Michael Moore says that the timing of Hurricane Gustav with the Republican National Convention is "proof that there is a God in Heaven."

That Michael Moore still makes films and is taken seriously is proof that the Devil walks on earth.

Palin

Well, it's the gutsy, strategic choice, that's for sure. Her conservatism will appeal to the base, which is finally fired up two months before the election. Maybe a sliver of Hillary Democrats will defect to McCain. (Check out the posts of PUMAs and others at the Hillary Forum, for example) More likely, Independent women voters will shift to Republican.

A couple of here-and-there thoughts:

She should definitely cut some ads, talking about her upbringing, work as governor, showing the family, union member husband, shooting & hunting, etc. Play them in OH, PA, MI, MO, VA, NH, and across the Rocky Mountain West. Think about it -- do you think there will be a slate of Biden ads (except maybe in PA) that will have anywhere near the same effectiveness? These are the states she should primarily visit too.

The criticism has already begun, although Obama and Biden have wisely decided to stay above it all (at least for now), leaving it up to surrogates. But the attacks on "this woman" and "that woman" are good news to Repubs. Rapping her inexperience makes everyone look back at Obama, and the top of a ticket. Bringing up the ethics investigation of her back in Alaska is a trap -- all Palin has to say is "I did not act improperly, but I will also do whatever I can to protect my sister from domestic abuse." Wonder how that will go over with Hillary and Independent Dems. Rod Dreher covers this well. There are so many paths to a backlash, Democrats would be wise to stay away.

Her expertise is energy policy and Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of oil drilling, offshore and up north. Make her the energy-oil-gas point person all fall. "You are angry about high gas prices? Let me tell you about Alaska ... and have you met my husband, the union member and oil worker? Todd, tell them about the Northern Slope..."

Keep using the phrases "smashing the glass ceiling" and "old-boy's network."

The abortion issue is being overplayed. The diehard pro-choicers will never back her anyway, but Independents (who are not the doctrinaire single-issue voters) will see past that to energy policy, taxes, ethics reform, etc. The Left may not like the strong pro-life position. Who cares. They are on the outside looking in.

She has the possibility of being the first veep candidate to make a difference election day.

The Problems of Sarah Palin, Real and Apparent

I had a brief talk with The Ombudsman this morning about the choice of Governor Sarah Palin for the Republican nominee for Vice President. We had a robust exchange and agreed that some joint blogging on the topic might be "just the ticket."

From my perspective there are two sets of problems relating to Mrs. Palin, the real problems and the apparent problems. I'll take these in order of ascending importance and deal with the real problems first.

The real problems, chiefly her lack of policy depth and governing experience, are not terribly important in terms of the Vice Presidency. As a friend of mine recently said of the office, "How hard is it, really?" You have lunch with the boss once a week where you study his physical, mental and emotional well-being. You go to funerals, attend meetings, and help the party raise money. If you're lucky, like Al Gore, the president gives you a few substantive policy assignments. In Mrs. Palin's case, that's likely to be the energy portfolio. In this area, she would be formidable. As yesterday's interview with CNBC demonstrates, she's deeply knowledgeable and has a strong grasp on energy policy nuances. She was even able to call Obama and Biden "naieve" on the issue. With her reform credentials, she would also have an enjoyable time scrubbing appropriations bills for earmarks and making veto recommendations to McCain. The two are going to have a grand time together torturing Members of Congress over their pet projects. On the real side, the substantive side, her intelligence and philosophy make her eminently qualified for the vice presidency.

But first she has to get elected, and this is where the dragons be. I'll stipulate she has little to fear from the Obama/Biden team. They have already gotten their ears boxed by both Democratic nominees for being a tad bit aggressive in the way they came after Mrs. Palin's "experience" credentials after the Dayton announcement. American women don't like the rough stuff and they are a little tired of hearing that they aren't qualified to lead. Obama more or less apologized for his team's behavior yesterday afternoon. Apart from further developments on the attempted firing of Mrs. Palin's brother-in-law from the state police force, she's largely immunized from political attack by the Obama team.

