McCain Deserves a Second Look

Kate O'Beirne has a great article up today at the National Review on John McCain's presidential prospects. She argues that McCain might in fact be the most formidable candidate in the GOP presidential field. Check it out:

While Hillary Clinton is looking like a sure bet for her party’s nomination, only the reckless would wager their own money on the likely Republican nominee. With the presence of Fred Thompson and the absence of Newt Gingrich, the GOP field is now complete — and completely without a conventional frontrunner. Its fluidity has prompted a second look by the rank and file: Republicans seeking to keep their party’s base intact, while appealing to independents in order to have a shot at defeating Hillary, are taking another look at John McCain.

A veteran GOP congressional aide who has been a critic of McCain, most recently on the issue of immigration, recently surprised himself by concluding that the Arizona senator would be the best general-election candidate. This strategist seeks a nominee who will unify and energize the base, who has the potential to win, and who makes fellow Republicans competitive. He notes that McCain is pro-life and strong on national security, and has long been in favor of fiscal restraint. In addition to unifying social, economic, and national-security conservatives, he argues, McCain has a maverick image that can appeal to the independent voters who abandoned the GOP in droves in 2006.

O'Beirne performs some nice comparative analysis on the top candidates' poll standings, and it turns out that despite popular perceptions, McCain runs just as well against Hillary Clinton in head-to-head matchups as does Rudy Giuliani (Giuliani's general election electability is a main reason many Republicans say they'll back him). Here's more:

McCain is a conservative whose heterodox views on campaign-finance reform and immigration are shared by the more liberal Giuliani. With the defeat of the “comprehensive” immigration bill he championed, McCain recognizes that the public demands concrete enforcement measures — and he now pledges to secure the border before pressing for the legalization of illegal aliens. (He will, of course, have to convince conservatives that he is a genuinely reformed reformer committed to an “enforcement first” agenda.)

Finally, McCain is in a long-term, stable second marriage and talks to all his children, although not as frequently as he would like. One son is a midshipman at the Naval Academy and another is an enlisted Marine serving in Iraq.

Should Republicans reject the false choices being offered — and make a considered choice based on the man and the merits — a second look could give John McCain a second chance.

McCain remains my candidate for the GOP nomination. Throughout the year I've stated my credentials as a national security voter, and McCain's knowledge and resolve on American national security can't be matched by any of the other top contenders. While O'Beirne doesn't stress it, the improved situation in Iraq may also help McCain look more and more like like a winner.

Iowa and New Hampshire More Important Than Ever

I posted earlier this week on the Iowa GOP's decision to push their party caucuses up to January 3, a date marking the earliest start to the presidential nomination contest in post-1972 history. Beyond citing the research of William Mayer - perhaps the country's top expert on the politics of presidential nominations - I didn't really elaborate on the practical significance of this year's extremely frontloaded primary season.

Thus, I'm pleased to report that Mark Barabak and Dan Morain's article today has a great analysis of the implications of this year's unprecedented early balloting:

For months, politicians in big states like California, Florida and Michigan have griped about their lack of influence in the 2008 presidential race, pushing up their primaries to try to diminish the sway of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Now, thanks to those efforts, Iowa and New Hampshire appear more important than ever.

The reasons are illustrated in the latest campaign fundraising reports, issued this week. The figures show a presidential contest that has effectively split into two financial tiers. One consists of Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, who are swimming in campaign cash. The other consists of everybody else in the race.

Despite the competitive nature of the contest, fundraising has proved more difficult than many presidential candidates anticipated, particularly on the Republican side. Candidates face pressure to score an early victory in Iowa or New Hampshire -- the two states adamant about voting first -- and then hope to quickly replenish their campaign treasuries to compete in the rapid succession of contests that follow.

Failing that, the also-rans, Democratic and Republican, will probably have to pack up their campaigns and quit before the vast majority of voters even have a chance to weigh in.

"Iowa and New Hampshire are everything," said Scott Reed, an unaffiliated GOP strategist, echoing the words of other political analysts. "They'll be like a slingshot for whoever wins and does well."

Read the whole thing.

This need for big, early money is probably the most important implication of the frontloaded calendar, and frankly I'm endlessly fascinated by current developments in presidential campaign finance (my defense of the big money campaign regime is here).

In 2004, President Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry raised $274 million and $253 million respectively (and that was just for the primaries, as both candidates accepted public funding for the general election). Total receipts are expected to exceed that this year, and Barabak and Morain have a nice graphic on the money totals for the current candidates' presidential campaign war chests (click here to see the graphic). Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have raised about $80 million apiece. On the GOP side, Mitt Romney's the most prodigious fundraiser, at $61 million, and Rudy Giulani's holding the second spot with about $47 million.

The lower-tiered candidates will certainly be hard-pressed to remain competitive as their war chests dwindle come January. The main thing to watch, though, will be how much each of the major-party nominees raise and spend in the general election. 2008's expected to be the most expensive campaign ever. But what matters most is how well the GOP does in funding their party's standard-bearer.

Personally, I'm expecting a tight race in money and polling, but in the battle of ideas the GOP will win hands down.

Blog Watch: Digby's Hullabaloo

With this entry, the "Blog Watch" series comes to American Power. As regular readers may recall, the original goal of Blog Watch was to comment on political blogs that raised:

...significant questions involving style, analysis, and ideological orientation. I'm particularly interested in dissecting and challenging radical, antiwar bloggers.

So far, as things have developed, I've challenged not just antiwar ideology, but the whole mindless nihilism associated with the endless hard-left attacks on the Bush administration and all things Republican (my earlier entries in the series are here, here, and here).

That effort continues with today's dissection and rebuttal of Digby's Hullabaloo. Hullabaloo's a vile yet influential leftist blog (Digby's posts are regularly cited by some of the top Bush-bashers of the left-blogosphere). I have on occassion waded into the dark comment threads there, which feature all of the classic characteristics familiar to the paranoid hate-addled hordes of the radical set. Most of Hullabaloo's posts are written by Digby, whose biography at The Huffington Post notes:

"Digby" has been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a writer whose political and cultural observations have entertained and informed the blogosphere since 2002. They can currently be found at http://www.digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.laweekly.com/.

(Yawn here.)

Hullabaloo's a group blog, however. That slippery wannabe international relations blogger Glenn Greenwald did a guest gig at Hullabaloo some time back (my jaws clench and hackles rise at the mere mention of Greenwald, but I've made mincemeat of him elsewhere). One current Hullabaloo co-blogger is Tristero, which is the pseudonym for Richard Einhorn, a modern classical composer by profession. Tristero should probably stick to music, as his foreign policy analysis is nothing more than boilerplate antiwar hatred of the Bush adminstration's forward international policy.

In one of his recent posts Tristero claims Turkey was readying an incursion into Northern Iraq, despite news reports indicating that Turkish plans were merely preliminary, against the wishes of the United States government, and that strikes against Kurdish rebels in Iraq were nowhere near forthcoming. But such facts didn't stop Tristero from launching this outlandish diatribe against the administration:

As far as I can tell, this article contains no information to support the assertion that "a Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq" is unlikely and plenty of reasons to worry about the opposite. Anyone familiar with the situation care to explain? Juan Cole mentions it, with a slightly less optimistic take on the situation than the Times provides, but does not offer an opinion as to how likely it or unlikely a military incursion by Turkey could be.

