Stromata Blog

Obama’s Retrograde Future

The appealing element in Barack Obama’s oratory is his call for putting aside the obsolescent quarrels of the past. Plenty of Americans are unhappy with the increasing bitterness of national politics and frustrated by the political class’s rote invocation of tired nostrums. Senator Obama tells us that he wants to soar above all of that. As often happens, however, there is some incongruity between rhetoric and reality:

Last night during the State of the Union address, Barack Obama sat next to liberal lion Ted Kennedy who had endorsed him earlier in the day. The seating arrangement highlighted the merger of Camelot and Obama. . . .

The Kennedy/Obama merger surely has energized a bunch of wheezing Baby Boom gasbags who never cease pining for a return to the glory days of their past. But precisely therein lies the problem. Obama is putting forth a new kind of politics, and yet is oddly wallowing in the imprimatur bestowed on him from one of the dinosaurs of the past. Obama preaches a politics of national unity, while there hasn’t been a more deliberately divisive political leader (not named Clinton) than Ted Kennedy over the past forty years. . . .

Without exaggeration, Ted Kennedy's style of liberalism was exhausted while Obama was still in high school. What's more, Kennedy has always made a less-than-entirely reputable champion for his brand of politics. One of the exciting things about the Obama campaign is the way it offers hope that a new kind of politics might emerge. It's hard to see how Obama benefits by embracing the worst of the old kind of politics that so much of the country is so eager to leave behind.

Has Senator Obama ever interspersed his exaltation of “change” and denunciation of “cynicism” with a single idea that wasn’t a tired liberal cliche? Has he extended – I won’t ask for a hand; how about a finger? – to the opponents whom his party has demonized since the beginning of the Clinton Administration? Has he said a negative word about Bush Derangement Syndrome? Stood just once against the tide of Democratic partisanship? Consulted with any policy analysts who don’t come from well to the left of center?

Talking about a “new politics” is easy. The phrases trip off the tongue. But didn’t there used to be a line about “walking the walk”?

An Illusion of Recession?

As our politicians rush to enact an almost certainly useless “stimulus” package, Brian Wesbury, chief economist for First Trust Portfolios, L.P. (a credential that I’ll leave unevaluated), takes a contrarian view in today’s Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wesbury doesn’t think that a recession is looming. His principal argument is that the economy looked just as weak in 2006’s fourth quarter as in 2007’s, yet the upshot was not downturn but acceleration.

True, retail sales fell 0.4% in December and fourth-quarter real GDP probably grew at only a 1.5% annual rate. It is also true that in the past six months manufacturing production has been flat, new orders for durable goods have fallen at a 0.8% annual rate, and unemployment blipped up to 5%. Soft data for sure, but nowhere near the end of the world.

It is most likely that this recent weakness is a payback for previous strength. Real GDP surged at a 4.9% annual rate in the third quarter, while retail sales jumped 1.1% in November. A one-month drop in retail sales is not unusual. In each of the past five years, retail sales have reported at least three negative months. These declines are part of the normal volatility of the data, caused by wild swings in oil prices, seasonal adjustments, or weather. Over-reacting is a mistake.

A year ago, most economic data looked much worse than they do today. Industrial production fell 1.1% during the six months ending February 2007, while new orders for durable goods fell 3.9% at an annual rate during the six months ending in November 2006. Real GDP grew just 0.6% in the first quarter of 2007 and retail sales fell in January and again in April. But the economy came back and roared in the middle of the year – real GDP expanded 4.4% at an annual rate between April and September. . . .

Personal income is up 6.1% during the year ending in November, while small-business income accelerated in October and November, during the height of the credit crisis. In fact, after subtracting income taxes, rent, mortgages, car leases and loans, debt service on credit cards and property taxes, incomes rose 3.9% faster than inflation in the year through September. Commercial paper issuance is rising again, as are mortgage applications.

Some large companies outside of finance and home building are reporting lower profits, but the over-reaction to very spotty negative news is astounding. For example, Intel's earnings disappointed, creating a great deal of fear about technology. Lost in the pessimism is the fact that 20 out of 24 S&P 500 technology companies that have reported earnings so far have beaten Wall Street estimates.

Mr. Wesbury’s forecast is GDP growth for 2008 in to 3 to 3.5 percent range, with only a 10 percent chance of a recession. If he’s right, investors have a spectacular buying opportunity. On the other hand, the fact that the economy quickly recovered from a brief spell of doldrums doesn’t prove that it will do the same thing again. A year ago, the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was a year further off, the CPI was rising less rapidly, and the credit markets were much more sure of themselves. Mr. Wesbury argues that the credit crisis is overstated. That’s probably true, but a mass shift of investors’ sentiment toward safety, even if motivated by irrational fears, can throttle back entrepreneurial activity. He pays almost no attention to the prospect of inflation and the constraints that it imposes on Federal Reserve Board policy. If commodity prices continue their rise, the Fed may be compelled to slow the creation of dollars dramatically, regardless of the impact on economic growth.

