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Ashbrook E-Mail Update
March 6, 2008
In This Edition: Review of Recent News and Commentary | Other Ashbrook Web Sites | Recent Ashbrook Publications | Book of the Week | Upcoming Events | Ashbrook Podcasts | Donate to the Ashbrook Center
Review of Recent News and Commentary
Obama Collapse?
I give this the dramatic title, not because Robert Novak’s perfectly prosaic column deserves such drama (although what it says is true), but because there is an implication underneath the surface that says that Obama (and his advisors) are capable of total collapse near the end of the primary process which he still leads and almost cannot lose (the delegate count) until after the primary process. Their childish and imprudent behavior (and Novak doesn’t site all of them) was revealed before Ohio-Texas. The adults (notice I didn’t say the elder statesmen) left in the Democratic Party are now losing sleep. Indeed, they may have killed sleep because the ghost of McGovern’s huge loss in ’72 now begins to loom in the backs of their minds if Obama is the nominee. Hillary (this shouldn’t surprise) will play this ghost like a Stradivarius. And this looming catastrophe will be the basis of all her attack ads from now on. It will resonate ten-fold more than it did the three days before the Texas and Ohio vote when it just started sinking in. This is also her only chance and basis for persuading the superdelegates to come out in her favor before the convention. Because she will take Pennsylvania by circa 16-20 points, her argument will have standing and even the blind will see it.
Posted by Peter W. SchrammGood News for Hillary, Bad News for Democrats
Hillary’s "win" of Tuesday seems significant to all of us because our minds are still in the winner-take-all mode; yet she hasn’t gained on Obama in delegate count, and I don’t think she will by more than a dozen even if she wins Pennsylvania by double-digits, which she will. She hasn’t really won anything; the so-called wins just give her psyche a boost to press on. She feels better about herself and her prospects, so she will psuh on with even greater vigor.
So, it will go to the Convention, and be decided by the superdelegates and Michigan and Florida (which will have to be re-played); the DNC had better decide that now, not nearer the Convention. The possibility of mischief and betrayal are huge; and I do not think that Hillary or her people (including her trimmer husband) are statesmen enough to handle all of it without engendering the permament ill will of the Obama side. The fact that race is involved in the calculation is not a small point. If blacks in the Democratic Party think they have been taken for granted all these years, what do you think they are going to think if Hillary "takes it away" from him now? There will be so many deals cut before all this is over (including the VP slot) that we will not be able to count them all. The scenario of ’68 Chicago Convention-blood-in-the-streets-stuff is an underestimation of what will happen in Denver and following. Hillary will not give in now under any circumstances and she will have no regard to the consequences to the party she has been using as a vehicle for her success. If there were elder statesmen in the party, people with real authority, who could step in and work it out, that would be another thing, but there aren’t. They are all partisans without standing or trimmers without principle. The Democratic Party will teeter on a precipice of anarchy because they forgot (or never knew) that forming a majority is not merely a problem in adding numbers.
Posted by Peter W. SchrammPodcast on Moral Beauty
Adam Carrington graduated from AU and the Ashbrook Scholar Program in December with a BA in Political Science and Religion. He is off to graduate school to continue his studies in both, with an emphasis on theology. His Ashbrook Thesis was entitled: "Moral Beauty’s Divine Center: Jonathan Edwards and the Necessity of God in Ethics." His primary reader was Professor David Tucker (the others were Professors Justin Lyons and Peter Slade) and his hour-and-a-half oral defense of the thesis in front of the committee (and a couple dozen others) was a tour de force. You will get a sense of his excellence when you listen to this brief podcast with him. I will miss his well-disposed mind and great heart and wish him well in his future studies.
