Category Archives: Politics

Nixon and the Conservative Ascendancy

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With the completion of his forthcoming Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein (personal | blog) has really outdone himself. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus was a mere 671 pages long. Nixonland will be in tomb-territory at just short of 900 and it sounds like it is approaching a grand theory of contemporary American politics level of analysis.

Not being a member of the advanced copy, galley proof gravy train, I am relying on Ross Douthat’s very interesting review in the current Atlantic (“E Pluribus Nixon,” vol. 301, no. 4, May 2008, pp.83-86). He has a lot to say but his last few column inches sum up are the chewiest morsels:

And yet one doesn’t have to excuse Nixon’s many sins to wonder whether his mix of ruthlessness, self-interest and low cunning might have been preferable to some of the alternatives on offer. … It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reaganites and Clintonians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok.

In this climate, the voters didn’t choose Nixon over some neoconservative or neoliberal FDR; no such figure was available. They chose Nixon over an exhausted establishment on the one hand — nobody seems more hapless in Nixonland that figures like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller — and the fantasy politics of left and right on the other. They chose Nixon over the abyss.

Perlstein sometimes seems to suggest that Nixon was the abyss, and that by choosing him we vanished into it. But this misunderstands contemporary America, and it misunderstands Dick Nixon. A cynic in an age of zeal, a politician without principle at a moment that valued ideological purity above all, he was too small a man to threaten the republic. His corruptions were too petty; his schemes too penny-ante; and his spirit too cowardly, too self-interested, too venal to make him truly dangerous. And he was a bridge, thank God, to better times. Could America have done better? Perhaps. But on the evidence of Nixonland, we could have done far worse as well.

In a certain sense I imagine this as of a piece with Sean Wilentz’s also forthcoming The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, which incidentally picks up where Mr. Perlstein’s story leaves off. Both books seem important analyses of the most outstanding fact of the present political era: the ascendancy of the right. But are there really any structural forces at play here? Nixon’s victory owes as much to contingency as to any deep forces of the American psyche. Consider how differently events could have played out had Sirhan Sirhan’s aim been a little off. Nixon would have disappeared into history as merely a McCarthyite coat-tail rider, Vice President and two-time Republican also-ran. Reagan killed Carter in the electoral college, but he only won 50.7 percent of the popular vote. If Paul Volcker had been less bold as Federal Reserve Chairman and the Sea Stallion been a more reliable helicopter, perhaps Carter would have been a two-term president.

This passage may be too sweeping to be a useful analysis. Perhaps I post it more for reason of appreciating its tone than its incisiveness. Ringing speeches by American politicians aside, I think that often the best thing about modern liberalism is that it minimizes the damage of human perfidy rather than serving as a forum for the realization of “our potential.” And that is about the best for which we can practically hope.

My inclination is to lump those who see Nixon and his coconspirators as a catastrophe as the other side of the same coin with the fascist sympathizers of the 1930s a lá Carl Schmitt and that strain of neoconservatism that persists today — the Straussian strain — who worry that democracy isn’t a system of governance up to the challenges or that it will fare poorly in the competition of international politics against stronger state types. The robustness and fault-tolerance of liberalism is consistently underestimated. A couple of teapot totalitarians, domestic or international, will hardly spell the end for our way of life. As a political-philosophical conservative and a liberal, I don’t have exalted hopes for democracy, but neither do I see it as really imperiled by either its mediocrity or its excesses.

But then I think again and wonder if I have castigated too quickly, and it is confidence, not fret that is misplaced. A wayward politician every few election cycles is one thing, but an assault sustained over a prolonged period may be something else. The thing that makes U.S. liberalism robust is that politics is founded in the fundamental life of the people and in the United States there is a long tradition — stretching back to our British cultural antecedents — amenable to such a system of government. But such characteristics aren’t our only ones. A militarism, paranoia, religious absolutism and that old saw whose penetrating insight has been dulled from having become a cliché, the sense of manifest destiny are as much a part of the American character as the democratic ideal and each can serve as a basis for an attack on the latter. Under the relentless pressures of the military-industrial complex and its attendant right-wing tendencies, has the U.S. character has started to distort? Perhaps the democratic ideal was something that could only flourish under the conditions of splendid isolation (the name for the British version of the same; out name, “divine providence,” obscures the geopolitical reality in a haze of latter-day theology). I believe that the remove of the United States from the corrupting necessities of realpolitik was a part of the original formulation of the notion of “the city on the hill.” Could it be that the democratic ideal is simply not something that can survive into the age of the ICBM and jet aircraft? In this sense, perhaps what makes Nixon unique is his excessive focus on foreign policy, to such a detriment to domestic issues, that his domestic program became but a withered appendage to foreign policy ends, hardly the place to invest precious principles.

