Cognitive partitioning & meritocracy (Part II)

(This is the second part of a blog essay about how the processes of meritocracy have created a social and cultural gap between conservative intellectuals and grassroots conservatives. In Part I, I discussed how widespread standardized testing and the democratization of higher education fostered a "cycle of selectivity" in which America's brightest students have come under increasing pressure to grind it out academically in order to gain entrance into top schools.)

My late Aunt Barbara was a high-school biology teacher, frequently honored for her excellence. A couple of years before her retirement, she found herself under pressure to change grades for some of her students who had scored poorly on a big test. The students were among the valedictorian candidates at LaGrange (Ga.) High and the poor test grades in an advanced honors course threatened to affect the final selection of valedictorians. (Like many other schools, LaGrange now recognizes multiple valedictorians, reflecting the "prizes for all" trend.)

Aunt Barbara refused to budge on the grades, but as she explained the pressure parents applied to the system (this incident was just one example), it reinforced my perception of what a sea change had occurred in public schools since my own youth. Bright students are nowadays herded into "gifted" programs in elementary school and into the AP/honors track in high school. The 4.0 all-A average that used to be the acme of academic excellence is no longer sufficient for the aspiring young meritocrats. Honors classes award extra credit so that a 5.0 is now possible.

Since making all A's and a high SAT score no longer suffice to guarantee admission to the top colleges and universities -- plenty of ultra-smart grinds have tasted the Bitter Thin Envelope of Rejection from Harvard or Yale, to which their hopeful parents had insisted they must apply -- these young grinds also cram their teenage lives full of extra-curricular activities designed to highlight their "leadership" or illustrate that they possess that "something extra" which will make their application stand out amid the pile of applications from the brainiac herd.

By the time a kid gains admission to a top school, then, he hasn't had an unscheduled moment since eighth grade, and nearly all of his overscheduled adolescence has been spent in the company of his brainiac peers. And, with rare exceptions, these peers are all offspring of affluent, ambitious, college-educated parents like his own, so that for all the rhetorical emphasis on "diversity," there is a stultifying sameness to the millieu in which these teenage strivers are reared.

Even if there were more diversity in their backgrounds, however, the brainiac's actual teenage experience has become homogenized. Think of Anthony Michael Hall's character in The Breakfast Club. Now clone him several times over, and you will have a useful portrait of the AP/honors classroom at the typical large "comprehensive" high school in the leafy upper-middle-class suburban cul-de-sac enclaves where most of these nerds are raised. (Except that, two decades after The Breakfast Club, more of the nerds are Asian.)

Peers and perceptions
While it continues to be my firm belief that David Brooks ought to be dumped from a C-130 onto a Taliban position east of Jalalabad, Brooks is nevertheless a keen-eyed sociological observer. In 2002, he wrote an interesting article in the Weekly Standard about the "almost crystalline meritocracy" that produces the students who inhabit our nation's elite campuses:

They grew up from birth being shepherded from one skill-enhancing activity to another. When you read their résumés, you learn that they got straight A's in high school and stratospheric board scores. They've usually started a few companies, cured at least three formerly fatal diseases, mastered a half dozen or so languages, and marched for breast cancer awareness through Tibet while tutoring the locals on conflict resolution skills and environmental awareness.

Brooks can be forgiven the hyperbole, for he exaggerates only slightly. One important influence of this pressure-cooker process -- the factor that relates most directly to the defects of our conservative intellectual class today -- is that it isolates the young meritocrat within a peer group of his fellow nerds. Since ninth grade (if not before), the National Merit Scholar finalist has associated with and measured himself against other brainiac nerds like himself. These are the only true peers he has, against whom he competes for academic honors, and with whom he can recall shared experiences.

Think how narrow is the path to high achievement that results in a 17-year-old receiving the Sweet Thick Envelope of Acceptance from his first-choice college. That path may seem wider in a posh suburban school district where the AP/honors track is crowded with the sons and daugthers of hyperachievers, but that is a cruel illusion.

There might be 35 kids at Sodded Lawn High who could succeed at Harvard, but it's unlikely that more than two or three of them will actually gain admission there. There will be dozens of those super-bright grinds who are cursed to attend those schools whose campuses are populated almost entirely by Ivy League rejects -- Tulane, Swarthmore, Duke, Haverford, Wesleyan, Emory, Colgate -- students whose failure will stand as burning reminders to future waves of ambitious nerds how easy it is to fall short even by the second-rate standards of Penn, Brown and Cornell.

Because this elite path is so narrow, because any minor slipup might mean the kind of admissions-process embarrassment that compels a kid with a 1,440 SAT to accept a scholarship offer from State University, those in the "almost crystalline meritocracy" seldom have any non-meritocratic friends. They don't spend their weekends helping a buddy install a custom cam in his third-hand Ford, nor will you find them working a part-time job at Old Navy. They've never worked the summer toting boards on a construction crew or gotten wasted at a farm party or engaged in any other activity that would have put them into the familiar company of those slackers and losers and hell-raisers who constitute the non-elite extracurricular club known as Future Republican Voters of America.

Meritocratic prejudice
I arrived in Washington from North Georgia 11 years ago seeking an answer to a question I'd heard over and over from conservatives down home: "What the hell is wrong with those Republicans in Washington? We elect 'em and send 'em up there and then it's like they forget why they're there and who put 'em there."

A big part of the answer to that question involves this socio-cultural gap that the "crystalline meritocracy" creates between conservative intellectuals and the typical Republican voter. The editors and writers at major conservative publications, the wonks at the think tanks, the analysts and "senior fellows" and other functionaries of the rightward infrastructure in Washington -- these people are drawn from the ranks of top university graduates who are the end product of that meritocracy. They reflect, in greater or lesser degree, the distinctive prejudices of their class, and these prejudices tend to alienate them from the Republican rank-and-file.

Just one illustrative anecdote: About a year ago, a bright young operative in Washington (who is certainly not a snobby elitist Ivy League type) told me in all seriousness that virtually all college-educated women under 30 are pro-choice. Now, I don't doubt that hard-core, single-issue pro-lifers are a minority in the college-educated female 18-29 demo, but I do doubt that hard-core, single-issue pro-choicers are a majority in that demo.

The available exit-poll data don't allow such a detailed demographic analysis, but if 44% of 18-29 white voters punched the button for McCain-Palin, I think it safe to say that some signficant plurality of college-educated young women are pro-life. And I further believe that, ceteris parabus, the pro-life position is not a sufficient deal-breaker for enough college-educated under-3o women that the Republican Party dooms itself to defeat by being pro-life. In other words, there are a lot of "soft" pro-choice women who are either somewhat persuadable to a pro-life stance, or else aren't strongly interested in the politics of abortion, caring more about economic issues, etc.

Having not been isolated within the intellectual class, however, I know that the absolute solid bedrock of the 21st-century GOP coalition are the pro-life activists. Those are the folks who put butts in the voting booth -- they deliver on Election Day. The Republican Party can easily afford to lose 100% of the Harvard vote, but if the GOP loses the pro-lifers, you can kiss it good-bye, people. That isn't to say the pro-lifers should be endlessly pandered to, but you can't piss 'em off, either.

As with abortion, so on down the line on various other issues. To have a political movement that is active, energetic and confident enough to secure that magical 50-percent-plus-one of majority power, conservatives have to hunt where the ducks are and dance with the ones that brung 'em. The hard-core "base" alone may constitute only 30% of the electorate, but without the enthusiastic support of the base, you cannot then reach out successfully to the undecided, independent "swing" voters. And you can't get the enthusiastic support of the base when the most prominent spokesmen for the movement are taking to the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to urinate on the party's grassroots, or to engage in cowardly hand-wringing about the Hispanic vote. (Question: Why is pandering to Hispanics acceptable, while pandering to blue-collar evangelicals is not?)

Real trouble vs. imaginary crisis
Economic issues and the Bush administration's blunder-plagued foreign policy are the sine qua non of the Republican Party's electoral woes in 2006 and '08. "Brand damage" and "Bush fatigue" are undeniable realities. The GOP lacks popular conservative leaders with strong crossover appeal to independents.

Yet what do we hear from so many of our Beltway conservative intellectuals? They conjure up a complex existential crisis of conservative ideology, and make important-sounding noises along the lines of, "The party of Ronald Reagan today stands at a crossroads ..."

From these pompous beginnings, they proceed to cherry-pick the vote totals and exit polls, make ostentatious allusions to Russell Kirk or Barry Goldwater, throw in a bit of anecdotal example, all preparatory to pointing fingers at the usual suspects: Those damned Republican voters! Those ignorant xenophobic hicks in Flyover Country who foolishly insist that the conservative movement ought to try to actually conserve something! How dare those backwoods holy-rollers attempt to influence the party of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Francis Fukuyama and George Freaking Will!

