International Politics and Russia's Invasion of Georgia

Russia's invasion of Georgia, justified by Moscow as an incursion to defend South Ossetia separatists, has raised fundamental questions of great power politics and world order in late-Bush-era international relations.

The initial debate focused on locating the conflict's casus belli, and on questions of Georgian irrationality in launching a blitz on the breakaway rebels. Some have focused on U.S. responsibility for the war, arguing that America's broader policy on Georgia's accession to NATO provoked Moscow's aggression in the former Soviet republic. There's also been some allegations of a neoconservative election ploy to help the GOP in November - this the latest in the left's meme of alleging a "neocon" plot foisting endless wars of neo-imperial aggression on the world.

Along these lines this morning is Juan Cole's argument that the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003, combined with American foreign policy assertiveness, destroyed the global institutional order and raped the international rule of law:

An emboldened Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sarcastically likened Russia's actions to Bush's foreign policy...

Indeed, Putin's invoking Bush's Iraq adventure points directly to the way in which Bush has enabled other world powers to act impulsively. With his doctrine of preemptive warfare, Bush single-handedly tore down the architecture of post-World War II international law erected by the founders of the United Nations to ensure that rogue states did not go about launching wars of aggression the way Hitler had. While safeguarding minorities at risk is a praiseworthy goal, the U.N. Charter states that the Security Council must approve a war launched for this purpose or any other, excepting self-defense. No individual nation is authorized to wage aggressive war on a vigilante basis, as Bush did in Iraq or Russia is now doing in the Caucasus.

Cole is rehearsing the debate on the origins of the Iraq war, rehashing the claim that America's toppling of Saddam lacked international legitimacy. This is the "big lie" meme that's popular on the left (the dead giveaway is the Bush-Hitler analogy of naked "wars of aggression"). Recall, of course, that the U.S. acted in 2003 on a long series of U.N. Security Council resolutions dating from the 1991 Gulf War armistice. The U.S. and its allies launch Operation Iraqi Freedom within the parameters of international law, and the resistance at the U.N. Security Council in 2003 - especially among France and Russia - reflected interest-based opposition to American policy among the international system's middle powers.

But Cole's attention on international institutions deserves a closer look: What has happened within the so-called "architecture of international law" following the shock of renascent Russian revanchism?

Well, the U.N. Security Council is naturally stymied, as Moscow holds a veto as a permanent member. The Office of the U.N. Secretary General has condemed Russian aggression, but has passed the buck to France, saying it welcomes the earlier Paris-backed cease-fire agreement that Moscow had no intentions of observing. The EU, the most successful international institution to emerge on the European continent in the post-World War II era, is utterly divided, with the Franco-German founders only weakly criticizing Moscow for fear of an embargo on Russian oil supplies to Western Europe. Meanwhile, new EU members from the East - such as Poland and Estonia - are pushing for a more aggressive condemnation of Moscow that will signal a firm Western commitment to former East Bloc nations who don't doubt a reestablishment of the Russian yoke in Eastern Europe.

There's NATO to consider as well. Of all the post-1945 multilateral institutions, NATO embodies both the hopes and failures of the post-Cold War international order. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization began its history as a balance of power alliance. Its raison d'etre was to stop a Soviet Blitzkrieg invasion across the central plains of Europe, pushing its Warsaw Pact armored divisions through Poland to defeat American power in West Germany. With the expulsion of NATO forces bordering Eastern Europe, Moscow would consolidate its Western expansion, in the hope of expelling U.S. forces off the continent once and for all.

As time went by, NATO has been tranformed from a traditional security alliance to some confused-hybrid order falling between traditional collective security ("one for all, and all for one") and collective defense (a "collective security alliance" of increasing scope, with enlargement aspirations encompassing the nations of the former Soviet sphere of influence in the East). The recent proposals for Georgia's accession to NATO reflect the logical end-result of moving from a balance-of-power alliance checking Moscow's threat to the West to a continental-wide institutional arrangement predicated on some "new world order" of a Washington-Moscow condominium of interests. In other words, a post-Cold War "end of history" would see Moscow acquiesce to its former antagonists establishing a strategic beachhead on the Russian landing grounds in East Central Europe.

As the world has seen, however, Russia under Vladimir Putin has reprised the historic traditions of Great Russian Nationalism. Russia's incursion to restore hegemony in Georgia is the prerogative of a renascent great power pursuing its timeless interests in securing a sphere of control at its southern outposts. International institutions have so far been largely ineffective in stopping the Russion drive for mastery in Georgia.

Melik Kaylan, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, laid out the big picture for Russian's designs in Georgia and beyond:

As we worry about another Russian imperialist adventure in Georgia, we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger picture either: To wit, Moscow has always had a clear strategic use for the Caucasus, one that concerns the U.S. today more than ever.

Having overestimated the power of the Soviet Union in its last years, we have consistently underestimated the ambitions of Russia since. Already, a great deal has been said about the implications of Russia's invasion for Ukraine, the Baltic States and Europe generally. But few have noticed the direct strategic threat of Moscow's action to U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Kremlin is not about to reignite the Cold War for the love of a few thousand Ossetians or even for its animosity toward five million Georgians. This is calculated strategic maneuvering. And make no mistake, it's about countering U.S. power at its furthest stretch with Moscow's power very close to home.

The pivotal geography of the Caucasus offers the Kremlin just such an opportunity. Look at a map, and the East-meets-West, North-meets-South vector lines of the region illustrate all too clearly how the drama now unfolding in the Caucasus casts Moscow's shadow all across Central Asia and down into the Middle East. In effect, we in the West are being challenged by Russian actions in Georgia to show that we have the nerve and the stamina to secure the gains not just of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but of the entire collapse of Soviet power.

Between Russia and Iran, in the lower Caucasus, sits a small wedge of independent soil - namely, the soil of Azerbaijan and Georgia combined. Through those two countries runs the immensely important Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which delivers precious oil circuitously from Azerbaijan to Turkey and out to the world. This is important not just because of the actual oil being delivered free of interference from Russia and Iran and the Middle East, but also for symbolic reasons. It says to the world that if any former Moscow colonies wish to sell their wares to the West directly, they have a right to do so, and the West will support that right. According to Georgian authorities, Russian warplanes have tried to demolish the Georgian leg of that pipeline several times in the last days. Their message cannot be clearer.

Besides their own pipeline, Georgia and Azerbaijan offer a fragile strategic conduit between the West and the "stans" of Central Asia -- including Afghanistan -- an area that the Soviets once controlled in toto. We should remember that an isolated Central Asia means an isolated Afghanistan. Look at the countries surrounding Afghanistan -- all former Soviet colonies, then Iran, then Pakistan.