A personal note: Once, I had a long private talk with an American deputy ambassador who had been stationed in Iraq during 2004. I brought up my concerns about Turkey and the Kurds and, with the kind of flattery ambassadors learn to dispense on a moment's notice, he expressed surprise that I, a mere musician, knew enough to ask questions about it. I, too, was surprised, but I was surprised that he thought the questions were that esoteric.

The unpredictable effects - except that I knew they would be the bad kind of unpredictable - of destabilizing Iraq on its neighbors were among the many reasons I thought the Bush/Iraq invasion was major league cuckoo. By 2004, however, I had come to the genuinely terrifying conclusion that I, a mere musician, and my colleagues for the past year, a bunch of loudmouth bloggers who refused to accord any respect to those who believed in "the triumph of hope over experience," understood the world far better than America's political and media leaders. That may sound like a boast but really it's not. It highlights how profoundly incompetent, claustrophobic, and twisted American political discourse had become, and still is.

It chills me to the bone to realize that Walter Russell Mead, an old friend who has since gone on to acquire an enormous reputation in international affairs, got Bush/Iraq wrong and I got it right. There is something profoundly out of whack in this country for something like that to be true. But it is. And it wasn't just a lucky guess on my part; I wasn't guessing. Nor was it an excusable mistake on Walter's part, not only because it wasn't simply one mistake, but because it was an inexcusable cluster of serious mistakes for anyone to make who claims expertise in foreign policy.

The citation of Juan Cole is odd, since Cole fails to support Tristero's main point. Perhaps Tristero thought that bandying about Cole's name would lend some credence to his argument, although Cole's radical views have long been marginalized (Cole's reputation in the historical profession is controversal, and his application for a post at Yale University was rejected on the grounds of anti-Americanism and shoddy scholarship). But what's more interesting is all of Tristero's unwarranted assertions of superior foreign policy knowledge. Tristero's post is dated October 10, and this is just weeks after General David Petraeus testified to Congress on America's military success in Iraq, a performance that has been greeted by a growing sense that events in Iraq have improved dramatically.

But such views are par for the course over at Hullabaloo. In a characteristic post, Digby dismisses mainstream policy discourse as mere "incoherence" :

Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It's no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.

As an example of this, Digby attacks Mitt Romney, and she cites his (objectively sensible) views in this YouTube as "complete nonsense":

Also, after the recent commanding debate performances by Rudy Giuliani, Digby pulls up some partisan hack piece at Slate calling Rudy a liar, and then argues:

I don't think Rudy cares about facts any more than George W. Bush does, and undoubtedly doesn't know them in the first place. After all, Bush lied repeatedly during both of his presidential campaigns, just as he's doing now when he claims that SCHIP will allow rich people to steal from the taxpayers. (Like he thinks that's a bad thing.) They just make things up because they don't care to know the truth ... and it doesn't matter....

In any case, the bar has been set very low for GOP presidents. Yet they seem to be able to set it lower each time. If Giuliani wins we will not only have an idiot for president we will have a dangerously unstable idiot for president who is even more arrogant and malevolent than the one we have now. I have a sneaking feeling "competence" is going to be the least of our problems.

That's it? A couple of factual discrepancies over New York City tax policies during the 1990s and you have the basis for a complete smear of the entire GOP establishment as a bunch of liars! "Bush lied, people died!" Haven't we heard that before? It's so simplistic, and it would be just a matter of odd fascination if it weren't for the fact that these innacuracies go over as mainstream analysis in contemporary left-wing policy circles.

But I truly understood the true nature of Digby's hard-left ideological project after reading her denunciation of Bill Cosby's appearance last weekend on Meet the Press. Digby mounts her attack on Cosby with another volley of the "gibberish" line, laced with extreme exaggeration for effect:

I just suffered through one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I watched Bill Cosby ramble on like he was drunk, dominating the conversation, for nearly an hour on Meet The Press, most of the time speaking pure gibberish.

(Imagine him doing it in his patented Fat Albert voice as well...)

The context for Cosby's Meet the Press appearance is the release of his new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, which is coauthored by Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a well-respected child psychiatrist who specializes in African American issues. The book argues for a closer look at black American culture in an effort to find solutions to the current African American crisis.

Now, I watched the show, so I can attest to the real reason Digby attacks Cosby as incoherent: Cosby argues that the contemporary black family is dysfunctional - especially families of lower socioeconomic attainment - and these families have failed to provide the model of stability and responsibility that is the necessary prerequisite for success in life, educationally, professionally, and socially. Digby cites this passage from the interview transcripts to illustrate Cosby's alleged gibberish:

MR. COSBY: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.” And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with.[...]

MR. COSBY: ...in times of need, etc., etc. So when you look at education, it is my belief that it is there with a very ugly head. However, it is also my belief that this is not the first time my race has seen systemic or institutional racism. There were times, even worse times, when lynchings were acceptable. Sure, the newspapers wrote about it, but it happened. Juries were set and freed the, people who did the, the lynching. Therefore, we knew how to fight, we knew how to protect our children, protect our women. Today, in lower, lower economic areas, some people—not all—some people are not contributing to that protection. Therefore, when you see these numbers, you see, you see numbers and the character correction has not happened. Many times it’s the TV set, a BET or, or videos played, kids look at it and they admire it. It’s the proliferation of drugs into the neighborhood.

Cosby's been been at the forefront of a recent movement to pinpoint the causes of the contemporary African American crisis at the level of the family. His speech at the NAACP's 50th commemoration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision sparked a vigorous debate in the black community over institutional versus individual factors in the crisis of poverty and crime among black youth today.

Cosby wasn't speaking gibberish last Sunday on Meet the Press. Indeed, his comments were far from incoherent. A written transript - like that provided by Meet the Press - can't do justice to the syncopated down-home patterns of Cosby's speech.

I listened with ease as Cosby spoke truth to the pathologies of contemporary black America. He speaks with the voice of the traditional black elder sage who's been down with the brothers in the 'hood and knows "what dey got t'do" to rise up from the depths of danger and despair. Cosby's voice is the powerful trumpet of contemporary black conservatism, a movement which doesn't discount America's history of institution racism. Instead, black conservatives focus on educational excellence as a means of advancement within the society. They stress neighborhood safety and security, and most of all they denounce the endless cries of "racism" which cast blacks as the "victims" of an irredeemable racial caste system that locks them in the dire straights of socioeconomic inferiority. Black conservatives look within, to the heart and soul of the indiviual, for answers to the problem of black uplift.

And this is why Cosby's attacked mercilessly by Digby ("it's all gibberish"), as well as the entire class of left-wing victimologists. The conservative position on individual responsibility challenges the enduring shibboleths of the radical sociology on race. This nihilist ideology (which inherently offers no compelling policy alternatives) is anathema to the future chances of America's black youth, and the entire anti-Bush, anti-traditionalist project mounted at Digby's Hullaballoo holds disastrous implications for the future of American public policy.

So, as we see here and elsewhere, conservatives have a continuing interest and responsibility to challenge and rebut this radical left-wing dogma. The stakes are incrediby high: For although the radicals propose absolutely nothing of reason and hope, such "discourse" is becoming all too common within the broader tide of leftism that gaining traction in the poltical system. All conservatives need to join together to beat back this antiwar, multicultural, statist onslaught chipping away at our common political decency and vitality.

See also the previous entries from Blog Watch: The Blue Voice, Firedoglake, and Glenn Greenwald.