What Mr. Wesbury does show is that panicky measures are unwarranted and that policymakers, while doing the minimum necessary to prevent demoralizing bank failures, should concentrate on establishing favorable conditions for long-term growth, in particularly by making tax cuts permanent.

Quote of the Day

One of Mark Steyn’s readers submits an “all-purpose stump speech for this primary season”:

My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.

The Candidates We Have

With the easy option of Fred Thompson gone, I suppose that I must ponder the relative merits of Messrs. Giuliani, McCain and Romney.

The Democratic contenders are out of the question. One is nice guy but short on experience and conventionally left-wing. He also needs to get much further away from his days of being buddies with the likes of Tony Rezko. There are occasional signs that he may develop into a different kind of Democrat, but right now that is all hope and potential, not reality.

The other two Democrats left in contention (one only barely, I realize) represent a “small and angry fringe” (to borrow a term that the New York Times, in a revealing burst of psychological projection, applies to President Bush). Even if I agreed with their policy positions, I wouldn’t want either in a position to thwart the “conspiracies” of her or his abundant “enemies”.

Anyway, regardless of their personal qualities, all three Dems promise higher taxes, more government spending, energy policies that discourage production, a surge of racial and sexual preferences, and a suspicious attitude toward freedom of speech. Most importantly, none of them shows much interest in the continuing war against Islamofascism. The last bout of insouciance, during the administration of the Tin Lady’s husband, led to 9/11. Why should we expect the next to have a happier outcome?

It would be pleasant to be able to declare that one of the Republican candidates was ideal, but the political world isn’t the realm of the ideal. Ronald Reagan was a principled, thoughtful, capable, eloquent and likable conservative. One can’t give full marks in every category to many other men, past or present. As someone has inevitably said, you go into an election with the candidates you have.

So we have a field of two lightweights and three middleweights. To dismiss the former first, Mike Huckabee is the Republican Barack Obama: pleasant, intelligent, full of potential, but quite out of his shallows and a bit too close to a corrupt political culture. Ron Paul is our Dennis Kucinich, without the flying saucers but with the dubious background in conspiracy theorizing fever swamps. It’s amusing to see his fans, such as poor, demented Andrew Sullivan and the usually non-demented John Derbyshire, straining to excuse or explain away his paper trail of racist, antisemitic and simply nutty effusions. If libertarians would shut Rep. Paul away in the cellar where conservatives keep the John Birch Society and Pat Buchanan’s rag, their movement would have a future. One of the hardest and most essential tasks in politics is to divest oneself of crazy allies. Neither libertarianism nor liberalism is doing a good job on that score.

That brings us to the three GOP front runners, one of whom will, barring a tidal wave, be nominated for President in Minneapolis seven months from now. Commentary in the dexterosphere has concentrated on their shortcomings. “None of the above” is not, however, an option. Moreover, many criticisms center on areas where the President can’t do much (abortion and same-sex marriage, for instance) or will have to row upriver to depart from his party’s consensus (e. g., immigration). We need to look most closely at the areas of maximum Presidential autonomy – foreign policy, economic policy and judicial appointments – as well as, of course, electability, without which the most sterling Presidential qualities will be wasted.

Let’s start with the last, where many commentators make an elementary mistake: They look at polls matching this Republican against that Democrat today and project them to next November, declaring, for example, that John McCain is the strongest GOP prospect because he currently matches up best (or least badly) against Senator Obama or Mrs. Bill Clinton. Does no one recall the February polls from elections past, the ones that showed Ronald Reagan hopelessly behind Jimmy Carter or Mike Dukakis overwhelming George Bush père? Except in the marginal and obvious cases, polls at this point measure transient breezes of sentiment and familiarity with the candidates. They tell us almost nothing more.

Instead of relying on surveys indicating what the candidates look like now, let’s consider how they’ll appear after their strengths and weaknesses have been hashed over for several months. Bear in mind that the Tin Lady will certainly repeat her husband’s 1996 tactic of early and intense negative advertising. If Senator McCain is her opponent, the negative themes are obvious: age, temperament and Liberty Savings & Loan. The picture of a man of the past – a bit out of touch, a bit too hair-triggered, a bit too gullible to slick operators – will be easy to paint. It would, in fact, not be a lot different from the caricature of Bob Dole that worked so well for Bill Clinton.