Is it really so? Are the problems of the GOP really the fault of Republican voters, rather than the fault of the intellectuals? Go scan their output from 2001-04 and try to see if you can find where any of these eminent pundits warned of the political and policy errors by which the Bush administration rendered the Republican Party label increasingly toxic to independent voters. When you find that David Brooks column from 2003 warning about the baleful effects of the Community Reinvestment Act and the dangers of pumping liquidity into an already overheated housing market where traditional standards of creditworthiness had been abandoned, please let me know.

Damn. Once again, I've gone off on a mad tangent and haven't fully explicated what I meant to tackle. I need to cool off a bit and try again. I want to talk about how summer internships have replaced summer jobs, and how the meritocratic conservative elites tend to flock to Washington at age 22 or 23, and how this exempts them from the kind of exposure to non-elite folkways that would inspire confidence in the common sense of common people. I realize that it may be unpopular for a conservative to defend the common sense of the electorate immediately after Barack Obama was elected with a 53% majority, but let's face it: Voting against John McCain is a very easy thing to do -- 53% of Republican primary voters voted against him, too.

To be continued . . .

The man of Steele

Ralph Z. Hallow reports in The Washington Times that GOPAC Chairman and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele "definitely" wants the RNC top job:

A behind-the-scenes battle to take the reins of the Republican National Committee is taking off between former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele.
Neither man will acknowledge his interest in the post, but Republicans close to each are burning up the phone lines and firing off e-mails to fellow party members in an effort to oust RNC Chairman Mike Duncan in the wake of the second consecutive drubbing of Republican candidates at the polls.

I was among those who felt that Steele should have gotten the RNC job after the 2006 election, when instead the Bush White House insisted on Florida Sen. Mel Martinez.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Paul Broun, moderate

Believe it or not, calling Obama a Marxist is a centrist, mainstream position in Georgia. I'm sure some of Dr. Broun's constituents have said worse things about the president-elect. Dr. Broun is a physician and an ex-Marine, so he's not a stupid man. Plus, you must admit, the "civilian security force" idea is kind of extreme, isn't it? Like ... a militia? Or maybe the Minuteman Project? Don't liberals hate all that vigilante-type stuff?

And if that wasn't what Obama was talking about, well, what was he talking about? Maybe somebody in the press corps should have asked him about that during the campaign. But I guess it's hard to ask questions while performing fellatio.

Two headlines

Bush leaving office more unpopular than Nixon

For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics

The mere fact that Bush speaks in a drawl has badly hurt the South's reputation. I'm a native Georgian, so trust me this isn't the first time I've been embarrassed by a Southerner in the White House.

Wiccans for Obama

Kathy Shaidle informs us that Obama got 64% among voters who had a favorable view of Wicca. Of course, Obama was actually their second choice. In the primaries, all the witches supported Hillary, whose Secret Service codename was "Broomrider."

Palin: A praying woman

During her interview with Greta Van Susteren, Sarah Palin discussed the possibility of a 2012 presidential campaign:

"You know, I have -- faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator's hands -- this is what I always do," said Palin, who served as running mate to Senator John McCain.
"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is," she added.
"Even if it's cracked up a little bit, maybe I'll plow right on through that and maybe
prematurely plow through it, but don't let me miss an open door.
"And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

I remember, shortly after she was nominated, seeing a video of her talk to a church group, where she said she hoped that the U.S. mission in Iraq was in accordance with God's will. And I felt, at that moment, a great calm. This is obviously a praying woman, who sincerely seeks God's will, and it seemed obvious that He had some work for her to do in the mysterious scheme of Providence. Whether or not, the Republicans won, I felt that God had a hand in it, and so I am perfectly at ease with the idea that Obama's election is likewise part of the divine plan.

Shortly before the election, and long after I had written off the possibility of a Republican victory, a Christian woman I know told me that she'd heard that the McCain campaign had instituted daily prayer sessions. And I told her that I was taught that God always answers prayer -- but "no" qualifies as an answer. She didn't mind that reply, and though she desperately wanted the GOP to win and was heartbroken by the defeat, she remains steadfast in her faith that God's will is ultimately sovereign.

God's chosen people, the Israelites, were enslaved by Egypt, then conquered by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. A remnant of Judah was restored, but then conquered by the Romans, who ultimately destroyed the temple at Jerusalem and scattered the surviving Jews. Does this mean that God favored Egypt, Assyria or Rome? No, those heathen nations were mere instruments in His work of chastising Israel for its sins, and in ultimately perfecting His great work of salvation.

We can deserve no favor of God. He is sovereign, and any blessing He bestows upon us is grace and mercy, since we deserve nothing but destruction. We should be grateful even for His chastisement as a blessing, an indication of His special interest in us. If it is God's will to destroy us, nothing can save us. However, if it is His will to save us, nothing can destroy us. Therefore we ought to be humble and grateful to have hitherto escaped destruction.

If Sarah Palin believes in that basic Romans 8:28 kind of truth -- and it seems she does -- and He "opens that door," then I will feel that it is for a reason, without presuming to know what the reason is. But the fact that this formerly obscure woman is now the No. 1 news topic in America (frankly, she's far more interesting than Obama) ought to be recognized for the miracle it is.

Hey, Allah: Believe, baby!

Cognitive partitioning & meritocracy (Part I)

Yesterday, in discussing the prejudice of (some) conservative intellectuals against evangelical Christians, I wrote:

One of the great woes of the conservative movement in recent years is that it has attracted a set of intellectuals who are culturally and socially disconnected from the people whose votes elect Republican candidates. This is, to an extent, a result of what Herrnstein and Murray called "cognitive partitioning."
Our intellectual class is now dominated by "meritocrats" who come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and who have been grinding it out since middle school trying to get into the elite schools that offer the fast track to success. Conservatism has sought out these brainiac types who bring with them a set of class prejudices that make them incapable of relating to State University business majors and self-sufficient tradesmen, the petit bourgeois backbone of the suburban Sunbelt GOP.

By referring to Herrnstein and Murray, of course, I meant The Bell Curve, and one of the great intellectual tragedies of the 1990s. Because of The Bell Curve's controversial assertions about race, heredity and intelligence, it was dismissed as crypto-eugenic pseudoscience. What was lost in this unfortunate (if perfectly understandable) controversy was the book's profound observations about the impact on our class structure of widespread standardized testing and the democratization of higher education. These observations -- contained in Part I of the book under the heading, "The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite" -- were as valuable as any sociological writing since Veblen, and yet were trampled underfoot because of the racial controversy.

Given that I've been so often smeared as a bigot, I hesitate even to reference The Bell Curve -- "A-ha!" shouts the Southern Poverty Law Center -- but a comment by Kathy Shaidle on the previous thread encouraged me to do so, since so few conservatives ever address the political influence of class perceptions in a useful way. But since coming to Washington in 1997 I have seen first-hand how the processes of modern meritocracy have created an unmistakable class divide between conservative intellectuals and the kind of grassroots conservatives who are the true political backbone of the movement.

A short history of brains
Let's begin by summarizing very briefly what Herrnstein and Murray say in Part I of The Bell Curve, in my own words and augmented by some of my own knowledge and experience of the history of the subject (I used to be an education reporter). Prior to World War II, high intelligence was scattered rather haphazardly across society. The first mass implementation of IQ testing was done by the Army to sort recruits in World War I. So it was quite possible, circa 1920 or 1940, that yon farmer driving his tractor across the cornfield had a 120 IQ -- the mean IQ of today's college graduate -- or that the owner of a small-town grocery store had a 140 IQ, which would almost certainly qualify him for admission to a good law school nowadays (since the LSAT is, to a great extent, an IQ test).

Most importantly, IQ testing was not widespread within the education system, and in the early 20th century the American education system itself was decidedly undemocratic. In much of rural America, the eight-grade country schoolhouse was the norm, and if a farm lad wanted to attend the high school in the county seat, he had to arrange his own room and board in town. To attend college, prior to WWII, you either had to be from a rich family, or win a scholarship, or else work your way through. (Ronald Reagan had an athletic scholarship to Eureka College.)

All this changed in the aftermath of World War II. First, IQ testing was again used in the armed services and the brightest recruits qualified for officer-training programs, or for high-skill specialties such as pilots, engineers, radio operators, etc. And then the GI Bill provided college tuition to hundreds of thousands of veterans (including my own father).

Then came the widespread prosperity of the long postwar boom and, beginning in the late 1950s, federal college tuition aid programs. For the Baby Boomers, then, a college education was no longer for the privileged few, but was available to just about any smart kid who wanted it. Well ... who was "smart"? This was where the SAT and other standardized tests came to exercise so much sway in education.

The SAT was first administered in 1926, but its use in college admissions -- along with a similar test, the ACT -- did not become widespread until the 1950s. By the '80s, the SAT was virtually universal for college-bound students. (I never took the SAT, and when I started Jacksonville State University in 1977, it was open admissions with no testing required. I briefly considered majoring in education, the ACT was required for admission to the teacher-training program, and so one Saturday morning my sophomore year, I took the test with a crushing hangover. When I later picked up my score at the registrar's office, the girl at the desk looked at the score and said, "Wow. Too bad you didn't take this before -- you would have qualified for the President's Scholars program." C'est la vie.)