The natural resources of Central Asia, from Turkmenistan's natural gas to Kazakhstan's abundant oil, cannot reach the West free of Russia and Iran except through that narrow conduit in the Caucasus. Moscow's former colonies in Central Asia are Afghanistan's most desirable trading partners. They are watching the strife in Georgia closely. It will tell them whether or not they will enter the world's free markets without a Russian chokehold on their future - or, whether they, and their economies, are doomed for the foreseeable future to remain colonies in all but name. And it won't be long before Moscow dictates to them exactly how to isolate Kabul. Moscow is perfectly aware, even if we are not, that choking off the bottleneck in the Caucasus gives Iran and Russia much say over our efforts in Afghanistan.

In Iraq too, the Kremlin's projection of power down through Georgia will soon be felt. Take another look at the map. If Russia is allowed to extend its reach southwards, as in Soviet times, down the Caucasus to Iran's borders, Moscow can support Iran in any showdown with the West. Iran, thus emboldened, will likely attempt to reassert itself in Iraq, Syria and, via Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

Seen from a macro-perspective, it is not "pure hype" to see the current crisis in the Caucasus as the predecessor to a longer round of violent skirmishes over the ultimate control of the South Asian strategic rimland.

This why the battle for Georgia today is a battle for the West tomorrow: "We are all Georgians" now, yet we are not without resources to stop Putin's hegemonic advance.

The manner and dispatch with these facts are apprehended among the various political actors, in the U.S. and abroad, tells us much about the nature and efficacy of the international architecture of law and order that so many are quick to tout.

Image Credit: Wall Street Journal

The Coming Minority-Majority

I discuss, every semester, the emergence, in roughly forty years, of a minority-majority demographic in the United States. By 2050 or so, non-white ethnic groups will compose a majority of the American population.

The New York Times reports on new Census data confirming the prediction (see chart here):

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

The latest figures, which are being released on Thursday, are predicated on current and historical trends, which can be thrown awry by several variables, including prospective overhauls of immigration policies and sudden increases in refugees.

A decade ago, census demographers estimated that the nation’s population, which topped 300 million in 2006, would not surpass 400 million until sometime after midcentury. Now, they are projecting that the population will top 400 million in 2039 and reach 439 million in 2050.

So-called minorities, the Census Bureau projects, will constitute a majority of the nation’s children under 18 by 2023 and of working-age Americans by 2039.

For the first time, both the number and the proportion of non-Hispanic whites, who now account for 66 percent of the population, will decline, starting around 2030. By 2050, their share will dip to 46 percent.

Higher mortality rates among older native-born white Americans and higher birthrates rates among immigrants and their children are already driving ethnic and racial disparities.

“A momentum is built into this as a result of past immigration,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, there were more Hispanic immigrants than births. This decade, there are more births than immigrants. Almost regardless of what you assume about future immigration, the country will be more Hispanic and Asian.”

With the Census Bureau forecasting even more immigrants, other demographers estimate that the proportion of foreign-born Americans, now about 12 percent, could surpass the 1910 historic high of nearly 15 percent by about 2025 and may approach 20 percent in 2050.

According to the new forecast, by 2050, the number of Hispanic people will nearly triple, to 133 million from 47 million, to account for 30 percent of Americans, compared with 15 percent today.

People who say they are Asian, with their ranks soaring to 41 million from 16 million, will make up more than 9 percent of the population, up from 5 percent.

More than three times as many people are expected to identify themselves as multiracial — 16 million, accounting for nearly 4 percent of the population.

The population of people who define themselves a black is projected to rise to 66 million from 41 million, but increase its overall share by barely two percentage points, to 15 percent.

“What’s happening now in terms of increasing diversity probably is unprecedented,” said Campbell Gibson, a retired census demographer.

Several states, including California and Texas, have already reached the point where members of minorities are in the majority.

“Within the conventional definition of race, of white, black, Asian, minority vs. non-minority, this is a big change,” said David G. Waddington, chief of the Census Bureau’s population projections branch.

All the projections are subject to changing cultural definitions. The share of Americans who identify themselves as white, regardless of their ethnicity, will remain largely unchanged, declining from less than 80 percent in 2010 to about 76 percent when the majority-minority benchmark is reached in 2042.

“The way people report race 20 or 30 years from now may be very different,” Dr. Waddington pointed out.

The Census Bureau’s projections are likely to fuel debates over immigration policy, overpopulation and the changing electorate, and recall earlier eras when the Irish, the Italians and Eastern European Jews were not universally considered as whites. As recently as the 1960s, Hispanic people were not counted separately by the census and Asian Indians were classified as white.

As noted in the article, California now has a minority-majority population. At first, some students are not sure of the implications of the national demographic shift, but when I note that California is currently the most diverse state, and that the Long Beach area - where my college is located - has been identified as the most diverse locality in the nation, the "coming" minority-majority doesn't seem so far off.

The Bush Legacy Begins

Now that the war in Iraq has been won, President George W. Bush's historical legacy is already being reset as a resolute commander-in-chief who will leave office with the greatest foreign policy turnaround in the history of American international affairs.

Brian Kelly, at this week's U.S. News and World Report, announced his magazine's new-found appreciation of the president, saying that Bush had, "the fortitude to execute one very tough call, and so far the country's better off for it" (the magazine's essentially renouncing its cover story of May 2007, "A Sinking Bush").

At Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, an academic expert in world politics, and the editor of Newsweek International, makes a backdoor case for the president's history-making firmness and resolve: "What Bush Got Right":

A broad shift in America's approach to the world is justified and overdue. Bush's basic conception of a "global War on Terror," to take but the most obvious example, has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades. But blanket criticism of Bush misses an important reality. The administration that became the target of so much passion and anger—from Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone—is not quite the one in place today. The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed. This has happened without acknowledgment—which is partly what drives critics crazy—and it's often been done surreptitiously. It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure; the old way simply wasn't working. But for whatever reasons and through whichever path, the foreign policies in place now are more sensible, moderate and mainstream. In many cases the next president should follow rather than reverse them.

Note here that Zarakia himself was one of the leading advocates of strategic retreat from Iraq.

In November 2006, at the same time the administration was preparing the shift toward a new counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq, Zakaria, in a Newsweek cover story, laid out the case for an American withdrawal from the war, with the following title:

Rethinking Iraq: The Way Forward

The drawdown option: It is past time to confront reality. To avoid total defeat, we must reduce and redeploy our troops and nudge the Iraqis toward a deal.

Zakaria was wrong in 2006, and badly so. But unlike the editors at U.S. News, he's apparently not prone to journalistic introspection nor the admission of analytical mistakes.

But the icing on the cake is the new poll out from Rasmussen finding that just 41 percent of Americans think that President Bush will be rememberd as "the worst president ever":

Forty-one percent (41%) of Americans say George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst U.S. President ever, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

But 50% of Americans disagree, despite Bush's record low poll numbers on his job performance.

Rasmussen finds a partisan split to opinions on the Bush legacy (and he's at 33 percent in public approval), but it's striking that half the country has begun to place President Bush's leadership in perspective. Contrast this to the historical profession, composed of mostly left-leaning scholars, with 61 percent of them rating G.W. Bush as the worst president in history (see also here and here).