Voting Your Anxiety

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In light of recent debate surrounding Barack Obama’s comments about rural bitterness being the cause of gun culture and fundamentalist religion, I have been wanting to locate a certain passage from an article and fortunately Kevin Drum turns it up for me (“The Culture Wars,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 15 April 2008). Turns out it was Garance Franke-Ruta (“Remapping the Culture Debate,” The American Prospect, 16 January 2006):

Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to. People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities. In such environments, where there are few paths to social solidarity and a great deal of social disruption, the church frequently steps into the breach, further exacerbating the fight.

We’re still in the realm of arguing that ideology follows material circumstance. People vote their confidence and their insecurity. I loved Thomas Frank’s book, but have had reservations that it’s too facile. He argues that people don’t vote their material interest owing to effective right-wing propaganda, but he fails to take into account certain aspects of people’s material situation.

This also sweeps in the George Lakoff-type point insofar as this interpretation poses problems for the model of liberals chafing for the nanny state and always eager to swoop in and save everybody from everything versus strongly independent conservatives just wanting to be left alone to live their lives. People on the right socially are every bit as eager for the government to prop up their lives and communities and offer all sorts of inducements, it’s just that they want their government support to be punitive and compulsory.

The Destruction of Barack Obama, Part III

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Some might characterize Barack Obama’s 6 April 2008 comments as standard What’s the Matter With Kansas sort of stuff. Not William Kristol. For him it rings more reminiscent of Karl Marx (“The Mask Slips,” The New York Times, 14 April 2008):

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.

My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

This isn’t completely inconceivable. When I read What’s the Matter With Kansas I was struck by a certain Dialectical Materialist tendency, but similarity is not identity. Barack Obama as Marxist dialectician? Can Denish D’Souza be far behind with a comparison between the Senator’s remarks and some musings from one of Osama bin Laden’s videos?

The grounding in sound judgment of the imaginings of the right aside, at this point I would say that whatever crossover appeal Barack Obama once had is gone. The vitriol towards him on the right is now every bit as unhinged and hysterical as that over Hillary Clinton. I regularly get forwards from my tap into the right-wing psyche describing his as “scary” and a socialist with lurid scenarios about how he will wreck everything that is decent about the U.S.

I argued early in the primaries that anticipated perceptions of the right shouldn’t be a factor in Democratic deliberations about their candidates because the right wing mentality is not one with which there can be any negotiation (insofar as the personal characteristics and voting record of a candidate are our negotiating position). The tactic presently on display is not one that takes careful stock of the facts about a Democratic candidate and reacts accordingly, but a stock tactic which, when the facts of the matter don’t fit the stereotypes on offer, simply doubles down on the demagoguery and looks twice as hard for minutia to link candidate to cliché. It was inevitable that eventually Barack Obama would end up looking about as attractive as Hillary Clinton. Lest anyone need any reminding, in 2004 a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart and a conscience was made the dishonorable one and a cocaine using draft dodger was lifted up as the one whose record honored the military.

This is perhaps the central point that Democrats need to learn about the operation of the right today. It doesn’t matter what candidate we choose: the resultant smear campaign will be the same. The thing is that the Republicans are a one trick pony, so you might think that Democrats would have caught on and developed a counter strategy by this late date. Apparently we don’t even have one trick.

Hillary Clinton: Reloaded

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Hillary Clinton throwing back a brew, Bronko's Restaurant and Lounge, Crown Point, Indiana, 12 April 2008

Hillary Clinton hesitating over a shot of Crown Royal, Bronko's Restaurant and Lounge, Crown Point, Indiana, 12 April 2008

For the last few years it’s been kissing your way to the White House. This year for a few days it seemed like it might be sobbing your way to the White House. My hope is that it might now turn to drinking your way to the White House. After a dry drunk as president, this is a welcome change. Words won’t help you now Obama. Time to pony up. You’ve done coke so showing this old lady up should be no problem. Or maybe it’ll be like Marion Ravenwood drinking a bunch of Nepalese tough guys under the table at her bar, The Raven, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Campaigning at Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana, Senator Clinton was polishing of a brew when someone offered “You want a shot with that?” John Stewart mocked her for her choice of Crown Royal. But if you watch the video, when it’s suggested that she drink a shot she says, “I want something sweet.” It turns out that her idea of something sweet is actually the sweat end of bitter. When most people say “something sweet” what they mean is a Mellon Ball or a Lemon Drop. When Hillary Clinton say “something sweat” what she means is a sweat whiskey. I’m sold.

