous, principled, courageous, sweet, and very funny. The world has a horrible hole in it that nothing can fill. I’m glad Andy — generous as always — wrote something for me to publish now, since I have no words at all. Beyond: Andy, I will miss you.

My thoughts are with his wife, his parents, and his brother and sister.

As are mine and those of others he touched through his writing.

I never met Andy in person, although we corresponded a bit through emails and cross-blog exchanges. Indeed, I offered and he accepted a position as an OTB associate blogger last February, shortly before deployment, but he was ordered to stop all blogging not approved by Army brass almost immediately thereafter.

He did ultimately get the opportunity to blog at the Rocky Mountain News. In his last missive for them, he wrote about spending Christmas handing out toys to Iraqi children. And a little about the nature of the enemy:

Handing out gifts is great fun, but in Iraq you always have to be alert for the possibility that the enemy will take advantage of the opportunity to turn such an event to their advantage. Iraqi soldiers handing how clothing is good for building relationships between the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi people. A suicide bomb in a crowd of children seeking gifts could destroy that in a heartbeat, however, so while we enjoyed the scene of the Iraqi soldiers handing out clothes, toys, candy, and more to the hordes of Iraqi children, we were pleased to see that they also remained alert to potential threats, and they handed out a lot of great gifts that, we hope, will provide just a little help to families down on their luck.

He expressed these wishes in his post-mortem message:

What I don’t want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I’ve enjoyed in my life. So if you’re up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can’t laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

Here’s one of many versions of the song via YouTube:

While this shouldn’t need saying, it probably does:

I do ask (not that I’m in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don’t drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don’t cite my name as an example of someone’s life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I’d prefer that you did so.

Matt Burden, Soccer Dad, the Protein Wisdom gang, Bob Owens, John Cole, Mike Hendrix, and other bloggers express their sentiments. More will follow as word spreads.

The Rocky Mountain News has published a moving obituary.

He was the first casualty for 2008 in Iraq. And a small part of Maj. Andrew Olmsted likely would’ve chuckled at that fact. It would be droll and play into his sense of self-deprecation.

But for everyone else, the news would be devastating.

Quite right.

As expected, many, many more bloggers have added their tributes: Phil Carter, John Donovan, TigerHawk, Michael Totten, Noah Shachtman, Bruce McQuain, Joe Katzman, Kate McMillan, Matt Yglesias, Virginia Postrel, BitchPhD, Brad DeLong, Kevin Hayden, and many, many, more.

Tim Blair cranks up the ’80s music: “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads.

Jim Henley, following Andy’s injunction to remember him as he was, quips, “Dude, check it out! Your last post is getting linked everywhere!” He follows it with a more maudlin post, describing their friendship-by-correspondence.

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be publishing excerpts and re-posts of material buried deep in the OTB archives. Some will be profound and some silly; some will demonstrate keen insights and others painful errors.

Shockingly, we are now back to ORANGE. Question: Am I going to change how I conduct my life one scintilla of an iota? I mean, aside from hiding under my desk covered in plastic wrap while holding a roll of duct tape? (Or was that Level Yellow? I can never keep that straight.)


Update: I have now familiarized myself with the DHS Scaredy Cat Decoder and have not slaked my thirst for insight.

For one thing, they haven’t gotten around to updating their web site:


Following a review of intelligence and an assessment of threats by the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Homeland Security Council, has made the decision to lower the threat advisory level to an elevated risk of terrorist attack, or “yellow level.”

Maybe they don’t update except when it’s Level RED? Or, perhaps, they stop updating after it gets to YELLOW because they’re too busy protecting us.

Also, they inform me that:


The world has changed since September 11, 2001. We remain a nation at risk to terrorist attacks and will remain at risk for the foreseeable future.

Actually, I don’t think the world has changed a lick since 9/11, but certainly our perception of it has.

Regardless, a useful insight follows:


At all Threat Conditions, we must remain vigilant, prepared, and ready to deter terrorist attacks. The following Threat Conditions each represent an increasing risk of terrorist attacks. Beneath each Threat Condition are some suggested Protective Measures, recognizing that the heads of Federal departments and agencies are responsible for developing and implementing appropriate agency-specific Protective Measures. . .

So, I’m supposed to be not only vigilant, but also prepared and ready. I need to acquaint myself with the nuances in those terms, as they all mean the same thing to me.

At any rate, if you look at the detailed list, you’ll see that we as citizens actually don’t have anything to do based on changing rainbow colors. It’s just the various government agencies that have to vary their levels of vigilance, preparation, and readiness.

LEVEL ORANGE – May 22, 2003

Two posts stand out from my stroll down memory lane of four years ago (a rather light posting day):

“MUSICAL HANGING CHADS?” examines a scandal in the voting in the “American Idol” final, in which Ruben Studdard beat Clay Aiken by a slim margin.

In “HANDICAPPING 2004,” I rebut the extant conventional wisdom that President Bush was a “shoe-in” for re-election because of the national security issue. I was quite prescient in noting that the Democrats could largely neutralize the issue if they went away from Howard Dean and instead chose a John Kerry type. I was much less prescient, however, in my advice that, “The way for the Democrats to win is to neutralize the issue as best they can rather than carping at the way Bush is handling the war.”

As part of a continuing series, I’ll be highlighting material buried deep in the OTB archives that I still find interesting. From four years ago, today:

“RENO” joined in on the debate, “Was Janet Reno the worst AG we have ever had, or what?” Not much substance to it but it somehow strikes me as amusing these days.

“PROBLEM? WHAT PROBLEM?” demonstrates that one woman’s annoyance can be another man’s marketing ploy.

“BRETT-COTT” was an early look at a recurring topic at OTB:

Brett Marston is boycotting MSNBC and related companies until Michael Savage is off the air. He provides a link demonstrating what a despicable louse Savage is. While I’m more likely to agree with Savage’s political conclusions than is Brett, I must say I also find Savage rather vile.

I’m not a fan of boycotts and am pretty sure they don’t work at the personal level. Plus, the fact that MSNBC is owned by Microsoft and General Electric means that Brett should really boycott everything from Windows to lightbulbs. Personally, I just skip the specific shows I don’t like. I’m not a big fan of Phil Donahue, so I didn’t watch the show. (Which, come to think of it, may call into question my boycott thesis, since that show has been canceled.) On the other hand, I like ER, so I’ll keep watching that.

Savage’s show was canceled around July 7. We’ll never know the full extent to which Brett’s boycott factored into MSNBC’s calculations; they attributed the firing to some particularly inflammatory remarks. I’ve long since stopped watching ER, although not out of protest but because I tired of it.