The attacks that can be crafted against Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney are not insubstantial but are, on the whole, less compelling. The mayor has led a colorful life, and the Left has a litany of denunciations of his governance of New York City. The governor is a Mormon, a successful businessman (which means that he has taken actions that can be portrayed as “heartless”) and a “flip-flopper”.

While there’s a danger that those messages will sink in, they differ from the anti-McCain shibboleths in a crucial respect: They can’t help but give an opening for counter-messages. Hillary Clinton’s biography is as spotted as Rudy Giuliani’s, and his failings are venial sins of appetite with no taint of corruption (no quick cattle future profits, no “lost” billing records, no Whitewater). His record as mayor is widely admired; it’s hard to cavil at the man who cleaned up Times Square and suppressed the squeegee guys. As for Governor Romney, innuendos centered on religion and wealth have never worked well in American politics, and his changes of position have been quite gradual and unspectacular compared to the Tin Lady’s Iraqi somersault.

Moreover, both Giuliani and Romney have won races in very liberal electorates, which implies some talent for campaigning, more perhaps than it takes to win as a right-of-center Republican in Arizona. Weighing negatives and positives, I think that either or them will run more strongly than McCain.

The next question is, assuming that they can be elected, how well can we expect each of them to perform as President?

On foreign policy, there is little difference in expressed positions. The most important exception is Senator McCain’s tendency to conceive of the War on Terror in primarily military terms. He thus is willing to hamper intelligence gathering efforts by taking an ACLU-ish view of the human rights of captured terrorists. I worry that “lawfare” will blossom on his watch.

Governor Romney has said the right things about the war, but softly and perhaps reticently. One wonders how strong his opinions really are, and how readily they might be influenced by the bureaucracy’s phalanx of pacifist-minded “experts”.

Mayor Giuliani is clearly the best acquainted with foreign policy issues, most opinionated (in the right way) and the most likely to listen to sound advice. He also has experience at circumventing or overruling out-of-sympathy bureaucrats. One can’t be certain, naturally, but I’m willing to take a chance that a Giuliani Administration would be persistent and consistent in confronting our enemies and succoring our friends. My expectations for his rivals are decidedly more mixed.

On economic matters, Senator McCain is again the outlier. Yes, he now backs the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, but he didn’t when he had a chance to vote on them, and his objections were much like those that Democrats make to tax cuts: They “help the wealthy” and “increase the deficit”. He may no longer believe that. Nonetheless, his persuasiveness as an advocate of making the cuts permanent is open to doubt. Elsewhere, it looks like he won’t so much as argue for conservative alternatives to the liberal orthodoxy. On global warming, expanded oil drilling and the supposed evils of pharmaceutical companies, he sounds a lot like John Edwards.

There isn’t, to my eye, a lot to distinguish the Giuliani from the Romney economic program. Governor Romney doubtless has a deeper understanding of the subject, which might enable him to argue his policy’s merits more persuasively (or might just make him incomprehensible to laymen).

Finally, judicial appointments are a vital consideration. The next President will almost certainly name at least two Supreme Court Justices. Justice Stevens is nearly 90; Justice Ginsburg is 75 and infirm; Justices Kennedy and Scalia have entered their 70’s, and Justice Souter soon will. There are also more than the usual number of vacancies in the lower courts. In an ideal world, judges wouldn’t be society’s decision makers, and who they were would be a secondary election issue. That isn’t the world we live in.

All three Republican candidates promise the same thing: the appointment of “strict constructionists” in the mold of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. History demonstrates, though, that good intentions aren’t enough. Without a first rate judicial vetting operation, such as President Reagan had, right-of-center Presidents find themselves responsible for Earl Warrens, William Brennans and David Souters. (Even first rate screening can produce an Anthony Kennedy; there are no sure things.) The best Presidential candidate is the one who best understands this truth. I can’t evaluate them on that score, but it is certainly a point in Rudy Giuliani’s favor that his leading advisor on legal issues is Reagan veteran Theodore Olson.

Those are my thoughts so far. I suppose that they lean toward Rudy, but the Illinois primary is still a couple of weeks off, and I don’t yet have to make up my mind. We’ll see whether further cogitation has any effect.

Bye-ku for Dennis Kucinich

Why should Taranto have a monopoly on this exercise?

He could have gone far
if that saucer had landed
little green voters.

Isn’t it an odd coincidence that the two candidates with cute wives dropped out within a few days of each other?