As the SAT became universal, top universities increasingly attracted the brightest students on a nationwide basis. Before World War II, the Ivy League schools were still what they'd always been, bastions of privilege for the brightest sons of the Northeastern elite. But by the 1960s, these schools -- and other top-flight schools like Stanford, the University of Chicago, etc. --were getting applications from smart kids all over the country.

As college education became more democratic, the top schools became ever more selective and, if anything, a degree from a top school carried even more prestige in 1980 than it had before WWII. Whereas a bachelor's degree from, say, the University of Kansas had indicated one's place in the top 10% of academic ability in 1940, by 1980, such a degree might signify only a top 20% status.

The meritocratic process
A cycle of selectivity (vicious or virtuous, take your pick) began to impact the meritocratic process. Once the average SAT of incoming freshman classes became public knowledge -- thank you, U.S. News & World Report -- employers that were looking for real brainpower quite logically focused their recruiting efforts on the graduates of the schools with the highest numbers. And super-ambitious parents became almost fanatically obsessed with getting their kids into those top schools.

The public education system responded to all these changes in various ways, with more and more testing in earlier and earlier grades, special "gifted" classes, and so forth. My own experience might be intructive of the haphazard and experimental nature of these developments.

I vaguely remember our class being given a very basic kind of fill-in-the-dots standardized test toward the end of third grade (i.e., spring 1968). We were tested again in fifth grade, and our elementary school instituted what is now called "tracking": We were divided into four classes -- 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D -- with the brightest kids in 5A and so on down the line. (Which was kind of weird to me, since I was plunked into 5A with the goody-two-shoes kids like Keith Enterkin and Kathy McDade, rather than with all my buddies in 5C and 5D.) Then in sixth grade, they tried some sort of primitive "gifted" program that required about 10 of us kids to study statistics after school with the principal (whom I hated), and so in seventh grade, when I was invited to be in the middle-school "gifted" program, I said, "Screw that. Why do extra work for no credit?"

To continue down this particular personal sidetrack a bit further, my experience as a "gifted" student -- who tested in the 98th percentile in fifth grade, maxing out in both reading comprehension and vocabulary -- probably explains my complete contempt for the public education establishment. I was the victim of several "innovative" programs (including the once-notorious "New Math") and suffered mental abuse doled out by many sadistic half-bright bureaucrats who called themselves "teachers." From what I saw during my years covering public schools in Georgia in the '80s and '90s, the situation has scarcely improved -- and "gifted" education has, if anything, gotten worse.

When the Columbine High massacre occurred, I noted several things: (a) Columbine High was a large "comprehensive" school with a floor plan almost identical to Lithia Springs High, where I graduated; (b) the two killers were both extremely bright kids who'd been in advanced AP/honors type classes; (c) neither of the killers had gotten into his first-choice college; and (d) each of the killers was from a two-child family, the younger sibling of a "star" child.

The "comprehensive" high school with over 1,000 students is a very bad idea, and it is especially bad for bright kids who don't have some extra-curricular activity -- sports, band, drama, etc. -- from which they can derive peer status. Tracking bright kids into AP/honors courses only tends to reinforce the kids' elitist sense of superiority. If a 15- or 16-year-old is really bright enough to do college work, then let him "test out" of high school and go to college. Don't force him to keep going back to that idiot factory ("subsidized dating," as Newt Gingrich once described high school) with its vicious cliques of jocks and preps and stoners, etc. The Columbine massacre was an evil nightmare from hell, but it was not an unpredictable outcome of the one-size-fits-all education system.

You want "education reform"? Abolish public schools. Get government out of the education business. Fire all the teachers and administrators. Sell the school buildings, the equipment, the buses, the books -- the whole shebang -- at public auction. Return the money to the taxpayers, and let every parent henceforth know: If you bring a child into this world, you and you alone are responsible for that child's education. That's the kind of radical libertarian I am, and my opinion is perfectly consonant with Christian conservatism, since anything as thoroughly f----d up as the American public education system must surely be the spawn of Satan.

Well, it's 2:30 a.m., and that sidetrack delayed our arrival at the main topic: How the meritocratic process by which intellectuals are developed tends to separate the conservative intellectual class from the people whose votes make possible the conservative political movement. Come back tomorrow, and I'll have more.

However, let me add one final thing this morning: If you're smart enough to read and understand The Bell Curve, you're extremely smart, no matter what your race, ethnicity, educational background or socioeconomic status. That was what was so ironic about the furor over the book. How could any reader feel insulted? If you're smart enough to read it, the book says very flattering things about you. Maybe morons should feel insulted, but no moron could ever get through a single chapter of the book. I'm looking at Page 1 and see these words: literate, artifact, blithely, heterodox, productive, transmission, simian, geographer, relevance, capacity. Turn to Page 2, and about halfway down, you encounter this sentence:

His most influential immediate successor, a French psychologist, Alfred Binet, soon developed questions that attempted to measure intelligence by measuring a person's ability to reason, draw analogies, and identify patterns.

Anyone who would voluntarily pick up a book containing such a sentence is, almost by definition, an intellectual. So what was all that uproar about, with people acting as if they'd been slapped in the face and called ugly names?

UPDATE: Part II of this essay is now online.

George Freaking Will, again

Another shot at the rubes and yahoos who, he says, are ruining the Republican Party:

Some of the Republicans' afflictions are self-inflicted. Some conservatives who are gluttons for punishment are getting a head start on ensuring a 2012 drubbing by prescribing peculiar medication for a misdiagnosed illness. They are . . . unhinged by their anger about the loathing of Sarah Palin by similarly deranged liberals. These conservatives, confusing pugnacity with a political philosophy, are hot to anoint Palin, an emblem of rural and small-town sensibilities, as the party's presumptive 2012 nominee.
These conservatives preen as especially respectful of regular -- or as Palin says, "real" -- Americans, whose tribune Palin purports to be. . . .
We have seen this movie before. Immediately after the 1972 election, some conservatives laid down the law -- the 1976 Republican nominee must be Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The Air Force should load George Will and David Brooks into a C-130 and airdrop them, sans parachute, on a Taliban position in Afghanistan. They're useless as intellectuals, but perhaps they'll do some good as ordnance.

Attaboy, Douthat!

Defeat seems to have stirred one of my least-favorite Young Turks to finally aiming his Harvard-trained mind at liberals, proclaiming his "contempt" for Doug Kmeic. Certainly few voices in the '08 debate were more contemptible than Kmeic's, who allied himself with Soros-funded front groups and argued that pro-life Catholics should support Obama, who (a) ended up with 54% of Catholic votes and (b) is now poised to overturn the so-called "Mexico City rule" prohibiting U.S. funding of foreign abortion providers.

UPDATE: Douthat's mocking of last week's conservative leadership summit is neither funny nor insightful. And as to Douthat's allusion to Gary Hart vs. Walter Mondale in '84, Hart was George McGovern's former campaign manager, and McGovernism was more the problem than the solution for Democrats in the '80s. (As I well know, having been a Democrat who voted for Mondale in '84.) Besides which, Hart took himself out of the race with his "Monkey Business" affair. And Hart's erstwhile mistress, Donna Rice, married a Republican and became an anti-pornography activist. Which is to say: Try another analogy, Harvard boy.

Who is Barack Obama?

Greg Ransom has amassed some interesting background on the identity-formation of the chameleon-on-plaid who is now the president-elect.

Obama was abandoned by his father, who died an alcoholic failure in Kenya. Somewhere around here, I have a 10-year-old book exploring Bill Clinton's personality through the prism of his stepfather's alcoholism. It's amazing how these early influences shape personality.

Blame the Bible-thumpers?

James Antle at The American Spectator:

Now blame for the Republican electoral debacle has been extended to all the rubes who are said to populate the religious right.
Even some right-leaning pundits are getting into the act. Beliefnet's Steven Waldman warned before the election that "religious conservatives will have to grapple with their role in electing Obama" since they supposedly vetoed pro-abortion Joe Lieberman, whom Al Gore found to be a sure ticket to the White House, for vice president.
In his post-election column for the National Post, David Frum counseled Republicans to embrace "a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues," a move that will "involve painful change" on such issues as abortion. There will be more college-educated social liberals whose values must not be threatened by Republicans, he argues, than Joe the Plumbers who are threatened by Democrats.
"Consider the nature of the Republican failure. That old rallying point, social conservatism, simply didn't draw the masses in 2008," Amity Shlaes concluded. "Truth be told, the pro-life line and appeals to piety often backfired."

Read the whole thing, especially where Antle quotes Christopher Caldwell's 1998 attack on the same holy-roller yokels -- an attack to which I replied in Chronicles.

One of the great woes of the conservative movement in recent years is that it has attracted a set of intellectuals who are culturally and socially disconnected from the people whose votes elect Republican candidates. This is, to an extent, a result of what Herrnstein and Murray called "cognitive partitioning."