Neoconservative Rebirth

Jacob Heilbrunn's column today argues that the neoconservative movement is regrouping with the appointment of John Podhoretz at the new editor of Commentary Magazine:

For several years, the conventional wisdom has been that neoconservatism is on the skids. Vice President Dick Cheney has been sidelined while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flexes her diplomatic muscles, and old neocon standbys such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have largely disappeared from view. But the movement isn't dead yet. As shown by the announcement this week of former New York Post editorial page editor John Podhoretz's appointment to head the flagship neoconservative journal Commentary, the movement may be battered, but it is not going away. If anything, it is regrouping.

At the moment, the future of neoconservatism hangs on its unspoken system of dynastic succession, in which the top posts of the movement are handed off to the sons of its leaders. A second generation is taking over from the first to lead the crusade against the liberal traitors at home and the terrorists abroad.

Like William Kristol, who edits the influential right-wing journal the Weekly Standard, Podhoretz is the son of neoconservative eminences. Kristol's father, Irving, was editor of the old neocon journal the Public Interest and helped create the movement's network in Washington; his mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a conservative cultural critic and prominent advocate of Victorian morality.

In Podhoretz's case, his mother, Midge Decter, is a trustee of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and has written several books decrying feminism. His brother-in-law, Elliot Abrams, who played a leading role in the Iran-Contra affair, is a staffer on the National Security Council responsible for the Mideast and democratization programs.
But in this galaxy of notables, it is Podhoretz's father, Norman, who looms largest. Norman, now 77, is the patriarch of the neocon movement. An advisor to presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, a prominent advocate of bombing Iran, author of the bestselling book "World War IV" and himself the editor of Commentary for four decades, he exemplifies the intensely intellectual and combative first generation of neoconservatives.

A scholarship student at Columbia University who resented what he called the "WASP patriciate," Norman Podhoretz studied under the literary scholar Lionel Trilling and initially made his name by denouncing Jack Kerouac and the Beat movement in the late 1950s. His mentor at Commentary was Elliot Cohen, a former Trotskyist turned virulent anti-communist. After Cohen committed suicide in 1959, Podhoretz was named editor at age 30.

At first, Podhoretz turned against such mentors as Trilling and embraced the left. His memoir, "Making It," made matters worse by revealing his lust for success. The snobbish New York intelligentsia snubbed him.

But in the late 1960s, Podhoretz took yet another turn. Disgusted by what he viewed as the anti-Americanism of the antiwar movement, he moved sharply to the right. Under his leadership, Commentary defended Israel, denounced the Soviet Union and opposed affirmative action. Its articles helped Daniel Patrick Moynihan and then Jeane Kirkpatrick become U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations. Podhoretz was riding high.

For the hawkish Podhoretz, who had been raised on the Cold War and had written articles about Mikhail Gorbachev with such titles as "The Fantasy of Soviet Collapse," the end of the Soviet Union came as a shock. The neocons were reduced to gadflies as President Clinton won two terms in the 1990s.

With 9/11, Podhoretz and the neocon movement were revitalized. But it is the sons who will carry forth the standard in coming years.

John Podhoretz will undoubtedly seek to update his magazine, which has lost many of its readers. The younger Podhoretz epitomizes the ethos of the new generation; he has spent much of his time as a critic of pop culture, writing about films and television. If his father wrote books with such titles as "Ex-Friends" - about intellectual grandees such as Hannah Arendt - John Podhoretz's memoir, "Hell of a Ride," was about watching the antics of interns working for George H.W. Bush. Unlike his father's generation, John Podhoretz's has never really rebelled. As a result, it is not made up of disaffected liberals but of people who have been attracted to the right from the beginning. They have never flirted with the left but have been groomed to battle it.

And so Podhoretz has been tapped to continue the war against liberalism and to rejuvenate the magazine that played such a key role in the history of neoconservatism. After the debacle of the Iraq war, it will be a stiff challenge. Unless, of course, Giuliani wins the presidency. Then all bets are off, and an article in Commentary may once again be the ticket to a United Nations appointment, not to mention a Cabinet post.

While John Podhoretz may have been groomed under the aegis of his father, I would argue a whole new generation of 9/11 neoconservatives - born of the outrage against the left's demonization of the United States in the early Bush years - will grow and prosper in the years ahead.

Neoconservatism offers a compelling alternative to the nihilism of the contemporary left, and the moral clarity of the movement - in both domestic and international life - provides a vital foundation for the conservative policy agenda going forward.

For Commentary's announcement of Podhoretz's appointment as editor, click here.

Plus, be sure to see my initial post at American Power, which provides a nice primer on the power of neoconservative ideals.

See also, Irving Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion."

Big Money Bundling is Campaign Finance Issue for 2008

Today's Wall Street Journal has an inside report on the trends in bundling contributions to the presidential candidates under current campaign finance regulations. Here's the introduction:

The bundling of political donations once was an innocuous play in the game book of Washington political operatives. Now, the fund-raising practice has grown so widespread, and some of its practitioners so brazen, that bundling has become the chief source of abuse in the American campaign-finance system.

The strange case of Norman Hsu, the textile-importer-turned-fugitive who cobbled together $800,000 in contributions for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, is the tip of the iceberg. Candidates for offices from county commissioner to U.S. president are increasingly turning to bundlers -- individuals who ask friends, family and business associates for contributions to their candidate of choice -- to help bring in the tremendous amounts of cash now needed to wage political campaigns.

The number of bundlers working for presidential campaigns has nearly doubled since the last election, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from campaigns and watchdog groups. The volume of cash they funnel to individual campaigns, as a percentage of all money raised, has soared as well. Bundled donations account for more than one-quarter of presidential campaign contributions this year, up from 8% in the 2000 race.

Bundling is legal and has been around for years, but new forces have turned it into an election-season cornerstone. Campaign costs have surged, with each candidate's viability increasingly measured by their ability to raise cash. Recent finance reforms have closed old avenues for individuals to make big donations, making stars out of connected fund-raisers who can coax small donations from a broad network of names. Campaigns encourage ambitious bundling by rewarding top fund-raisers with perks, including access to candidates.

The article develops the angle that bundling is a way for illegal contributors to funnel money to the candidates. The Clinton campaign's Hsu scandal certainly demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on big money bundlers to help bankroll campaigns.

Yet there's an enterprising element to the current big money system that's fascinating. Since at least 2000 - when George W. Bush declined public financing in his race for the GOP nomination - the campaign financing regime's been in turmoil. The WSJ piece has more on this background:

Bundlers for major campaigns say they're following the rules. They're motivated by a shared ideology with their candidates and a desire to see them win. "The way I see it, there are two elections. The first is how many people are willing to dig into their pocketbooks to finance a candidate," says Domino's Pizza CEO David Brandon, a bundler for Republican Mitt Romney.

The bundling boom is partly an unintended consequence of prior stabs at reform. In 1974, lawmakers responded to Watergate-era political abuses by limiting the amount of money any individual can give. At the same time, to help lower the cost of campaigns and reduce reliance on private donors, the federal government offered to match money raised by a campaign with public funds, provided the candidates agreed to a federal spending limit.

In the history of campaign-finance law, well-intentioned efforts to curb abuses in one area typically open the door to those in another. The Watergate-era reforms prompted an explosion of political-action committees, which had much higher limits on how much they could receive from individuals and dole out to campaigns. PACs became the new conduit for big cash.

Meanwhile, campaign budgets ballooned. In 1976, $300 million was spent on candidates for Congress and the White House, according to the Federal Election Commission. Since then, the cost of campaigns has grown by about 40% every four-year election cycle. The 2008 elections are expected to cost $6 billion in all -- with the presidential contest, for the first time, expected to exceed $1 billion.