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, President Bush does not have the lowest public approval rating on record. That distinction goes to Harry Truman, who upon leaving office held a 22 percent approval rate in Gallup polling.

President Truman today is generally considered one of the top ten presidents in American history. With President Bush, if the shifting media portrayal of administration "resolution" is a decent indicator, George W. "Truman" Bush will in time also ascend to the "near great" category of America's great presidential leaders.

McCain Best in Crisis, Poll Finds

The new Pew survey finds the presidential election horse race essentially tied, with Barack Obama holding a 46-to-43 percent lead over presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

The results are within the poll's statistical margin of error. What's noteworthy is that the survey finds a majority of Americans seeing McCain as possessing superior crisis decision-making judgment:

With less than two weeks to go before the start of the presidential nominating conventions, Barack Obama's lead over John McCain has disappeared. Pew's latest survey finds 46% of registered voters saying they favor or lean to the putative Democratic candidate, while 43% back his likely Republican rival. In late June, Obama held a comfortable 48%-to-40% margin over McCain, which narrowed in mid-July to 47% to 42%.

Two factors appear to be at play in shifting voter sentiment. First, McCain is garnering more support from his base - including Republicans and white evangelical Protestants - than he was in June, and he also has steadily gained backing from white working class voters over this period. Secondly and more generally, the Arizona senator has made gains on his leadership image. An even greater percentage of voters than in June now see McCain as the candidate who would use the best judgment in a crisis, and an increasing percentage see him as the candidate who can get things done.

Conversely, Obama has made little progress in increasing his support among core Democrats since June - currently 83% favor him compared with 87% of Republicans who back McCain. The likely Democratic nominee is still getting relatively modest support from Hillary Clinton's former supporters: 72% of them support Obama, compared with the 88% support level that McCain receives from backers of his formal GOP rivals.

I've noted that the Democrats have reason to worry about thier electoral fortunes this fall. Recent polling has shown McCain with a double-digit lead over Obama on cultural issues and traditional values. Now, with the Pew data, we see Obama with increasing liabilities among Southern whites and the white working class (folks with less than a four-year collegiate education).

As Captain Ed notes, "Obama needs a momentum reversal, and he needs it quickly."

Diabolical Neocon War Plans Against Russia!

It's pretty much the case now that any international crisis involving the potential deployment of U.S. military power will be denounced as a "neocon plot" by many in the left-wing press and blogosphere.

Think Progress continues the genre with their sensational post this morning upon news of a possible cessation of hostilities in the Causcasus: "Ceasefire in Georgia Dashes Neocon Predictions of Russian Expansion in The Region."

Taking it even further is Robert Scheer, who argues that neoconservatives are manufacturing a foreign policy crisis: "Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?":

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate's foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime it was Putin's Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate's demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

Diabolical? God, that's taking things to the extreme.

I noted previously that even Democratic foreign policy eminences, like former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, have seen naked Russian brutality and hegemony in Russia's war with Georgia.

So there's no doubt that anti-neocon fervor has been quickly stoked by war the Russo-Georgia war.

In this case, the push to discredit neocons has an interesting electoral component, not just in Scheunemann's ties to Georgia, but also in the situation that McCain has long warned of Russian bellicosity, and his foresight is another strong reminder of his unrivaled foreign policy experience this year.

As Ben Smith noted yesterday:

While virtually every other world leader called for calm in Georgia last Thursday morning, John McCain did something he’s done many times during his career in public life: He condemned Russia....

McCain’s confrontational stance on the Caucasus crisis stems from a long, personal skepticism of Russian intentions, one that dates back to the Cold War and that eased only briefly in the early 1990s.

Indeed, McCain, who publicly confronted Putin in Munich last year, may be the most visible — and now potentially influential — American antagonist of Russia. What remains to be seen is whether the endgame to the Georgia crisis makes McCain seem prophetic or headstrong and whether his muscular rhetoric plays a role in defining for voters the kind of commander in chief he would be.

What is not in doubt is McCain’s view of Russia. His belief that Moscow harbors dangerous aspirations goes back a long way, as does his fervent view that the only way to quiet the Russian bear is through tough talk and threat of real consequences — and certainly not through accommodation.

This kind of strategic clarity is anathema to the Democratic left. For example, check out Josh Marshall, who is sounding tocsin in his post on McCain, "Dangerous and Unstable."

There's a whole lot of left-wing unseriousness on foreign policy this season, but the Georgia crisis has really shown how genuinely silly many of these people are.

Blogging, Copyright, and Fair Use

Blog surfers might have caught the discussion of the Fair Use Doctrine of U.S. copyright law at Right Wing News.

The piece is an interview with attorney Ron Coleman, who blogs at Likelihood of Confusion. The introductory passage is worth consideration:

Well, it's fair to say that well over 90% of bloggers are not risking any legal trouble. Most people write their original thoughts, they make legitimate links, and even things like hotlinking graphics, even aside from the copyright issue, are probably not actionable ... But, if there is any single problem that seems to consistently be out there, it's copyright infringement regarding the use of photographs from news services.

As a mid-level blogger with moderate traffic, I don't worry too much about copyright lawsuits, although I'm not inattentive to the issue. So, let's look at the legal use of original writing and photographs in blogging one by one.

For newspaper articles, and scholarly essays, how much can be excerpted? A few sentences? A couple of paragraphs, or more?

Common sense tells me the less the better, but I do have a recent example of copyright infringement to share. Dave Marlow, a revolutionary socialist who blogs at The Red Mantis, was contacted by the Council on Foreign Relations for copyright infringement when he posted the entire text of a Foreign Affairs debate essay, "Revolutionary Road? Debating Venezuela's Progress."

Here's the letter CFR sent Marlow:

Dear Mr. Marlow,

We are glad that you enjoyed the Herrera article in the July/August Issue of Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately, the full version of the article that you have posted on your blog constitutes a copyright violation. We ask that you remove the full text from your blog immediately and encourage you to refer to the Foreign Affairs permissions policy for more information. While we are very appreciative that you thought enough of the article to share it on your blog, hopefully you understand our position and the legal ramifications.

Best,

Communications
The Council on Foreign Relations
212-434-9888
http://www.cfr.org/

I doubt Marlow gets a ton of traffic, so it's a good question as to why a small-fry blogger was cited for copyright infringement by an organization of such prominence (Marlow thinks he was targeted because he's Marxist).

But it's not just republishing a full-length essay that's problematic. Recall in June there was a big controversy across the web over Associated Press allegations of intellectual property right in the blogosphere. The wire service argues that any use of original AP content constitutes copyright infringement. The blogging backlash was vicious, but the legal issues counsel that bloggers need to respect copyright guidelines, for AP and the commercial press in general.

The second issue surrounds the republishing of photographs on blogs.