Our intellectual class is now dominated by "meritocrats" who come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and who have been grinding it out since middle school trying to get into the elite schools that offer the fast track to success. Conservatism has sought out these brainiac types who bring with them a set of class prejudices that make them incapable of relating to State University business majors and self-sufficient tradesmen, the petit bourgeois backbone of the suburban Sunbelt GOP.

Conservative students on elite campuses seem to develop a siege mentality. On the one hand, they are forced to refine their arguments against liberalism. On the other hand, they tend to internalize the notion that conservatism is somehow less respectable than liberalism, so that there is a flinch reaction to accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. This creates within the conservative intelligentsia an obsession with respectability.

The quest for respectable Republicanism explains why so many conservative intellectuals kept boosting Rudy Giuliani during the 2006-07 runup to the GOP primaries. Giuliani is a New Yorker, a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights Catholic (oxymoron alert) -- not an evangelical hick governor from Waco or Wasilla. What is odd about conservative intellectuals, especially the younger ones, is that if their class prejudices and standards of "respectability" had dominated the GOP in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan's presidency would never have happened.

Reagan's great feat was to take the fierce anti-communism of Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater (which had been disdained as outlandish by the intellectuals of their day) and weave it into a larger, broader critique of liberalism, delivered with a genial smile. Reagan learned from conservative failures of the past the importance of building a coalition through tactical alliances.

Today's conservative intellectuals often praise Reagan and try to claim the mantle of Reaganism for their own pet projects, but they have a very un-Reaganeque tendency: Trying to build a movement via subtraction. David Frum delivered an infamous auto da fe against anti-war conservatives. Chris Caldwell wants to run the pro-lifers and gun owners out of the Big Tent. George Will thinks the GOP's problem is too many hockey moms. And, yes, there are far too many Christian conservatives who use "libertarian" as a pejorative.

I believe that the Republican Party's only hope for success against the Obama regime is to return to the "Spirit of '94," the limited-government reformist message with which Newt Gingrich rallied conservatives in 1994. I believe that conservative evangelicals need to consider the relationship between markets and morality. I believe that "libertarian populism" offers a winning antidote to the nonsense of "national greatness" and "compassionate conservatism" that have led the GOP astray. Pro-lifers need to show themselves dependable and useful allies in the fight to preserve economic liberty, and ought to soundly reject the temptation of Huckabeeism.

Fantasies on the Left

The Left has not paid enough attention to realize that Republicans no longer have any power in Washington:

Considering that the Republican party really has been purged of moderates now, I'd say that the GOP is going to be the much bigger roadblock to compromise than the left. They're more radical than ever. The Republican party is now led by Rush Limbaugh. There's nobody else. And when Obama reaches out his hand to Rush Limbaugh he's going to get it whacked off with a chainsaw, at which point, these villagers (who haven't even considered this political problem) are going to blame Obama for being unable to govern in a bipartisan fashion.
All over television this morning the gasbags seemed convinced that Obama had been elected to stop the left from ruining the country. And when it turns out to actually be his supposedly cooperative new partners in governance -- the right -- that stands in his way, they will blame him for being too far left. It's a trap.

This is unmitigated paranoid fantasy. Republicans could not be a "roadblock to compromise" if they wanted to. For better or worse, come Jan. 20, Democrats will run Washington without any effective opposition. Republicans will hold 174 seats in the House and 40 seats in the Senate, with three Senate seats -- Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia -- still in dispute. The GOP can't do anything in the House except complain, and the only influence they have in the Senate is a very shaky filibuster threat.

Pace the idiot bloggers, what has "gasbags" on TV worried is the possibility Obama's administration will be so radical as to spark a political reaction a la 1994. There is no "roadblock to compromise" because there is no GOP opposition powerful enough to require compromise. Democrats are in charge now, and Obama's media friends are worried he'll revert to his Trinity Church "god damn America" roots and alienate some of the 43% of white voters he got on Election Day.

James Joyner, elitist?

It ill behooves any graduate of Jacksonville (Ala.) State University to join up with the snob brigade against Sarah Palin, but at least my good buddy isn't vicious about it. If the other anti-Palinites were as mild and reasonable as Dr. Joyner, maybe I wouldn't want to punch them in the nose -- or sic Charlie Martin on them. Among other things, James says:

[C]onservatives ought to take the criticisms of more centrist Republicans to heart rather than making support for Palin some sort of litmus test. . .

Very good. I don't make it a litmus test -- Quin Hillyer is a conservative, a friend and a Palin critic -- and don't want anyone else to make it a litmus test. My objection is to the tone and content of specific criticisms, and particularly to any attempt to make her the scapegoat whose alleged defects exempts others from blame.

[T]he idea that she didn’t know much about foreign policy or the broader swath of national issues grew steadily starting from Team McCain’s decision to shelter her from the press and then blossomed into full force with horrible performances in the Katie Couric and Charles Gibson interviews.

Agreed. The problem was the "decision to shelter her from the press," which raised the stakes in the big one-on-one interviews. It is easier for a politician to dodge, or dismiss, a "gotcha" question in a press conference than in a one-on-one. The person at the lectern has more control at a press conference than does the subject of a one-on-one interview, who is really at the mercy of the questioner -- and the producers at the editing console.

I stressed, though — drawing comparison with Harriet Miers . . . that her résumé was thin for the office by recent standards.

The "recent standards" being Dick Cheney, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and George H.W. Bush, four names that take us back to 1981. In three of four of those instances (Cheney, Gore, Bush 41) the idea was to get a Washington establishment type to balance the "outsider" candidate (Bush 41, Clinton, Reagan). Quayle was a "movement" conservative intended to balance the un-conservative Bush. We can argue elsewhere the intent and meaning of the Palin pick, but Joyner's comparison of Palin to Miers is most unfortunate. What made Miers unacceptable was the phalanx of resistance from the Federalist Society, who are our conservative go-to guys for judicial selections. If a Republican appointee to the appelate courts doesn't pass muster with the Federalist Society, think, "Souter." Unacceptable.

[Palin supporter Bill Dyer is] much more of a populist and I’m much more of an elitist in terms of credentialing and expertise. . . .
I saw little evidence, though, that she’s very interested in foreign policy or most issues of American domestic policy.

These are certainly legitimate criticisms. Joyner is a specialist in defense policy, and I note that most of Palin's foes tend to come from the defense/foreign-policy sectors of the conservative -- or, as the vogue is, "center-right" -- coalition. But given that the GOP foreign policy establishment spent all of 2002 and 2003 up until the first strike on Baghdad telling us that the invasion of Iraq was an emergency imperative, that Saddam's WMD programs were an eminent danger to vital U.S. interests, I am certainly not the only conservative who now has a jaded view of the "Vulcans" and their vaunted expertise.

Furthermore, and I'm not sure I've argued this explicitly elsewhere before, I think it generally a political mistake to make foreign policy such an overwhelming emphasis in conservative politics as was the case after 9/11. Wars end, alliances shift, new threats emerge, but except in emergencies, it is difficult to get American voters to concentrate on foreign policy.

We saw how the conservative consensus of the Reagan years fell apart once the Soviet threat crumbled (and after Bush 41's tax hike and minimum wage increase caused a recession), and we've seen something similar during the Bush 43 presidency. In 2002 and 2004, Republicans made the fight against terrorism the fulcrum of the campaign, and succeeded. But by 2006, the trick didn't work any more, and it is possible to see the nomination of the war hero McCain this year as another failed attempt to re-run the "patriot hawks" vs. "traitor doves" game. If nothing else, people grow bored with that message eventually.

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.

Now, James can like or dislike Palin as a potential 2012 presidential candidate and it makes no difference to me. We can discuss that in mid-2011. But what some of Palin's other Republican critics are clearly and most objectionably trying to do is (a) make her the too-convenient scapegoat for the 2008 defeat, and (b) so damage her as to assure that she is not viable for 2012.
There is a difference between merely being mistaken and consciously doing evil. James and I and Bill Dyer can argue about Palin's merits and demerits, and any of us may be mistaken in our judgments, but the smear-mongers sabotaging Palin from inside the McCain campaign have engaged in something else entirely.

Losing Althouse

Ann Althouse offers a very interesting confirmation of my assertion -- the subject of a much-criticized American Spectator column Oct. 7 -- that it was his Sept. 24 bailout stunt that cost McCain the election:

September24: . . . After hearing from Obama, I view McCain as having pulled a stunt, a stunt that he should have seen would be ineffective.
September 25: I find Palin's interview with Katie Couric "Painful. Terrible." Yet McCain wants the VP debate to go first. She's not ready, and he's throwing out impulsive, erratic ideas.
September 25, a little later: I'm impressed by Mickey Kaus's mockery of McCain's stunt. . . .

Now, Althouse is a law professor who can hardly be taken as representative of "swing" voters in general, but there is something important going on here. While she originally thought McCain's stunt was clever, she changed her mind once she saw Obama's reaction. Which is to say that it was the contrast between the two men that was decisive.

Notice also how the disastrous Couric interview with Palin (arranged by the worse-than-useless Nicolle Devenish Wallace) aired almost contemporaneously with the bailout stunt, so that the effect of the two events cannot be disentangled in the ultimate chain of causation. (This disaster is "over-determined" to borrow social-science jargon from Rich Lowry.)