By the late 1990s, presidential hopefuls were chafing at the federal spending limits. In 1999, George W. Bush announced he would opt out of the federal system -- the first major presidential candidate to do so since the program was introduced 25 years earlier. His decision freed his campaign from spending limitations, but increased the pressure to raise private money to offset the waived federal funds.

Mr. Bush retooled his strategy. As governor of Texas, he had cultivated donors who contributed $100,000 or more to his campaigns. (Texas law doesn't limit campaign contributions from individuals.) But when Mr. Bush began his first presidential campaign, those donors were forbidden under federal law at the time from giving more than $1,000. Mr. Bush created a program that rewarded individuals who brought $100,000 or more to his campaign, in increments of $1,000 or less.

He named the supporters "Pioneers," publicizing their names on his Web site and inviting them to private campaign events and strategy sessions. A tracking number was attached to the donations channeled by each Pioneer to the campaign, allowing the Bush team to tally the haul of each and foster competition among them. Mr. Bush recruited about 250 bundlers who raised at least $25 million of the $100 million he raised for the 2000 race.

Bundling received another, if unintentional, boost in 2002. That year's McCain-Feingold Act banned corporations, unions and others from making large donations, known as "soft money," to the Democratic and Republican parties. Most of this soft money had been spent on behalf of the parties' presidential and congressional candidates, so the new law effectively closed the avenue that high-rolling campaign donors had used to skirt individual campaign limits. The rule also doubled the limits on individual donations to $2,000 for a primary election and another $2,000 for the general election for congressional and presidential candidates. (The limit is currently $2,300 per candidate per election.)

In the 2004 election, both President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, declined matching funds. Had they accepted federal money, they would have received $17 million each and been limited to spending roughly $44 million. Mr. Kerry went on to raise $215 million, and Mr. Bush raised $259 million. Each used networks of more than 500 bundlers, according to Public Citizen.

This season, nearly every major presidential candidate has declined public funding and relies heavily on bundlers.

Mrs. Clinton's campaign has awarded the title "HillRaiser" to the 223 bundlers it says have channeled $100,000 or more her way. That means the campaign's bundlers account for at least $22.3 million, or about 28%, of the $80.1 million that public records show it has raised through Sept. 30. HillRaisers include movie producer Steven Spielberg, supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle and former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.

The article goes on to discuss the potential improprieties that arise out of bundling practices, and it discusses congressional efforts to rein in unscrupulous bundlers.

But if you think about the criticism of bundling - in Congress or other reform circles - it's not just the problem of a few bad eggs here and there, breaking the laws or coercing political contributions from workers or union members. The larger issue is money in politics altogether. The article quotes Fred Wertheimer, of the reform advocacy group Democracy 21, on the "corrupting" influence of money in politics:

"The pressures of unlimited, arms-race spending has put the highest premium on presidential candidates finding bundlers who can raise huge amounts of money and the lowest premium on filtering out problematic bundlers," says Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan Washington-based group dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics. "This has opened the door to anything-goes bundlers pursuing anything-goes fund raising."

Folks like Wertheimer have never met a campaign finance reform law they didn't like. It doesn't matter that some of the biggest abuses in campaign finance in recent years have been found in the Democratic Party's big money operations: Money in politics is inherently corrupting, distorting the policymaking process and threatening the "integrity" of the system.

Certainly there's a case to be made for eliminating exclusive backroom deals and corporate deep-pocket backing for America's political leaders. But as any student of campaign finance knows, money in politics is like the winding waters of a raging river. Should a dead log block the river's passage, the water finds a way to continue its flow, up, over, and around the impediment. So it goes with money. The McCain-Feingold reform act of 2002 is largely responsible for making the current crop of bundlers so powerful. The law has also made interest group 527 organizations (a regular target of criticism) powerful producers of campaign advertising. Who knows what consequences will flow from the next round of "progressive" campaign finance reforms?

Most interesting, though, is that much of the money being bundled by these big money brokers comes in political contributions of $2000 or less. Overwhelmingly, these donations reflect everyday people exercising their First Amendment rights to financially support their favored candidates. As such, the current freewheeling system of big bundlers may be more democratic than anything the Wertheimer types might bring about to replace it.

White House is Unending Nightmare for Democrats

Morton Kondracke's got an interesting piece up today at Real Clear Politics on the coming Bush administration policy offensive:

President Bush’s approval ratings are still in the low 30s, but White House aides insist that he’s now on policy offense across the board.

From Iraq to SCHIP to the budget, energy policy, trade, terrorist surveillance, the mortgage crisis and even prescription drug costs and student test scores, top Bush aides say that events are turning in his direction - and that they are trying to get the word out more effectively.

Indeed, there is some truth in what they say. For sure, developments in Iraq have taken a distinctly favorable turn, opening up the possibility that Bush could claim success for his policies by the end of his term.

Legislatively, Democrats have all but declared defeat in their effort to stop the war. At a luncheon with reporters last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted that “when we said we would end the war, we never said that we had the veto pen or the signature pen. ... I don’t disagree with the public evaluation that we have not done well in ending this war.”

With Republicans sticking by him, Bush has won the running room to pursue his policies at least until next March - and probably through 2008.

On the ground, Gen. David Petraeus’ “surge” strategy seems to be working, with Sunni Arabs decisively turning against al-Qaida and Shiites beginning to reject the Mahdi Army militia of Muktada al-Sadr.

U.S. casualty levels are down to their lowest levels since 2003, Iraqi security force deaths are at their lowest level ever, and civilian deaths in September were down 77 percent below the level of last year.

“Democrats are stuck in the negative” on the war, a White House aide said in a session with columnists last week. “They are without a positive narrative,” although he said • this was last Friday • that the media had yet to catch up with favorable developments.

But the administration’s “good news is no news” problem eased significantly this week when two of Bush’s harshest journalistic critics - Tom Ricks and Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post - wrote a front-page story headlined, “Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled.”

That Democrats are still “stuck in the negative” was demonstrated by the fact that their frontrunning presidential candidate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), is still quoting the ill-timed charge of Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, a former U.S. commander in Iraq, that the war is an “unending nightmare.”

If the war proves not to be an unending nightmare, after all, it would certainly be a boon for Bush - and would raise the question of whether Democrats can ever be relied upon to pursue a foreign policy endeavor if the going gets difficult.

The Washington Post has a story on Bush's statements yesterday suggesting he's "relevant":

President Bush declared yesterday that he remains "relevant" despite his political troubles, and he derided Democrats for running a do-nothing Congress that has failed to address critical domestic, economic and security issues in the nine months since they took control of Capitol Hill.

Trying to turn the tables on his adversaries, Bush lashed out at lawmakers for stalling housing and education initiatives, trade agreements, and judicial nominations, and for not having passed any of 12 annual spending bills more than two weeks into the new fiscal year. "Congress has little to show for all the time that has gone by," he said during a White House news conference.

Bush's assault on Democratic leaders during the 47-minute session reflected a broader attempt by the White House to go on the offensive at a time when polls show that the public has soured on Congress just as it has on the president. Stuck with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency with just 15 months left in office, Bush presented himself as still in command of the Washington agenda and rejected the suggestion that he has grown "increasingly irrelevant," as a reporter put it in a question.

"Quite the contrary," he said. "I've never felt more engaged and more capable of helping people recognize . . . that there's a lot of unfinished business." Defending his rejection of a popular children's health program expansion, Bush said his veto power gives him leverage. "That's one way to ensure that I am relevant," he said. "That's one way to ensure that I am in the process. And I intend to use the veto."