Posted by Peter W. SchrammRural Ohio Voters
The Washington Post runs a story today about the intractability of rural Ohio voters that—while it offers some interesting observations for more thoughtful analysts to ponder—is a good illustration of the condescension and bewilderment of the media in the face of common sense and decency. In order to process the facts encountered in the investigation for this article, the author (Kevin Merida, whom I’m told also wrote a nasty hatchet job of a book on Clarence Thomas), has to slip into the "these hicks are too dumb to know better" mode of reporting.
His assault on the unsophisticated rubes of rural Ohio begins with an interview with a Democratic Party Chairman in Darke County, James Surber. Surber expresses his frustration with the inability of the people in his county to understand their own interests. "I have always said that the three most baffling questions you could ponder forever are: What’s the meaning and purpose of life? Why is Bruce Willis a star? And why do farmers vote Republican?" Surber said. But Surber, in typical Democrat arrogance, doesn’t think he needs to waste his time with imponderables. He has a practical understanding of rural Ohio voters. It’s all about abortion and guns, you see.
Former John Edwards adviser, Dave Saunders, agrees. "It’s all social and cultural," said Saunders, "It has nothing to do with policy. It’s about wedge politics. And the way you pull wedgies out is simple—you say it’s a lie." To illustrate this, he pointed out that Harry Reid has an A+ rating with the NRA. Apparently Saunders thinks that all his people have to do in Ohio is go around talking about how Dems also love God and guns, skirt the abortion question, and things will come up roses there for them in the fall. Their strategy is to cut losses in rural Ohio counties like Darke—where Bush won in ’04 with 70% of the vote. But they see Southeastern Ohio (my old stomping grounds) and small northern Ohio towns (like Ashland?) as the big prize in this election.
They are right about that much. The area in question and the big prize in this election probably will be Southeastern Ohio and small towns in the northern part of the state. The Democrats can’t win without them. But if this article is anything like a real indication of the means by which they intend to go about gaining favor in these areas, I think they’ve got some more hard lessons to learn about rural Ohio voters. For example, take a look at Troy Balderson’s webpage—a family friend who just secured the GOP nomination for State Rep in Zanesville. Guns and God certainly feature prominently among his priorities. But that’s far from all that motivates Balderson or his voters. Indeed, his GOP opponent in the primary lost because these were the only issues he talked about. Balderson is talking about taxes, excessive government regulation and interference in business and health care, and the harm these things do to the local economy. That message rings true in Southeastern Ohio.
Merida noted that, "In Ohio on Tuesday, nearly six in 10 voters called the economy their No. 1 issue, according to exit polls." Democrats seem to think that Republicans are oblivious to this. Apparently, they believe they’ve got a wide opening through which to sell us their snake oil economic remedies. They seem to think they can run from their Liberalism by "say[ing] it’s a lie." Perhaps they can get away with that on the God and Gun front—but on everything else, they will have to TELL lies in order to do it. I don’t think they’re above that, of course. But it will be much harder than they seem to think it’s going to be to convince the rural rubes I know—whose only problem with the Republicans is that they were trimmers when in power—that Liberal Democrats are going to be better stewards of the economy.
Posted by Julie PonziFood for Thought
Here’s the best case Hillary’s people can make. Here’s Noah Millman’s effort to sketch out the arguments on both sides. I report; you know what to do.
Posted by Joseph KnippenbergRandom Observations
- Hillary’s dilemma: She should drop out, she can’t possibly win. She can’t drop out, she just won some big victories.
- The mainstream media has clearly flipped to her. The reason: Her continued campaign is good news. It saves us from months of political boredom.
- Her only chance is somehow to discredit Obama as a plausible nominee. I hope she doesn’t go too far down this negative road, and that the mainstream media doesn’t help her make mountains out of the molehills that have emerged so far. The Democrats have no alternative these days but to rely on her self-restraint.
- McCain owes Huckabee big for staying in the race and allowing him to grab the headlines Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
- Here’s one rejoinder to the professor I talked about before who’s voting for Obama in the hope he will govern as a Democrat. One of my colleagues says it’s conceivable she’ll vote for McCain in the hope he’ll govern like a Democrat. Her hope, of course, is more reasonable, and it may be one reason that arguably Mac is the strongest possible Republican candidate.