I was so amused by this that I actually can’t decide which picture I liked the most. So here she is, both a beer and a whiskey. More at The Gawker (“A Shot in the Dark: Hot Hillary Clinton Party Photos!,” 14 April 2008).

Global Versus Bilateral Nuclear War: The Good News (And Some Bad)

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People persist in saying things like that the post September 11th security environment makes us pine for the simpler, more straight forward time of the Cold War or that the nuclear danger is worse now. The simple answer is that one madman trying to smuggle a poorly constructed, untested, low-yield weapon into the United States is a word of improvement over the second most powerful country in the world with 30,000 high-yield weapons on hair-trigger alert.

But prospects are better in another way, even in the face of more widespread nuclear proliferation. Consider what would happen if there actually was a nuclear war. The Cold War was global, with each country having drawn a security perimeter and established hundreds of red lines. The United States and the Soviet Union had scores of counties under their nuclear umbrella through what was called extended deterrence. “Credibility” was on the line. The crossing of any red line by the other would have initiated an escalatory path that could have lead quickly to the outbreak of full scale nuclear war. And were war to ensue, the targets would be global, preemptory and without provocation. The SIOP up through the late Nixon administration called for the destruction of targets throughout the communist block, including Eastern Europe and China, regardless of the cause of war. If the Soviet Union invaded Saudi Arabia, we were going to destroy Beijing, Warsaw and Pyongyang later that day, no matter what. Similarly, if the United States went to war with China over Taiwan, the Soviet Union could have ended up destroying Paris, Tel Aviv and Ottawa.

People talk today as if North Korea, Pakistan, India, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil or Argentina possessing or acquiring nuclear weapons is a cataclysmic problem. The fact is that these countries aren’t involved in global struggles with their strategic competitors. Were nuclear war to break out between any such pair, the target list would be limited not just by technological capability, but by political consideration. Were India and Pakistan to come to nuclear war over Kashmir or some other border dispute, they would concentrate their fire on one another. India may keep some weapons in reserve to prevent China from taking advantage of the situation, but they wouldn’t simultaneously launch attacks on 50 additional countries. Similarly, hypothetical hostilities between Israel and Iran would remain regional, provided a certain third power could keep a lid on its apocalyptic enthusiasms.

And this arrangement may be systematic. In the past, a war might have caused peripheral powers to come running to the conflagration, thinking that they too might have some interest served by tilting the outcome one way or the other. But nuclear war is so devastating that only powers with a direct mortal interest in the struggle would participate. Peripheral powers might be sent scrambling, doing everything in their power to cordon off and avoid involvement in such a struggle. They might be totally preoccupied with limiting the problems of fallout, refugees and other passive damage.

The bad news is that the nuclear danger has become much more chaotic and laden. The world is more shot-through with it. The good news is that should the danger be realized, the number of weapons and the portion of the world under threat in any particular conflict is significantly less. The potential for the escalation of any given nuclear war to global war has decreased. In other words, though the probability of war may have risen, the consequences have been greatly reduced.

The key to keeping these struggles and their potential wars limited and regional, is to avoid the trap of extended deterrence. External powers may feel tempted to try to manage these regional struggles by enhancing the deterrent power of one country over another. This should be avoided, for extended deterrence creates the network by which a regional problem spreads. It’s the geopolitical analogue to the problem of fourth generation warfare, where a weak adversary can use the tight systems integration of its stronger opponent as a force multiplier. An otherwise localized attack is spread far and wide by networks (e.g., power, communication, fuel distribution, etc.).