His reprimand of Congress drew a scathing response from Democrats. "I appreciate that the man who has managed Iraq so well is going to give us a lecture about management," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.). "The man who gave us Katrina is going to tell us how to manage?"

Emanuel sounds more like a whacked-out lefty blogger than a top member of the Democratic congressional leadership. The Democrats have failed miserably to pass their policy priorities, and the party's leadership has been reduced to spouting off schoolyard epithets against a president who continues to dominate policymaking, and whose political fortunes are rebounding. Now that's an unending nightmare, for the anti-Bush crowd.

The Social Security Crisis as "Neocon Plot"

I love this editorial from the San Diego Union Tribune, which notes that despite decades of warnings that Social Security's long-term sustainability is suspect, hard left commentators dismiss calls for reform as a "neocon plot":

For decades, pundits, think tanks, presidents and Congress have put out dire warnings about the enormous strain that the retirement of the massive baby boom generation will place on the federal government. Nevertheless, except for a serious entitlements reform push led by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole in the mid-1990s and President George Bush's attempts to kick-start Social Security reform in 2005, the issue has been largely ignored.

The debate over the entitlements crunch will cease to be academic on Jan. 1, when the first of the 78 million surviving boomers will turn 62 and become eligible for Social Security. (Just yesterday the nation's first baby boomer applied for Social Security benefits.) Even this approaching landmark, however, has not shaken the what-me-worry set. The Democratic presidential front-runner – Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. – has all but ruled out any significant changes. Meanwhile, it is increasingly common to hear DailyKos.com pundits and rising young liberal commentators such as Matthew Yglesis assert there is no entitlements crisis – that it's all a “neocon” plot of nefarious origin.

Never explained is how – without wrenching change – we can go from a nation where there are four people working and paying payroll taxes for every retiree reliant on Social Security and Medicare to a nation where the ratio is 2-to-1. Never explained is how the federal government will pay for national defense or children's health coverage or any of hundreds of other worthy programs in 2030 when entitlement costs and interest on the debt will gobble up 75 percent of incoming revenue.

The editorial notes that negotiations are currently underway to hammer out a compromise on entitlement reform, which might include further increases in the retirement age in exchange for an increase in the top income level subject to Social Security taxes. It's not privatization, but it's a start. As the editorical notes:

Nevertheless, at some point, everyone who cares about the future of the country has to embrace problem-solving over absolutism.

The hard-left netroots could not care less about problem solving, of course. If the GOP has anything to do with a policy proposal, the idea must be some neoconservative plot hatched from the evil confines of the Bush White House.

American Leadership and International Human Rights

Samantha Power, a leading expert on international human rights, and the author of A Problem From Hell, argues that the Bush administration has provided strong leadership in responding to recent world humanitarian crises, but other leading global actors have yet to to step up to share in the "responsibility to protect":

Rebel troops stampeded an african Union base in Darfur, Sudan, last month, murdering 10 African peacekeepers. That same week in Burma, the military regime killed a Japanese photographer and turned its machine guns on unarmed, barefoot monks. The violence in Darfur and Burma met with widespread international condemnation but scant concrete action. The perpetrators will almost certainly get away with murder.

What is going on? Even in an era of connectedness, when such outrages are beamed into living rooms around the globe, the world's major powers can't seem to agree on what should be done or who should do it. While many foreign critics of the U.S. express relief at the erosion of American influence, events in Burma and Darfur show the downside of the U.S.'s diminished standing: a void in global human-rights leadership.

The U.S. has raised its voice on Darfur and Burma louder than any other country. George W. Bush has regularly denounced the Sudanese campaign of destruction as "genocide," Washington has spent $2.5 billion on humanitarian aid to keep Darfur's refugees alive, and the Administration has spearheaded creation of a 26,000-person, U.N.-led peacekeeping force. When the Burmese regime cracked down on protesters, it was Bush who used his appearance before the U.N. General Assembly to announce that the U.S. would freeze the assets of Burma's repressive leaders and deny them visas. Yet when he urged "every civilized nation" to use its diplomatic and economic leverage to "stand up" to the regime, his appeal was largely ignored. Many countries acted as if they agreed with Burma's self-serving claim that the crackdown was simply an "internal matter." Notwithstanding the U.S.'s $500 billion military budget and $13 trillion GDP, its summoning power has dwindled.

The inaction is partly backlash against the discredited American messenger. Torture, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and the bungled, bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq have all made U.S. human-rights appeals ring hollow. But many countries that point to America's abuses are doing so to cover their self-interested, economic reasons for overlooking atrocities in Darfur and Burma.

U.S. leverage over Sudan and Burma is particularly limited. In 1997 Congress protested Khartoum's brutal tactics in southern Sudan by barring select Sudanese companies from involvement in the U.S. financial system. The same year, Congress punished the Burmese junta's "severe repression" by prohibiting U.S. investments in Burma. These measures have left the U.S. with few remaining business or diplomatic ties to terminate.

Others will need to step in. But China, the international actor with the greatest leverage over both countries, seems disinclined to use it. Two-thirds of Sudan's oil goes to fuel China's booming economy, and China's foreign direct investment in Sudan exceeds $350 million annually. China is Burma's leading arms supplier and trading partner and has just won the right to build a major oil pipeline there. Beijing's support for abusive governments would be troubling under any circumstances, but its influence is magnified because it is using its veto on the U.N. Security Council to block international sanctions.

Some observers hope U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his envoys can persuade repressive regimes to relent. U.N. officials must certainly use their pulpits to condemn abuses and mobilize international (not simply bilateral) punitive measures. But history has shown that envoys rarely succeed unless the Security Council is united behind them. Until Sudan and Burma begin to hear Chinese footsteps, they will have little incentive to engage in good-faith negotiations.

Given China's human-rights deficiencies and its reluctance to be seen to cave in to outside pressure, it will not budge easily. But China's wealthy trading partners must show Beijing that the long-term costs of uncritically backing murderous regimes exceed the benefits of doing so. We must elevate human safety alongside consumer safety, expressing the same outrage over massacred civilians that we do about faulty toys. And governments sending athletes to China's Olympic "coming out" must shine the torch on its support for brutal regimes.

It may take China decades to see that governments that kill at home make unreliable neighbors and threaten global stability. In the meantime a coalition of the concerned must insist that what is manifestly true of the economy is also true of human rights: in this age, there is no such thing as a purely "internal matter."

Power's political affiliations are on the left, and in 2005-06 she worked in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow. Which is what makes her argument here so interesting.

Some of the recent foreign policy manifestos of the leading Democratic candidates - like Hillary Clinton's - have invested a lot of rhetoric in renewing America's commitment to multilateralism and liberal internationalism. But Power underlines a key assumption of international politics: Coordinated multilateral action in international politics usually requires the leadership of a hegemonic power to help pay the burdens of international cooperation. Unfortunately, the Democrats have announced an aversion to the robust assertion of American power to achieve international objectives (we need to cultivate our "soft power" profile). But should they come to power in 2009, the Democrats might have second thoughts on multilateralism. Coordinated global action will most likely emerge amid American leadership and power, a necessary resource in the provision of international public goods.

