Wishful Thinking

Heh. Indeed. Also, there was all that blather about how new presidents grow into the position. In the event, our GW became more of an incompetent partisan hack by the day.

It does not matter who the Republican nominate because they just are not going to win. None of the potential Republican nominees stands a chance of winning a state that Kerry carried in 2004. The Democratic party will easily carry Ohio, New Mexico, Iowa, and Missouri. There is a good chance that the election will be a rout for the Democrats no matter who they nominate or who is nominated by the Republicans.

A few elections ago (1988, I think) the Democratic candidates were routinely referred to as "the seven dwarfs". So, for the Republican front-runners, I suggest we reach back into recent American mythology for an alternative appellation to "terrible troika". How about "the three stooges"?

Then we can play the game of match the stooges: McCain=Moe, Giuliani=Larry, and Romney=Shepp. If Gingrich were to make it into the top tier, he would make a natural Curly.

How lame is that? Will's the guy who recently wrote a column about how conservatives need to move beyond "St. Ron."

George Will has always been something of a contortionist when it comes to spinning every problem as an indictment of liberalism. But, wow, is he really trying to blame liberals for the NYC of "Bonfire of the Vanities"? Wasn't that book, more than anything, an indictment of the Wall Street culture created/fed by the deregulation (notably, of the bond market) of the Reagan years? Anybody got a clue what he's talking about there?

nope lewp and neither does will.
shorter will: the right should abandon any and every "principle" they ever claimed to hold, even repudiate bush/cheney, if it means retaining the white house.
this from the pundidiot who loves to accuse liberals of having no "moral compass".

I think Bonfire of the Vanities (a great novel, in my opinion) does have an anti-liberal message in certain respects. Among other things, its a take-down of race hustling (one character modeled on Al Sharpton, I believe), which is a familiar theme of Wolfe's. There is also a lot of tension in the book involving people who have liberal cultural beliefs and taboos (such as the prosecutor), coming in contact with a reality that completely contradicts those beliefs.

I guess you have to read the book to know what I mean. I think a lot of Wolfe's themes' are a reaction against some of the ridiculousness you see from liberals in the late 60's, early 70's. For example, read "Mau Mauing the Fly Catchers".

I find it striking that a wife swapper like George Will who dumped wife #1 to trade her in on a newer model pontificates on moral issues. Talk about throwing stones from a glass house.

What about the Terrible Troika's dubious commitment to conservatism?

Huh? Did Matthew even read the rest of the column? Will goes on to detail all of the reasons that conservatives can be happy with any of those three choices - reasons that their commitment to conservatism should not be considered "dubious".

It's strange - like Matthew stopped reading the column after the Reagan paragraph.

Re: "Mau Mauing the Fly Catchers".

Correction: its "Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers".

The Goopers could build a Frankencandidate using nothing but the best parts of each of these losers and it would still lose 40 states in '08.

Al, if i read you correctly, you are saying that conservatism now consists of opposing abortion, opposing government involvement in prescription drugs on the basis of costs (as distinct from philosophy, mind you), opposing tax hikes in new york city while calling them names, and supporting endless expenditure of blood and treasure in iraq, and it doesn't matter what your track record was in getting there.

and you support that?

as for will's ridiculous assertion that liberals are only characterized as "growing" while conservatives as "pandering," it ranks among the choicest pieces of stupidity the tenured purveyor of tripe has produced.

Jim W., i was going to get into wolfe's value system, but i think that would take us too far afield, but let's at least note that "mau mauing the flak catchers" had really nothing to do with "liberalism" as such but rather with a handful of liberals (enough to fit into bernstein's apartment) wanting to connect with radicalism.

I remember the Republican rebuttal about dim-witted George Bush: he'll gather smart people around him.

That worked out well.

Howard,

I think Wolfe lampoons a certain sensibility that was pretty widespread among liberals of that era. Certainly, more than a handful (although the essay was based on reporting vis-a-vis a handful of people). I agree, it doesn't really have anything to do with liberalism as it is properly defined. But, I think one of Giuliani's strong suits is a no-nonsense law and order persona that will appeal to the sense of outrage people have with this kind of liberal sensibility. That's what I think George Will might be getting at.

Minor point. Years ago, I heard Tom Wolfe tell a packed house at the NYC Bar Association that he had not even heard of Al Sharpton when he dreamed up the Rev. Bacon. He was not under oath, but I think I believed him.

jim w, not that it isn't an interesting question in general but i really don't want to go down the analyzing wolfe's value system pathway today (don't have the time to enter into it), so let me just say as a final note (on my side) on that that i don't think it's accurate to characterize the gathering at bernstein's apartment as a "pretty widespread" feeling among "liberals." If that were the case, the black panthers would have been much more popular than they were.

i think more accurate is that there was a cohort of who people were disgusted with liberalism of the day, since the most exemplary liberal of them all, hubert humphrey, had sold out his birthright for the potage of vietnam.

that said, yes, i agree: rudy's appeal (to will and to the gop in general) is that he got the homeless off the sidewalks and the squeegee guys off the sidewalks (although the latter is apparently not really guiliani's doing).

