The Republican dilemma: appealing to the base and the middle at the same time

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me that some of the disagreement we had in this thread reflects the fact that there are actually two populations to which the Republican Party could appeal.

The first is the base, the “preaching to the choir” group. The conservative base needs to be motivated to get out and vote, and must be kept energetic and enthusiastic in order to do that.

The second is the people who aren’t already on board, and who need to be convinced or “swung.” They tend to be more moderate and are the so-called “Independents” and also the low information voters or “LIVs.”

The two groups have a tendency to respond to very different and possibly contradictory approaches. This accounts for quite a bit of the turmoil in the Republican Party. The base is angry (often very angry) at anything that smacks of appeals to the center, the LIVs, the moderates, the undecideds. In fact, members of the base tend to be turned off by such appeals—and rightly so, I think, when a candidate ventures so close to the center in enough areas that he/she becomes nearly indistinguishable from an actual centrist or even a Democrat. That’s where the insult “RINO”—Republican In Name Only—comes from.

But as I see it, the base can sometimes confuse appealing somewhat to the center with being from the center or of the center. You can do the first without being the second. However, although it’s not easy.

So, how could a candidate reconcile the two approaches?

Of course, if the first group (the base) is large enough and motivated enough (and especially if the party is in the majority among voters to begin with), wooing the middle is much less important and can even be more or less dispensed with. All you have to do is turn out the base in enough numbers.

I believe that was why Obama won in 2012; he was still successful at doing so. It’s not that he didn’t appeal somewhat to the middle, most especially in the 2008 election, where he did it by pretending to be far more moderate than he actually was. The left was going to vote for him anyway, particularly because of his race, so I doubt he had to worry much about losing them and could afford to present himself as much as possible as a centrist. (I think almost anyone should have seen through his charade, which wasn’t very good, but apparently they did not.) It also didn’t hurt that Democrats were in the majority anyway, and that Bush had gotten such a bad rep by 2008 that people were eager for a change of party.

Republican candidates face a different task. First of all, during the last decade the GOP has not had the majority of voters who affiliate with a party or lean towards a party. So the GOP base is not enough, unless turnout is absolutely extraordinary for them and low for Democrats. That can’t be counted on; even in 2012, when Republicans seemed very motivated to vote, it didn’t come to pass that turnout was extraordinary (although there was no “missing 2 million Republican voters; that is a persistent myth I’ve written about before).

In any election under such conditions, the GOP must do those two contradictory things I’ve already mentioned: highly motivate its somewhat-perfectionistic base, and appeal to the middle. Some people think the best way to do this is to have a candidate who actually is from the middle, but I think that’s a poor solution. Some might say Romney fit that description, but I supported Romney because (1) he was the nominee, and I would have supported any Republican against Obama; and (2) I was and still am of the opinion he was more conservative than conservatives thought, and I devoted a fair amount of verbiage to trying to prove that.

But I think a conservative candidate can appeal to the middle as well as the base, if he/she is smart about it. That’s what Reagan was able to do so well. Reagan, of course, was sui generis. But in a different way, I think Scott Walker has the potential to do it, and that’s one of the main reasons he’s been my favored 2016 candidate for a long time. He has a proven ability to win as a conservative in a mostly-blue state, which involves appealing to the middle and even liberals, and to do it again and again while sticking to his conservative principles. He doesn’t do it by being an attack dog, although he does it by being dogged in keeping on message and delivering results. He doesn’t pander to the middle even in his rhetoric, but he also performs as a conservative who delivers the goods. That’s why I like governors as Republican candidates: they have a record to point to, and if successful at performing effectively as conservatives, it can be a very strong argument, even to the middle.

Obama: taking the gloves off at last

The New Neo Posted on by

Back in November of 2010 I made a prediction that frightened me:

The American people are a generally genial and forgiving (not to say trusting) lot, predisposed to like [Obama], and by [2012] he may indeed have rehabilitated himself in the eyes of enough voters that he will win his bid for re-election and even increase the Democrats’ Congressional representation.

And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?

I was wrong about two things: 2012 didn’t increase the Democrats’ Congressional representation. And Obama didn’t fake as much moderation between 2010 and 2012 as I thought he might in order to win it all in 2012. The rest seems to have come to pass as predicted. Let me say, as I’ve said before, that I don’t think I showed any remarkable foresight in predicting this. Any close observor of Obama could and should have done the same.