The Lessons of a Precipitous U.S. Withdrawal

Dr. Earl Tilford, a military historian and former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, has an interesting piece over at FrontPageMagazine today. Tilford discusses the final years of American military operations in Vietnam, focusing on the disastrous consequences of America's exit for those remaining in-country after the final evacuation:

Enormous numbers of South Vietnamese who fought for the Saigon government and who supported U.S. policy were left behind to face the harsh “justice” of the victorious communists. In Cambodia and Laos major blood baths took place. The Cambodian Khmer Rough systematically annihilated anyone associated with the Phnom Penh government along with an entire class of educated people. Millions were murdered. In Laos, the Pathet Lao, under the control of the North Vietnamese, imprisoned and murdered the Lao royal family along with hundreds of officials of the Vientiane government. The North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao conducted a genocidal campaign against the Hmong, a tribal people who, with U.S. support, fought valiantly for their homes in the mountains surrounding the Plain of Jars.

In early 1975, as the communists initiated their final offensives in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the American left remained riveted on the supposed ravages of war wreaked on Indochina by U.S. military forces. A continuous cacophony bellowed about “secret bombings” and lamented an “eco-disaster” issuing from a supposed “bathing of South Vietnam” in Agent Orange. In the aftermath, the left’s silence over the murderous aftermath undertaken by the communist Vietnamese and their cohorts in Cambodia and Laos was pervasive.

The lessons for today are clear. First, any precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be costly even if it were possible, which it isn’t. Second, the sectarian violence that follows, being religiously and ethnically-driven, will be far bloodier than what happened in South Vietnam, more resembling the ethnic and class-cleansing carried out by the Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao. Third, in Indochina there was no regional power ready or able to fill the void left by America—China tried in 1979 and the Vietnamese army trounced its invasion forces. Iran, by contrast, is anxious to dominate Iraq, seize its oil, and then exercise hegemony over the Persian Gulf region.

Iran ultimately plans to establish a global Islamist caliphate. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Shi’ite mullahs in Teheran know the United States and Israel present major obstacles to realizing that vision. Make no mistake: Iran is at war with the Judeo-Christian West. If we lose this war, we lose Western civilization.

Today's left is again silent on the threats we now face - or the radicals simply dismiss such warnings as more "neocon" lies. Thank goodness we have scholars like Tilford focusing attention on the clear dangers in world politics today.

Iowa GOP Sets Caucuses for January 3

The Iowa Republican Party has rescheduled the party's nominating caucuses. The Los Angeles Times has the story:

Iowa Republicans on Tuesday moved the date of their caucuses to Jan. 3, ensuring the earliest-ever start to the presidential primary season.

The caucuses - a statewide gathering of party members who cast their votes in a series of precinct-level meetings - were originally scheduled for Jan. 14. But the 2008 political calendar has been in flux for months, ever since Florida and other states began pushing their dates forward to have a greater say in the nominating process.

"We were going to have to move to stay first, so we just did it," Chuck Laudner, executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, said after state GOP leaders approved the switch. "Moving into December was not an option, so we moved as close as we could without going over."

Iowa Democrats have yet to schedule their vote. But the party is weighing two options: voting on the same day as the state GOP, or holding a separate vote on Jan. 5, which would split the caucuses for the first time since 1972.

"We will decide our caucus date based ultimately on what is best for the people of Iowa and the Democratic Party," officials said in a statement issued shortly after Republicans announced their move.

Earlier Tuesday, Democrats in South Carolina announced they would seek the national party's permission to advance their presidential primary to Jan. 26, three days ahead of the current schedule.

South Carolina Republicans are set to vote Jan. 19. Leaders of both parties are fighting to preserve South Carolina's status as the nation's first Southern primary.

The biggest remaining question is when New Hampshire will vote. The state will host the first primary and is expected to go no later than Jan. 8, though Secretary of State William M. Gardner - who has sole discretion to set the date - has said he may schedule the vote as early as December to protect New Hampshire's primacy and spread the voting out.

Michigan has scheduled its primary for Jan. 15, in violation of national party rules. As a result, Democratic candidates have pledged to avoid campaigning in the state.

Whatever the final schedule, the result is the most front-loaded primary calendar since the current nominating system gained hold in 1972.

On Feb. 5 alone, more than a dozen states - including California and New York - will vote in what will amount to a coast-to-coast national primary.

I've lectured this week on presidential nominations, and I mentioned the January 14 date for Iowa's caucuses. I told my students the primary schedule's still in flux, however. I'm glad I did! I'll pull this article up on the overhead in tomorrow's classes and update my earlier lecture.

Frontloading's interesting to me, as one who's been teaching this stuff for ten years. A few students usually fall asleep during the discussions of delegate selection, although a few are getting fired up about voting.

For a top scholarly analysis of frontloading, see William G. Mayer and Andrew E. Busch, The Front-Loading Problem in Presidential Nominations (2003). For an interview with Mayer, click here.

Hillary Clinton and American Foreign Policy

The "Campaign 2008" foreign policy series continues over at Foreign Affairs with a new essay from Hillary Clinton, "Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century." Clinton's article arrives amid great anticipation, at least on my part (and I imagine on the part of a number of others who follow the foreign policy-making literature). Unfortunately, Clinton's piece is a let down: The article recycles much of tired criticisms of the Bush administration's foreign policy, while at the same time offering a half-baked validation of much liberal internationalist gobbledygook common among leftist foreign policy specialists.

Here's Clinton's boilerplate attack on the Bush administration's foreign policy record:

The tragedy of the last six years is that the Bush administration has squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States enjoyed a unique position. Our world leadership was widely accepted and respected, as we strengthened old alliances and built new ones, worked for peace across the globe, advanced nonproliferation, and modernized our military. After 9/11, the world rallied behind the United States as never before, supporting our efforts to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan and go after the al Qaeda leadership. We had a historic opportunity to build a broad global coalition to combat terror, increase the impact of our diplomacy, and create a world with more partners and fewer adversaries.

But we lost that opportunity by refusing to let the UN inspectors finish their work in Iraq and rushing to war instead. Moreover, we diverted vital military and financial resources from the struggle against al Qaeda and the daunting task of building a Muslim democracy in Afghanistan. At the same time, we embarked on an unprecedented course of unilateralism: refusing to pursue ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, abandoning our commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and turning our backs on the search for peace in the Middle East. Our withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and refusal to participate in any international effort to deal with the tremendous challenges of climate change further damaged our international standing.

Our nation has paid a heavy price for rejecting a long-standing bipartisan tradition of global leadership rooted in a preference for cooperating over acting unilaterally, for exhausting diplomacy before making war, and for converting old adversaries into allies rather than making new enemies. At a moment in history when the world's most pressing problems require unprecedented cooperation, this administration has unilaterally pursued policies that are widely disliked and distrusted.

Yet it does not have to be this way. Indeed, our allies do not want it to be this way. The world still looks to the United States for leadership. American leadership is wanting, but it is still wanted. Our friends around the world do not want the United States to retreat. They want once again to be allied with the nation whose values, leadership, and strength have inspired the world for the last century.

Clinton then goes on to say that she'll restore America's global standing in the world. Actually, she won't have that hard a time of it, since things aren't as bad as she makes out. The last couple of years have seen great improvement in global sentiment regarding the United States. According to a Pew Global Attitudes Report from 2006, strong majorities in all of America's major current treaty allies - Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan - held a favorable opinion of the U.S. Even in Britain - where opinion is often characterized as deeply opposed to the Bush adminstration - 56 percent of those polled held favorable views of America.

America as international bogeyman gains some support among Third Word nations in the Pew survey, but in truth the nature of global anti-Americanism is much more complicated. As Anne Applebaum pointed out in a 2005 Foreign Policy essay, even during the initial outrage following the American invasion of Iraq, people around the world continued to see the America as the world's beacon of liberty, and in a number of countries - like India, the Philippines, and South Africa - majorities evinced "mainly positive" views of the U.S.