Howard, I'm not sure why you think that conservatism would now consist of a certain set of policies to which all conservative candidates must adhere. The point of Will's column is that conservatism consists of a whole bunch of policies, and we conservatives should be happy with someone who agrees with us on most of those policies. Take any subset of conservative policies (pick any say, ten, policies) - if we get a candidate who agrees with us on enough of them (say, I dunno, eight) then we should be behind that candidate if he wins the nomination. That's not saying that the conservative policies that such candidate refuses to support are no longer "conservative" - just the conservatives need to be pragmatic even if the nominee doesn't always support conservative policies.

I've actually been thinking about that point a bit lately. I've said for a while that I can't support McCain because of his anti-First Amendment policies. But I'm having second thoughts about that - I mean, I expect social conservatives to get behind Rudy if he wins the nomination, why wouldn't a McCainiac similarly expect me to get behind McCain if he wins the nomination?

Both Republicans and Democrats have a certain weakness for charismatics. Reagan not only decriminalized abortion as governor of California, but was himself divorced (not to mention from a generation where divorce was far less common). Likewise, Bill Clinton ought hardly to have been a darling of the libs - in many ways he was the most conservative Democrat to be elected since Cleveland - but he was nevertheless deemed to be the "first black president" by Ms. Morrison (this may or may not have been about the time that Eve Sedgwick declared herself to be a gay man trapped in a woman's body...my memory is mercifully cloudy sometimes).

The Republicans may or may not nominate Rudy "kewl mayor type" Giuliani but the polls suggest quite strongly that this guy's base is the Republican base, and to think that these voters know nothing about his past or his views is the same kind of naive blindness with which Democrats in and outside Washington have been trafficking on a grand scale in recent decades. There are polls to be believed and polls to be questioned, and these are I think polls to be believed. And the fact that evangelical leaders and other Republican special interest figureheads may decline from endorsing him (that NRA guy was the latest) may not only not harm his chances in the primaries - it may help him in the general election.

I misread the 06 midterms in a big sort of way, thinking the Republican base was becoming more pragmatic. As it turns out I may not have been wrong about that, only that Independents actually turned out to vote in the midterms, and voted for Democrats. But that doesn't mean a) Republican voters won't be pragmatic in the their choice for a president candidate in 08 (not least because they believe the so-called war on terror is more important than the culture wars) and that b) Independents won't split their vote in 08, choosing Democrats for Congress and Giuliani for president.

Some observed that Harry Truman didn't seem up to the job either.

As the old saw went -- Harry Truman's too qualified to be Vice President but not qualified enough to be President.

I had to laugh at Will's column today, in that he talked all around the CPAC convention but never mentioned Coulter, just like last Sunday on This Week he dismissed Coulter with a single "hrummmp".

But of course, the relatively insignificant Edward's bloggergate had a prominant place in his column last week.

The elephant in the room for "presentable" conservatives like Will is that while they spend lots of time on the "fainting couch" when it comes to those horrible liberals, they are sniveling hypocrits when it comes to their own party's transgressions.

More importantly, though, Will must recognize that the "base" needs red meat thrown to them to feed whatever bigotry (masquarading as values, of course) is in vogue that election cycle. And as Coulter demonstrates, the bigotry-du-jour is homophobia.

The CPAC convention demonstrated that the GOP "base" is getting nastier and nastier, as they are recruiting new, younger members. This is going to be an increasingly significant problem, and "presentable" old standard bearers like Will who ignore this will be relegated to the fringes.

actually, Al, my point is different.

Conservatism - real, actual conservatism, not what the contemporary right-wing thinks - stands for small government, modesty in expectations for what government can achieve, non-interference by government in private decision-making, an understanding of the value of functioning markets (not the protection of current oligopolies), respect for popular traditions and for empiricism, and a host of related considerations.

i realize that in the end, usage drives definition, and if people who want to call themselves conservatives today want to invent definitions of the word to fit their right-wing viewpoint (for the only time in my life, i'll give coulter credit: she every so often seems to recognize that she is a "right-winger"), then that's what contemporary conservatism means, but by the intellectual standards of conservatism, neither mccain, giuliani, romney, nor will is supporting anything resembling "conservative" positions.

unlike many here, i actually expect better of you, which is to say, i expect that you are interested in honest conservatism and not authoritarian, slogan-based right-wing politics, which was my underlying point.