Stimulus, Real and Illusory

If stock market reactions mean anything, it should be obvious by now that “stimulating demand” (i. e., parachuting cash to low income consumers) will do nothing to avert recession and that looser monetary policy won’t do much more. Regarding the former, Alan Reynolds had some acute observations in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

All proposals for fiscal stimulus claim to “jump-start” the economy by having the government borrow money from Smith and give it to Jones. Unfortunately, Smith is paid interest on that IOU, which implies a higher tax burden on somebody. That future taxpayer is, as usual, the forgotten man. All the attention is instead focused on Jones – trying to get the Jones family to spend more on what Mr. Bush alluded to as “basic necessities.”

Investors know such consumer staples are the least cyclical component of the economy. . . . An indiscriminate spurt in “aggregate demand” is essentially irrelevant to longer-term economic problems concentrated in particular industries and particular areas. Food stamps don’t buy condos in Las Vegas or new cars from Detroit. . . .

Why all the political emphasis on promoting a one-year sales push for consumer staples? Recessions never began with a drop in consumer spending, except when credit controls were imposed (1980) and when price controls collapsed (1953, 1973).

The economy was in recession from March 2001 to November 2001, but consumer spending fell in only the first and last of those months, plus September. Real consumption last November was still 3% higher than a year before – not much below the post-1960 average increase of 3.6%.

We are nonetheless constantly told that consumer spending is the driving force behind economic growth or recession, simply because 70% of GDP is used to finance consumption. This demand-side fallacy arises from focusing on uses of income rather than sources. In reality, consumption depends on income and wealth, and income and wealth depends on business. If business is profitable, personal income from work and investments will rise and that will finance consumption.

Until the Republican Party started sinking into the Slough of Despond, investors blithely treated the Bush tax cuts as permanent. Now the odds are in favor of Democratic victories in November, and every Democratic Presidential candidate favors letting the cuts expire. On the GOP side, the current front runner voted against them. Thus the economy can look forward to a huge tax increase within three years. That fact is sufficient to explain why a minor correction of the housing market bubble has metastasized.

The best possible stimulus package would be the prompt elimination of the sell-by dates for marginal tax rate reductions. The Fed could then deal with the short-term credit problem without trying to cope with the worldwide economy at the same time, and Say’s Law – “products are paid for with products”, so that consumption arises from production – would dispel the current doldrums.

Against Malaise

James Taranto’s bye-ku for Fred Thompson was, uncharacteristically, neither gracious nor funny. (Contrast his send-off for Duncan Hunter.) Though I’m no pro at this game, let me suggest,

“I’m running,” Fred said,
and conservatives tingled,
but he only walked.

Senator Thompson’s withdrawal will no doubt deepen the malaise that seems to be spreading on the Right. Self-criticism is no vice. On the other hand, self-pitying gloom is no virtue. Most of today’s conservatives can’t remember the days when things looked truly hopeless, nor what we did about it.

We now think of Barry Goldwater’s run for the Presidency as the springboard of modern conservatism, and in many ways it was. Yet the Right’s prospects were, by any objective measure, far worse in its aftermath than they are today. The Republican Party was a remnant in both Houses of Congress, and conservatives were far from dominant within that minority. Leading GOP Senators included such figures as Tom Kuchel, Clifford Case, Jacob Javits, Kenneth Keating and Hugh Scott. After the legendary Everett Dirksen’s death, Senator Scott succeeded as minority leader. The desperate straits of the conservative contingent are shown by the fact that its candidate was Howard Baker.

Four years after the Goldwater defeat, the three leading candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination came from the party’s center-left: Richard Nixon, George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller. Ronald Reagan was trounced in every primary he entered (21% in Nebraska, 20% in Oregon, 10% in Wisconsin).

How did conservatism recover? If it had followed the path that many of its leading lights recommend now, we would have looked for principles to jettison and gimmicks to adopt, on the assumption that traditional right-wing views had proven permanently unattractive. Instead, the conservatives of the day concentrated on developing and expounding their “discredited” opinions. New ideas, most notably supply side economics, turned up, but not among those who were most frantic to remodel the old ideology.

If the American public decides that it wants to offer limp resistance to Islamofascism, raise taxes, expand entitlements, ignore the long-term financial problems of Social Security and Medicare, watch passively as the marriage and the family fade away, put more decision making authority int the hands of activist judges and liberal bureaucrats, and solidify a spoils system based on race and gender, it won’t be because some historical force has rendered opposition futile. There’s nothing compelling about the retrograde progressivism of the Democratic Party. If it prevails, the blame will go primarily to the navel-gazing and backbiting on our side of the spectrum.

Stimulating Downward

This morning’s headline news was that the President and the chairman of the Fed want an economic stimulus package. Investors want that, too. Recession isn’t the path to a bull market. It was obvious by the NYSE’s closing bell, however, that there is a wide gap between the Beltway and the business world as to what “stimulus” means.