The Blame Sarah First crowd would have you believe that Palin exercised a negative effect independent of Maverick's own shaky performance, a negative effect that had more to do with her objective qualifications (or lack thereof) than with Team Maverick's thorough botch of her press relations.

Althouse, who was sympathetic to Obama from the start, was pushed toward the GOP ticket by Palin's nomination, even though she remained steadily turned-off by McCain's incoherence. (See her entry for Sept. 7.) As much as she disliked the Couric-Palin interview (thanks again, Nicolle!), it was really McCain's bailout stunt, symptomatic of his general incoherence, that provided the decisive shift. Her reaction to McCain's debate performance is entirely negative.

Non-partisan likeability
This all goes back to what I've been saying for weeks. If you are a genuinely independent voter -- an "Ordinary American," someone who in all honesty might vote for a candidate of either party -- then ultimately you are going to vote on your general impression of the candidates. Before the 2004 election, I wrote an article (available only in PDF) for the moderate Republican journal Ripon Forum, in which I pointed out the "likeability" factor as trumping the sort of demographic microanalysis favored by pundits:

The big picture is left out of this microscopic calculus: Head to head, side by side, which one of these men does the electorate actually like?
Whatever his failings, Mr. Bush is basically likeable. This was a key factor in 2000, and is prominent again in 2004. His basic likeability is now giving Democrats nightmares. When the infamous Iowa "scream" derailed the energetic Howard Dean's Democratic primary campaign, esablishment Democrats quickly jumped aboard the John Kerry bandwagon. But once Mr. Kerry secured his party's nomination, Democrats were dismayed to note that they faced a repeat of the 2000 election: A stiff, pompous, boring Democrat competing with the aw-shucks charm of a smiling Texan.

That "aw-shucks charm" seems to have passed its sell-by date shortly after Bush's re-election, but the basic point remains sound: Independent voters, who ultimately decide presidential elections and "swing" the swing states, really do act on the entirely irrational belief that by watching a man talk on TV, they can judge his fitness for the presidency. To the eternal consternation of pundits and policy wonks, the fine details of policy that motivate intellectuals and ideologues have little to do with persuading undecided, independent "swing" voters.

This is what has frustrated me about the McCain candidacy since the primaries. (Some) Republicans and (some) ideologues viewed his candidacy through rose-colored glasses: McCain was a heroic patriot whose POW biography would rally conservatives, while his "Maverick" image would sufficiently distance him from the Bush-damaged Republican brand. In hindsight, everybody seems to realize that this view was mistaken, without realizing why it was mistaken.

John McCain is not likeable, not by the standards of telegenic likeability that have prevailed since the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate. I have friends who've met the senator (a distant relative I call "Crazy Cousin John") and genuinely like the man. But he is old and bald and comes across on TV as grumpy. This is why, much to horror of my True Believer conservative friends, I ultimately favored Mitt Romney in the GOP primaries. In politics, ceteris parabus, tall, rich and handsome beats old, bald and grumpy any day of the week.

This is not to say that policy and ideology are irrelevant, but the party and the movement whose icon is the amiable erstwhile movie cowboy Ronald Reagan ought never to discount the importance of having persuasive, likeable spokesmen -- and spokeswomen, too, which is why I'm so big on Sarah Palin.

Our Sarah didn't fare too well with independent voters in 2008 (if you believe the polls, which no True Believer ever does), but then again, Reagan wasn't exactly a darling of the "swing" voters in 1976. And, yes, the True Believers are shuddering in rage at the audacity of comparing Palin to Reagan, but they should reserve their rage for those who compare Obama to Reagan. Don't pretend we don't know which comparison Reagan would find more insulting.

If Palin lacks (or seems to lack) the kind of sturdy intellectual commitments that Reagan possessed -- another hindsight judgment that few would have granted the Gipper in '76 -- it cannot be denied that she possesses in great measure his down-to-earth likeability. Having excoriated McCain and Schmidt and the rest of Team Maverick for their boneheaded blunders, I yet give them full credit for seeing Palin's natural political talent.

God-given talent
When I was a sportswriter in North Georgia in the late '80s, Calhoun High School football coach Johnny Gulledge remarked that "you can't coach a 4.4 forty." That is to say, the kind of speed that can run 40 yards in 4.4 seconds is a God-given talent for which a winning coach gets credit when the speedster is his starting running back, but for which he gets blamed when that speed is on the other team. (Gulledge's teams were plagued by a shortage of speed in those years.)

My American Spectator colleague Quin Hillyer has joined others in asserting that Palin's electric effect on the Republican base was essentially a fluke, that any good running-mate pick would have excited the conservative grassroots in this otherwise bleak season for the GOP. With all due respect, I disagree. What some call a fluke, I see as . . . well, something else. (Perhaps you're familiar with the Veggie Tales episode where Pa Grape's niece saves them from the Island of Perpetual Tickling. Perhaps not.) Sneer at "populism" all you want, but I know what I believe.

For such a time as this, you might say, Palin's choice was hardly a fluke. She was the Miracle Worker, the Sweetheart of the Heartland, and if you were not there in Shippensburg to see those people standing in that cold wind, you can be forgiven if you don't get it. But let them that have eyes see:

What do you mean 'we,' Kemosabe?

P.J. O'Rourke ruminates on "our" failure, applying the first person plural to what "conservatives" did, or did not do. Many of his criticisms are fair, and many of his jokes are funny, but O'Rourke suffers as badly as anyone from the common confusion over who and what is meant by "conservative." His paragraph on immigration is an example:

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job.

When was a policy of border security seriously undertaken by the federal government? Under Reagan? Bush 41? Bush 43? So "conservatives" are blamed for a supposedly unworkable policy that has never even been attempted. And the idiocy of the Bush proposal to turn illegals into citizens is that people who don't obey immigration laws are not likely to obey naturalization laws.

Behold the incoherence of conservative discourse, with O'Rourke bashing a cartoon stereotype of Buchananite policy proposals (policies that, to repeat, have never actually been attempted nor even proposed by any Republican administration) in a magazine that would never publish anything by Pat Buchanan himself. And meanwhile, over at The American Conservative, they're bashing away at cartoon stereotypes of neoconservative foreign policy.

This epic battle of factional strawmen has been going on for years, with purges and counter-purges and ex-communications until conservatism looks like the Sharks and Jets going at it in West Side Story. (I've sometimes thought I should write a memoir entitled First They Came for Mel Bradford: Neo, Paleo, Me-o, but I don't know that enough people would get the joke to justify publication.)

Ordinary American voters can be forgiven their confusion that resulted in, inter alia, 54% of Catholics voting for Obama. "Conservatives" speak in a self-contradictory cacophony, the ideological label applied willy-nilly to politicians and policies, to include at various times Chuck Hagel and Joe Lieberman, Tamar Jacoby and Peter Brimelow, Chris Cox and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Doug Kmeic and Judie Brown.

Average voters don't pay enough attention to politics to differentiate among the Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors of conservatism. One survey found that 41% of CNN viewers don't know that Democrats hold a majority in Congress. Anecdotes from focus groups indicate that voters hold wildly inaccurate perceptions about politics. But pretty much everybody knows George W. Bush is a Republican, and they overwhelmingly hate him.

The problem with conservative intellectuals (and O'Rourke would qualify as such) is that they presume a far more informed electorate than actually exists. They therefore look at elections and imagine that voters are rejecting specific policy positions with which voters are, in fact, entirely unfamiliar.

Talk to any genuine independent voter and you will always hear them say they "vote for the man, not the party." So when independent voters swing sharply against the grumpy old bald guy, this cannot be viewed as a referendum on conservatism so much as it is a referendum on grumpy old bald guys. (Which is why the idiots who backed Rudy Giuliani in the primaries were . . . well, idiots. Giuliani is slightly less grumpy than McCain, but equally bald and almost as old.)

Republican "brand damage" or "Bush fatigue" -- the two phenomena are related, if not entirely coterminous -- translates to a relatively slight marginal difference in the partisan loyalties of voters. A few million people who used to be solid Republicans now call themselves "independent," and a few million former independents now call themselves Democrats. So the electorate goes from 51% Republican to 46% Republican in the space of four years.

This shift, however, cannot be blamed on conservatives if, by "conservative," you mean the average Rush Limbaugh listener. Limbaugh didn't tell Tom DeLay, Bob Ney and Ralph Reed to crawl into bed with Jack Abramoff. Limbaugh didn't tell Mark Foley to send e-mails to House pages. Limbaugh didn't tell Larry Craig to play footsie with that Minneapolis airport cop. Limbaugh adamantly opposed John McCain's nomination, and Limbaugh wasn't the one who advised McCain to suspend his campaign and endorse the bailout.

