Category: The Dish

The Clintons aren’t done with yet.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? If his two potential successors both endorsed his war to begin with, history will not regard the next president as a rebuke to the last one.

McCain insists on not revisiting the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. He wants a debate solely on the surge. I can understand why; but I doubt it will work. It won’t work because the notion that the surge is indeed a success is, at the very least, debatable; and because the question of judgment in foreign affairs is necessarily a vital topic for a campaign. And the judgment that the war in Iraq was a good decision does not look so good in retrospect. Nice try. Try again.

He was much too civilized to have been personally hostile or rude. He published Marvin Liebman and David Brudnoy – and in his day, National Review was not as uniformly homophobic – or virtually Homorein – as it now is. But Buckley never challenged what he believed was a necessary moral and social injunction against gay love, marriage and sex. (In a heated debate with Gore Vidal, he responded to the vile accusation of being a Nazi by accusing Vidal of being a "goddamned queer." At least being a NAzi is a choice.) Gay men were allowed sex, as a function of a civilized society’s benevolence, but only allowed. We were never to be regarded as equals, and our rights were always contingent on others’ toleration. Homosexual sodomy was always subjected to more scrutiny and disparagement than heterosexual sodomy, even when sodomy became – as it did in the 1960s with the advent of the pill – the overwhelming sexual practice of the straight. And so gay sex lives were subject to the kind of thought experiment – tattooing our buttocks in the HIV epidemic – that simply would never have been applied to heterosexuals. He echoed Charles Kaiser’s belief that gay sexual freedom and privacy could not apply to the HIV-positive, who were to be regarded as threats and enemies. And after Marvin Liebman came out, he was frozen out as well. Buckley’s response to one of his oldest friend’s coming to terms with his own nature was as follows:

"I honor your decision to raise publicly the points you raise … but you too must realize what are the implications of what you ask. Namely, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is aligned with, no less, one way of life, become indifferent to another way of life …

National Review will not be scarred by thoughtless gay bashing, let alone be animated by such practices … You are absolutely correct in saying that gays should be welcome as partners in efforts to mint sound public policies; not correct, in my judgement, in concluding that such a partnership presupposes the repeal of convictions that are more, much more, than mere accretions of bigotry. You remain, always, my dear friend, and my brother in combat."

Liebman was indeed a brother in combat, one of the great gay foes of totalitarianism, up there with Whittaker Chambers and Alan Turing. But he was always reminded that his gayness would bar him from full inclusion as an equal in the conservative movement. I wish that times had changed. But the stance remains – absent Buckley’s grace and manners, and compounded now by the dark strains of fundamentalist bile.

I read this Sean Wilentz piece twice to try and figure out how he construes the facts he relays in the piece to prove his thesis that the Obama campaign has been race-baiting. You try. He seems to see no distinction between members of the press and the Obama campaign itself. And he seems completely unaware that the reaction to both Clintons’ racially-charged comments came first from the black community, which had been remarkably pro-Clinton until that point. Who is a better judge of race-baiting? African-Americans or a Clintonite like Wilentz? I should add that I don’t think Hillary was guilty of much more than unconscious racial condescension. But Bill? That Jesse Jackson comment? C’mon.

"We’ve been preoccupied and polarized by two hot-button issues — abortion and homosexuality — for way too long. It’s hard to see any positive results out of all this conflict," – Brian McLaren, evangelical pastor.

I really think McCain is unwise to follow Clinton’s strategy against Obama. It increasingly looks as if he’ll argue that he has more experience and more readiness. Those themes will only reinforce the narrative of age and youth, a narrative that helps Obama. In my view, McCain can only win this campaign if he adopts Obama’s message. McCain has to become the change candidate.

He needs to offer a radical program to bring the war in Iraq to a close, foment energy innovation, offer a market-driven healthcare plan that expands choice and access, simplify taxes, obliterate pork, secure the border and reform entitlements.