Chairman Bernanke killed all hope of a rally as soon as he said that whatever was done should be “explicitly short-term”. In other words, neither permanent extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts nor other long-term incentives will be on the table. Instead, our leaders on both sides of the aisle prattle about $100 or $150 billion in tax rebates and public works projects – as if those amounts would, with the help of even a generous Keynesian multiplier, mean much to a $13 trillion economy.

Meanwhile, all of the Democratic Presidential candidates have called for huge tax increases and have given up any pretense that they would use the revenue surge to eliminate the federal budget deficit, much less accumulate (Bill) Clinton-sized surpluses. Whether or not Rubinomics was overrated, now it’s dead and gone. The sole and explicit goal of the promised return to marginal tax rates in the vicinity of 50 percent is to support equal massive increases in federal spending. The great secret of the Clinton/Rubin years (never mentioned by the protagonists, of course) was that the government’s share of the economy fell, more than offsetting the malign effects of the 1993 Clinton tax package (which itself was whittled away over the years). Now Wall Street faces that prospect of bigger taxes and bigger government. Is it any wonder that entrepreneurs are battening the hatches?

There’s nothing particularly wrong with rebates; money is better spent in accordance with wage earners’ actual preference than politically inspired priorities. Nonetheless, rebates are a feeble anti-recession tool. If they are paired with nothing but money creation by the Fed – a tactic whose utility is, judging by the latest inflation numbers, entering the negative zone – the outcome may indeed be “stimulative”, but not in the direction that we want.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “We’re All Keynesians Now”
Bill Thomas & Alex M. Brill, “No Stimulus Gimmicks, Please”

Noted in Passing

■ I promised not to fill this blog with blather about my recent travels, and I won’t, but I was interested to see that David Frum, in the course of writing about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sums up my reaction to Paris:

It is very weird to think that the Paris of 1831 [the year of Hunchback’s publication] looked much more like Paris of 1482 – the year in which the novel is set – than the Paris of today.

There was of course no Eiffel Tower, no Grand Palais, no Pont Alexander III. There were no Belle Epoque apartment houses, no Metro signs, no Opera, no Haussman boulevards. The Arc de Triomphe was begun - but abandoned unfinished.

Ile de la Cite was still a jumble of ancient houses and shops. The area around the Beaubourg, the old marketplace, was still one of the most densely inhabited in the city. Montmartre was a semi-rustic village, covered with vineyards and windmills. The Tuileries marked the westward end of the built-up city, with the Champs Elysees a long suburban promenade spotted here and there by palaces new and old.

The city would change more in the next 175 years than it had in the previous 350. . . .

It’s a very striking thought that a modern tourist can see much, much, much more of the scenes and surroundings of the American Revolution than of the French. The Bastille: gone. What was the National Assembly: gone. The Jacobins and the Cordeliers: gone. The prison in which Louis XVI was held: gone. The Champs de Mars: changed beyond all recognition.

You can stand where Patrick Henry gave his oration, visit old North Church, tour the hall in which the Constitution was written, and of course see the homes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and so many others. Let nobody talk of the European sense of history and American neglect!

■ I’m reminded, by his linking to one of my posts, that I ought to call attention to Nicholas Whyte’s series of reviews of works that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula. He is currently up to number 28 (Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag”) and has about 30 to go. It’s a worthwhile project, illustrating the breadth and vagaries of taste within the SF community, and Nicholas’ comments are readable and perceptive. In fact, he deserves a Best Fan Writer nomination for them.

As a completely separate interest, fantastical in its own way, Nicholas maintains a site devoted to election results in Northern Ireland from 1885 to the present.

■ Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal carried a remarkable story about a new twist in Koranic studies [link may work only for subscribers].

Before World War II, German scholars compiled a huge photographic record of early manuscripts of Islam’s sacred book, with the aim of bringing modern scholarly methods to bear on the text. The effort ground to a halt under the Hitler regime, which had other priorities for men who knew Arabic. Then, on April 24, 1944, British bombers devastated the Bavarian Academy of Science, where the collection was housed. Its custodian, Anton Spitaler, reported that it had been destroyed.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars – and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

“He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it,” says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Since contemporary Moslem governments show little inclination to grant Western scholars access to documents, the rediscovered archive is a vital resource for Koranic studies. Not surprisingly, some Moslems feel threatened.

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. “Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention,” a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. “Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable.” . . .

In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.

Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran “didn’t just fall from heaven” but “has a history.” When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents,” read one letter to the Yemen Times. “Allah, help us against our enemies.”

Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.