Now, however, he’s been extremely immoderate in his actions, and he’s telling his supporters that he has plans to do a lot more of it before he’s through:

Speaking of his remaining time in office, [Obama] said: “Two years is a long time.”

He can say that again ”” and did, attaching a scary promise about his plans for the twilight of his ­tenure.

“Two years is also the time in which we’re going to be setting the stage for the next presidential election and the next 10 years of American policy,” he told wealthy ­donors in San Francisco. “So I intend to run through the tape and work really hard, and squeeze every last little bit of change.”

There you have it. Instead of cleaning up the messes he’s created, Obama is hell-bent on making more of them.

The word that comes to mind is “rogue.” As in, the president is going rogue. Like an elephant on a rampage, he’s breaking free of all constraints.

The author of the article, Michael Goodwin, points out that people such as Putin and our enemies around the world are aware that the next president, be he/she Republican or Democrat, will probably try to assert more American control in the world than Obama has. That means they have two more freebie years to grab what they can and do as much damage as possible. And two years—as Obama rightly said—is a long time.

[NOTE: Jonathan S. Tobin continues to warn of the constitutional crisis we face (and remember that Tobin voted for Obama in 2008), describing a new immigration-ruling horror perpetrated by a single liberal judge in DC:

If liberal federal judges and the president are determined to trash the rule of law in this manner, we are on the verge of a full-blown constitutional crisis. As much as there is reason to grant many illegals a path to legality if not citizenship, without first securing the border, such proposals ought to be off the table. Rather than contribute to a consensus that might create real immigration reform, both the president and liberal judges like Boasberg are creating a set of circumstances where it has become impossible.

Oh, and the words “at last” in the title of my post were meant to be ironic.]

Giuliani explains

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or not agree with this new move of Giuliani’s. But in his explanatory column published in the WSJ he seems to be making several of the same points I’ve been trying to make over the weekend in my posts about tactics:

My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart. My intended focus really was the effect his words and his actions have on the morale of the country, and how that effect may damage his performance…

Obviously, I cannot read President Obama’s mind or heart, and to the extent that my words suggested otherwise, it was not my intention.

In terms of tactics, however—you may be surprised to hear that I actually don’t agree with Giuliani’s WSJ column in the tactical sense. That is, I don’t think that it was a good move for him to try to explain afterwards and issue a near- or quasi-apology. The potential gains are not worth it. The left has already done with his original statement what it was inevitably going to do with it, and a column such as Giuliani’s that attempts to perform damage control ex-post-facto translates mostly as weakness after the fact.

The big plus of his original statement was its boldness and strength. So I think he ought to have let it be now and just moved on.

And the Oscar goes to…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I don’t much care.

But as in previous years, I like watching the fashion. So that’s what I’m doing.

And while I’m watching the fashion, I’ll just observe that, when you wear one of those boob-revealing dresses, they tend to smash the merchandise into the pancake look, which is not the most attractive possible mode of presentation.

Truth-telling and hard-hitting politics

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section to yesterdays’ post on Giuliani’s remarks about Obama’s lack of love for America, some people seemed to think I was saying not to tell difficult or challenging truths.

I don’t know why people would read that post and come to that conclusion. But I get the impression that a lot of people are sick of candidates who are seemingly afraid to criticize Obama (or other Democrats) in a hard-hitting way. I’m actually pretty sick of it, too.

So let me clarify and simplify my point from yesterday: I want a candidate who’s not afraid of telling the truth about what Obama and the Democrats have done and are doing, and what their goals appear to be. What I am objecting to—and will continue to object to—is candidates who opine about the inner workings of a person’s heart in terms of whether that person “loves” America. It’s something no one can know, so it’s way too easy for the opposition to attack comments like that. And comments of the type Giuliani offered aren’t persuasive to anyone who doesn’t agree with them already, anyway.

In my opinion, there’s a much better way to say something similar. As I wrote yesterday:

And [whether Obama loves America is] a thing that is inherently unprovable and unknowable, anyway, because it’s a statement about what’s in someone’s heart. The most we can say is that Obama’s behaves as though he doesn’t love America.

Giuliani actually qualified his initial statement by saying that he believes Obama doesn’t love America. However, not only did the MSM ignore the belief part, but Giuliani complicated things by adding more categorically (as well as somewhat more irrelevantly), “He [Obama] doesn’t love me. And he doesn’t love you.”