Coleman at RightWingNews warns bloggers not to publish copyrighted photos on their blogs, arguing there's little justification for claims of fair use. Gabriel Malor concurs, suggesting that if bloggers are just reposting pictures to provide "newsworthy images to interested viewers," this may constitute copyright infringement.

This is all pretty sobering. As Dave Marlow's experience indicates, even lower-tier bloggers might get some copyright headaches.

As readers here know, I repost photos from the major news media regularly, and I do so cognizant that a fair use challenge might arise. So, be judicious in citing original sources and observe copyright and fair use laws, but don't forget to have a little fun with your publishing.

Epic Obama Victory Unlikely, Trends Suggest

David Paul Kuhn, at the Politico, reports that a runaway landslide victory for Barack Obama in November is highly unlikely, based on presidential election history:

From the fever swamps of the blogosphere to the halls of academia, there is a chorus of voices who have come to the same conclusion about the presidential election: Barack Obama is going to win in November, by something resembling a landslide.

Yet for all the breathless analysis and number-crunching that has convinced observers Obama is en route to an epic victory, there is one key historic fact that is often overlooked—most popular vote landslides were clearly visible by the end of summer. And by that indicator, 2008 doesn’t measure up.

In five of the six post-war landslides (defined as a victory of 10 percentage points or more) the eventual winner was ahead by at least 10 percentage points in the polls at the close of August, according to a Politico analysis of historical Gallup polls. Over the past week, however, Gallup’s daily tracking poll pegs Obama ahead of John McCain by a margin of 2 to 5 percentage points.

The one exception to the August rule was 1980. Ronald Reagan was trailing slightly in the August polls before surging forward to win by roughly a 10-point margin.

By comparison, the biggest post-war landslides—1964, 1972 and 1984—were signaled by a large, double-digit advantage held by the eventual winner at the close of August.

Lyndon Johnson was trouncing Barry Goldwater in one late August 1964 Gallup poll, 67 percent to 26 percent, taken on the opening day of the Democratic convention. A July poll showed Johnson also winning by a two to one ratio. Johnson went on to win the race 61 percent to 38 percent.

While Richard Nixon in the summer of 1972 was not faring as well as Johnson in late summer 1964, it was nevertheless clear in Gallup’s polling that the incumbent was on his way to a rout that would have been hardly imaginable just four years before.

In mid-July, Nixon was only ahead by about 10 percentage points. But by early August Gallup tracked that his lead had grown to twice that. He went on to win by 23 percentage points, nearly his exact margin in August.

Reagan, in his 1984 re-election campaign, also was ahead by a modest 10 points in August. But he won in the fall by nearly twice that margin.

In the past two months, Obama’s polling has held steady, remaining in a narrow single-digit band.

“There certainly was a definite cockiness that Democrats felt once they regained control of Congress, and I’ve also felt it was a misplaced cockiness,” pollster John Zogby said.

Still, he acknowledged why there was such optimism. “You’ve got a lot of conditions that are similar to 1932 and similar to 1980, a very unpopular president and the party brand badly hurt.”

Only two post-war popular vote landslides have occurred without an incumbent finishing on top—1952 and 1980. They offer conflicting lessons.

In the case of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, two late August Gallup polls showed him with at least 53 percent of the vote and ahead by at least 15 percentage points. But the race narrowed in polling to a dead heat before Eisenhower pulled off his 11-point win. In his 1956 rematch with Adlai Stevenson, he expanded his margin to a 15-point blowout.

Read the rest of the article, here.

The essay cites additional polling experts and political scientists who see the Democrats by far the odds-on favorite. Pollster Brad Coker sees the makings of a landslide, but suggests that race may play a factor:

“This may sound kind of harsh, but if the Democratic nominee were a white male from a red or purple state, the theory would be dead on that this would be set up, there would be a very, very high probability for a Democratic landslide,” said Brad Coker, the managing partner of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. Coker said that, in his view, two factors along with race are anchoring down Obama. He cites Obama’s political inexperience and that “you’ve never had a young guy win by such a large margin, post-war.” Coker added that Obama’s ideology and geography were also factors, though of lesser importance in his view.

I had been one of those Republicans who was becoming resigned to a Democratic victory this fall.

But last month's Wall Street Journal poll, finding John McCain holding an 11-point lead over Obama on the values divide, along with Obama's huge campaign missteps this last couple of weeks - starting with the Illinois Senator's celebrity world tour - has convinced me that the GOP has a huge opportunity to snag the White House in November.

The best analysis on this last point is Steven Warshawsky's "Why Barack Obama Will Not Win." Warshawsky touches on all the vulnerabilities mentioned by Coker, but his discussion of Obama's inexperience is the best:

One of Obama's most striking characteristics is how "green" he is compared to previous presidential candidates. Obama was born on August 4, 1961. He just turned 47 years old. The average age of elected presidents since 1952 (the era of televised politics) is 56.

If elected president, Obama would be the fifth youngest president in U.S. history. The only younger presidents would be Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Ulysses S. Grant, all of whom were much more accomplished than Obama. Grant, Roosevelt, and Kennedy were war heroes. (Not Clinton, notoriously.) Roosevelt and Clinton had served as state governors. Grant had been the general-in-chief of the Union Army during the Civil War. The least experienced of the four, Kennedy, had served twelve years in Congress, six in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate, and had been a serious candidate for vice-president in 1956.

What has Obama accomplished to date? In truth, not very much -- except to master the art of self-promotion.

Obama has written two best-selling autobiographies: Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). Yet he has never served in an important leadership position in government, business, or the military. His ability to perform as a chief executive officer is completely untested.

Obama has prestigious degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, but no significant professional achievements to his name. No businesses or organizations he has founded or managed. No law firm partnerships. No important cases he has tried. Not a single work of legal scholarship he has authored, despite having been Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review and a part-time law professor at the University of Chicago for twelve years. (This is unheard of in the elite ranks of the legal profession, and calls into question the bona fides of Obama's professorship.)

Obama's principal occupation before entering politics was as a "community organizer" in Chicago. By his own admission, these efforts achieved only "some success," and none worthy of highlighting on his campaign website. Obama then served eight unexceptional years in the Illinois Senate, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, where he is not even considered one of the Democratic Party's legislative leaders.

And this man believes he is "the one we have been waiting for"?

Obama may be considered a "rock star" by his supporters, but the kind of superficial glamour and excitement that this terminology suggests is not what most voters are looking for in a president. Heartland values, not Hollywood values, still define what most voters want in a president. Most voters want a president whom they perceive as loyal, courageous, hardworking, and fair. Someone who commands the respect of others through the strength of his character and the wisdom of his actions. Someone who is prepared to fight to protect his home and country from invaders. In other words, someone who appeals to voters, on a psychological or emotional level, as the kind of person they would want for a father, husband, boss, or comrade-in-arms.

Rock stars may be fun, but they do not fit this image. Neither does Obama. His life story, while unique and interesting, bespeaks little more than an ambitious and opportunistic young man, still wet behind the ears, with an unhealthy fascination with his own ego - and potentially unreliable when the chips are down.