Applebaum also notes large generational differences in public support. In countries like Poland, for example, anti-American opinion after Iraq was isolated to younger cohorts who have little recollection of American support for Poland during its historic resistance to Communist oppression during the Cold War. Applebaum highlights the tremendous latent good will toward the U.S. in international attitudes. Such positions make understanding international opinion more involved than we might get from Clinton's the-U.S.-as-bogeyman meme. (Don't forget as well the tremendous outburst of lasting respect for the United States in Indonesia, which followed America's strong leadership in tsunami humanitarian relief efforts.)

Also questionable are Clinton's obligatory statements on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. One can place little trust in such statements, because Clinton has shown very little consistency on Iraq policy in 2007, endlessly shifting her positions to satisfy the most important constituency demands of the moment. Because of the sheer logistical and strategic impediments to a rapid withdrawal, Americans ought not to expect a rapid drawdown of American forces in Iraq. To do otherwise would invite a collapse of order, and indeed the potential release of violent elements intent to restore a reign of murder in the wake of America's precipitous exit:

Here's Clinton:

We must withdraw from Iraq in a way that brings our troops home safely, begins to restore stability to the region, and replaces military force with a new diplomatic initiative to engage countries around the world in securing Iraq's future. To that end, as president, I will convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council and direct them to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home, starting within the first 60 days of my administration.

While working to stabilize Iraq as our forces withdraw, I will focus U.S. aid on helping Iraqis, not propping up the Iraqi government. Financial resources will go only where they will be used properly, rather than to government ministries or ministers that hoard, steal, or waste them.

As we leave Iraq militarily, I will replace our military force with an intensive diplomatic initiative in the region. The Bush administration has belatedly begun to engage Iran and Syria in talks about the future of Iraq. This is a step in the right direction, but much more must be done. As president, I will convene a regional stabilization group composed of key allies, other global powers, and all the states bordering Iraq. Working with the newly appointed UN special representative for Iraq, the group will be charged with developing and implementing a strategy for achieving a stable Iraq that provides incentives for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey to stay out of the civil war....

As we redeploy our troops from Iraq, we must not let down our guard against terrorism. I will order specialized units to engage in targeted operations against al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist organizations in the region. These units will also provide security for U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq and train and equip Iraqi security services to keep order and promote stability in the country, but only to the extent that such training is actually working.

Nothing new here. Recent reports indicate dramatic U.S. successes in beating back al Qaeda's operations, and the U.S. military is engaged in a wide-variety of security initiatives with local forces to accelerate the operational independence of the Iraq security apparatus.

But check out as well Clinton's platitudes on global multilateralism:

Contrary to what many in the current administration appear to believe, international institutions are tools rather than traps. The United States must be prepared to act on its own to defend its vital interests, but effective international institutions make it much less likely that we will have to do so. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have understood this for decades. When such institutions work well, they enhance our influence. When they do not work, their procedures serve as pretexts for endless delays, as in the case of Darfur, or descend into farce, as in the case of Sudan's election to the UN Commission on Human Rights. But instead of disparaging these institutions for their failures, we should bring them in line with the power realities of the twenty-first century and the basic values embodied in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Here Clinton systematically ignores the role of interests in international politics. The U.S. will resist multilateral initiatives that work to subordinate American international priorities. The Bush adminstration in fact began efforts to reform global bodies like the IMF and U.N., only to meet vicious opposition from some of the most corrupt bureaucrats on the planet. Hillary Clinton needs to propose an increase in such efforts, not the abandonment.

Finally, Clinton's international agenda evinces hallmarks of 1990s-era foreign policy as social work:

To build the world we want, we must begin by speaking honestly about the problems we face...We will also have to take concrete steps to enhance security and spread opportunity throughout the world.

Education is the foundation of economic opportunity and should lie at the heart of America's foreign assistance efforts...As president, I will press for quick passage of the Education for All Act, which would provide $10 billion over a five-year period to train teachers and build schools in the developing world. This program would channel funds to those countries that provide the best plans for how to use them and rigorously measure performance to ensure that our dollars deliver results for children.

The fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other dreaded diseases is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity. These diseases have created a generation of orphans and set back economic and political progress by decades in many countries.

These problems often seem overwhelming, but we can solve them with the combined resources of governments, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We can set specific targets in areas such as expanding access to primary education, providing clean water, reducing child and maternal mortality, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases. We can strengthen the International Labor Organization in order to enforce labor standards, just as we strengthened the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements. Such policies demonstrate that by doing good we can do well. This sort of investment and diplomacy will yield results for the United States, building goodwill even in places where our standing has suffered.

Read the rest. Clinton goes on to propose American pocketbook leaderhip on global warming, international energy investment, human rights, gender equality:

U.S. leadership, including a commitment to incorporate the promotion of women's rights in our bilateral relationships and international aid programs, is essential not just to improving the lives of women but to strengthening the families, communities, and societies in which they live.

These are essentially human development issues. But what's missing is a discussion of the fundamental importance of markets and trade in promoting economic growth in Third World countries. The U.S. can continue to build the international infrastructure of global prosperity through policies of trade expansion and international openness. Greater economic development will precede greater human development. According to Clinton's manifesto here, though, rather than a reliance on traditional trade practices, we see an aggressive call to lift up all nations through a Herculean American social policy effort.

There's much that's admirable about such goals, and we shouldn't reject innovative approaches in helping to solve the globe's most intractable problems. But Clinton's paper is almost like a wish list for the future of America's global role. Her discussion of vital interests and Ameican policy is cursory, and she avoids any tough talk beyond quick talking points on "firmness" and "resolve" (she derides the Bush administration as advocating the use of force as the preferred policy to most international problems).

Hillary Clinton's deeper problem is her notion that American foreign policy is a moral failure, and that we must "regain our authority" in international affairs. The U.S. hasn't lost its authority. The country remains the world's indispensible nation, and when global crises demand benign leadership for the provision of international goods, the U.S. will continue to get the call. We've faced difficulties in Iraq, which has made sustaining momentum and support more difficult. But we're gaining the upper hand, and to now feed the terrorist a victory through withdrawal would be folly. In the realm of opinion, much of international anti-Americanism is based on a resistance to America acting on the basis of its self interests. This is not new, and opinion trends are already turning back towards increasing acceptance and support (and recent elections in France and Germany have demonstrated how powerful the impulse to bandwagon on American power remains).

The U.S. needs to make adjustments, indeed, but not in the direction proposed by Hillary Clinton. America should leverage its improvements in Iraq to foster increased international efforts to combat the forces of terror, both transnational and state-sponsored. Diplomacy is key here, of course, but we have no desire to negotiate away our vital interests in regional and global security. We can, as well, increase spending on defense and expand the armed forces. We must increase efforts at vigorous public diplomacy to clarify America's interests in democracy promotion, economic development, and nuclear nonproliferation. We must not denigrate the great power that we enjoy. We can exercise robust leadership amid our substantial capabilities in ways no less "warm-hearted" than in earlier eras. In short, we need to continue to get things right, to follow-up our current victories against the forces of nihilism with more success. The "American idea" continues to glow, yet its illumination burns brighter amid a backdrop of competence and progress.