There is a hugely unjust process by which influential "conservatives" are scapegoating others for their own policies -- the likes of "Cakewalk Ken" Adelman and "Bailout Ben" Bernanke endorsing Obama, for example. Those whose ideas caused the Republican disaster exempt themselves from responsibility by casting aspersions on critics who opposed their disastrous ideas, so that Steve Schmidt points the finger at House Republicans who voted against a $700 bailout that Schmidt insisted McCain must endorse -- even though polls clearly showed voters disapproved of the bailout!

Conservatism has suffered mainly from an ideological inferiority complex, one that Ronald Reagan alluded to in 1964:

Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we are denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we are always "against" things, never "for" anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.

Exactly. Conservatism can be defined adequately as "opposition to liberalism," both in terms of general philosophy and specific policy proposals. To be against "the schemes of the do-gooders" ought to count as sufficient wisdom for conservatives, given that (a) the schemes will do no good, and (b) the "good" is subject to dispute anyway.

Conservatives don't need a global-warming plan, or a poverty plan, or a health-care plan. We ought to be arguing instead that the problems liberals now "plan" to solve are either non-existent (e.g., global warming) or else are largely the result of the last generation's liberal "plan." But the inferiority complex of conservative intellectuals requires that they offer up plans of their own to address these problems -- problems that have nothing to do with the just powers of a constitutionally limited government, the true meaning of the Constitution being the main thing we conservatives ought to be trying to conserve!

Instead of arguing over what a massive, expensive, insolvent government with unlimited powers should be doing, why don't we instead argue that the government is too big, too expensive and too powerful? That was what I signed up for. What about you?

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden responds to O'Rourke:

He makes some points, but seems to suffer from the very Democratic view that everything should be knowable in advance, executed with judicious hindsight, denounced if it encountered problems, and subject to ideological purity standards, especially where Republicans are concerned. And that northeastern elites should keep their country cousins off the nice furniture.

Glad that Crittenden recognized O'Rourke's digs at the "country cousins," which I had not targeted because I didn't want to draw the accusation of special pleading. But it certainly is worth observing that most of these cri de coeurs about the failure of conservatism are not coming from people who live in places where Republicans actually won.

Politically (as opposed to philosophically) the conservative center of gravity has always resided in the South and West, and among people pissed off at the Washington establishment. One can trace this theme from Barry Goldwater to Howard Jarvis to Jerry Falwell to Rush Limbaugh to Jim Gilchrist.

The Southern and Western political brawn of the conservative movement, however, has tended to empower a class of conservative intellectuals who have nothing in common with -- and who act as if they are embarrassed by -- the actual voters who make possible conservative governance. (Yes, David Brooks, I'm talking about you.)

This disconnect between conservative voters and conservative elites is deeply implicated in the incoherence that has come to typify the movement over the past 20 years. The people whose votes elect Republicans are never allowed to speak for the Republican Party. Stan Evans famously observed of conservative politicians in Washington that, by the time any of "our people" get into a position to do any good, they're not our people anymore. But regarding the contemporary class of intellectual conservatives, I'm not sure that they were ever our people to begin with.

UPDATE II: A big thank you to Kathy Shaidle and Sondrak for the linkage.

UPDATE III: LGF -- which lately has been trying to purge Pam Geller as a Nazi (!) sympathizer -- doesn't mind saying "we blew it." And I argee: You blew it. And in fact, you still blow. Purge-happy partisan fanatics! Purge the Buchananites! Purge the libertarians! Purge the creationists! Purge the pro-lifers! Bobby Jindal is "political suicide!"

Purge, purge, purge, until the Republican Party is only you, and then maybe people will understand that this was your objective from the very beginning, you intolerant assholes. I am reminded of Bob Barr's description of the more fanatical Libertarian purists -- they don't want to belong to the Libertarian Party, they want to belong to the Libertarian Club.

Let these purging purists have their way, and you can plan to hold the 2012 Republican convention in Charles Johnson's living room. And I'll vote Libertarian again.

Hurricane Britney hits Louisiana

Been neglecting the celebrity news lately, but here's something interesting:

Britney Spears arrived Friday in Louisiana with her sons for a family visit to her hometown in Kentwood.
It was the first time the 26-year-old singer was allowed to take Preston, 3, and Jayden, 2, out of California since losing all custody rights earlier this year to ex-husband Kevin Federline.
"This is a terrific indication of the progress she's made, and the growing trust between the two parents," says a source close to Spears. "It was arranged cooperatively between Kevin and the lawyers."
Reports that Britney spent Saturday night passed out drunk in a trailer park could not be confirmed.

Maybe I made up that last part.

WaPo admits pro-Obama bias

The Washington Post (Pravda on the Potomac) has never been as liberal as the New York Times (Ivestia on the Hudson), but it is liberal, and Deborah Howell is OK with that.

Ironic news of the day

Warren Buffett, who backed Obama for president, has seen his Berkshire Hathaway profits decline 77 percent in the third quarter. His reward? Named to Obama's economic advisory board.

Mayor becomes ugly woman mayor

A change you can believe in:

The first time Stu Rasmussen was elected mayor of Silverton, Ore., he wore shirts and pants. This time around, after a landslide victory, he will be stepping into office donning a dress and makeup.
Rasmussen was recently elected as America's first transgender mayor. . . .
My primary platform was low growth," he said, referring to his support for keeping the town small. "We had other issues I thought were not being properly addressed."

Let's be honest: With a face like that, the chances of Mayor It being involved in a sex scandal are practically zero. Then again, that's what they said about Eliot Spitzer . . .

Palin the assassin?

Tim Shipman's secondhand reporting twists a nothing of a story into a scary headline:

Sarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service over death threats against Barack Obama

But you read down into the story and there's nothing to support the lede except:

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks. . . .
The revelations, contained in a Newsweek history of the campaign, are likely to further damage Mrs Palin's credentials as a future presidential candidate. She is already a frontrunner, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, to take on Mr Obama in four years time.

"Revelations," eh? Let's take a look at what that Newsweek story actually says, shall we?

"I'm worried," Gregory Craig said to a NEWSWEEK reporter in mid-October. He was concerned that the frenzied atmosphere at the Palin rallies would encourage someone to do something violent toward Obama. He was not the only one in the Obama campaign thinking the unthinkable. The campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October. Michelle was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. "Why would they try to make people hate us?" she asked Valerie Jarrett.

Except for the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, there is no reason to connect (a) Sarah Palin with (b) assassination threats against Obama. You've got Democratic operative Craig (whom we remember from the Clinton impeachment) who's worried about the "atmosphere" at Palin rallies. Then you've got a post-Labor Day increase in threats against Obama. And . . . that's it?

That all death threats are made by subnormal mouth-breathers, I take as a given. (If you really want to assassinate somebody, you don't make threats. Sirhan Sirhan -- to whom Bill Ayers dedicated a book -- didn't make threats.) The only threat against Obama that actually led to arrests was made by a couple 0f teenage losers in Memphis, Tenn., a place where Sarah Palin never campaigned. There was nothing Sarah Palin said or did that was responsible for threats against Obama. If the threats spiked up after Labor Day, it was only because subnormal mouth-breathers don't pay attention to elections until after Labor Day.

Newsweek clearly is trying to peddle a disgusting smear by the Obama camp, and in the process take out a potential future rival. Tim Shipman merely makes explicit what Newsweek implied, but it's like Oakland -- there's no "there" there. The Secret Service did not -- repeat, did not -- blame Sarah Palin for threats against Obama, and Shipman's story is thus a lie.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Not a sore loser, just a loser

McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt explains that it's not his fault:

The moment that I will look back at as the moment deep in my gut that I knew, was September 29, when I was flying on a plane with Governor Palin to Sedona for debate prep, watching the split screen on the TVs . . . and it showed the stock market down seven, eight hundred points; it showed the Congress voting down the bailout package on the other side, and then, House Republicans went out and told the world that the reason that they voted against this legislation, allowed the stock market to crash, allowed the economy to be so injured, was because Nancy Pelosi had given a mean and partisan speech on the floor. And this was their response. And I just viewed it as beyond devastating, and thought that at that moment running with an "R" next to your name, in this year, was probably lethal.

Got that? House Republicans "allowed the stock market to crash," and that's why John McCain lost, rather than because of Schmidt's insistence on Sept. 24 that the candidate suspend the campaign, call for a postponement of the debate, and fly to Washington to push for the unpopular $700 billion bailout. Classic.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Why Palin won't wait

At the Corner and at Politico, campaign staffers fight the smears against Sarah Palin. Allahpundit rounds it up with a long exit question suggesting (a) "social issues" won't matter in 2012, and (b) there's no reason why Palin can't wait until 2016, or later, to take her shot at the Big One.

OK, I'll bite. Regarding (a), we have no idea what the political landscape will look like in 2012. Nobody in 2004 -- except, perhaps, Barack Obama -- imagined how off-message and unpopular the GOP would be in 2008. I have never thought of Palin as a one-dimensional social conservative. She describes herself as a fiscal conservative and, considering what the Democrats are likely to do with Obama in the White House, a reformist governor with a strong fiscal-conservative message running as an "outsider" looks like a smart bet for 2012. (Yes, that could also describe Bobby Jindal.)

