Iraq may end up helping GOP

Opposition to the Iraq war continues to be a rallying cry on the left. Barack Obama has not only made his opposition to the Iraq invasion in 2003 a foundation of his candidacy, but his economic plan is based principally on his ability to repurpose the $12 billion a month spent on the war into other uses -- namely universal health care and other entitlement programs. Both Obama and Clinton claim to have plans to begin withdrawing American troops immediately upon taking office, even if the process as a whole will take 14 to 16 months to complete. But the intent is clear: to remove US combat forces from the major operations that they have been engaged in during the "surge" -- even as these operations have met with great success.

Where does this reflexive opposition come from? It is clear that opposition to the use of American power is at the core of the Democratic party, and it particulary animates primary politics. But data seems to show that opposition to the Iraq war is deeper than just a partisan divide, and that the American people are tired of the war and want it to end. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 63% of Americans believe the Iraq war wasn't worth the price paid, while 49% believe US troops should be brought home "immediately", regardless of the situation on the ground.

These are astonishing numbers given the success of the surge and the precipitous decline in US combat casualties. In February, for example, there were 25 US combat deaths, down 64% from the year-earlier period. Put into perspective, there were over 43,000 deaths from traffic accidents in 2006 -- an average of 3,500 per month. While every combat death in Iraq is a tragedy, these are trained soldiers who have volunteered to be in the fight -- not innocent bystanders. In comparison to any other war -- from World War II to Korea to Vietnam -- the rate of combat casualties in Iraq is phenomenally low.

Thus, the opposition to the war seems out of proportion to the facts on the ground -- and is obviously driven by other forces. My belief is that much of it comes from the undeniable bias of the media that is quick to report on our setbacks while largely ignoring our successes. The picture being painted is unrealistically gloomy and has been for the past three years -- even in the face of progress.

The fundamental story-line on Iraq has not changed since the breakdown in security and the attack on the Samara Mosque in early 2006; most reporting still focuses on sectarian strife, "civil war" and the lack of progress in political reconciliation. All of these issues have been overtaken by events on the ground, where security has been restored and sectarian conflict has been substantially reduced. But that is not a story you are likely to hear in the main-stream media.

My guess is that the Iraq war is going to play against the Democrats in November -- both because the situation will continue to improve, and because John McCain can rightfully take credit of much of the recent success. I know that Americans don't want to lose in Iraq, and when confronted with the reality of our progress will choose to go with the Commander in Chief who can finish the job.

The stakes -- particularly when properly communicated -- are simply to great to fail: a base of terrorism in Iraq on the border of a soon-to-be nuclear Iran. Most Americans know that there is no way we can let that happen. Whether that is enough to sway the election to McCain will largely be determined by his ability to frame the debate and rightly keep us focused on the extreme price of failure.

Electoral College on Dems' hit list

It's time for a civics lesson. “Civics” is the old-fashioned word for how to understand your country’s politics and government. Since your country is the world’s leading superpower and the mightiest nation from any standpoint the world has ever seen – to say nothing of the fact that your country is simply yours – her politics and government are worth understanding. Oops. I fell into another anachronism, albeit a beautiful one. I referred to our country in the feminine. Ever wonder where this curious habit comes from? It comes from an older age when public discourse was dominated by men, and men – good ones, at least – love their country in a similar way to that in which they love a woman.

They want to provide for her, protect her, vindicate her honor when it is called into question, and – as she does for him – help her to improve and grow where she needs improvement and growth. Oh, and they think about her frequently and are extraordinarily proud of her. Even in our egalitarian age, isn’t this so much richer than referring to your country as “it”?

Here’s another way in which our ancestors were wiser than we: remember that odd system called the Electoral College? It comes up every four years when we elect a president. Presidents are elected most immediately by states, not by popular vote. Popular votes determine which candidate wins each state, but then people called electors cast their state’s official presidential ballots. Whichever candidate wins a majority of electoral votes becomes President, regardless of who has the most popular votes. Because the number of electors each state gets is determined by its population, usually the two vote tallies coincide, but, as Bush v. Gore in 2000 showed, this is not always the case. Gore won the popular vote, but Bush won the Electoral College vote.