Democratic Stupidity

Here's how James Caesar sums-up the Democrats in his new article over at the Weekly Standard: "The Stupid Party." According to Ceasar, after a half-century of scientific progressivism, the Democrats moved toward nihilism by the end of the 1960s:

This split between the liberals and the radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s cost the Democratic party its confidence, and the party has never been quite the same since. The New Left did not take over permanently, a task for which it was morally, intellectually, and above all politically unfit. Once it became clear--as it did in the 1972 election--that the majority of the American people had no sympathy for the New Left's cause, especially "revolution," the old liberal mainstream was in effect asked to step back in and serve as the public face of the party, and it did so in the persons of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

But the New Left didn't disappear. Renamed the cultural (or multicultural) left, it decamped from center stage and repaired to safer quarters in the universities, where it managed to carry out much of its program. Inside the Democratic party, it ceded actual leadership, but maintained an impressive power base and exercised enormous influence on the policy agenda. Usually, the old liberals found the cultural left too dangerous to embrace, but too powerful to resist.

The result by the 1980s was a much weakened liberalism that was no match for a renewed conservative movement. Sapped of energy, liberalism had become, in Paul Starr's words, mostly "defensive" and "oppositional." Liberals tried to stick to the catechism of the older values, but were often pushed off course by the conflicting priorities championed by the cultural left. Liberals lacked any clear conception of first principles or anchoring ideas to guide them. Except for the fact that the Democratic party remained the home of almost all of the intelligentsia, it had now become the "stupid party" of American politics, an honor previously reserved for Republicans. Not even the two Clintons, with their high IQ's and a new generation of policy wonks to serve them, could change this. The "New Democrat" thrust was wholly strategic and practical: to move the Democratic party to the center and to "reinvent" government. Whatever other contributions may be ascribed to the Clinton Democrats, deep reflection about the party's theoretical foundations was not among them.

Caesar says things have gotten worse during the Bush years. Especially noteworthy is the vacuity of the foaming netroot hordes of the radical left:

Today, the Democratic party mainstream has its values, its instincts, and, as usual, more than its share of 10-point programs. It even has its "isms," represented by its leading troika: the pragmatism of Hillary Clinton, the idealism of Barack Obama, and the populism of John Edwards. Yet its intellectual reservoir has shown itself to be lacking in depth and confidence. Today's Democratic mainstream is no more willing or able to stand up to the party's present leftist insurgency than the older mainstream was to stand up to the New Left. The tenor of the current left is best captured by something Lionel Trilling said in 1949 about conservatives: They do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

Even this description may be overly generous. The journalist Matt Bai, in his recent book The Argument, undertook an anthropological field trip to investigate the natives who inhabit the progressive coalition of billionaires and bloggers. The big money men and women--what the left used to call, back when it framed matters more astutely, the "obscenely wealthy"--are mostly people who have made their fortunes recently. (George Soros, the godfather of the movement, is an exception.) The last thing these newly rich would wish to be called, however, is nouveau riche; they are bobo billionaires who profess to regard their own fortunes with nonchalance. Steven Gluckstern, for example, who helped bankroll the Democracy Alliance--a new organization to fund the rebuilding of the progressive infrastructure (dues $200,000 a year for five years)--told Bai, "I don't really care about money. I mean, I like it. You can do fun things with it. You can give it away." All in this progressive money set, which includes some of Hollywood's more modest donors, follow the new progressive formula of buying political influence while decrying the influence of money in politics.

The allies of the wealthy, the bloggers, are the coalition's hit men. Almost all are males in their thirties. The two most prominent, "Markos and Jerome" (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD), gained their fame and won their political clout by latching onto Howard Dean's candidacy in 2003 and using the Internet to help create the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party." Their websites not only constantly abuse thought, but show contempt for intellectuals, even while gaining influence among them. The language is often violent and vulgar. The moving spirit of the Daily Kos is one of anger and resentment, which, when not directed at Democrats who dare to stray from the wing line, is directed at the president, the vice president, and the Iraq war.

The bloggers in turn are teamed up with the new, Internet-reliant grassroots associations like MoveOn and ACORN. What emerges from Bai's study of the coalition is that the tone of MoveOn's recent New York Times ad assailing General Petraeus as "General Betray Us," far from being exceptional, is perfectly typical of the discourse preached and practiced by this so-called progressive coalition. The ad stood out because it exposed to the world at large the ugly style the new radicals have developed for use among themselves--and because it forced the main Democratic presidential candidates, who declined to disavow it, to show publicly their fealty to the movement.

The Democratic party, its prowess renewed by a taste of success in 2006, is riding the crest of a political wave. It is the stupid party triumphant. What serious Democrats must now consider is whether to accept this state of affairs--or begin to think deeply enough to find a principled ground for rejecting a faction in their midst that is not only stupid but dangerous as well.

What's interesting about Ceasar's piece is how nicely he captures the chest-thumping narcissism of the hard left blogosphere. Markos Moulitsas is the worst - his megalomania I've called "The Daily Kos Syndrome" - but the same massive narcissism is found among most of the top radical lefty blogs.

These trends wouldn't be much more than a nuisance, except that many in the not-too-smart Democratic congressional majority lack the nerve to stand up to these idiots. Even Hillary Clinton, alas, can't stick to the firm centrism she sought to establish during her first Senate term. Certainly she's got the brains - if not the backbone - to rescue the Democrats from their stupidity, although I'm not holding my breath.

Majority Says SCHIP is Low-Income Program

A new poll on health care policy from USA Today finds a majority of Americans disagreeing with the extention of the Children's State Health Insurance Program to middle class families:

• 52% agree with Bush that most benefits should go to children in families earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level — about $41,000 for a family of four. Only 40% say benefits should go to families earning up to $62,000, as the bill written by Democrats and some Republicans would allow.

• 55% are very or somewhat concerned that the program would create an incentive for families to drop private insurance. Bush and Republican opponents have called that a step toward government-run health care.

Taken together, the results show that while Bush may be losing the political battle with Democrats, he may be doing better on policy.

The public's actually more trusting of the Democrats to handle overall children's health reform, which is a bit contradictory given public opinion's firm opposition to the morphing of SCHIP into a middle class program. Americans are obviously concerned about health access, but they're not so bad off as to endorse a sneaky, underhanded Democratic social policy power grab.

Paul Krugman's a Respected Economist in His Other Life

One would hardly know it from his New York Times commentaries, but Paul Krugman's actually one of the country's great contemporary economists, his current post being at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Yet, he's not mainstream. A casual perusal of his essays reveals Krugman's considerable left wing bent, and I'm being nice here (Krugman's a superstar among radical lefty bloggers). In today's column Krugman spouts off about some "Gore Derangment Syndrome." Here's a nugget:

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

It's bad enough dredging up all the old nonsense about the "stolen" 2000 election. Gore lost that race fair and square, and the popular vote nationally means nothing if the candidate fails to win a majority in the Electoral College (precisely Gore's problem).

But Krugman's got no time for such details. He's on a roll, riding Al Gore's Nobel bandwagon to rustle up some readers along the far left fringe. It must be nice for op-ed columnists to dish out such left wing trash, as the current climate certainly is weary of all things Republican, and the media has elevated Gore to some kind of heroic savior.

But the facts aren't supporting Krugman - an interesting thing, given his pedigree as a eminently trained academic. Global warming remains a controversy in environmental science, and progress on the ground in Iraq is proving that G.W. Bush is in fact the man-of-the-moment in tamping down the nihilist forces of terror worldwide (see my post today on the increasing defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq).

For more on Krugmania, see my good bloggin' buddy, The Oxford Medievalist.