- One of Hillary’s comments this morning suggests that her real goal now is a Obama-Hillary ticket. And as some have suggested, the role of the Superdelegates may end up being to facilitate that statesmanlike conclusion to this contest.
- Obama-Clinton would be really, really hard to beat.
Posted by Peter LawlerObama's First Hundred Days
Michael Gerson considers what the opening of an Obama Administration would look like, if he kept his promises in foreign policy. His conclusion?
Obama’s 100-day agenda would be designed, in part, to improve America’s global image. But there is something worse than being unpopular in the world—and that is being a pleading, panting joke. By simultaneously embracing appeasement, protectionism and retreat, President Obama would manage to make Jimmy Carter look like Teddy Roosevelt.Which is why President Obama would probably not take these actions—at least in the form he has pledged. Sitting behind the Resolute desk is a sobering experience that makes foolish campaign promises seem suddenly less binding.
But it is a bad sign for a candidate when the best we can hope is for him to violate his commitments. And that’s a good sign for John McCain.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Joseph KnippenbergLiberal Fascism and the Road to Serfdom
Michael Tomasky has written a dismissive review of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism for The New Republic. "Tedious," "inane," and "deeply frivolous" are among its bouquets. Despite his contempt, however, Tomasky acknowledges that Liberal Fascism raises a serious question, one for which neither Tomasky nor liberalism generally has a comparably serious response.
The question is whether there is a slippery slope between liberalism’s social reforms and totalitarianism. It is a danger that conservatives have been warning about for decades; The Road to Serfdom and Capitalism and Freedom are two books that remain on conservatives’ shelves because they sounded this alarm. Liberal Fascism extends Hayek’s and Friedman’s arguments by contending we’ll have a more acute awareness of the possibility that liberalism and totalitarianism will converge beyond the horizon in front of us if we understand the ideas and language they shared beyond the horizon behind us. Goldberg excavates the intellectual origins of modern liberalism to reveal a disturbing contrast between its zeal for social reforms and a petulant impatience with all the ways liberal democracy can thwart those reforms.
Tomasky responds to this point by insisting that the slope between liberalism and totalitarianism is just not that slippery. Something "deep within liberalism… prevents it from degenerating into fascism, and that is its explicit recognition that the state must serve both common purposes and individual liberty." When social reform "crosses the line into coercion," true liberals "get off the train, and do their noncoercive best to derail it."
Tomasky’s reassurance is a pretty good Rorschach test. If you find it so obvious and commonsensical as to wonder why the point even needs to be made, your politics and instincts are reliably liberal. If, instead, you find it as smug and condescending as the official spokesman who blandly announces, "Yes, we’re aware of the problem and have it under control," while smoke seeps out from beneath the closed door behind him, you are a conservative.
The reason Tomasky’s reassurance does not reassure is that the more you examine the theory and practice of modern liberalism the less you understand why the slope is not slippery. You might think, for example, that if he had more time or space, Tomasky would describe, tangibly, the "something" that keeps liberalism from degenerating into fascism. Or that he would give us the coordinates of the "line" that defines the degree of coercion that liberals simply won’t tolerate, no matter how laudable the social reforms being advanced. But Tomasky’s other writings, and those of liberal advocates and theoreticians generally, do not make these distinctions any more distinct. The reassurance, such as it is, comes down to postulates about liberals’ sensibilities and character: We’re nice people, not thugs, who want to do good things, but have no interest in resorting to force to get our way.
Most liberals are nice people, not ogres pretending to be nice. But niceness isn’t always enough; principles can be useful, too. Put together enough nice people, determined to do enough nice things, and the line defining the sort of coercion that must not be used gets pretty elastic. Think of the nice professors and deans who have enacted speech codes at dozens of colleges to promote the nice goals of tolerance and self-esteem.