This system runs deeper and influences presidential elections, and thus the direction of national politics, more significantly than almost anyone realizes. It is one of the foremost examples of the genius of the American founders and of the depth of political understanding the entire founding generation held. Why did they do it?

It’s very simple: the American founders did not want to create a democracy. Democracy is chaotic and too easily results in the tyranny of the majority. Since a simple majority of any group of people is often wrong and, not infrequently, very wrong – witness the massive crowds attending the rallies of Barack Obama, who in his speeches either says nothing but feel-good platitudes or promotes the worst kind of liberalism directly opposed to the wisdom that made this country great – the founders, foreseeing how easily crowds can be seduced by a good but empty speaker, created a system of institutions that filters and moderates popular impulses.

It also preserves our constitutional system as a federal republic, and keeps it from degenerating into a direct democracy controlled only by big cities and big states. If there were no Electoral College, candidates would never come to Colorado and Wyoming – they would spend all their time campaigning in New York, California, Texas, and Florida, and in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. In a direct democracy, carrying nothing but California, New York, and the big cities could get you very close to the presidency.

In fact, that’s exactly what Al Gore did in 2000. If you look at one of those red/blue maps you saw so many of while the 2000 hanging chads were still being counted, you’ll notice that all of the major urban areas are blue. All of the rural areas in between the concentrated blue areas are red. In terms of square miles, Bush won going away. In terms of people, Gore won. The electoral college – as it was designed to do – protected the interests of massive rural areas and their durable American values against the heavily concentrated populations of more educated but less virtuous urbanites, in the process protecting the interests of small states against big ones and the very meaning of what it means to be a state in the United States.

All of this classical American political wisdom the Democratic Party wants to do away with, and has already done away with in its own state primaries and caucuses. If you are following the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, you are noting that the winner of a particular state doesn’t matter all that much because delegates are assigned proportionally to the popular vote. If you win 53% of the popular vote in a state, you get 53% of the delegates for that state. This destroys the meaning of delegates and, to a large degree, of states – delegates become merely a direct proxy for the popular vote. The candidate who wins the Democratic nomination will have won the largest number of individual votes, not the largest number of states and state delegates. This is not a republic, but a directly democratic form of government, which is why the Democratic Party is called Democratic.

In contrast, note how Republicans conduct their primaries. For the most part (there are exceptions), winner takes all. If you win a state, you get all that state’s delegates. This is how a federal republic operates, which is why the Republican Party is called Republican. This is, moreover, how the founders designed the presidential election system to work (the Electoral College is set up in Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, and was modified by the 12th Amendment), and is the kind of connection that explains and is explained by the fact that Republicans, with notable exceptions like Sen. John McCain, generally defend historic American political values while Democrats, their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, typically oppose historic American political values and want to reconstruct the Constitution in their own image.

Hillary Clinton is already on record calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. If you want to see how this looks, just look at how the Democratic Party is conducting its primaries and caucuses now. Not only is there very little federalism or states rights in it, but on top of the popular vote the party has constructed a system of “superdelegates” who are not tied to any state; they are party elites who can vote for whomever they wish. The number of superdelegates is so large that they can easily sway an election, regardless of the popular vote; indeed, after Tuesday’s election victories by Hillary Clinton, we are assured that this year’s Democratic nominee will be chosen according to which way the superdelegates swing. The Republican Party has no superdelegates.

This is educational: while Democrats pay lip service to serving the people in their efforts to deconstruct historic American political structures, what they do in reality is replace those political structures with increased power at the top. The people are not empowered; the rhetoric of empowering the people is used, just as Stalin and Mao and Trotsky used it, to clear the way for government by a small band of elites. This is the most pernicious effect of direct democracy the American founders foresaw, and against which we are protected as long as we defend the structures they put in place. The Electoral College while it filters popular government, does so to protect government of, by, and for the people.

So the next time your friend, coworker, family member, neighbor, priest, pastor, or friendly neighborhood professor bad-mouths the generation of Americans who founded your country, remind them she – not “it” – is great for a reason, and no other generation of nation builders has ever been so supremely successful in their efforts to endow their posterity with the blessings of wise liberty.

Meaning no disrespect

The analogy is inelegant, but Hillary Clinton's double win in Texas and Ohio yesterday may be the most dramatic stop of an unstoppable force since Stalingrad. When the Russians broke the German winning streak in February 1943, the Reich's military machine hadn't lost anywhere in Europe in 42 months. Understand, I'm not likening Obama's or Hillary's politics to those two scorpions in a bottle in World War II. I'm merely pointing out an obvious military parallel.