Regarding (b), recall that in Bill Clinton wasn't on anybody's radar screen in 1990. But a lot of Democratic contenders were scared out of the race when Bush's popularity zoomed during Desert Storm, so that Clinton won the nomination against a relatively weak field. Likewise, in 2006, the possibility that Obama could challenge and beat Hillary Clinton for the 2008 nomination seemed remote, And, more recently, in July 2007, John McCain's campaign was bankrupt and people were writing his political obituary.

When you get your shot, you take your shot. It's obvious Palin has got a shot in 2012, and she'd be a fool to pass it up. Trying to conjure reasons why she shouldn't take the shot isn't going to keep her from taking it.

Of course, we're getting way ahead of the game here. Starting Jan. 20, conservatives are going to have their hands full trying to stop the Obamafication of America. We'll have a couple of years to watch the kind of moves Palin makes, she'll have a couple of years to take a look at the situation, and around December 2010 -- assuming that opposition to Obama is still legal -- she'll decide whether to greenlight a campaign for 2012. But I bet money she goes for it.

Roll Tide!

Dadgum, it wasn't pretty, but a win's a win, when you're playing at Baton Rouge. No. 1 Alabama gutted it out for a 27-21 overtime win over a tough LSU team. My brother said, "Don't they know I'm on blood pressure medication?"

With the score tied 21-21 and about 2 minutes left in regulation, a 22-yard punt return by Javier Arenas set the Crimson Tide up at the LSU 41. Four plays later, on second-and-2 from the Tigers' 22, a face-masking penalty gave 'Bama a first down at the LSU 12. Three plays later, as time expired, Van Tiffin tried a 29-yard field goal, but it was blocked.

In overtime, LSU quarterback Jarrett Lee tried for a touchdown pass but was intercepted in the end zone by Alabama safety Rashad Johnson. Tide QB John Parker Wilson hit Julio Jones for 24 yards and then put it in the end zone on a quarterback sneak from the 1-yard-line.

Not a pretty game, by any means, but another "W," and I'll take it. Now Alabama is 10-0 and controls their own destiny -- four more wins, and they're national champions. Just take 'em one at a time.

'Rebuild the Party'

Several of my friends -- including Erick Erickson, Matt Lewis, Jon Henke, and J.P. Freire -- have formed Rebuild the Party, an effort to construct an online-based project to modernize and strengthen the Republican Party.

Commenter Rae says, "I don't see R.S. McCain on their coalition list." Correct. I wasn't asked to participate. It's a Young Turks organization, and I'm 20 years older than most of those guys. (Yesterday, I was talking to a conservative activist, a guy about my age, regarding the Old Guard and the Young Turks, and he referred to himself as a "Medium Turk," which is an apt description.)

I'm not the "joiner" type, anyway. I work for money, and don't much go for that volunteer True Believer stuff: Save the Whales, Save Darfur, Save the GOP. As a professional journalist, of course, I'll be interested in covering their project, and certainly wish them success. The Republican Party is such a wretched mess nowadays it's hard even to imagine how it could be fixed.

So NOW the NYT is fair to Palin

Once the election is over, the New York Times provides something in the neighborhood of factual reporting about Sarah Palin. They couldn't have allowed facts to get in the way of anonymous smears and tendentious misrepresentation so long as it was possible that The One might be hurt by the truth. Fausta Wertz has a nice roundup on today's Palin news, and says:

Part of Palin’s appeal to people like me is that she tells it like it is, unlike the current convoluted language in the media and the upcoming administration.

She links Doug Ross who says about media bias:

Put simply, there appears to be only a turnstile between a Democratic administration and a cushy media job.

For a couple of weeks, I've been trying to think of how to boil down into a single column exactly how the Republican Party has blown its media-relations operation over the past decade. What does the GOP do wrong? Well, "everything" might be a short summary.

If the media is 90% liberal (and it's close to that), this means that there are relatively few opportunities for Republicans to hire campaign operatives who have actual newsroom experience. So you've got people running press relations who don't have the faintest clue about what motivates reporters.

Out on the trail covering McCain and Palin, you could not miss the campaign staff's vibe of hostility (or perhaps a defensive fear) toward the press corps -- a hostility returned with interest by reporters who were tired of being fed press releases, shuttled around to scripted events, and denied direct access to the candidates. The campaign would set up a "pen" for the press, and any reporter who wandered outside the pen to try to get some "local color" quotes from the crowd was apt to be confronted with an officious staffer telling him to get back where he belonged. (This happened to me in Lebanon, Ohio, though I eventually managed to elude the staff and do some reporting despite them.)

Obama's campaign was run by David Axelrod, who spent 8 years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and has a thick Rolodex of press contacts. The success of the Obama campaign had a lot to do with the amazing ability of Team Hope to get the press to frame its coverage to reflect exactly the spin the Obama campaign wanted. And a big part of that was Axelrod working the phones with reporters and editors in a collegial manner.

The poisoned relationship between the media and the Republican Party is not entirely the fault of the media. There must be some secret school somewhere that trains Republican operatives to treat reporters like crap. But it's infinitely easier for GOP officials to whine about "media bias" than to admit the fact that they don't know what the hell they're doing when it comes to press relations.

Just in case any campaign operative happens to be reading this, let me explain something to you: When a news organization spends money to send a reporter to cover your event, they're doing you a favor. It's free publicity, and you need to show some evidence that you appreciate it. Self-important staffers are apt to get confused about the nature of this nexus between themselves and reporters, and to imagine that they're the ones doing reporters a favor simply by allowing reporters to cover the campaign.

Now if I, a conservative journalist, perceived that kind of condescending attitude coming from the McCain campaign staff, don't you think the liberal reporters caught it? And don't you think it rankled?

Flacks and hacks
Since I'm on this rant, how about I give you miserable little staff punks some insight into the journalistic mind, OK? You have no idea how infinitely inferior you are to an experienced reporter, in that reporter's mind. You're just another P.R. flack, another publicist trying to promote a product, no different than the insignificant people who flood the mailboxes of every newrsoom in America with press releases. If there is one attitude more prevalent in the newsroom than liberal bias, it is a profound contempt for publicity-seekers, a category that most emphatically includes politicians.

Some of my best friends are P.R. people and over the years, I've come to appreciate what it is they do, and how they do it. I've been schmoozed by the best in the business, and recognize the symbiotic relationship between reporters and publicists. But I'm a rarity in that regard, and the reporter's natural resentment of P.R. flacks is aggravated by our knowledge that the flacks are getting paid more by their clients than we hacks in the press corps are getting paid to cover whatever it is you're trying to promote.

This flacks-and-hacks dynamic exists at every level of journalism down to the tiniest weekly paper. Reporters everywhere learn from Day One on the job to be unimpressed by politicians and other publicity-seekers, to think themselves superior to, say, a county commissioner or a city manager. This innate arrogance of the press may seem objectionable, but the only possibility for objective news is a reporter who is not overawed or intimidated by the people he's reporting about. (Something the Obamaphiliacs in the press corps ought to consider.)

Political reporters are self-consciously the elite of the journalistic profession. They have a deep disdain for the "lifestyle" feature writers, the slobs on the sports desk, etc. The guy who covers political news for a daily in Pittsburgh or St. Louis is going to see his byline on the front page almost daily. He's the Big Dog in the newsroom, the ace, and everybody knows it. And if he somehow manages to work his way up to the major leagues of journalism -- the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Reuters, U.S. News & World Report -- well, it doesn't exactly encourage humility.

The arrogance of TV reporters is far, far worse, in part because TV reporters make so much more money than print reporters, and in part because the TV guys are genuinely famous. Some guy who began his career covering brush fires in Kansas was a local TV star -- a bona fide celebrity -- from the time his first story aired in whatever piss-ant town he started in. By the time he makes it to the status of network political correspondent covering a presidential campaign, by God, he thinks he's the next Cronkite. (Except more hip and sexy.)

The campaign to nowhere
Now, try to put yourself in the shoes of these reporters, out on the road covering a presidential campaign, their news organizations being billed thousands of dollars for travel expenses, their editors expecting big scoops and hard news and -- nothing.

A hotel, a bus, an airplane, a bus, and their reward is to be herded into a pen with all the other reporters so that they can do stenography about a speech at a rally that's no different than the speech at yesterday's rally. Never a press conference, never a chance to get five minutes of one-on-one time with the candidate. And the whole time, they're being fed a bland diet of press releases, conference calls and -- if they're lucky -- some not-for-attribution bullshit from a "senior campaign official."

This was what the McCain campaign gave the press corps day after day. And except for a few weeks of doubt in September, these reporters were quite aware they were covering a losing campaign that -- by all normal logic of public relations -- should have been only too eager to curry favor with the press. But as Newsweek reported:

McCain would want to head back to the reporters' section of the plane, and Davis would pull him back. "No, no, no, I want them around me," McCain would say, referring to the reporters. "No, no, no, they're screwing you," Davis would retort. At McCain's insistence, his new campaign plane this past summer had been fitted with a large bench-style couch, to re-create the space on the Straight Talk Express bus, where the candidate had spent hours jawing on the record with reporters, half a dozen or so at a time. But reporters were never asked to sit there. McCain did not look happy about being kept on a tight leash, as least as far as reporters could tell from a distance.