I would much rather Giuliani had cited some act or statement of Obama’s that demonstrates his lack of love for America, and then asked, “Does that sound like a person who loves America?” And then went on to list another act of Obama’s, or quote from Obama, that demonstrates his lack of love for America, and to follow it up again with, “Does that sound like a person who loves America?” In other words, I’d like to see a similar use of rhetorical questions as used in Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar, only with the opposite intent—in this case, not to raise Obama’s reputation but to lower it. Better in my opinion to ask questions than to do what Giuliani did, and just as hard-hitting if not more, on the same topic.

Of course, the media will do what it will do with Republicans—which is to criticize nearly everything they say. The trick is to be very strong in criticizing the opposition without giving the MSM any more ammunition than necessary for its inevitable attacks. This requires a certain cleverness and a lot of thought, but it’s really not all that hard to do and is a good skill for a potential president to have.

I agree, however, that it’s better that it was Giuliani who did what he did rather than a current candidate or officeholder. Giuliani is more tangential at this point but can serve as a sort of pot-stirrer to raise “interesting” questions like Obama’s attitude towards America, questions the media certainly isn’t about to go into on its own. I just think there are better ways to do it than the way he went about it.

I also think, as I said several times in the comments, that this incident will blow over soon. It will be then replaced by another, and then another. In fact, it’s already been replaced by the ridiculous MSM-manufactured Scott-Walker-doesn’t-know-if-Obama-is-a-Christian!!! flap. Walker did well to answer that he didn’t know, and then he added:

To me, this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press. The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about…

I would defy you to come to Wisconsin. You could ask 100 people, and not one of them would say that this is a significant issue.

Hear, hear! That’s what I like to see—throw it right back at them. Of course, that doesn’t mean the press will report the attack on their questions; they certainly didn’t focus on that last part of Walker’s message, did they?

So I have a further suggestion for Walker and any other GOP candidate: don’t even give them the satisfaction of the “I don’t know” part of the answer. In the case of these gotcha questions (especially ones about Obama or any other candidate’s state of mind) keep it very short and sweet. How about the all-purpose response of something on the order of, “Why on earth would you want my opinion on that?,” and then disagree with whatever claptrap they offer as an answer and say the question was irrelevant. Or offer this even shorter response to the initial question, “Why not ask Obama?” Or “That would be between Obama and God, wouldn’t it?” or any number of other variations on the theme of meeting a stupid question with a smarter question.

Whoever the Republican candidate ends up being, I don’t want him/her to be a pushover. I know that Reagan is always a dangerous standard to try to emulate, because he was a master in this regard, but a reaction more like his would be the goal: polite and even humorous, but very hard-hitting.

So, does Obama love America?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: More on this topic here.]

I don’t think he loves it in any conventional sense. You don’t want to “fundamentally transform” something you love.

Or do you? For example, a family can get together in an intervention to try to motivate a loved one to stop doing drugs. They’re looking for a fairly fundamental transformation to occur, and yet they still love the person.

In fact, they would say they’re doing this because they love the person. And that’s how I think Obama would answer when questioned about why, if he loves America so much, he wants to fundamentally transform it, and why he criticizes it so much. He’d say he does it because he loves it so much.

Now, I happen to think the evidence is overwhelming that he not only doesn’t love America but that he doesn’t even like it. It’s a feeling I have about a lot of liberals I know, too, those who can’t seem to conclude a simple conversation about a seemingly-innocuous and non-political topic without dragging in some observation about how awful America is. It’s like they have a nervous twitch or Tourette’s; every now and then they just have to say it.

But I also think that Rudy Giuliani and other politicians would do well to stay far away from this particular topic. It gives the opposition a golden opportunity to pile on with the “mean, hateful Republicans” meme. And for what? The only people who respond positively to such statements about Obama and America are the already-convinced.

And it’s a thing that is inherently unprovable and unknowable, anyway, because it’s a statement about what’s in someone’s heart. The most we can say is that Obama’s behaves as though he doesn’t love America. But again, why bother?

As soon as I heard the story, though, a memory rose from my youth. We’re at a dinner of my extended family. Is it Thanksgiving, a birthday, or what? I don’t know, but at the table sit my mother and father, my brother and me, my maternal grandmother, and the uncle who is my father’s brother.