When you remember that the Red Army got massive American aid in turning back the Wehrmacht, the parallel continues -- since Republican crossovers were significantly helpful (though probably not decisive) in helping Hill and Bill prevail with their big-state firewall strategy where Giuliani had failed with a similar plan in Florida.

Now the question is, can Sen. Clinton capitalize on this turning point and gain victory by driving Sen. Obama all the way back to Denver five months from now, as the Germans were driven all the way back to Berlin 27 months after Stalingrad?

Overselling McCain doesn't help

Distinguished former state senator Mark Hillman yesterday on these Backbone America pages joined the chorus of Republicans advocating for an “at least he’s not Hillary or Obama” vote for John McCain in November. Hillman pays lipservice to Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and James Dobson, all of whom are being candid about McCain, but then portrays a vote for McCain as the only move consistent with our principles. Withholding such a vote, he claims, is “suicidal self-indulgence” and “personal pride and prejudice,” and will result in “surrendered freedoms, suffocating tax burdens, and national insecurity” that will be “as much our responsibility as that of those we ‘helped’ to elect.”

This isn’t the way to persuade conservatives, Senator.

This kind of pragmatism-masquerading-as-principle thinking in the GOP is precisely why some of us are considering sitting this presidential election out and focusing on down-ballot candidates who are genuinely people of principle. Enough is enough, and if this weak-kneed party is ever going to develop real backbone again, it’s going to take a revolt of conservatives from within, not a tame, obedient rollover for every lame GOP beltway insider who arises.

In the meantime, if you want to tease conservatives to the polls in support of McCain this year, I suggest a better strategy is to start being candid about what a weak candidate he is, dispensing with both the recitations of how strong he is on this or that issue and the helium about “this election is about principles that will guide our country for the next four years” – that conviction is the reason McCain is in trouble in the first place.

I submit a better strategy is a more humble one: I’m voting for McCain, but I understand if you’re not. He’s weak, and, currently, our party is weak. It’s not clear at all in this case what the right thing to do is. The late William F. Buckley and National Review did something similar in 1956, running a tepid endorsement of Eisenhower entitled not, “We Like Ike,” but “We Prefer Ike.” He was, they thought, given his acceptance of the New Deal and merely mild opposition to Communist expansion, only the lesser of two evils.

That kind of candor has the potential to be persuasive, especially given John McCain is to the left of Eisenhower.

On McCain’s alleged toughness on national defense, here is a story about his joining Democrats in supporting the closure of Guantanamo Bay. Says the story:

“McCain wants to close Guantanamo, he says, because its existence is damaging U.S. credibility abroad. He also wants to speed up trials. ‘He would want to speed up the tribunal process for prisoners, because he doesn't support indefinite detentions,’ McCain spokesman Danny Diaz says.”

This is straight liberal dogma about Guantanamo and puts McCain to the left of all other 2008 presidential candidates except Ron Paul on the issue and to the left of a vast majority of national Republicans.

On McCain’s alleged fiscal and economic conservatism, Sen. Hillman mentions in passing Sen. McCain’s opposition to Bush’s tax cuts. Here is Club for Growth’s take on the matter, entitled “John McCain Is No Supply-Sider.”

Then there was the “Gang of 14” circus led by McCain that, as he did on so many other occasions, undercut Senate GOP leadership in its attempt to prevent Democrat use of the filibuster in opposition to the judicial nomination of Judge Samuel Alito and future such nominations. Senate Republicans had a 55-45 majority in the Senate at the time and could have changed Senate rules to prevent the filibuster from ever being so used again. (The Constitution requires only a majority vote for confirmation of the president’s judges, not the super-majority required to defeat a filibuster.) McCain led the movement to stop that change and was hailed by the media, as he has been on so many other occasions, as a “bipartisan, moderate” hero.

And we are supposed to believe his judicial appointments will be heroic constitutionalists?