For some perhaps fathomable reason, I suspect that there will never be much enthusiasm for finding layers of redaction in the Koran. The rediscovered archive is a valuable tool for scholarship, but tools are useless without the will to make use of them.

Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam’s founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.

If mere cartoons can give rise to murderous rage, what will happen when and if the Germans produce “the first ‘critical edition’ of the Quran – an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature”? It’s hard to be extremely optimistic.

Catching Up

Last Tuesday I was in Paris, where it was scarcely practicable to stay up till the polls closed in New Hampshire. Nor was there much point: Every poll and pundit knew that Barack Obama was about to batter the Tin Lady. The only suspense was over whether his lead would be in double digits. Having declared a few days earlier (see previous post) that the results of the Iowa caucuses would not affect the identity of the Democratic Presidential nominee, I figured that I would have the task of explaining why New Hampshire was just another anomaly. That could wait a day or three.

As matters turned out, the NH Democrats preferred Bill Clinton’s life partner after all. The discrepancy between the vote count and the polls doesn’t strike me as especially mysterious. It shows that many, many voters feel only a faint attachment to their “preferred” candidate. The pollsters picked up an Obama rivulet, not a tsumami. When it came down to casting actual ballots, the habit of enabling the Clintons was too strong to be overcome by her rival’s diaphanous attractions. Senator Obama may well “bounce back” in South Carolina, but my prediction is that the race will be over by the early hours of February 6th.

On the GOP side, Mike Huckabee shows no signs of expanding his appeal beyond his base. According to the New Hampshire exit polls (not wholly reliable, as they also forecast an Obama victory, but they can’t be off by an order of magnitude), he got something like seven percent support from voters who didn’t identify themselves as Evangelicals. It would be interesting to see some polls pitting the Republican contenders against each other one-on-one: If Governor Huckabee can come within 20 points of Thompson, Romney, Giuliani or McCain, I’ll be astonished.

The risk is that, instead of wooing non-Evangelical conservatives, the Huckabee campaign will become a grievance machine, moaning that Evangelicals are relegated to the role of supporting extras in the Republican extravaganza. That silliness is refuted by the fact that Republicans nominated and elected an out-in-the-open Evangelical in 2000 and 2004. The truth is that very few on the Right hold Huckabee’s religious view against him. The objections to his candidacy spring from his nannyism and his naivete (to put it nicely) in foreign affairs. A Republican President who is more interested in a national smoking ban than the war against the mufsidun will be good for neither the country nor the party.

On the other hand, a Huckabee candidacy that doesn’t turn whiny and resentful do much to counter the elite media’s sneers and smears about the Christian Right. As Jim Geraghty observes,

I think we can give the “Most Endlessly Smeared” award to the social conservatives, who want a society where moms and dads don’t have their daughters to grow up to be a slow-motion train wreck like one of the Spears sisters, and as a result have been painted as intolerant, hateful, ignorant, enraged, repressed, and snake-handling, ever since the Washington Post stated as fact in a front page story that they were “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” . . .

[T]he Huckabee we see on the campaign trail today – bass guitar-playing, joke-telling, always deploying the right anecdote at the right time, ol’ Huck – has already become one of the most influential social conservatives in America today. And he’ll retain that title, even if his campaign crashes and burns in the near future (and that doesn’t seem terribly likely).

The various causes of social conservatism – the promotion of a culture of life; the desire for entertainment options that won’t teach your kids the exact wrong lesson; the commodification and commercialization of childhood; a healthy caution of strip-mining human embryos for the miracle cure du jour that scientists promise to deliver; the desire for a community where the values of the family are reinforced when the kids walk out the front door – they could use a gifted advocate. Too often the most high-profile advocates of these causes hand their enemies plenty of ammunition – must I name names?

I’m less optimistic than Mr. Geraghty that this potential will be realized. So far, the candidate has said more about the impracticable Fair Tax proposal than the destruction of childhood, more about smoking than abortion, more about the wickedness of corporate executives than the folly of saturating the public square with sexual imagery. Instead of demonstrating that one can argue reasonably and humanely for social conservatism, he has worked to move social conservatives to the left on economic and foreign policy issues. Still, there is a possibility that he’ll change emphases as the campaign goes on. I don’t get the impression that he is strongly wedded to the left-of-center elements of his platform. He is certainly able to talk a good limited government game:

I only could stay for Huckabee’s 15-minute opening remarks at a packed – I mean packed – event at a gym in a Londonberry middle school this morning, but it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It was one of the most stirring and persuasive defenses of self-government and limited government – including the doctrine of subsidiarity – that I have heard in a long time. This guy is very good, and very shrewd – after playing the evangelical card in Iowa, today he was saying how America is all about “live free or die.”