The conversation veers, as it so often does when my uncle is around, to the political. My uncle is around quite a bit, because he lives very nearby, as does my grandmother. All the adults at the table are liberal Democrats except for my uncle, who is a Communist (although carefully not a member of the Party), a fact I’ve known for just about forever because he is quite free with his pro-Soviet commentary. It is one of the leitmotifs of family life—that, and the rising volume of my father’s voice as he argues with his brother in frustration.

To my uncle, nothing America does is right. But everything the USSR does is wonderful. When I was young I got an education in what the mind of a leftist fanatic looked like, and it was astounding how he could take any event that you would think might reflect poorly on the Soviets, and flip it around somehow to make it sound okay and even benevolent (at least, to him).

My father’s family had come from Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and my uncle had been born there and had come as a tiny child. My father, the younger one, had been born in the United States. They grew up poor and struggling and were self-made men. Like Obama, they were raised among many people who were pro-Communist, but that was in the days before and immediately after the revolution. With my father, Communism never took. But it established deep deep roots in my uncle.

My mother was from a very different background. Her family had been in this country since early in the 1800’s. They were liberal Democrats, including her mother, who was the only grandparent I really knew. My grandmother was a patriot. She had plaques on the walls of her apartment thanking her for her service on behalf of soldiers during the war, and she would listen to my uncle—the brother of her son-in-law—with growing fury.

And that’s what I remember best—when my grandmother could take it no more and finally would say something to him. She was already around eighty years old and her voice shook, but not with age. It shook with frustration and barely-suppressed outrage, as she said forcibly but not loudly (the intensity of her emotion actually weakened her voice rather than strengthened it; that same thing happens to mine if I get angry enough): “America has been good to you. If you hate it here so much, why don’t you go back to Russia where you came from?”

With a little smile, he would answer, “I have to stay here where I’m needed, to help bring about changes to make America better.” If pressed on the question of whether he loved America (a question he never was asked), I imagine he would say that he did, although I don’t know. But that would be an awfully odd sort of love, wouldn’t it?

Obama—as Giuliani also pointed out—was influenced by Communists in his youth. True enough, and if they were not necessarily members of the Communist Party, I know full well that doesn’t mean much. I know the milieu to which Giuliani is referring, and a person being raised that way (I was not) doesn’t always mean that person swallows Communism whole. AFter all, my father didn’t. But it certainly can mean the person becomes a leftist (call it socialist, Communist, whatever you like), and I think that in Obama’s case, as I’ve said many times, the evidence is that he’s a man of the far left and has been for his entire life. He has learned to hide that in order to get elected, but he certainly didn’t hide it very well (although well enough, well enough).

There is a dilemma for those who would criticize Obama such as Giuliani. Giuliani is out of office, and probably never will hold office again, so he is free of the need to be all that careful in order to protect his political career. When he made the original statement about Obama’s lack of affection for this country, Giuliani was at a rather small (about 60 people) and seemingly private Republican dinner. But Giuliani should know that nothing of that sort can be considered to be private anymore, and that whatever he says will be reported on if the press or the left thinks it can harm the right. So whatever he says, it will be extrapolated by the left and the MSM to be a demonstration of the animus that dwells in the heart of all Republicans. I think it’s best to not go in that direction. Leave it to the talk show hosts.

On the other hand, if no politician ever goes in that direction, we maintain the fiction that Obama is just an ordinary bloke who loves America and wants whats best for it, rather than a leftist who wants America to lose power and status in the world. But I think the best way to point this out is to stick to the facts and not the feelings, and the facts are what Obama has done to show his leftism and dislike of America. And he’s done plenty.

Is a doughnut always a dessert?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse highlights what is apparently a highly-debated question on the Web: “Is a doughnut a dessert?” The person Althouse quotes has answered this pressing (dare I say weighty?) question this way:

Zach’s position: a doughnut is always and inherently a dessert. My position: a doughnut eaten in the morning is breakfast; a doughnut eaten later in the day is a dessert

I teeter on the bring of being derailed from this issue by poignant memories of doughnuts past. But I will stay relentlessly on target and say: when eaten for breakfast, a doughnut is a dessert eaten for breakfast. Same for a pie of pie, or any other food that’s usually a dessert and is eaten as a meal.

A dessert eaten for breakfast.