Or think of the nice officials in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, promoting the nice goal of better facilities for the mentally ill. When, 15 years ago, civic groups responded to this initiative by protesting plans to put such facilities in their neighborhoods, the humanitarians at HUD demanded the groups’ membership lists, any letters they had written to public officials or newspapers, and "any petitions, names, addresses, and phone numbers of anyone who had indicated support for the group’s efforts," according to James Bovard. Roberta Achtenberg, the Assistant Secretary of HUD, defended the department’s actions in terms indistinguishable from Tomasky’s: "In every case of this nature, HUD walks a tightrope between free speech and fair housing. We are ever mindful of the need to maintain the proper balance between these rights." If you liked Achtenberg’s sense of balance then you’ll love Tomasky’s sense of limits, and join with him in rejecting Goldberg’s overwrought hysteria about liberalism’s ominous possibilities.
Posted by William VoegeliHuman Nature?
Hugh Hewitt posts a notice of a new National Geographic program called, "Aftermath Population Zero," which considers what the world would look like were there no human life on earth.
The most interesting sentence of the description might be this one: "After being controlled by humanity for millennia, nature reclaims the earth."
Do the powers that be at The National Geographic Society think that humans are fundamentally unnatural? That would explain alot. Is Environmentalism, in its strong, quasi-religious form, misanthropic?
On his blog, Jonah Goldberg posted this pearl of environmentalist wisdom, via Todd Seavey:
Around the time of the DDT ban, Dr. Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, may have revealed how some environmentalists really feel about human beings when he was asked if people might die as a result of the DDT ban: "Probably… so what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any."At least according to this web page, and the sources it cites, Dr. Wurster denies having made this notorious comment I quote below, which apparently is attributed to him by on Victor Yannacone, one of the founders of the Environmental Defense Fund.
Posted by Richard AdamsGary Gygax, RIP
I’ll never forget the day I met Gary Gygax, the geek-culture icon who created Dungeons & Dragons, and who just passed away this week. It was at Gen-Con, which at the time was the country’s biggest game convention. My parents—in what they still consider one of their worst parenting decisions—had allowed me to make the trip with a friend, on a Greyhound Bus, from Pittsburgh to Racine, Wisconsin. Monster Manual II had just come out, and he stopped me to ask if he could see my copy. It turned out that something that he wanted to be included wasn’t, or something that he wanted left out was included, or something like that. I wasn’t quite following what he was saying. For me, a pimply-faced kid about to start high school, it was like meeting Elvis. He thanked me, signed my book, and went on his way. That made the whole trip worthwhile.
That was nearly thirty years ago. Last summer, when my nephews came to visit, we played their version of D&D, which was a far cry from the game I remembered. I don’t think Gary’s name was even on the box; he had sold the rights long ago to a company called Wizards of the Coast.
I sold all of my old D&D stuff about fifteen years ago, but I still look back fondly on my years of near-obsession with the game. It was a great creative outlet for me and my friends. It also gave me my first exposure to what would probably be called "social conservatives" around here. They tried to close down our local club, charging that the game promoted devil worship or some such nonsense. They failed; we got to keep our group, and we played every Saturday until somewhere around my junior year of high school, when I moved on to other interests. But Gary Gygax’s passing makes me sentimental for those days. So, in my best uber-geek voice, I proclaim: "I raise a flagon of mead to you, my liege, and hope that the afterlife brings you nothing but natural 20s."
Posted by John Moser
Barack Obama and the Tyranny of the Majority
by Joseph Knippenberg (Editorial)
The latest front in the hard-fought battle over the Democratic nomination centers on the so-called "superdelegates," office-holders and party officials who are supposed to exercise their independent judgment in selecting the person best suited to carry the party’s banner in the fall election. With her long history in the party, Hillary Rodham Clinton had counted on their support as she moved toward the convention, hoping that they would put her over the top if both she and her opponent lacked a clear majority. MORE
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