The American people are not going to entrust the security and prosperity of the country to such an immature and unproven man.

Warshawsky predicts Obama winning about 45 percent of the national popular vote.

I think the final results will be closer (the third party factor is insignificant this year), but I'm confident the Republican John McCain can win a majority of the electorate based on his experience, bipartisan appeal to independents, his traditional American values, and his national security credentials.

Moscow's Western Apologists

Victor Davis Hanson wins gold with his analysis of the permissive causes of Moscow's Georgia incursion.

One of the most important factors contributing to war is the left's refusal to see naked neo-imperialist aggression in Russia's strike in the Caucasus. For Hanson, there's a brilliance in Moscow's perceptions of Western capitulations to its designs in the south:

The Russians have sized up the moral bankruptcy of the Western Left. They know that half-a-million Europeans would turn out to damn their patron the United States for removing a dictator and fostering democracy, but not more than a half-dozen would do the same to criticize their long-time enemy from bombing a constitutional state.

The Russians rightly expect Westerners to turn on themselves, rather than Moscow — and they won’t be disappointed. Imagine the morally equivalent fodder for liberal lament: We were unilateral in Iraq, so we can’t say Russia can’t do the same to Georgia. (As if removing a genocidal dictator is the same as attacking a democracy). We accepted Kosovo’s independence, so why not Ossetia’s? (As if the recent history of Serbia is analogous to Georgia’s.) We are still captive to neo-con fantasies about democracy, and so encouraged Georgia’s efforts that provoked the otherwise reasonable Russians (As if the problem in Ossetia is our principled support for democracy rather than appeasement of Russian dictatorship).

From what the Russians learned of the Western reaction to Iraq, they expect their best apologists will be American politicians, pundits, professors, and essayists — and once more they will not be disappointed. We are a culture, after all, that after damning Iraqi democracy as too violent, broke, and disorganized, is now damning Iraqi democracy as too conniving, rich, and self-interested — the only common denominator being whatever we do, and whomever we help, cannot be good.

There's more at the link.

Particularly insightful is Hanson's discussion of the postmodern paralytic aversion to realpolitik. The resort to military force is "mindless" and "inhumane." Meanwhile, whole populations fall under the hegemony of the revived Russian Bear, and it's all the Bush administration's fault.

The End of Consumerism?

I'm still trying to figure out if this "phony recession" is really as significant as earlier eras of American economic dislocation. Sure, housing's collapsed, credit markets and banking institutions have face bailouts and shakeouts, and unemployment is up near 6 percent.

Yet, the economy grew in the 2nd quarter at 1.9 percent of GDP, which is more than double 0.9 percent growth rate for the first quarter of this year. Meanwhile, the Dow-Jones industrial average is pushing 12,000, as international oil markets have seen a pull-back in petroleum costs.

I know many families are facing the strains of the subprime fallout and the drop in housing prices, so it remains to be seen how it all ends up, but there's a resiliency in the economy that has kept things rolling along.

Is it consumers? Have consumers continued to spend while income has lagged, breaking out the plastic to keep the party going?

This week's U.S. News argues that indeed credit card-driven spending has kept the economy afloat, but the good times are coming to an end. We may be seeing "The End of Credit Card Consumerism":

When it comes to longevity, few royals can top America's King Consumer. For more than four decades, our shopaholic nation has shown an insatiable desire to spend until our credit cards melt. And throughout this era, consumer spending has, well, consumed a greater and greater share of our total economy. Only twice since 1965, despite half a dozen recessions, have Americans spent less in a year than the previous one. Indeed, it often seems that we have defined ourselves by our ability to buy supersized everything, from McMansions to tricked-out SUVs to 60-inch flat-screen televisions—all enabled by decades of cheap credit.

On the surface, it may seem that there's nothing wrong with all that conspicuous consumption, especially for the biggest, most productive economy on the planet. After all, our undying love of stuff has helped fuel a global economic boom. Yet today, America finds itself at a once-or-twice-a-century economic tipping point. A sharp slowdown, record-high gas prices, high consumer debt levels, a plunging real estate market, and the growing green movement all seem to be conspiring to dethrone King Consumer and transform the economy and the American way of life for years to come....

Party's over. Many consumers, of course, don't have much choice but to scale back. Total credit card debt has increased by over 50 percent since 2000. The average American with a credit file is responsible for $16,635 in debt, excluding mortgages, according to Experian, and the personal savings rate has hovered close to zero for the past several years. High gas and food prices are causing real incomes to fall. Even worse, rising inflation will probably cause the Federal Reserve to start jacking up interest rates once the credit crisis on Wall Street has passed, tightening credit even further. "We're shedding jobs, it's much harder to borrow, and what used to be capital gains are now capital losses," says Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics at Moody's Economy.com. "There's no source of funding for spending." Because many of us won't be able to as easily use our homes as ATMs, Hoyt expects to see an upward trend in saving and slower growth in consumer spending, compared with the binge of the past decade.

It was our appetite for housing, after all, that served as the catalyst for the multidecade consumer boom. Consider this: Consumer spending has risen to just over 70 percent of the U.S. economy from a bit more than 60 percent in 1965. The pace really picked up in the 1970s, when the first baby boomers started buying and furnishing their own homes. But now, Rosenberg says, the median boomer is in his early 50s and looking to unload his fleet of leased SUVs.

To some degree, then, demographics are destiny. Longer term, an aging population will need to spend less and save more for retirement. As that process plays out, consumer spending may become less important in the big economic picture. Moody's Economy.com forecasts that the combination of demographic and financial factors will cause just such a seismic economic shift. Reversing a four-decade ascent, consumer spending could actually start falling as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, slipping to 68 percent over the next seven years.

Read the whole thing, here.

It seems to me a bit premature to suggest this particular economic crisis will trigger an end to the modern industrial growth model of the American economy. We may indeed see this period as wake up call for rethinking some priorities, especially on automobile travel and gasoline consumption.

But I don't think we've had enough economic crisis and market dislocation to shake the notion from the great multitudes of people that their birthright is to share in the promise of the American way, which includes material affluence as well as political liberty.

Related: "Inflation Staggers Public but Economy Still Seen As Fixable."

The Politics of the Olympic Games

I was 11 years-old in 1972. The Olympic Games that year form my earliest recollections of the world's quadrennial sports competition, but also my earliest memories of Middle East terrorism.

The '72 games were far from the first to be so politicized (Berlin in '36 and Mexico City in '68 come to mind), and this year - right on cue - we've seen the tremendous political conflict leading up to this year's summer games in Beijing. Indeed, as Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal argued, in "China's Olympic Nightmare," Beijing's coming-out party has been wracked by organized anti-Chinese political activism around world. China's politburo may have thought the protests would be isolated or overwhelmed by the excitement and spectacle of the approaching competition, but from human rights to enviromental pollution, China's public relations have been hammered, and the regime's not expected to get as big a boost from the Olympics as had been anticipated.