On the war, he can reiterate that he brought change once before to Iraq and can bring it again, by orchestrating a withdrawal that is as careful (to paraphrase Obama) as the invasion was careless. But he needs to broaden that message, adding diplomacy to his theme. He should embark on a world tour of allies in the spring, reassuring Americans and the world that he will reverse America’s not-so-glorious isolation. He can credibly insist that he will change America’s interrogation and detention policies, and restore America’s moral standing. He should waste no time in meeting with other world leaders on the subject of climate change. 

Obama’s weakness is on his left-wing economics. But McCain shouldn’t attack too aggressively there either. He should rather propose: a broadside on pork barrel spending, a commitment to fiscal retrenchment, a reform of entitlements, a pledge to ratchet back the massive expansion of government under the Bush Republicans. At some point, McCain should also risk a fight with some of the uglier elements of the far right. The country is sick of the screeds and hate of figures like Ann Coulter. A Republican version of Clinton’s famous Sistah Souljah moment, when Clinton publicly took on an African-American rapper for violent anti-police rhetoric, would keep the campaign fresh and signal a willingness to shake things up.

McCain has two tendencies: to react with prickly intransigence to criticism and to inspire others with the record of his own public service. Many of his fellow Republicans will urge him to savage Obama on his youth, inexperience and liberalism, and Obama might well provoke an explosion at some point. If that is the strategy, McCain will fail. But if he can master his own volatile temperament and out-Obama Obama on the change theme, he stands a real chance.

This is a change election. As the economy sours even further, it will become even more so. Running as the whiter, older, more experienced candidate is a recipe for failure. And McCain has the capacity to present himself as a change agent – starting with the GOP.

But beating Obama won’t be easy. Just ask Hillary.

Apparently it’s the 65 and over crowd that we should really worry about.

She says she was expecting this for a year:

None of this is surprising to me. You know, last spring when I looked at how the race was shaping up, I knew that it would be a close contest and I assumed it would be with Senator Obama and at that time I said we have got to start thinking about Texas, we have to start thinking ahead.

But they only grappled with the primary/caucus rules this month. Hmm.

I have no reason to believe this isn’t an accurate assessment:

I believe it’s fair to say that WFB supported the invasion of Iraq and began to have misgivings about the result that led him to reconsider the whole enterprise — but that he also supported the troops surge. Last year, he made a personal contribution to the presidential campaign of John McCain.

I’m pinioned in the same place. I didn’t believe the surge, as advertized, would work in even reducing the violence. I was wrong about that, even though I was following Petraeus’s own metrics. But surely two facts help explain its unexpected success: the Sunni insurgency decided that crazy Jihadists were temporarily a greater threat than the Shiites or the Americans, and were happy to be trained, armed and paid by the US to regain control of their territory; and Sadr decided it was in his interests to facilitate rather than impede the construction of a Shiite-dominated state. The question now is whether the reduced violence means a greater chance of an historic rapprochement between the various ethnic and sectarian factions that divide Iraq at a national level – which was explicitly the goal of the surge. I don’t see any serious evidence that this is the case. Yes, at a local level, it seems as if there is some cross-sectarian interaction. But every apparent step forward is, more often than not, reversed soon thereafter. That was the case with the de-Baathification law; it now seems to be the case with the recent apparent progress on provincial elections. Perhaps the strategy is to provide enough long-term life-support to allow such tiny, always reversible, glacial steps to proceed. But given the depth of the divide, the trauma of the recent past, the difficulty of knowing who is fooling whom, we’re talking about a commitment decades long, with no surety of any success. We’re talking about those parts of empire that only drain.

And, following WFB, I’ve been struck in retrospect by the utopianism of the whole project. This, I hasten to add, is a conservative judgment, and an indictment of my own previous zeal.

At the same time, I don’t want to miss twists and turns that might yield better outcomes. Or strategies that enable us to withdraw as prudently as possible. And there’s no one on the right more able to make that argument than McCain. But he hasn’t made it convincingly yet. Mere appeals against "the white flag of surrender" are not arguments. We’re waiting. For honesty.