I love dessert, although I’m always trying to stay away from it. Usually I succeed, but if it’s in the house it gets eaten. It doesn’t even usually stay around till morning and give me an opportunity to eat it for breakfast.

But I don’t gravitate towards eating sweets (the generic designation allows us to avoid the entire semantic issue) for breakfast, anyway. I’m not ready for them yet at that time of day.

The Hitler “Downfall” parody to end all Hitler “Downfall” parodies

The New Neo Posted on by

Very meta:

(And yes, it’s a parody. The subtitles are not a correct translation of what he’s actually saying.)

By the way, in case you’re curious and have never seen the movie “Downfall,” here’s the original clip from the film, with the correct English subtitles (I think! I don’t speak German). This is a slightly longer version of the clip; the part that is usually parodied begins at 0:44 and ends at 4:39:

More on spokespeople: revolutions devouring their own

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: While writing this post on spokespeople, I came across the following post, which I wrote in 2006, about an Iranian spokesperson in 1979 who shortly thereafter came to a difficult end. His story seems both poignant and still relevant, and I thought I’d publish it again. Ghotbzadeh, unlike so many of our present-day spokespeople, was not merely a spokesperson or a journalist. But it was as a spokesperson for the new Khomeini regime that I—and America—knew him.]

In the Atlantic article I discussed yesterday, a name on the first page caught my eye: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister at the time of the hostage crisis.

Suddenly, although I hadn’t thought of him in decades, the memory came back. Ghotbzadeh! I recall his sardonic, jaded, man-of-the-world expression—a strange combination of arrogance and weariness. As the spokesperson for the regime, he was featured often on TV (I think on the nascent “Nightline,” then entitled “America Held Hostage”). As a visible and familiar figure, he became somewhat of a focus for my frustration and annoyance with the entire situation. Something about him seemed hollow, although he was clearly intelligent and articulate.

As events unfolded, it turned out that Ghotbzadeh was one of those cautionary figures, a man who was instrumental in planning a revolution that then got away from him and proceeded to devour him in the process. Like Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins; like Trotsky and so many other engineers of the Russian revolution who were slaughtered in the great purges; authors of violent revolutions often come to violent ends at the hands of their violent former comrades.

Thus it was with Ghotbzadeh. Here he is:

Ghotbzadeh was close to the Ayatollah Khomeini while both were in exile in Paris, and became one of his right-hand men back home in the early days of the revolution. He seems to have been motivated most strongly by hatred of the Shah’s regime. But, paradoxically, his role in the hostage crisis was as a relative moderate (accent on the “relative;” moderate in comparison to what?). He seemed to be working for a diplomatic solution, and lost favor with the Iranian powers that be in the process.

Former hostage and Ambassador at the time, Bruce Laingen, has this to say about Ghotbzadeh:

I didn’t like him at the outset for the role he played as Foreign Minister, but I sensed as time went on over those months, that he came to the conclusion, himself, fairly early, that this hostage business was counterproductive to the revolution and that it needed to be ended. I think he genuinely wanted to end it and was prepared to make some concessions to do that. And he stuck his neck out to do that. He showed some guts.

It all unraveled rather quickly:

Ghotbzadeh finally resigned in 1980 over the deadlock in negotiations. That year, after he was arrested and briefly detained after criticizing the ruling Islamic Republican Party, he retired from public life. In 1982 he was arrested on charges of plotting against the regime. Although he denied any conspiracy to take Khomeini’s life, he apparently admitted complicity with Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariat-Madari in a plot to overthrow the government. Ghotbzadeh was convicted in August 1982 and executed the following month.

Did he really plan to end the Khomeini reign, and, if so, with what was he planning to replace it? Or were the charges trumped up, and was he forced to confess to crimes he didn’t commit? At the time, I remember being astounded at the news of his startling reversal of fortune and allegiance; it was quite a switch from disliking him to feeling some sympathy for the man.

Guillotining having gone out of style, Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad shortly after his trial. The revolution had eaten another of its own.

But not everyone connected with the early days of the revolution has met such a fate. Others connected with the hostage crisis have prospered. It’s unclear whether or not the current Iranian President, our good friend Ahmadinejad, was one of those “student” hostage-takers, although several former hostages have identified him as such. But there’s very little doubt about the identity of another former hostage-taker who’s riding high at present: Hussein Sheikholeslam, recently an Iranian diplomat and legislator.