That was, however, a brief, shining moment, not the Huckabee we see day after day.

What Hath Iowa Wrought?

Having no psephological reputation to safeguard, I’ll boldly say, nothing.

The closest analogy to the Tin Lady’s loss is Barry Goldwater’s defeat in New Hampshire by Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964. Goldwater had to fight a long campaign for the nomination, rather than waltzing to victory, but he was the choice of Republican office holders and power brokers (as everybody has forgotten nowadays), was immensely if nervously popular among the rank-and-file, and eventually prevailed over a motley opposition. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s life partner isn’t likely to be beaten by a third-of-a-term Senator who has never faced a serious electoral contest above the state legislative level, who has close ties with the most corrupt elements of the Illinois Democratic Party, and whose fresh, new political idea is “Can’t we all just be friends?”

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee finished first, but with only 34 percent of the vote. I’m pretty sure that the only candidates he could have beaten one-on-one are Ron Paul and Alan Keyes. According to surveys of the caucus goers, he got only 15 percent support among those who didn’t identify themselves as Evangelicals. Even the latter gave him slightly less than a majority.

If Governor Huckabee held the views of Fred Thompson, his Evangelical support might well be a foundation rather than a ceiling. He is, however, on the liberal side of the Republican Party on every question except abortion and same-sex marriage, so very few non-Evangelical conservatives will be attracted to him. Instead, he runs the risk that, as his positions become better known, his backing among right-of-center Evangelicals will fade. There are other pro-lifers in the race, either unambiguous (Thompson) or only slightly fuzzy (Romney and McCain). One could argue, too, that Rudy Giuliani is a social conservative on a wide range of issues. Cleaning up Times Square did more for the poor and helpless than Governor Huckabee’s promiscuous pardons. Giuliani also, while not pro-life and apparently insouciant about homosexuality, has never done much to actively promote the “abortion rights” and “gay rights” agendas. So far as I can see, he simply has no desire to take a firm stand on either, which means that, as President, he would be inclined to go along with the preferences of his party, a Robert Casey in reverse, if you will. Contrary to media portrayals, social conservatives grasp the wisdom of the half-loaf and the long view. As a social conservative myself, a Giuliani nomination wouldn’t be my first choice, but I doubt that it would much dampen my enthusiasm; after all, every prospective Democratic nominee is inter alia a vociferous proponent of partial birth abortion and “hate crimes” legislation (i. e., the importation of the legal regime of Steyn-persecuting Canada). Mayor Giuliani is well to the right of that.

There is one respect in which Governor Huckabee’s day in the sun may do some good. The Left, both secular and religious, has devoted great energy to insinuating that right-of-center Evangelicals are unanimously clones of Bob Jones and Rousas J. Rushdoony. Now comes a self-identified member of that supposedly scary theocratic clique who is intelligent, personable and unthreatening. He makes it plain that heavy breathing about Evangelicals as the “American Taliban” isn’t just malicious but absurd.

Predictions

A day late, but, after reading the NRO prophets’ symposium, I figured I could do better than those guys.

• Having reneged on its pledge to decommission its nuclear program by December 31, 2007, North Korea will solemnly swear to do so by December 31, 2008. It won’t.

• If Osama bin-Laden does not die, it will be because he is already dead.

• Hamas will continue firing rockets at random targets in Israel. Israeli responses will be widely denounced for interfering with the Peace Process [ed. note: sentence revised on 1/4/08 for clarity]. Meanwhile, nothing that was promised by anyone at the Annapolis Conference will actually occur.

• Vladimir Putin will reject mass petitions urging him to become Tsar – but only because he realizes that possession of the title would diminish his power.

• Peking will announce that mainland China’s economy is growing at a 12 percent rate in 2008. Twenty years from now, economic historians will ascertain that the real growth rate was minus three percent.

• The 2008 Presidential election will make the election of 1860 look like a unifying experience. On a lighter note, it will add to the stock of election trivia, as Michael Bloomberg (Independent) spends the most money per vote of any candidate in history and George Phillies (Libertarian) spends the least.

• No matter how the economy performs, a majority of Americans will believe that it is in a recession as of November 4, 2008.

• The New York Times will enter Chapter 11 reorganization. Writers at the Huffington Post will blame William Kristol.

• Others have predicted that Miley Cyrus will not get pregnant. I’ll be bolder and predict that Billy Ray Cyrus will not write a book on Christian parenting.

• Plans to film the sequel to The Golden Compass will be quietly shelved.

• The MSM will forget that Iraq exists and will concentrate on blaming George W. Bush for Pakistan.

• A post-election Congressional session will yield to common sense and repeal section 409A.