Common sense, and even the slightest consideration of the reporter's point of view, tells you why any strategy of secluding candidates from the press contributes to bad coverage for Republicans. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer" -- this is good advice for dealing with hostile reporters. The guy who files an unfair, inaccurate story needs to be confronted directly by the candidate. Not with an angry rant, but with a calm, cheerful appeal to the reporter's conscience. (Yes, even reporters have consciences.) "C'mon, Jim -- gimme a break here. That was wrong, and you ought to be honest and fair."

The crutch of 'bias'
As ridiculously liberal as most reporters are, they usually pride themselves on being factual and fair. And as arrogant as they (we) are, journalists are human beings who respond better if treated like human beings than treated like cattle.

I love Rush Limbaugh, but when I hear him talking about the "drive-by media," and then see otherwise intelligent conservatives proclaim that the Old Media are irrelevant, I fear that we are surrendering to an attitude of defeatism. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that Republicans can do nothing to improve their media relations operation, and you act on that belief by treating reporters like crap, I can guarantee that GOP media relations will not improve.

At some point, whining about media bias becomes an all-purpose excuse for Republican Party failures. It's a crutch that weakens the party by allowing incompetent campaign operatives to externalize blame for their own screwups. And it violates one of Ronald Reagan's most basic principles:

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

Suppose that, by intelligent and patient hard work, the GOP could reduce media bias by 5 percent or 10 percent. The playing field would still be tilted against Republicans, but it would be more like walking up a steep hill, rather than trying to scale a sheer cliff.

Grassroots conservatives need to stop blaming everything on the media, and start taking a more critical look at the hired help on these campaigns, the clueless political cronies -- e.g., Tucker Bounds -- who have done so much to poison the GOP's relationship with the press corps. Being Jill Hazelbaker's ex-boyfriend is no substitute for competence.

They really are desperate

John McCormack calls it the most implausible Palin smear yet, and it is rather odd:

The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska. The McCain campaign ordered her onstage at the next campaign stop, but she refused to acknowledge the two Republican candidates standing behind her.

As McCormack points out, Bradley's opposition to ANWR drilling is the same is Joh McCain's opposition to ANWR drilling, and Sununu has a 100% right-to-life voting record, so that doesn't make sense at all.

On the other hand, now that I think about it, I don't remember Palin putting in plugs for local Republican officials when I saw her in Ohio and Pennsylvania. This routine of name-checking local officials at the beginning of a speech is essential to the presidential campaign business. (You remember Joe Biden's infamous "stand up, Chuck" moment with Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham.) And if Palin were indeed averse to that sort of political routine, it might lend credibility to this tidbit in the Newsweek story:

"McCain's advisers had been frustrated when Palin refused to talk to donors because she found it corrupting . . ."

Here, now, is a charge that would be gravely serious, if true. Political campaigns and political parties live or die by fundraising, and schmoozing donors is a basic function of what candidates do.

The candidate is handed a list of names and numbers with a bit of biographical information about each, and the amount of their previous donations, and he picks up the phone and starts "dialing for dollars" as it is called. And then, out on the trail, at each rally, there is a private VIP reception where the top local donors are rewarded with face-time and a chance for a grip-and-grin photo with the candidate.

This is the inescapable reality of politics, and the best politicians tend to excel at this kind of stuff. Over the course of time, these kind of personal contacts add up to a solid base of support. Bill Clinton famously built his political career in Arkansas by compiling a file of 5"x7" cards with donor/supporter information.

Surely, Palin has not succeeded in politics without knowing how important it is to do all this, but if -- as the implausible Newsweek story asserts -- she didn't know it, somebody had better wise her up in a hurry. She will be (or at least, ought to be) the No. 1 attraction at Republican fundraising events in 2009, an eviable opportunity to build her base of support among GOP bigwigs, and she needs to make the most of it.

Comparison test

All along, I've said that the best strategy for the McCain campaign in the Sarah Palin rollout would have been to put Palin into a press conference, rather than to hide her from reporters for weeks while sending "campaign spokesmen" out to defend her. Let's put that idea to the test, shall we?

Here is Sarah Palin in a Friday press conference:

And here is McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds at the GOP convention in September:

You can make up your own mind, but as for me, I don't ever want to see the name "Tucker Bounds" associated with the Republican Party again. That boy just needs to find himself a new line of work.

Palin & Romney, Tessio & Barzini

There was a time when the worst thing one Republican could say about another was that he was aligned with "the Eastern Establishment," a "Rockefeller Republican." A few years later, accusing your GOP rival of favoring detente with the Soviets was the favorite submarine tactic.

Now? If you really want to undercut a Republican antagonist's conservative credibility, accuse him of spreading dirt about Sarah Palin, as Marc Ambinder notes:

Rumor: Aides and advisers to Mitt Romney are responsible for spreading most of the anti-Palin stories that have been going around; during the campaign, they pressured reporters to look into reports of tension between McCain and Palin factions. . . .
Palin is the most popular figure in the Republican Party right now, and if you want a future in that party, you can't be seen as spreading gossip about her.

The rumors are mostly false, Ambinder says, but this raises the question, Who's spreading this smear? My guess: The McCain aides who bashed Palin are now the ones trying to hang the blame on the Romneyites.

So it's like Tessio proposing a meeting with Barzini: Any McCain aide blaming Romney thereby becomes identified as an anti-Palin traitor.

Applying to this situation the logic of Sherlock Holmes and the dog who did not bark, therefore, I observe that Nicolle Wallace has reportedly denied being the anti-Palin leaker and ask: Did Nicolle Wallace ever say anything nice about Mitt? (Let the folks at Operation Leper take note.)

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

UPDATE: Via Hot Air, this video:

The Anarchy of Hope

Laws? We don't need no stinkin' laws!

At least five people were arrested across the city after Barack Obama's rally in Grant Park, including a woman who slapped a Chicago police officer, saying police couldn't arrest her anymore, prosecutors said today.
Most of the others celebrated the historic occasion with gunfire.
Celita Hart, 19, stood silently in court today when she appeared for a bond hearing.
Prosecutors said Hart, who is black, yelled " 'White [expletive], [expletive] McCain--you white police can't do nothing anymore.'" With that, she reached through the window of a squad car and slapped a white male officer in the face, according to Assistant State's Atty. Lorraine Scaduto.

In the mind of his most ardent supporters, that is indeed what the election of Obama means: "You white police can't do nothing anymore."

Who says Libertarians don't count?

Libertarian Party candidate Allen Buckley got 127,723 votes (3%) in the Georgia Senate race, enough to throw Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss into a runoff with Democrat Jim Martin.

Chambliss voted for the $700 billion bailout. Should have listened to me, senator!

UPDATE: Ace wants his readers to donate to save Chambliss's seat. I'm having a hard time working up any real enthusiasm for that. His constituents were bombarding his offices with phone calls and e-mails begging him to oppose the bailout. He didn't listen. He pays the price. And if part of the price is a veto-proof Senate majority for Obama, well . . . whose fault is that?

These out-of-touch big-government Republicans commit political suicide and then come running to the conservative base expecting help. Screw 'em. Sen. Richard Shelby provided a solid argument for his vote against the bailout. Why didn't Saxby Chambliss listen?

UPDATE II: I've been watching this YouTube video of the last debate with Chambliss, Martin and Buckley, and you can see how Buckley (an attorney and CPA) slams Chambliss from the right. Martin -- he's just feeble. Should have been a Buckley-Chambliss runoff. And if I still lived in Georgia I'd have voted for Buckley, who at least tells the truth about entitlements bankrupting the country.

'Compassionate' idiocy

Dick Armey suggests that conservatives get out of the "compassion" racket:

Parties are all about getting people elected to political office; and the practice of politics too often takes the form of professional juvenile delinquency: short-sighted and self-centered.
This was certainly true of the Bush presidency. Too often the policy agenda was determined by short-sighted political considerations and an abiding fear that the public simply would not understand limited government and expanded individual freedoms. How else do we explain "compassionate conservatism," No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit and the most dramatic growth in federal spending since LBJ's Great Society?
John McCain has long suffered from philosophical confusions about free markets, and his presidential campaign reflected as much. Most striking was his inability to explain his own health-care proposal, or to defend his tax cuts and tax reform. Ultimately, it took a plumber from Ohio to identify the real nature of Barack Obama's plan to "spread the wealth."

Amen, Brother Dick. This is a point I made about "the triangulation of Hope" -- if people don't know what "conservative" means, how are they going to know a liberal when they see one?

Sarah Palin to speak at CPAC

Just got off the phone with Lisa DePasquale, director of the Conservative Political Action Conference, who tells me that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is confirmed as a speaker at CPAC 2009, Feb. 26-28 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC.

REGISTER NOW FOR CPAC 2009! To register by phone call 703-836-8602.