From the perspective of an observer, the broadcast and images of Beijing's opening ceremonies, and the initial competitions, seem to have dampened some of the pessimism of that thesis.

As the games have commenced, I've been impressed with Presdident Bush's presence at the Olympics, which gives some weight to the message that China has emerged as an accepted partner on the world's stage (it will be more difficult for the U.S. to paint Beijing as outside the institutional rings of power in world politics, if it wasn't before). Others are appalled. Gordon Chang argued that Bush's presence on opening night legitimizes China's authoritarian rule. Christy Hardin Smith attacks Bush for seeking his own poliltical rehabilitation in the People's Republic.

All of this is a reminder of how essentially politicized is the Olympic competition. Foreign Policy has more on that:

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge said in March, “We do not make political choices, because if we do, this is the end of the universality of the Olympic Games.” Two weeks later, Rogge observed indignantly, “Politics invited itself in[to] sports. We didn’t call for politics to come.” But after 75 years of watching the political manipulation and exploitation of the Olympic Games, can anyone actually believe this?

Trapped by its grandiose goal of embracing the entire “human family” at whatever cost, the IOC has repeatedly caved in and awarded the games to police states bent on staging spectacular festivals that serve only to reinforce their own authority. Of course, the most notorious example is the 1936 Berlin Games, which were promoted by a network of Nazi agents working both inside and outside the IOC. Pierre de Coubertin, the French nobleman who founded the modern Olympic movement, called Hitler’s games the fulfillment of his life’s work. As a reward for this endorsement, the Nazi Foreign Office nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But the IOC’s history of working with unsavory regimes didn’t end with the Second World War. The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City were awarded to a one-party, faux democratic government that hoped to use the games to legitimize its rule. Like the 2008 Games, they were confronted with massive antigovernment demonstrations that culminated with the Mexican Army mowing down 300 protesters. (The IOC has never acknowledged this greatest of Olympic-related political crimes.) The 1980 Moscow Olympics were only awarded to the Soviet Union when, in 1974, it threatened to leave the Olympic “family” after losing its bid for the 1976 Games. The IOC awarded the 1988 Olympics to Seoul in 1981, one year after South Korea’s military government carried out a massacre in the city of Kwangju, where paratroopers crushed a citizens’ revolt against the junta, killing at least 200 and injuring more than 1,000 people.

Whether unwelcome or not, politics is a part of the games. The problem is, the IOC seems not to have a clue as to what to do about it. Having failed to anticipate the scope of the anti-China protests this year, and lacking any real political clout, the IOC has fallen back on old clichés about Olympic “diplomacy” and its “nonpolitical” mission on behalf of peace and human rights.

Here's more detail on the Olympic politics of human rights:

When the IOC awarded the games to China in 2001, it assured the world that it was “not naive.” There would eventually be “discussions” about China’s human rights policies, the IOC promised. It was apparently the committee’s hope that the games would catalyze some sort of political opening. By the spring of 2008, as Chinese troops stormed into Lhasa, the IOC was claiming that the games had “advanced the agenda of human rights” by putting China’s human rights record on the front pages of newspapers around the world. That the committee would have much preferred to be spared this attention was wisely left unsaid. Nor has the IOC been willing to demand better behavior from China’s rulers. IOC president Rogge prefers to condemn “violence from whatever side.”

What the Olympics promote instead is a form of amoral universalism in which all countries are entitled to take part in the games no matter how barbaric their leaders may be. Some argue that the United Nations follows the same principle. But don’t be fooled. On a good day, the United Nations can affect the balance of war and peace. On its best day, the IOC cannot. What the IOC offers instead is a highly commercial global sports spectacle. It was instructive, for instance, to hear in April the sentimental invocations of “the Olympic family” as the IOC and the United States Olympic Committee quarreled in Beijing over their shares of global revenues from the games.

“Olympic diplomacy” has always been rooted in a doublespeak that exploits the world’s sentimental attachment to the spirit of the games. In the absence of real standards, the spectacle of Olympic pageantry substitutes for a genuine concern for human rights. At the heart of this policy is a timid and euphemizing rhetoric that turns violent demonstrations and state-sponsored killings into “discussions,” a combination of grandiosity and cluelessness that has long marked the IOC’s accommodating attitude toward unsavory Olympic hosts. Even today, with regard to Beijing, the committee has fallen back on its old habit of claiming to be both apolitical and politically effective at the same time. Although the IOC “is not a political organization,” it does claim to “advance the agenda of human rights.” Sadly, neither is true.

I think it's pretty easy to get caught up in the "spirit of the games," and to forget the brutality of the Chinese state.

In fact, the intensity of the competition - and the brilliance of athletic performances - have a way of melting even the hardest hearts pushing for greater democratization and liberty for the Chinese people.

It's a tough call, for deepening engagement, but an important one. But I'm going hold off on those questions for a few more days, while I tune into the lesser politics of Michael Phelps' quest for eight Olympic gold medals, among other things.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Breaking: Neocon War in the Caucasus!

I saw it coming.

Once Firedoglake announced the return of the Kaganite-Kristol axis of evil, it was only a matter of time before the Georgian war was uncovered as a neoconservative plot to open the latest neo-imperialist, petroleum-push crank-up for the U.S. armaments industry war-masters.

Think Progress' headline says it all, "Neocons Call For U.S. To Launch War With Russia":

Today the New York Times reports that Russia is escalating its war with Georgia, “moving tanks and troops through the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and advancing toward the city of Gori in central Georgia” and even bombing parts of Tibilisi, the Georgian captial.

Russia’s increasing aggression is putting a spark into American neoconservatives. Today on the Times op-ed page, one of their leaders, William Kristol, claims the U.S. must “defend” Georgia’s sovereignty as a reward for its participation in Iraq, while the conservative Washington Times is calling for “maximum pressure” on Russia....

Writing in the Washington Post today, Robert Kagan goes even further, suggesting that the Georgia-Russia conflict may be the start of World War III....

Like a good neoconservative, Kagan also links the Western response to the conflict and its wider policy towards Russia as “appeasement.”

There's a complete unseriousness in raising the specter of a neocon war against Russia.

It's certainly odd, for example, that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, who has been a consistently harsh critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, stated Sunday that:

... what Putin is doing vis-a-vis Georgia to what Stalin did vis-a-vis Finland: subverting by use of force the sovereignty of a small democratic neighbor ...

Barack Obama's first instinct was to recoil at the mere possibility of war, although he soon adopted a more hardline position as the realities of international power politics struck him.

For that, he'll no doubt be pilloried by the left, although neocon demonizations will naturally be reserved for the GOP warmongers.

**********

UPDATE: Be sure to check out these additional conspiracy theories of "neocon war" over Georgia:

* The Carpetbagger Report, "Neocons Still Love That Cold War Mentality."

* Crooks and Liars, "Russia and Georgia Hostilities Escalate Dramatically."