Her real problem will be with the press corps. The Fourth Estate is in love with glib wonkishness and Mrs. Palin is likely to be a disappointment in this area. After all, the press will say, are you REALLY qualified for the presidency if you can't explain the difference between Trade Adjustment Assistance and Alternative Trade Adjustment Assistance? What's your view on whether people with disabilities should be included in the denominator when states calculate their TANF work participation rate? The truth is that anyone who knows the answers to these kinds of questions should be automatically disqualified from holding elective office. Reporters will hold an absence of knowledge about such minutiae as a sign of unfitness for office.

I'm hopeful that Mrs. Palin will be able to thread this needle between her real and apparent qualifications for office. She is sui generis and all the comparisons to Dan Quayle will soon be drop-kicked into oblivion. Unlike Quayle, Palin's life experience (born into a humble, middle class existance, well-acquainted with the troubles of life on the frontier, impatient with privilege and corruption) is going to be high-tensile armor against media attacks. And therein lies her main strength: she will exceed expectations by several orders of magnitude.

One final, unrelated thought: John McCain's political genius (and his manager Steve Schmidt's) is something to behold. Only those two could figure out a way to totally squash the coverage of Obama's speech in Denver. That was one first-class roll-out in Dayton.

I have hope.

McCain has made his veep choice apparently, and all the rumors surround the usual suspects: Romney, Pawlenty, (gulp) Lieberman, and Hutchison. An uninspiring pool, but Romney is the best of the bunch.

How about this for a risky move? Pick Bobby Jindal just as Hurrican Gustav moves on Louisiana. McCain comes before the convention saying, "Governor Jindal can't be here tonight, because he is helping the people of his home state." Great story, public service before politics, etc.

And hope Jindal does a good job, a better job than the motley crew of boobs who watched while Katrina leveled the Gulf.

Surrender Your Liberties! Get Cool Stuff!

As Jonah Goldberg and many others have noted, the Left has a real softspot for effective, efficient, productive dictatorships. The latest exhibit in the sad history of the liberal love affair with totalitarianism is Tom Friedman's column in today's New York Times.

Friedman waxes eloquent on all the fabulous booty China laid before the world during the Olympic Games and contrasts this sharply with the sad condition of...LaGuardia Airport, a facility that causes much suffering among the denizens of Manhattan. China, Friedman tells us,

"did not build the magnificent $43 billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work."

Really.

You can scour Friedman's analysis from stem to stern and find not one mentnion of political oppression, human rights abuses, forced abortion or any of the other myriad sins the Chinese regime commits daily against its own citizens and around the world in places like Sudan.

Yes, Mr. Friedman, you can get whopping GDP growth and Potempkin-village improvements in highways, maglev trains and public parks if the government directs all aspects of politcal, cultural, and economic life. Yes, if you want material well-being you can get it, fast, at least in the short term, by denying people the right to govern themselves, think for themselves, worship freely, and live in peace within the four walls of their own homes. A bit tougher to "concentrate state power" and engage in "national mobilization" when you have you a constitution, free elections, separation of powers, a free press, private property and religious freedom.

What with all those checks and balances progress is bound to be slow. You might even have to answer a few difficult questions about ways and means. Someone might say, "I don't want to eat grass for dinner so that you can build the Bird's Nest," and you wouldn't be able to settle the argument with a quick prison sentence or a bullet to the back of the head.

Today would have been Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 100th birthday. LBJ had his warts, but is it me or is there a slight falling off in gravitas and depth between Lyndon Johnson and Joe Biden, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi?

As Henry Adams said, “the progression of President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to disprove Darwin.”

Did Hillary do too well last night?

The pundits were all over the map last night in judging HC’s speech. MSNBC predictably thought it was glorious, with Olbermann and Maddow singing hosannas as the network’s progressive Bobbsey twins. Fox fell on the other side, thinking the address fell short of endorsing Obama’s leadership and aptitude to be commander-in-chief. CNN fell somewhere in-between the two.