• 2008 will be significantly cooler than 2007. Al Gore will explain that the change is due to Global Warming. As a backup, he will declare that exactly the same policies are urgently needed, no matter what the climate does.

• The Chicago Cubs will win the National League pennant but lose the World Series to the Boston Red Sox.

And a Happy New Year to all!

Quote of the Day

The Tin Lady thinks we’re all children. John Edwards thinks many of us are sans-culottes ready to guillotine the aristocrats. Rich Lowry has been trailing the candidates through Iowa:

The Edwards message is breathtaking in its anger. This is 100-proof populism. He’s like a stand-up comedian who has steadily honed his material down to the most effective stuff. In the case of the comedian, all that’s left is laughs; in the case of Edwards almost all that is left is anger. His campaign pitch is like a well-polished mailed fist, aimed at the gut of the establishment, defined by Edwards as corporations and the Washington politicians who do their bidding.

“Corporate greed is killing the middle class,” Edwards says, “and stealing your children’s future.” He promises to confront the corporate interests, and explicitly promises not to sit down with them. (In his mind apparently, Pfizer is less worth talking to than the mullahs of Iran.) . . .

There is a strong element of paranoia to his message. The rich are getting richer according to Edwards, and “it’s not an accident, it’s not happening on its own.” He then cites alarming statistics about the suffering in America and urges, “enough is enough — I mean really.” He urges the crowd (which went on to give him two standing ovations) to “treat these people the way they treat you.” . . .

Republicans always accuse Democrats of class warfare, usually because Democrats want higher marginal tax rates. But this is real class warfare. This is a presidential candidate reading a whole class of people out of respectability, and promising, basically, to wage war on them. It’s a view that leaves no room for legitimate differences in point of view — on one side there are class enemies preying on the American people, and on the other, those who want to stop them. Edwards sprinkles hope in his message, but it still verges on the hateful, and if it were taken seriously would almost be scary.

Why not take it seriously? The Angry Left has become the soul, if not the body, of the Democratic Party. Is it unbelievable that at least one candidate has internalized the angst of the Krazy Kossack Kidz?

Update: Mr. Lowry expands his comments in an article aptly titled “The Hater”:

It is rare indeed to hear a politician brag about his fistfights as a child as Edwards does to establish his credentials for the “epic fight” ahead. Persuasion and negotiations are anathema to him and he explicitly forswears them: “People say to me, as president of the United States I want you to sit at a table and negotiate with these people. Never.” He’s willing to talk to Iran, but not to Pfizer. One is only a terrorist-sponsoring enemy of the United States, after all, and the other is a drug company.

The Tin Lady’s Expertise

Back in 2000, candidate George W. Bush was widely mocked for not being able to recall the name of the president of Pakistan. He countered by citing his acquaintance with the foreign minister of Mexico, a figure who, during that holiday from history, was arguably of greater importance to the United States than a dictator on the Indian subcontinent. The elite media sneered anyway.

Nowadays one might take it for granted that all Presidential aspirants pay close attention to events in Pakistan, which is looking to be the next major battleground in the war against Islamofascism. But, as an expert on that country notes (via Power Line), Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to have gotten as far as the headlines. On two separate occasions recently, she has made statements implying that ex-General Musharraf (that man Mr. Bush couldn’t remember) is running for the presidency in the elections scheduled for January 8th.

Given that the dispute between Musharraf and the Pakistani Supreme Court over the constitutionality of his election last October was the trigger for the present crisis, it is astonishing that the Tin Lady thinks he is already up for reelection. One can forgive minor slips, such as her belief that Benzair Bhutto’s father was assassinated (he was executed for ordering the murder of a political opponent, though his trial may not have been a model of due process) or unawareness that opposition leader Nawaz Sharif is ineligible for the presidency. Her obliviousness to major developments suggests a severe and not very creditable lack of interest.

But I do have an alternative theory. Maybe Senator Clinton, although fully in the picture herself, has simplified it for her audience’s limited intellectual capacity. James Taranto (second item) quotes from the Boston Globe a truly appalling expression of her view of the maturity of her countrymen:

The New York senator also highlighted a chapter in her book, It Takes a Village, that talks about every child needing a champion. She said most children have someone in that role and she’d like to fulfill it for the whole country.

“I think the American people need a president who is their champion. And I’ve been running to be that champion – to get up every single day and do all that I can to make sure I provide the tools that every single American is entitled to receive and make the most out of their own lives,” Clinton said.

Mr. Taranto doubts that “Mommie Dearest” is sincere. I’m not so optimistic. No one who doesn’t actually regard Americans as infants could imagine that such talking down would have electoral appeal.

Further (and lighter) reading: Alex Massie, “The Wodehouse Primary”