Month: January 2008

In the latest twist to this ever-changing race, it seems to me that McCain’s emergence as the GOP front-runner, even presumptive nominee, should clearly help Obama. If the Republicans are prepared to embrace a candidate who is not the establishment pick, why wouldn’t the Democrats in a change election? And McCain’s powerful appeal to moderate Democrats and Independents makes it all the more important for the Democrats to pick someone who can appeal to moderate Republicans and Independents. The Clintons simply don’t do that – especially after the ugly spectacle of their tactics in the last few weeks. That’s surely behind Obama’s latest rhetorical emphasis.

Even with the war hobbling him, even with the massive advantage of the opposition party in this year of recession and occupation, I’d say McCain could beat the Clintons. With Obama, it’s a whole different dynamic – and the narrative of the man in his 40s against the man in his 70s surely helps Obama. The Democrats aren’t stupid, are they? The logic of their heads as well as their hearts now favors the senator from Illinois.

The New York Post un-endorses.

Obama ratchets it up a notch:

"It is time for new leadership that understands the way to win a debate with John McCain or any Republican who is nominated is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq or who agreed with him in voting to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran, who agrees with him in embracing the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don’t like, who actually differed with him by arguing for exceptions for torture before changing positions when the politics of the moment changed."

A really insightful post from Ross:

He was lucky, to begin with, that George W. Bush lacked an heir apparent – no Jeb, no Condi, no Dick Cheney – who could unite the movement establishment against him. He was lucky that Mitt Romney was a Mormon. He was lucky that Fred Thompson, a candidate who might have succeeded in rallying both social and economic conservatives against his various heresies, was out-campaigned by Mike Huckabee, whose appeal was ultimately too sectarian to make him a threat. He was lucky that Rudy Giuliani ran an inutterably lousy campaign…

And on it goes.

Even evangelicals are being drawn to the calling to withdraw from the world:

Ours is a time of rapid social change. We are post-modern, post-Cold War, post-9/11, even post-Christian. All signs point to change, and we know things aren’t what they used to be. But we hardly know who we are. Amidst wars and rumors of war, our global identity crisis threatens to consume us.

But we have hope. The Holy Spirit is stirring in the places overlooked by Empire to raise up a new monastic movement. We don’t know yet what this movement of the Spirit will become. “New Monasticism” is the language we’re using to talk about it in the meantime.

Full story here.

A reader writes:

I don’t think the fact that Democrats want to help the uninsured and Republicans don’t is any great surprise.

What shocks the hell out of me is that by a 12% margin, Democrats are more interested in reducing the budget deficit.  Barely half of Republicans even care.  What ever happened to what was supposedly the party of fiscal responsibility?  Dick Cheney was right.  Deficits don’t matter, at least not to Republicans.

Bainbridge worries about the senator’s statist and interventionist rhetoric:

McCain has a lot more in common with TR and Bill Kristol than Ronald Reagan. And that’s damned scary. Why? If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness “conservatism” of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-"conservatism" of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home, as I’ve complained in more detail elsewhere. Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism. We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold, but in a sense those are tactical issues. Here is where, in my opinion, McCain fundamentally goes off the reservation. After all, as Russell Kirk wrote:

Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? … In short, deliberate entry into war commonly brings on consequences disagreeable even to the seeming victors. Prudent statesmen long have known that armed conflict, for all involved, ought to be the last desperate resort, to be entered upon only when all means of diplomacy, conciliation, and compromise have been exhausted.

Query whether Teddy Roosevelt or Bill Kristol would ascribe to those principles?