The Cold War was a worldwide ideological struggle between two powers whose reach spanned the globe. The strategy employed on both sides was the construction of a preponderant alliance and global encirclement. Extending deterrence to the pawns and over the battlefields of the world made sense. Kashmir is not such a situation. In trying to bring home the problem of extended deterrence, strategists used to ask, “Will the United States really trade New York for Paris?” The aim of the question was to underline the difficulty of asserting that the answer was “yes.” In the case of the question of whether the United States will trade Los Angeles for Riyadh, the answer should be easy: absolutely not. If Saudi Arabia and Iran destroy each other we will bare the burden of high energy prices before we risk the sting of losing a city.

What nuclear weapons do afford these regional powers is capability against their regional competitors, but also neutralization of an opponent’s network of allies; that is, deterrence against the involvement of external powers. And the primary external power that most nuclear aspirants have in mind is the United States.

That the United States will no longer be able to afford getting involved in every dispute, managing the strategic balance of every sector of the world, bending each to our advantage, is the real reason for the manic urgency of writers who see the likes of Iran and North Korea as such a problem. That it threatens U.S. global primacy is the cause for the hysteria. It is also the case for the urgency of a U.S. anti-missile system. ABM is the top-line U.S. primacy-preserving weapons system. Without it, U.S. hegemony withers and dies; with it, it can be extended a few more decades.

It is also the cause of the continuing enhancement of U.S. nuclear capabilities: global strike, the OPLANs, enhancements to yield, accuracy and fusing for hard-target kill, the reliable replacement warhead program. Whatever other factors idealists may identify, the hard calculation of interest and history — and the cynicism engendered of folly — suggests continued modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, even if carried out under the guise of numerical reduction. There is wide agreement that the current goal of the U.S. nuclear establishment is to achieve a high level of confidence in the conduct of a disarming first strike. And the political cause of this objective is to avoid being locked out of regional conflicts. These are not the tools of national security, but of continued meddling and foreign adventure.

The policy preferences of the United States are probably moot here, as the forces in play are larger than can be controlled by any country. We’re going to be run out of certain regions, whether gracefully or humiliatingly, like the British and the French after the Suez crisis of 1956. Most likely the latter. The notion of a unified global order is breaking down to one of regions, regional powers and internecine conflict. And nuclear weapons will be of a piece with this transformation.

(Sorry, the title promised good news with some bad as a caveat; it turned out to be mostly bad news. At least the whole world isn’t under threat all at once anymore!)

How to Destroy Obama, Part II

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With this most recent gaff, following on the press stampede over his bowling abilities, I’d say that all the pieces are in place to plop Senator Obama firmly into the standard media narrative of the elitist liberal. Last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine story (Sokolove, Michael , “Change Makes a Call on Levittown,” 6 April 2008) was essentially sympathetic and by a liberal supporter, but it was a toe in the water of the narrative.

Now we just need a story associating the Senator with some characteristic liberal elitist consumer good. Sacre bleu! Senator Obama welds a mean crocket mallet! Or that Malia Ann and Natasha were raised on Baby Einstein when heartland kids were running around in the woods with bb guns. Or hell, there’s nothing like the golden oldies: maybe there’s a picture of him windsurfing somewhere. Crocket playing, Baby Einstein watching, windsurfing liberal elitists! Then all that will be left is for Maureen Dowd to bless it with a few of her trademark witticisms and it will be off to the races.

Combine the Reverend Jeremiah Wright story, the budding liberal elitist story has got to be causing a lot of relief over at the McCain campaign. For the first time since his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Senator Obama is looking beatable.

What supporters of the Senator don’t get is that an election is not an occasion for a candidate to speak truth to electoral power. It is a contest to see who can flatter the electorate most vociferously without going so far as to sound insincere (special thanks to Mitt Romney for helping to demarcate the outer limits of this phenomenon). Every prejudice in the country must be honored, no matter how ill-founded or small-minded and no matter how much in conflict with the interest group to whom the candidate read a litany of promises just last week.

This is the problem with young, idealistic and first time voters as your base. They have no idea why it is that old politicians are so bland and cynical. It’s because that’s how one gets to be an old politician. The problem with Senator Obama is that he has had too many positive experiences telling the truth — or, honestly, well hedged and carefully parsed truth — he’s not exactly getting up in your face with it — and it has gone to his head. He started to think that he was invincible, that the sort of stuff that liberals say in their publications or to each other in closed-door strategy sessions could be said for mass consumption too. He hasn’t had enough chastenings like the one that he is presently receiving. These are lessons that most politicians learn on the small stage, before acceding to the national stage. This is what people mean when they say that Senator Clinton has superior experience.