* Down With Tyrrany, "McCain And His NeoCon Allies On The Warpath... Again."

* Empire Burlesque, "Marching Through Georgia III: Reality's Rout and Cheney's Viagra."

* Shakesville, "Let's Take on Russia Too."

But see the more sober analyses at PoliGazette, "Three Sides on Georgia," and Rightwing Nuthouse, "Georgia on My Mind."

No Antiwar Protests Against Russian Aggression in Georgia?

TigerHawk asks, "Where's the "anti-war" movement on the Russo-Georgia war?"

Well, as they say, "a picture's worth a thousand words":

Here's TigerHawk's summary:

Of course, the Russians have no meaningful justification under international law, far less than the imperfect case the United States and its coalition built to justify regime change in Iraq.

That caused me to wonder, where are the anti-war groups?

Well, as of this morning, you can find no mention of the war on A.N.S.W.E.R.'s home page. The group is addressing many other pressing matters, but apparently not the unremitting attack on Georgia. Code Pink? Nyet. Democracy Now!, which is a left-wing media group, has lots of news about American wars on its web page but nothing about Russia or Georgia. Nothing from the comrades at Peace Action. Stop the War Coalition? What war? You can search the home pages of left-wing groups until the cows come home and not find anything on the Russo-Georgia war.

C'mon guys, Human Rights Watch - to its credit - was all over this on Saturday with a boilerplate press release (although you would not know it from the scant press coverage it received, neither Israel nor the United States being involved). The least you can do is copy that one.

So far, at least, it is safe to conclude that these organizations are not so much anti-war as they are anti-American and anti-Israeli. It is useful to clear that up. And, by the way, if they decide to organize massive anti-war rallies against Russia and belatedly reveal themselves as intellectually honest, I will be the first to say so.

As I noted in my previous essay, "Moral Clarity and the Crisis in Georgia ," a big crises like Russia's revanchism in the Caucasus call for unflinching resolve, without ideological blinders.

So what do we see around the leftosphere?

Well, we have, "What a Convenient Little War for The Republicans," at the Huffington Post (I thought this piece was satire, but the huzzahs in the comments quickly snapped me out of it).

Firedoglake sees neocon total war designs, with the conflict being pushed by Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Randy Scheuenemann (John McCain's national security advisor), "Let’s Bring Back the Band."

And at Newshoggers, hands are being thrown up in disbelief at Democratic Party capitulation to alleged GOP war orchestration, "Obama Turns More Hawkish On Georgia Conflict."

Yep, it's all a BushCo-McCain plot to wag the dog just as Barack Obama's on an "exotic" celebrity vacation in Hawaii.

Photo Credit: Un-American Revolution, "Bush Hitler Reference, Gotta Love The Irony."

Conservative Coffeehouse Serves Up Right Blend

I've never been all that bothered by the left-wing environment at Starbucks-style coffeehouses. I see a lot of diversity, new-age hippy types, and techno-sophisticates plugging away on Wi-Fi, and I sit happily in my buttoned-down attire (on weekday afternoons, at least), reading the Wall Street Journal or grading papers. A lot of the kids sitting nearby might as well be my students.

I like to think I'm hip while I sip my double-latte.

But a conservative coffee proprietor in Crown Point, Indiana, is having none of it:

From the moment customers enter the front door, A Conservative Cafe is serving up caffeinated doctrine.

Ann Coulter books sit stacked by the fireplace and a picture of President Reagan hangs on the wall. Fox News plays on all the televisions and stock market quotes scroll along an electronic ticker above the cash register.

Behind the counter, owner Dave Beckham smiled proudly in a T-shirt with the face of Uncle Sam on it that read "Zip It Hippie."

The T-shirt is for sale at the cafe. So are others, including one with a peace sign that says "Peace Through Superior Firepower."

"It's a change from the traditional liberal bastion coffeehouses," Beckham said. "No one is going to bad-mouth America in here."

Friends warned Beckham to stay away from the conservative theme before the cafe opened in October 2007. The former art teacher came up with the idea about five years ago, he said, after souring on Starbucks and other high-end coffee chains.

He didn't like piped-in folk music, specialty drinks with faux-Italian names or patrons who frittered the hours away on laptops or listening to iPods. The atmosphere, he said, seemed an affront to Midwestern values he learned growing up in northwest Indiana.

"Coffee shouldn't be about sitting in a cafe for 12 hours," Beckham said. "Coffee gets us through our workday. It's what we drink before we make steel for the rest of the country or head out into the fields."

His disdain for the coffee chains coincided with his fear of an erosion in national pride, so Beckham made plans to build an old-fashioned java joint near the Crown Point town square.

There were two Starbucks within three miles of the shop's location, but Beckham and his wife, Jill, were convinced his pro-U.S. decor and Indiana-roasted coffee would strike a chord with the community.

About six months after Beckham opened for business, Starbucks announced plans to close one of its Crown Point locations. Since then, Beckham has begun pondering franchise opportunities for his cafe.

He acknowledged that Starbucks' downturn stemmed from a sagging economy and the company's massive growth, but he thought his success proved that some people were turned off by traditional coffeehouse culture.

Crown Point resident Matthew McPhee is one of them.

McPhee doesn't feel comfortable in trendier coffeehouses, where he often doesn't agree with the political conversations. He prefers Beckham's cafe, where red, white and blue bunting hangs outside the brick building and patrons can buy T-shirts emblazoned with the face of Reagan that read, "Silly liberal . . . Paychecks are for Workers."

"I like it here," he said. "I don't have to worry about listening to beatnik poetry or some political ideology that makes me want to vomit."

McPhee usually orders a radical right blend, the cafe's strongest roast. The other blends are conservative, moderate and liberal -- the latter of which Beckham described as a "Colombian decaf with no substance."

That's too cool!

Democrats On Edge as Obamania Cools

The Democratic National Committee has announced that Michelle Obama will give the opening-night address to the party's Denver convention in two weeks.

The buzz also has it that Chelsea Clinton will introduce her mother, Hillary, when the New York Senator giver her address on the convention's second night (Chelsea will speak instead of her father, Bill, a switch approved by Barack Obama himself, perhaps as a matter more of relief than retribution).

While the national party conventions have been criticized in recent years as anti-climactic, the closeness and controversies surrounding election '08 have placed a premium on campaign choreography and candidate image. With the Democrats first to hold a nominating convention, and with Obama's novelty wearing thin, the totality of the events in Denver - both inside and outside the convention hall - could dramatically impact the Democrats' presidential prospects after Labor Day.

The Guardian provides a nice synopsis:

Before flying with his family for a week's holiday in Hawaii yesterday, Barack Obama expressed concern about taking a break in election year. "During the middle of a campaign you're always worried about taking some time off," he said.

He may have good reason to worry. He leaves behind a Democratic party that over the past fortnight has been showing signs for the first time of nervousness about the November 4 election.