The judicial nominations of Reagan and the two Bushes have included Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter. True, they have also included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito -- as well as several other legal greats who, thanks partially to wimpy Republicans like John McCain, didn’t make it through the confirmation process. But they clearly included a few mediocrities as well, and given McCain is to the political left of Reagan and both Bushes, the likelihood that he will appoint anyone like Scalia or Thomas, for instance, with a Democrat-controlled Senate is simple naivete. The kind of justices McCain would appoint is entirely up for grabs.

Then there is McCain-Feingold. And we are supposed to be worried about the freedoms we will surrender under Obama or HRC? McCain said just last week that, if he could do it, he’d shut down 527’s as well.

The list could go on. There is no question there are some areas where McCain’s record is better than Obama’s or HRC’s – the list could probably be counted on one hand and definitely on two – and if McCain were running as a Democrat, we could without angst hope for his successful nomination as the best that party had to offer. The problem is that he is running as a Republican, bringing a long record of weakness and betrayal toward conservatives and the conservative movement with him under that banner. This creates a deceptive, mendacious candidacy that, like the presidency of Richard Nixon, holds the potential to do so much long-term damage to the GOP and its prospects for forming sustainable governing majorities in the future that many rightly wonder now if a Democrat victory in November is really the worse result.

If this seems like overstatement, think Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. McCain is to the left of both of them. Then think Bill Owens in Colorado.

The usual election-year pragmatism that is becoming current in GOP circles, and that will become more current as the election approaches, is laying the groundwork for the inevitable reaction among GOP elites if McCain does lose to Obama or Clinton in November: conservatives are to blame, and this further shows what Neanderthals they are (especially those nasty evangelical Christian types) with no political sense. If only they’d come out for McCain, he might have won. Let’s join Sen. Trent Lott and “do something about this talk radio problem” so it doesn’t bite us again.

So the 2008 history of the GOP goes: nominate a blue-blood, media-hungry Republican who’s been running for president for over a decade, whose record is pathetic on most things conservatives care about most deeply, sap thereby the central source of principled strength in the party, send out officious memos to state party chapters and conservatives everywhere telling them not to criticize Obama too toughly, and put pressure on everyone, everywhere to get on board the McCain bandwagon or be responsible for electing Obama or Hillary.

What a winner of a strategy. What a heroic, unflinching adherence to what we believe even in the face of adverse political tides!

I have a better idea. Let’s get conservative again. Let’s start actually being people of principle who put principle over pragmatism instead of just telling people that’s what we do. Let’s start learning from the people who are opposing McCain instead of bad-mouthing and marginalizing them. If we start to do this again, perhaps we’ll understand afresh what “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” means, what the sources of America’s greatness are, and how we can recover them again once the disastrous candidacy of John McCain is, mercifully, at an end.

The Telling of the Truth: William F. Buckley’s Life in Letters

“It is always fascinating to watch people react to the telling of the truth,” wrote Bill Buckley in his first book, God and Man at Yale. It is equally interesting to watch people react to the passing of someone who told the truth. Not your truth or my truth. Not the truth as he saw it. Not the truth as best he knew it. Not the kind of truth that feels good today but is opposite to the wisdom of the ages and of the sages, both past and future, and thus destroys tomorrow. The simple truth; or, as Christian apologist and philosopher of history and culture Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying, true truth: about life and about eternity, as it is available to any honest mind. The truth of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, their grandparents, and their grandchildren – linguistically adorned, philosophically beatified, and internationally contextualized to tell a true story that properly placed the man on the street, his full human and spiritual dignity intact, into the drama of the life of the nation and the life of nations.

Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston phone book than by the entire Harvard faculty not because he wanted to be cute, but because he wanted to tell the truth.

It was the same kind of truth Buckley told about Yale in 1951 at the tender age of 25. By then he in his exceptional talents had already discerned that even, or perhaps especially, many in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League had developed a curious aversion to true truth. It is an aversion that has almost universally swallowed up American intellectuals, and which Buckley was providentially destined, singularly equipped, and, it seemed, inordinately pleased to battle his entire life.

Even by the standards of the most literate literati, his vocabulary was staggering. And he wielded it not in the pretentious, ostentatious manner in which the mainstream, “drive-by” media are prone to wield theirs in an attempt to justify, mainly to themselves, their right to occupy the august, influential post to which they have risen. Rather, he wielded his with the commanding ease of a man who knew God was bigger than he was, and who was thus less interested in the great words he knew than in the great ideas – indeed, the great ideological worlds – he knew lay behind the words, and less interested in glorifying himself than in, as he put it, standing athwart history crying, in all wise benevolence, “Stop!”