It’s quite possible that this was the inevitable story that a month in Pennsylvania was going to generate and he would have been better off to have avoided the state altogether. But he’s in, so now he’s got to do something. The primary night election analysts are going to be zeroing in on the class, income and race demographics of returns and it will be the primary story of the night, even before the Clinton campaign begins to spin this aspect of the story hard the next day. One can already see the rumblings of the liberal elitist narrative, but the actual voting could be the story that finally gives it legs.

Now this is me playing instapundit. It’s the perception of the hour and one of the phenomenal aspects of Senator Obama so far has been his ability to come back strong. On the other hand, a similarly surprising aspect of the Senator has been his excess of conciliation with mortal opponents — witness the Samantha Power imbroglio.

Hillary Clinton’s pending win in Pennsylvania is going to do a lot to resuscitate her campaign. If she can plausibly dovetail it to a narrative about how she can win in the difficult states, that’s going to pose a real threat. Senator Obama has got to kill this. Apologies and some words about how he misspoke aren’t going to cut it.

Television Lineup of the Damned

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The three most despicable shows on television this season, namely Hell’s Kitchen, Moment of Truth and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader are the perfect shows for the decadence of the new Rome.

Hell’s Kitchen has managed to combine the Colosseum and the Vomitorium into one unseemly arena (Mr. Ramsay actually did throw up one recent contestant’s dish into a garbage can). Just what America needs: more arrogance, intemperance and yelling. And this time from a Britt. Thanks. We need more over here so keep ’em coming. We’ll send you all our sensible and mild mannered citizens.

Moment of Truth is the perfect show for the Bush years: it’s the propaganda lulling — or jarring — us all in the mindset to unproblematically accept the surveillance state. You may think that the executive overstep is a problem, but in fact it’s fun for the whole family. Who says that capitalism is inimical to the authoritarian state? Here one is sort of the advanced team for the other.

As if Who Wants to be a Millionare wasn’t insipient enough — I found the glacial pace of the show maddening, but apparently it was necessary for the viewership to keep up with the complexities of the game — now there’s the next big game show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, where the contestants giggle unashamedly at demonstrating the answer to be “no.” Oh! for the days of Win Ben Stein’s Money. Clive Crook worries that possibly for the first time ever, retiring workers are better educated than their new entrant replacements (“The Dumbing of America,” TheAtlantic.com, 28 March 2008). The study that he discusses uses master’s degrees as its reference point. Meanwhile in the rest of America, less than grade school is the benchmark of aspiration. With over a billion people, China will soon have more people with Ph.D.s than the U.S. will have people of any and every level of educational attainment and we keep on talking about a potential future peer competitor. The CCP must find that real rich.

How to Destroy Obama, Part I

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Dinesh D’Souza brainstorms his smear against a potential nominee Obama (“Ten Truths About The Election,” TownHall.com, 31 March 2008):

If Obama is the nominee, this is the GOP campaign commercials I envision. It begins by showing the rantings of Wright: America deserved to be attacked on 9/11, the government sponsors the Ku Klux Klan, AIDS is a federal plot, God damn America! These images are accompanied by a voice-over noting that Wright is Obama’s longtime mentor, and that Obama has attended this church for two decades. Then we see Obama saying he will no more disavow Wright than he would disavow a family member. Finalloy we see pictures of the two men embracing while a voice says, “Is this the man who is going to bring America together and stand up to our enemies?” At this point, it’s done!

Of course, I am busily thinking up my own ideal hit piece against Senator McCain and I can imagine throwing in a little religious wackoness and we deserved September 11th from the right, so I guess all’s fair. Just set aside any hope of a clean campaign. The 2008 general election will be the Bush doctrine as cornered animal. Expect it to bite.

And number ten of Mr. D’Souza’s truths about the election: Hillary Clinton will have a President Obama killed (no insinuation regarding Vincent Foster, this is the respectable right here, not the loonies).

Campaign Doldrums

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Way to go laying out the calendar for the primaries Democrats. Here’s George Packer on the effect (“Stop Shouting!,” Interesting Times, The New Yorker, 25 March 2008):

What we are witnessing is a controlled experiment in modern campaigning: eliminate policy differences between two candidates; space out the primary schedule so that it remains empty for seven weeks, thereby creating a political-news vacuum in which the candidates and their supporters continue to give speeches, hold press conferences, or blog nonstop; and subject every word to the scrutiny and amplification of the twenty-four-hour news machine. The predictable result is that two appealing politicians will quickly start to lose their lustre, until, by the time Pennsylvania gets to vote, on April 22nd, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will seem like the smallest, meanest, dirtiest, lowest, most dishonest candidates ever to run for office in the United States.