PS. now if you want to say that you support the republican party and you're willing to support its candidates, fine, so be it, but that's different.

I'm not sure I agree with your definition of conservatism, Howard. After all, there is a difference between conservatism and libertarianism (I think traditional conservatism is a lot more authoritarian than you are making it out to be). Will's column, of course, points out that the three candidates are all different types of conservatives, and thus non will be 100% acceptable to all the variants of conservatives. But, taken in broad brush, each should be acceptable to most conservatives. And I think that's about right.

Will's column is a tepid little exercise, isn't it? It starts out confusing:

First he leads with 'don't let the perfect drive out the good.' The very next sentence 'good' is demoted to 'satisfactory.' A good movie and a satisfactory movie, to me, are different levels of quality.

So it seems that the lead sentence should've been revised to 'don't let the perfect drive out the satisfactory.' Ok, then. Off we go.

But then, his point about Reagan is that he seemed unsatisfactory to begin with, and then became very good (not perfect!). At lease it seems this way, when he lists what Reagan did prior to becoming President. the list of dubious conservative achievements seems to make him unsatisfactory, not the minimal 'satisfactory,' to me at least.

Sheesh, the moving goalposts here are tough to follow.

But for his column to make any sense, I guess I'm going to have to say that the prePresidential Reagan is 'satisfactory' to the eyes of a conservative voter.

So Will shows how the 3 stooges are satisfactory. Point taken, I guess. I don't think it's too hard to show that a candidate is satisfactory. Aren't all those guys satisfactory? Brownback, Huckabee, et al. Which of them wouldn't be? Matt's right, this is a pretty mild, safe point: "Hey! They're ALL minimally acceptable! Relax!"

But Will doesn't seem to grasp or find it noteworthy, at least, that evangelicals don't want an adequate candidate like Dems settled on kerry in 2004 - they are a passionate bunch shooting for the stars, they want the rush of theocratic purity, to shiver at the idea of a person infused with Reaganesque serenity or Bushlike singlemindedness.

Will offers us a tepid point, really; 'well these three might end up very good, give them a chance.' It's 'meh' with a bowtie.

But Matt's right, as far as a formal argument, it proves too much - all these lukewarms candidates might end up solid ones. They might. They might not. With Bush, his mediocrity was, instead of a disguise of future greatness, actually the mark of his apogee! - he would sink in his leadership over the next eight years and try and take the country with him. That would be an interesting column - 'don't let the mediocre lead us to the pits.' But that's too depressing, I guess. Will aims to keep our sights low.

But that's the danger of lowering your standards and hoping for the best - isn't that precisely what people did with Bush, like Matt said? Worse, Bush edited this formula: he raised his standards to the moon (with remaking the armed services, with Iraq) and THEN hoped for the best - rather than planning for it.

As far as the crack about Cuomo, I don't agree:

"Nevertheless, it's a classic form of argument that proves too much. I mean, would Mario Cuomo have been the greatest conservative president of all time. His record was really unconservative."

That's not quite what Will said, I think. He didn't say the further you get from the satisfactory, the better the likelihood of becoming very good. He didn't introduce any continuum or notion of proportionality that would stupidly make the distance from the 'tolerable' the predictor of future superseding of its threshold. Otherwise, Marx would be even better than Cuomo.

It was a humble binary view; a lonely if/then - if you're tolerable, you might do better than that. That's it. Then he showed how all three were tolerable.

I know, I know: the proportionality argument is more interesting, it leads to a silly outcome that is fun to poke holes in. Unfortunately, Will didn't say that, his column was consequently duller than that. Like I said, meh.

I would've rather had Will say "Let's raise our standards. Look where tolerating a candidate got the party, America, and the middle East after eight years."

But raising the standards would highlight the 'dubious conservatism' of the stooges, and how people who are opportunistic enough to bend like a spoon in the Matrix for the Evangelicals might not be what we want now.

Meh.

1. There is an interesting tidbit in todays Washington Post raising the possibility of a third party presidential candidacy by Chuck Hagel. Although I think his chances of winning would be slim to say the least, such a candidacy would cast the November 2008 election into considerably uncertainty as it is not clear which party such a candidacy would hurt the most.

2. There is also another possibility, which nobody has raised, namely that Vice President Cheney might resign for health reasons. This would allow Bush to pick a replacement who might then become a front runner for the GOP nomination (i.e. Bush could pick Romney or Giuliani as Cheneys' replacement; McCain would be unlikely as, despite the appearance of harmony, they don't like each other).

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