Why do I mention Sheikholeslam? Only because I came across an interesting fact about him, an indication of the sort of cross-fertilization process that seems to have been at work in the revolutions of the 60s/70s. Sheikholeslam may not have been an actual student at the time of the hostage-taking in Iran. But whether or not Sheikholeslam was a student at that point, he certainly had been a student earlier—at UC Berkeley, where he learned a thing or two:

UC Berkeley gained a reputation as a center of student anti-war protest during the 1960s and 1970s. During that tempestuous period, an Iranian student named Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam attended Cal. He became fluent in English. He also absorbed the demonstrations criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and other nations.

After Hussein returned to Iran, writes Mark Bowden in his new book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” his anti-Americanism planted deep roots in his Islamic religion. In late 1979, the tree connected to those roots bore ugly fruit.

The student protests of the 60s didn’t actually revolutionize much in the directly political and traditionally revolutionary (i.e. a sudden overthrow of the existing government) sense in this country. The “revolution” they began here was more cultural than anything else, with resultant political ramifications. But not so in Iran, where students who had learned the anti-American and propaganda lessons of the 60s used them later to great effect. Some forget that the 60s didn’t just happen in this country; the protests occurred in Europe as well.

Khomeini spent some of his exile in France, but I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia, so this could be taken with a grain of salt) that the French were not necessarily simpatico to him during his rather short sojourn there:

In 1963, [Khomeini] publicly denounced the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was thereby imprisoned for 8 months, and upon his release in 1964, he made a similar denunciation of the United States. This led to his forced exile out of Iran. He initially went to Turkey but was later allowed to move to Iraq, where he stayed until being forced to leave in 1978, after then-Vice President Saddam Hussein forced him out…after which he went to Neauphle-le-Ché¢teau in France. According to Alexandre de Marenches (then head of the French secret services), France suggested to the Shah that they could “arrange for Khomeini to have a fatal accident”; the Shah declined the assassination offer, arguing that this would make him a martyr.

[NOTE II: My post about Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, is relevant here. Nafisi, an Iranian national, likewise fell in with other radical Iranian students while studying in this country. Then, when she returned to Iran, she saw quite a few of those former associates imprisoned—and in some cases executed—by their former comrades-in-arms.]

It’s not easy being a spokesperson

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve had our fun with Marie Harf and Jen Psaki, and Josh Earnest as well as Jay Carney before him (for some reason, Robert Gibbs wasn’t a source of much fun). But I admit to a sneaking sort of awe of what they do, although it’s not a good sort of awe.

People are fond of saying that Harf or Psaki are airheaded, for example. I beg to differ. What they are—and what all on that list are—is loyal party apparatchiks with a fair amount of facility (some more than others) at keeping their stories and talking points straight, firing off a flurry of glib words to get those points across, and sticking relentlessly to message in the face of some difficult questions and no small amount of mockery and potential embarrassment.

You might say that they are shameless. Perhaps. However, they are buoyed and driven not only by personal ambition, but also by their dedication to whatever they think their party and their boss stand for, so much so that they believe that telling lies and manufacturing spin is a noble calling. This accounts for their triumph over any lingering shame they might feel. As with Winston Smith’s interlocutor O’Brien, they not only say that 2 + 2 = 5, but they come to actually believe that on a certain level it’s true as soon as they say it.

Or of course they might instead just be sociopaths to whom the only important thing is their personal advancement in the world, and their jobs are their tickets to the stars.

It also takes a certain amount of skill to learn so much information each day in order to get the administration’s stories straight and be able to rattle off the responses without getting rattled. And if the responses are lies, coverup, and/or spin, so much the more difficult, because it’s harder to keep a pack of lies straight than it is to tell the truth. Yes, they get better at it over time, and some people have a special facility for it. But I still believe it isn’t easy just to keep up with the sheer pace of information overload.

Does this mean I have sympathy for their plight? No. I don’t even think they see it as a plight; I think they consider they’ve got a fabulous job in the service of a wonderful president, doing wonderful things. A little ridicule rolls off their backs. Although I did always see something in Jay Carney’s eyes—or did I imagine it?—some mild sense of shame that I haven’t spied in the physiognomy of any of the others. Perhaps it’s just that I remember this:

Hillary’s big draws

The New Neo Posted on by

Not long after the 2012 election I predicted that Hillary would run in 2016 and that she had an excellent chance of winning. I would currently place her chances somewhat lower than I did then, but still very good.