A Tale of Two Elections

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My thinking on the election at this point has been twofold. First is that a Barack Obama-John McCain matchup is good on either theory of campaigning, base mobilization or capture the middle. Senator McCain fails to mobilize the base, but has a lot of crossover appeal. However, the base just won’t give him a break so the need to throw them red meat will be endless and in his desperate attempts to mollify the base, he will sacrifice whatever crossover appeal he has. Senator Obama also has crossover appeal, but with a base more than enthusiastically behind him, he will be free to concentrate entirely on capturing independents. That’s an equation that just works for Democrats.

On the other hand, I’ve thought that 2008 could see an election in which spending by 527s could dwarf that of the actual candidates campaign committees. In 2004 the John Kerry and George Bush campaigns together spent $957 million and independent advocacy groups spent another $436 million. In 2008 it is anticipated that the 527s will constitute an even larger portion of total campaign spending. The candidates’ message could become only one of many voices, lost in the din. Their ability to shape their message could be totally lost amidst the interest groups with only limited commitment to the candidate’s agenda and no organizational connection. For instance, the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth specifically said that even if the Bush campaign or the RNC has asked them to desist their attack ads, they would not. John McCain has said that he wants to run an honorable, respectful campaign, but that may be out of his hands. Barack Obama may want to avoid any divisiveness, but similarly he may only have partial say in that.

These two thoughts are at odds because a wildly out of control, dirty campaign could end up mobilizing that right wing base that had originally resolved to stay at home. Adequately convinced of the depravity of Senator Obama, Senator McCain might start looking pretty good. The sentimental types have a hard time acknowledging this about the American character, but hate is a far more energetic motivator than affection. Similarly independents, always unsure about this black man, could be easily swayed once the flowery rhetoric is displaced by the images of an angry radical. I believe it was Karl Rove who said watch political commercials with the sound off to understand their true impact. Language is only going to get Senator Obama so far.

And so Kevin Drum gives me pause today (“Why Hillary Fights,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 30 March 2008):

Of course Barack Obama can win against John McCain. And I still believe that.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the Jeremiah Wright controversy has shaken my confidence a bit. This has nothing to do with the substance of the thing, which I think has been wildly overblown, but by the conservative reaction to it. Go scan The Corner and you’ll find Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson and the rest of the gang still in an absolute lather over Wright. Ditto for other conservative sites. They have no intention of allowing this to die, and I have no doubt that it will resurface with a vengeance in every last swing state this fall. When Obama continues to fail to denounce Wright thoroughly enough — and believe me, no denunciation will ever be enough with this crowd — then eventually the crossover Republicans who were singing Obama’s praises after Super Tuesday will, sadly but inevitably, use this as an excuse to switch their support to McCain. Can’t vote for a guy who doesn’t have the balls to disown an outraged black guy in a dashiki, after all. Ditto for a lot of political moderates who have fallen under the Obama spell but are really more anti-Hillary than they ever were pro-Obama.

Now, my guess is that, in the end, this won’t work. The polls taken after Obama’s race speech showed, gratifyingly, no reduction in his support, suggesting that a sleaze campaign will have a harder time working against Obama than it did against John Kerry. Still, it’s out there, and it’s pretty clearly part of the game plan for the fall campaign. I think Hillary’s folks are wrong to believe that Obama is doomed, but I’m not sure I think they’re delusional any more. There’s every sign that we have an ugly campaign ahead of us.

I just wish that once in my lifetime the Democrats would nominate someone legitimately hungry and angry, someone who had justice in their veins and realized that instituting in the world was going to require blood and who was willing to destroy the forces that stood in their way. I want the Dean scream, I want the crazy Al Gore circa 2004. I want Lyndon Johnson. Instead we get these wheedling, whining, preening milktoasts who think that an election is a word-emitting contest. I don’t know, maybe I’m a lunatic partisan at this point.

I too still think that Senator Obama will win, but it’s going to be ugly and Senator Obama still looks to me like a guy with a lot of on the job learning to do about the workings of a national campaign.