His humor was of a type that has become a bit of a hallmark in conservative circles: the kind that is less a positive creation for entertainment than an unavoidable adaptation to the telling of the truth and the negative or embarrassed reaction the truth engenders. When you repeatedly tell the truth, and that truth is not only repeatedly rejected, but repeatedly caricatured, studiously avoided, and, when the inevitable calamity arrives as a result, repeatedly blamed for having created the calamity, one develops a certain modestly self-aggrandizing humor that every genuine conservative recognizes and that no such conservative begrudges another. So Buckley, when asked why he tended to sit during his TV episodes of “Firing Line” and most other TV interviews: “It’s difficult to stand up under the weight of all I know.”

It’s not arrogance; it’s an attempt to advertise a healthy confidence in the truth in an age peopled by, as G. K. Chesterton once quipped, a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication tables.

His literary output was enormous, for a time almost single-handedly sustaining a post-war renaissance in conservative – that is, true – thought about God, man, Yale, society, state, and history. Like few others – his friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, did something notably similar – he put words, ideas, and history behind and around the thoughts, knowledge, emotions, convictions, hopes, and political visions of millions of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who sensed in the latter half of 20th century the rise of an aggressive totalitarian ideology that was finding a weaker and weaker United States, and a weaker and weaker spiritual, moral, and political backbone in the West, as its only meaningful world opposition.

The talk in the last week about Buckley as a defender of a more urbane, sophisticated, polished, and agreeable brand of conservatism than that to which we – sigh – are now condemned in the wake of his death is mere media kerfuffle. It is the kind of talk that comes from people not substantive enough to know what to say when an authentically great man passes. When Ronald Reagan passed, we heard much the same sort of thing from people who had spent their entire public careers criticizing, caricaturing, slandering, and opposing him. Now that he’s gone, what fond memories we have of him! What a better sort of conservatism he stood for! What dignity, what learnedness, what charity, what disagree-without-calling-your-opponents-names know-how he had! If only we had more like him!

The move is mendacious: a back-handed way of insulting those conservatives – that is, truth tellers – who remain, with whom both Reagan and Buckley consorted and identified their entire lives, and with whom still resides the only authentic stewardship of the life and legacy of either man.

Then, of course, there are the polite but empty compliments from respectable, moderate folk: even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, by God, at least you knew where he stood! Or, even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, you had to admire his talents and passion on behalf of what he believed in! The point being not to praise Buckley for anything genuinely praiseworthy, but to, again in a back-handed way, partake oneself of the immediate trend among the fashionable – the thing one is really in a habit of caring about – of honoring the venerable dead without oneself having to do anything like what the venerable dead did to earn the honor. That is, pay one’s easy respects to the dead without having to agree that this particular dead took the risk of telling the truth; of doing it for a long time; of sacrificing the many lucrative and fashionable engagements that one is oneself angling for and which would have easily been his had he chosen that easier pathway through life; and of putting up with the marginalization and condemnation from enemies, and not infrequent abandonment by ostensible friends, that inevitably attend such a courageous career.

In short, one is offering polite courtesies without offering the one thing that would truly honor the venerable dead: a frank admission that he was right, and you were wrong to disagree with, publicly oppose, or maintain a convenient silence toward him and what he believed, and toward what his genuine friends and heirs still believe.

The modern conservative movement in America – and the movement conservatives who comprise it – recognize innately that Buckley’s influence will last as long as our movement does. Many of us not only grew up with faithful, interested parents who kept copies of National Review on their coffee tables and in toilet-side baskets, but we still now have dusty, closeted boxes full of back issues with cartoon caricatures of Al Gore on the cover and Buckley’s inimitable columns in the back.

Yes, if only we had more of him. Eagles flock not, but one day, if God is gracious, there will be another collegiate Elijah who arises with the kind of spirit to, before he is 30, take on an Ivy League establishment, a political establishment, a world of easy, empty, errant words, with the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker’s truth that man is made in the image of God, and that what has happened once in six thousand years – a Gentile nation consciously and publicly founded on that truth – is not likely to ever happen again.