Leaving out policy and content, I thought the speech was magnificent in tone, delivery, and “feel.” In fact, she looked and sounded “presidential,” so much so that by the end, I wondered if the whole thing was a mistake. Sometimes a speaker can be too good, and eclipse the nominee. Think of 1976, when President Ford invited Ronald Reagan down to the podium to give an impromptu speech to the convention, a magnanimous gesture to a vanquished foe. Reagan ended up giving such a compelling speech that, according to biographer Edmund Morris, the delegates began to think they had nominated the wrong guy – Ford could never sound this good or be this riveting. “Buyer’s remorse?” I bet, as Charles Krauthammer noted last night, that behind the Obama button-clad hats many delegates were thinking, “Crap, we picked the wrong horse.”

You combine Hillary’s performance with President Bill’s upcoming extravaganza, sure to be a vintage red-meat act, and Obama suddenly has a very high bar to clear on Thursday night. He can give the oratorical, purple-prose address that keeps Chris Matthews’ leg atwitter, but can he give a presidential address?

Nation's Number One Self-Help Author



I laughed, I cried, I spat up my cocktail.

(HT: American Digest)

The Return of Mike Huckabee?

The Corner is saying (and Rich Lowry is urging) that McCain should take a second look at Governor Huckabee as veep. Although some conservatives would roll their eyes, I actually like the idea. In addition to all the reasons Lowry gives, Huckabee would also (1.) blunt any Southern strategy the Obama forces have (Huck polled fully 40% in the VA Repub primary), (2.) play awfully well in those "Hillary Democrat" areas of rural PA and OH, and (3.) check any "evangelical outreach" by the Dems.

And while he'd have his troubles versus Biden in any foreign policy discussion, the ex-Arkansas governor could run circles around him on nuts and bolts domestic issues like taxes, health care, education, infrastructure, etc.

He'd be the only candidate of the four to brag executive experience (Romney and Palin could play that card too).

So, like any good academic, I was listening to NPR, indeed to Fresh Air(!) with Terry Gross, and she is interviewing Beliefnet's Dan Gilgoff, who among other things writes the blog entitled "God-o-meter", and a very good read it is, too.

So, they're chatting about the Saddleback Forum, and Gilgoff reveals that Obama's campaign staff was really, really shocked at how well McCain did.  I mean, he was candid!  And revealing!  And was so comfortable in that setting!

I was flabberghasted at this flabberghastedness.  Where have these people been?  Haven't they watched McCain over the years on Letterman?  Haven't they seen him in town hall meetings?  Haven't they read any of his books?

It's enough to make you think that the Obama campaign is just a little, you know...arrogant.

A two and one-half year hiatus and this blog is still in operation. Amazing.

We have returned.

I think the Style Editor should apply to this.

And the Winner for the Worst Piece of Political Analysis Is…

Every once in a blue moon I come across a piece that fully captures the advanced state of decay at the heart of the World’s Oldest Political Party. It truly is difficult to know where to start with something like this. Its errors are so many and so fulsome, its analysis so riddled with the deepest sort of wishful thinking. It is like a dispatch from a parallel universe in which Constanza’s law (you remember, right? Just do the opposite of whatever your instincts tell you) has been suspended. In this universe bad instincts are followed to the hilt. It is like a lunatic at the wheel of school bus headed for a cliff saying, “Seriously, I've seen these things FLY!” He has failed to absorb the lesson of the Clinton presidency: the people will vote for Democrats only when they work as hard as they can to pretend they don't believe a word of party doctrine.

What is especially hard to believe about this drivel is that the guy who wrote is actually paid to provide strategic political advice to Democrat candidates for government. Oprah Winfrey-like, Al Quinlin suggests that the real problem with Democrats is that they have lost touch with their inner Democrat. The public, he says, hungers for “authenticity” and will vote for it in droves if only Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, et. al. will give it to them. (Yes, yes, give it to them, in the words of H.L. Mencken, good and hard.)