For them, this is supposed to be the Democrats' year, an inevitable march towards the White House after the catastrophic defeats of 2000 and 2004. Almost everything seems to be going their way: unpopular president, disenchantment with the Iraq war, a faltering economy and an inspirational Democratic candidate.

What is worrying the Democrats, in spite of all these pluses, is that Obama's poll lead has remained stubbornly small. A tracking poll by RealClearPolitics published yesterday has Obama on 46.9% compared with John McCain's 43.3%.

"I think there are a lot of Democrats who are nervous," said Tad Devine, chief strategist for the Kerry White House bid in 2004. "I think they thought this election would fall into their laps."

Sarah Murray explains the thaw in Obamania:

Obama has bestrode the news cycle like a Colossus since he entered the presidential race a year and a half ago. Whenever he hit low points like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright debacle, Obama’s instinctive response was to deliver a stirring speech… But there comes in politics a moment where what was once exhilarating (a presidential nominee who is the hopeful embodiment of 21st century America) becomes predictable and commonplace.”

There’s still plenty of room to spice things up though and alleviate that boredom. “In the next month, Obama will have twin opportunities to restore a sense of surprise and wonder to his campaign. A pedestrian vice-presidential rollout (especially if it is a make-no-waves selection like Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh) and an eloquent-but-empty convention speech could signal trouble. Obama needs to give independents and loosely affiliated voters new reasons to vote for him, since he appears to have reached a temporary ceiling a bit shy of 50 percent in most public polls,” [Salon's Walter] Shapiro says. Before this the goal was to “dominate the news cycle” but “Obama may be a victim of too much too soon.” At any rate, it seems like a good time for that Hawaiian vacation, Shapiro notes.

Well, Obama better be rested and ready, as he's got a lot of work ahead. Today's Gallup poll showed the Illinois Senator just barely on the upside of a statistical tie, 46 to 43 percent over John McCain.

Related: Steven Warshawsky, "Why Barack Obama Will Not Win."

Where is NATO Intervention in Georgia?

One of the debate's surround the crisis in the Caucasus is the nature of the casus belli. Has Georgia launched a war on a militarily preponderant geopolitical rival, or has Moscow cracked down on a breakaway republic in a burst of new oil-back Russian revanchism?

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez argue for the latter scenario:

As we write, reports are coming in that after a bombardment by Russia's aircraft, its tanks are advancing on the Georgian town of Gori - the birthplace of Iosif Djugashvili, better known as Stalin.

This throwback to the heyday of the Soviet Union is more than symbolic. Historical analogies are never perfect, but our sense of déjà vu was acute as we watched Moscow's Soviet-style move to reassert its domination of the USSR's former fief.

Moscow perceives a threat to its strategic interests from a small regional actor. It prods its neighboring clients to commit such provocations that the adversary is drawn into military action that "legitimizes" a massive, direct intervention to "defend the victims of aggression."

Svante Cornell makes a similar case in, "The War That Russia Wants":

For more on the origins of the conflict, see the analysis from political scientists Daniel Nexon and Charlie Carpenter.

Note, though, as the New York Times reports, Georgian soldiers on the ground feel betrayed by the United States, an ally of Georgia, the diplomatic delays, and the failure to mobilize a NATO riposte to Moscow's aggression:

In retreat, the Georgian soldiers were so tired they could not keep from stumbling. Their arms were loaded with rucksacks and ammunition boxes; they had dark circles under their eyes. Officers ran up and down the line, barking for them to go faster.

All along the road was grief. Old men pushed wheelbarrows loaded with bags or led cows by tethers. They drove tractors and rickety Ladas packed with suitcases and televisions.

As a column of soldiers passed through Gori, a black-robed priest came out of his church and made the sign of the cross again and again.

One soldier, his face a mask of exhaustion, cradled a Kalashnikov.

“We killed as many of them as we could,” he said. “But where are our friends?”

It was the question of the day. As Russian forces massed Sunday on two fronts, Georgians were heading south with whatever they could carry. When they met Western journalists, they all said the same thing: Where is the United States? When is NATO coming?

Since the conflict began, Western leaders have worked frantically to broker a cease-fire. But for Georgians — so boisterously pro-American that Tbilisi, the capital, has a George W. Bush Street — diplomacy fell far short of what they expected.

The logical answer here is the United States will not risk a great power conflict in Russia's backyard, a strategic area of Moscow's historic regional hegemony. But if alliance commitments and the NATO mission are to have continued relevance in its own theater of operation, the question of diplomatic inertia and NATO intransigence is troubling.

Michael van der Galien at PoliGazette indicates that NATO may still be relevant:

It could threaten with military action or, better, intervention and it could start talking to Russia actively to convince the Russians to stop their aggression. If this does not suffice, NATO countries can punish Russia by other means, and they can start the procedure to send peacekeepers to the region. Turkey, an important NATO ally, is located close to Georgia; Turkey’s territory can be used by NATO to push the Russian forces back into Russia. Such a threat alone would be suffice to push the Russians back into their own territory. My own estimation is that Putin and the country’s president have decided to attack Georgia because they believe that the West will sit by and do nothing. If the West would unite, they would take a step back immediately.

In other words, speak to Moscow in a language it understands: power politics.

Obscenities and the Left-Wing Blogosphere

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post examining the tendency toward profanity among leftist bloggers: "Obscenities in the Blogosphere."

I argued that crude vulgarity has become essentially the lingua franca of the hard-left blogosphere and commentocracy. Widespread profanity appears to provide leftists with some assumed heightened firepower with which to beat down opponents, who are demonized as fascist imperialists intent to exterminate racial minorities and the poor, among other things.

My observations derived from recent experience, as well as the debate surrounding profanty at last month's Netroots Nation conference in Texas.

Well it turns out that Matthew Sheffield at the Washington Times has performed a Google content analysis to determine the relative propensity to profanity between top left and right blog communities: "Profanity Greater on Liberal Blogs":

Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage.

That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other....

The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.

The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.

What explains this disparity?

Sheffield hypothesizes that Bush derangement is a precipitating factor. But beyond that, religious belief among conservatives inclines them less toward the use of profanity in their daily lives, and thus in blogging:

Conservatives, especially those who are more religious, are less likely to use profanity in their daily conversation.

This ties in pretty much with the my thesis on the left's secular demonology:

How might we explain all of this? Well, in my view, these folks are essentially Marxist, and at base, we might consider Marxist thought a doctrine of hatred, a secular demonology:

We hate those, whose existence urges us to reconsider our theories and our vocabularies. We hate what places a safe and irresponsible categorization of the world in jeopardy. We hate what threatens the purity and predictability of our perception of the world, our mode of discourse, and in effect, our mental security.

Thus, for the left, rather than consider that vulgarity has no proper place in the respectable exchange of ideas, crude language is a tool to beat down those who would challenge their way of seeing the world, especially those allegedly in the right-wing superstructure of greedy imperialistic designs.

See also, "The Obscenity of Spencer Ackerman," and "The Commentocracy of Hate."