Arguments that she would be tired and old by that time seemed—and still seem—overridden by other considerations, first and foremost her gender. As I wrote back then:

It’s women in particular who will vote for Hillary in even greater numbers than they did for Obama, and that’s saying a lot. To liberal and moderate women she is a role model, a hero(ine), an intrepid trailblazer (somewhat ironic, since her path to political prominence came through the traditional female route of linkage to a powerful male), and highly-respected star. Men would have to vote against her in a phalanx to overcome that advantage””and they won’t…

The American electorate appears to be highly motivated to elect “firsts” these days. It’s very likely that the prospect of electing the first black president was responsible for at least some of Obama’s initial attraction, and that same “first” impulse would be operating strongly for Hillary in 2016.

There are other plus factors for Hillary, such as incredibly strong name recognition (always important with the low information voter), and the fact that there isn’t really anyone else on the horizon for the Democrats. But overshadowing even that is identity politics and her gender. The only candidate that would be stronger in that respect would be a black or Hispanic woman, and the only one with equal name recognition is—you guessed it!—Michelle Obama.

For years I’ve heard people say that Michelle would run in 2016. I have consistently thought that was balderdash, and I’ve seen not a sign of movement in that direction so far. But lately I’ve decided it’s not balderdash at all. It really depends on what happens in the next year or so, what the Obamas’ actual (as opposed to their perceived) relationship is (in other words, are they of completely the same mind on more or less everything?), whether Barack Obama could bear to cede even the official trappings of power to his wife, and whether America would swallow the idea of someone completely untested in elected office or generalship running for president (Dr. Ben Carson would test that last proposition on the Republican side). But I have very little doubt that Barack and Michelle Obama would love to stay in power if they could, in order to continue whatever unfinished business may remain of the lofty fundamental transformation of America. And if a Michelle Obama candidacy looked like a viable path to that goal, they would take it.

But let’s get back to Hillary, the nominee I still think is far far more likely. Her path has gotten a bit harder than it looked to me to be in 2012, not the least because of the new trouble that that scamp, her husband, might be in (I write “scamp” because I think much of America looks on him with great affection and considers his shenanigans relatively unimportant). But Hillary herself is still highly admired, and as Bill Kristol points out, a poll of voters elicited a majority response that she “represented the future.” None of the Republican candidates were considered to do so, including those newly burst on the scene.

Speaking of the future—another huge draw Hillary would have for the Democrats is the fact that, during the campaign and during her presidency if elected, her gender would allow her to play the sexism card in the same manner that Obama wielded his very formidable race card. That is worth its weight in gold and then some.

And lest anyone think Republicans could finesse this by nominating a woman for president or for VP, I counter with: look what happened to Sarah Palin. Look, also, at what happened to Condoleezza Rice when she was prominent in the Bush administration, and Rice theoretically held both race and gender cards. But as you probably have observed, the rules of racism and sexism work quite differently for Republicans, who are assumed by definition to have betrayed and sold out both blackness and femaleness through their affiliation with the Evil Party.

The religious omission Obama hasn’t addressed

The New Neo Posted on by

In all the uproar about Obama’s refusal to label terrorists of the Muslim faith as being terrorists of the Muslim faith, what’s gotten somewhat lost is Obama’s failure to explain why he won’t label their Christian victims as Christians, and why he is so reluctant to label their Jewish victims Jews as well.

You may or may not accept his explanation of the Muslim-omission phenomenon. But at least he deigned (and I think that’s the correct word) to address it. I have seen nothing that even acknowledges his omission of the faith of the victims, much less explains it. Just denials/excuses/minimization.

I’ve written quite a few posts on it (see this and this, for example), and so have many other observors. The reasons Obama gave for his avoidance of the “Muslim” designation for terrorists cannot possibly apply to his refusal to acknowledge the faith of the victims, either. Whether or not Obama calls the Coptic Christians whom the terrorists beheaded (as the terrorists declared the victims’ Christian faith was the reason for the killings) “Christians” or not is not going to affect terrorist recruiting—except to the degree it makes Obama look ignorant or frightened, which would be likely to enhance recruiting.

I think Obama has not answered this charge because he has no answer that’s even marginally acceptable. All answers reflect very badly on him. So I think he hopes people will just forget about it as new crisis after new crisis comes our way.