One can only hope that this piece is making the rounds on the DailyKos and has found its way into the reading folders of all the Democrat higher-ups in town. If the Republicans had a mole writing policy at the DNC they could not have written a more favorable strategy.

The Postmodern Moment

As Peter Leithart observes:

Japan beats Cuba in the world baseball competition. According to the NPR report, during the final game, everyone in the stands - Japanese, Cubans, American spectators - does the wave and dances to YMCA by the Village People. After Japan wins, you can hear "We Are the Champions" in the background.

The world comes together to play an American sport, and everyone is unified by American pop culture.

Welcome to postmodernism.

It's almost a caricature of postmodernism, in fact, save that it happened. And damn it, not a single Cuban defection as of this AM.

Barone il Pezzonovante vs. E.J. Dionne, The Black Knight

Michael Barone has some good stuff up on his blog. Here's a gentle tweak at the very tweakable E.J. Dionne, who essentially wrote a column defending progressives against the charge that they do very well in places with very rich people. Barone has some substantive points, but let me cut to the nyah-nyah-nyah bit:

Dionne seems to be uncomfortable also with the idea that the Democrats depend heavily on elite rich voters who are out of touch with Middle America. He points out, accurately, that that's not the entire picture. But if he's not defensive about Democrats' rich elites, why bother to write the column?

I respond: because most of Dionne's columns come out of defensiveness. Heck, he writes entire books out of a sort of weird defensiveness. [Oh, how Dr. Potomac and I chuckled when after the 1994 Congressional elections, ol' E.J. came out with his book entitled They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. Obviously he had begun to write the book after the 1992 elections, only to have events catch up with him. Dr. Potomac, as I recall, suggested the subtitle "But, Actually, They're Deader". I thought about "Shoot'em Again to Make Sure They're Dead." Maybe E.J.'s writing a sequel: "They're Not Dead, Just Resting." Or, "They're Not Dead, They're Just in a Vegetative State." That's E.J. Dionne: The Black Knight of the American Punditocracy, with a writing schedule based on wish-fulfillment.]

•We often (OK, maybe just me and the Style Editor) talk about the great good Godblog Get Religion...not that it needs any advertising, but Terry Mattingly has a good post up on coverage of Ave Maria University, which almost inevitably is called Pizza U., thanks to the deep pockets of its patron, signor, and podesta, Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza. Comments, Doc C.?

• Confessing Evangelical has a post up on "Lent for Evangelicals". Frankly this is something that the Style Editor can really dig her canines into, so I will leave comments on the post to her.

Cherie Blair, et. al, v. The People

Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal is one of my all-time favorite writers. For those not familiar with work, Dalrymple is an English psychiatrist who spent his entire professional career working in the National Health Service seeing to the mental mental health needs of the British underclass. He makes a compelling argument in his best known book, Life at the Bottom, that the source of squalor and misery among Britain’s poor is a deeply engrained sense of victimhood combined with a highly developed ethic of relativism. As always, while those at the top, the “mandarins” he calls them, make a good living off of the behavioral problems of poor, English society as a whole continues to coarsen and the conditions of the poor themselves spiral downward. Life at the bottom means living with the burden of bad ideas conceived at the top.

The attached article has a hall of mirrors quality to it. Cherie Blair, Esq. is representing two Muslim girls who are suing for the right to wear headcoverings and other traditional Muslim dress to school. He points that Mrs. Blair has confused her categories. Since the long robes and head coverings are traditionally Muslim, Blair assumes that British society, by denying them the opportunity to wear those clothes to school, is engaging in cultural hegemony and oppression. The reality, Dalrymple says, is the opposite: the clothes themselves are symbols and tools of misogyny and oppression which Muslim men use to try to keep Muslim women barefoot, married at 12 and pregnant. As bad as those conditions are, the offerings of British society are equally bad: non-Muslims enjoy great freedom but increasingly convert freedom to a kind of license that is making life in many British cities intolerable. The trick, he says, is to hold freedom and discipline in balance. It is a trick the Muslim world has yet to learn and that the West,including Cherie Blair, is quickly forgetting.

David Warren

I can't really add to this; I can only commend it.

I’m sitting here icing my flab, having just returned from a most EXCELLENT time exercising my 2nd Amendment rights with some of my favorite mad libertarian and conservative running dogs, and I wish to pronounce that the heart of Conservatism is all about guns.

No? Oh well.

Is Dreher asking some good questions? He may well be. But my point simply is tone matters. Tone always matters. Tone can ruin the best questions and elevate dreck. Perhaps this is not how it should be, but it is how it is.

I work with some impassioned social conservatives, who are very upset about the state of the world. They want it to change, and they write all sorts of things to this effect. But in their op-eds and whatnot they don’t persuade. They bludgeon. And somehow this makes them not very persuasive.

The Ombudsman will be the first to tell you that tact is not one of my gifts. I fully embrace that there is a time and place for bludgeoning, but not every time and place is for bludgeoning, and it seems to me that the Crunchy Cons would do well to remember that.

Also Dr. P has a point: this is all possibly less interesting than Battlestar Galactica, which you have to admit is a frightening thought.

Meanwhile back here in Bobo Paradise, I offer this gem of an article from Thursday’s WaPo.

Also far more interesting to me than the Crunchy book is this one. I intend to give it a whirl after I finish with Flashman on the March.

We are amused.

Confronted with "Birkinstocked Burkeans," the Ombudsman is luke warm and thinks it will be a good-intentioned but ultimately fruitless attempt to reinfuse conservatism with orthodoxy. His sibling in crime, the Style Editor, is red hot with contempt and sees the entire project as self-righteous, preachy, and narcissistic. Which leaves me to play the foil and, yes, the curmudgeon.

I freely admit, after reading Crunchy Cons this past week, that there is a disingenuous element at play, claiming not to condemn others for living a less-than crunchy life but all the while asking how anyone could think one way and live another. I did think a better title would have been Look, Not Everyone Can Live Like This, But Shame On You, You Should. The book does make one feel guilty at times, and I think in many ways that is what Dreher wants. I'll leave the hand-wringing about self-righteousness to others on this site, however.

In our huff at being called out for not living life the right way, we should not lose sight at the book's broader purpose, as the O-man rightly suggested: reinjecting orthodoxy into American conservatism. By orthodoxy, Dreher means the intellectual foundations of the modern conservative movement found most readily in Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and others. He is making the direct charge that conservatism, now subsumed within the Republican Party, has drifted from its moorings. Once waving the banner of tradition, particularity, localism, and community, it now mouths all the modern platitudes about progress, development, globalization, and multiculturalism (resistence is futile!). Conservatives once shed tears when fields and old neighborhoods were bulldozed for renewal and housing projects; now they shed tears of joy when a new chain store opens offering toilet paper at bargain prices.

There is something to this charge. Too many Republicans think lowering tax rates is the heart of conservatism. The party bears virtually no resemblence to the themes explored in Kirk's 1953 Conservative Mind or to Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences and Visions of Order. Now if conservatives are no longer grounded here, in the fertile soil that gave them birth, then where are they now grounded? What is the 2006 conservative philosophy? I'm not sure it has one. Traditionalists (of which Dreher counts himself) cling to Kirk and company, the "others" (what to call these people?) cling to whom? Our Big Government conservatism, if there is such a thing, looks more like Woodrow Wilson -- spend and regulate at home, and make the world safe for democracy.

Another question -- is this spat between CCs and "the others" the old neo-paleo fight under new ownership?

Anyhow, it is true, dear fellow editors, that I liked the book and thought its broader question an important one to ask. Because if Dreher's questions are right (and I think they are) and his answers are right (I think they are, in part), then modern day conservatism is a body with no mind.