Jay Reding.com

Bill Kristol makes the case for Sen. Joe Lieberman as McCain’s VP:

Lieberman could hold his own against Biden in a debate. He would reinforce McCain’s overall message of foreign policy experience and hawkishness. He’s a strong and disciplined candidate.

But he is pro-abortion rights, and having been a Democrat all his life, he has a moderately liberal voting record on lots of issues.

Now as a matter of governance, there’s no reason to think this would much matter. McCain has made clear his will be a pro-life administration. And as a one-off, quasi-national-unity ticket, with Lieberman renouncing any further ambition to run for the presidency, a McCain-Lieberman administration wouldn’t threaten the continuance of the G.O.P. as a pro-life party. In other areas, no one seriously thinks the policies of a McCain-Lieberman administration would be appreciably different from those, say, of a McCain-Pawlenty administration.

What Kristol doesn’t seem to understand is that the pro-life position of evangelical and Catholic voters is not a political one. It’s a moral position. They believe as a first principle that the termination of an innocent human life is morally unconscionable and government should not sanction such atrocities. A stridently pro-abortion candidate is going to be a non-starter, or at the very least will have a very tough sell.

Sen. Lieberman is a brave man and a patriot. He was right on the war, and his steadfastness is greatly appreciated. However, he is a doctrinaire liberal on nearly every other issue, and in a close Senate it is possible that he could break a tie vote. He should have a seat in a McCain administration, but not as the number two man.

The word on the street is that Sen. Joe Biden will be Obama’s VP selection. The rumor mill states that Biden has already been assigned a Secret Service detail, and Gov. Kaine and Sen. Bayh have been informed that they will not be the pick.

Biden has some qualities that make him a good pick, but not enough to make up for his infamous lack of inner monologue. His tendency to put foot firmly in mouth is not something that makes him condusive to being a running mate to a neophyte politician.

Biden is a Washington insider, which goes against Obama’s message of change. He is someone who offers experience, but at a price. Of all the top contenders for Obama’s VP, he is perhaps one of the weakest.

Biden makes sense on a superficial level, but when it comes to who best complements Obama, he’s not the best choice that could be made.

On the other hand, it could be worse: Obama could have picked Clinton.

UPDATE: It’s official, Biden is it. At least the Obama people had the good sense to drop the bad news on the weekend.

Barack Obama was supposed to be the candidate that was the master of the viral video, but McCain’s campaign has been managing to more than hold their own. Their latest YouTube sensation continues to tweak the messianic air of the Obama campaign by using their own words against them:

The Obama campaign, which should by all rights be sweeping the floor with McCain, is floundering. The reason why is partially due to the fact that Obama is collapsing under the weight of his own hagiography. People are sick and tired of him already, and if his Invesco Field performance next week is half as nakedly self-congratulatory as expected, one wonders if Obama might leave the convention worse than when he arrived.

In the Democratic primaries, the late breakers tended to break against Obama. If that holds true in the general election, Obama may be in serious trouble.

I’ve been bearish on the prospects of the McCain campaign for most of the summer. After McCain’s confident performance at the Saddleback Forum last week and the movement of the poll numbers, I’m not so sure that when the cards are laid on the table, Obama’s hand might not have been as strong as everyone thought.

Sen. Obama has released his plan for space exploration. As a case study, it demonstrates the lack of coherence or policy judgment that has marked the Obama campaign. Space policy expect Rand Simberg has a detailed analysis of Obama’s space plan and finds it lacking.

For example, Obama’s campaign can’t seem to make up its mind about NASA’s COTS program:

Obama will stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate spaceflight capabilities. NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services is a good model of government/industry collaboration.

Which is all well and good, until one reads further down. Then Obama’s space plan says the opposite:

Obama will evaluate whether the private sector can safely and effectively fulfill some of NASA’s need for lower earth orbit cargo transport.

So, COTS is a “good model,” but Obama plans to “evaluate” it anyway. It’s the sort of muddleheaded stuff that Obama has been giving the electorate in just about every field. Simberg notes that this is a document clearly written by committee, and it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment.

Simberg notes something else disturbing about the Obama campaign’s attitude towards ideas not their own:

This part struck me (and didn’t surprise me):

Lori Garver, an Obama policy adviser, said last week during a space debate in Colorado that Obama and his staff first thought that the push to go to the moon was “a Bush program and didn’t make a lot of sense.” But after hearing from people in both the space and education communities, “they recognized the importance of space.” Now, she said, Obama truly supports space exploration as an issue and not just as a tool to win votes in Florida.

I’m not sure that Lori helped the campaign here. What does that tell us about the quality and cynicism of policy making in the Obama camp? They opposed it before they were for it because it was George Bush’s idea? And does that mean that space policy was just about votes in Florida before this new policy? I know that there are a lot of BDS sufferers who oppose VSE for this reason, and this reason alone, but it’s a little disturbing that such (non)thinking was actually driving policy in a major presidential campaign.

Sadly, I think that’s exactly how the Obama camp thinks—or more accurately doesn’t think. Obama is not a dumb person, not by a longshot. But he doesn’t have a wide grasp of policy. He has an incisive legal mind, but when it comes to issues like taxes, foreign policy, trade, and other major issues, he’s utterly reliant on a cadre of advisors. That is not healthy for a President. A President needs good advisors, to be sure, but ultimately the job of President is the world’s toughest management job. Nothing in this document or anything else that Obama has done suggests that he has the management skills to be an effective President. A country can’t be lead by committee, it needs someone to provide leadership and direction. At least as far as space policy is concerned, Obama shows little leadership or direction.

To be fair, that doesn’t mean that Obama’s space plan is all bad. He says some of the right things. But he also is against the “weaponization” of space—something which has already begun and requires more than the typical feckless diplomatic overtures to contain. He is for more international cooperation in space—which is all well and good except that tensions with Russia already could cripple us. He’s for accelerating the timeline for the Shuttle replacement—which is an absolute necessity.

What would a truly bold space policy be? How about a government sponsored X-Prize to truly foster space exploration? A policy that ditches the overcomplicated Ares/Contellation program and goes with the better-designed DIRECT 2.0 launch system?

Obama says the right things, especially with the idea of having a better connection between the Oval Office and NASA and other interested parties. The problem is that Obama clearly hasn’t thought his space policy through enough to come to any clear policy conclusions. Even where he says the right things, there’s no guarantee that he’ll really enact them. A document drafted by committee is not the same as a bold policy, and when it comes to the future of humanity’s exploration of space, Obama gives us precious little change that anyone can truly believe in.

Ilya Somin takes a look at the deal ending the conflict between Russia and Georgia. He finds that it isn’t as bad as it could have been:

If this agreement holds (a big if), it’s a better outcome than I would have expected. Georgia’s democratic government will remain in place, despite Russia’s previous determination to overthrow it. The Russians will not have destroyed Georgia’s oil pipeline to Europe (the most important pipeline in the region that doesn’t pass through Russian or Iranian territory). And Russia will renounce future use of force against Georgia and reduce its forces in the secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to their prewar levels. I am skeptical that the Russians will fully respect the last two commitments. Nonetheless, the outcome could have been far worse.

The problem is that Russia clearly is sending a message, not only to Georgia, but to the rest of its former satellites: we can break you. Vladimir Putin and his crony Dmitri Medvedev will use whatever they can to ensure that Russia’s hegemony over the former Soviet Union is not challenged. Ukraine, another democratic, pro-Western state, is likely to be next in Russia’s crosshairs.

Putin wants to ensure that Russia, and not those upstart republics to its southwest, gets the benefit of supplying most of Europe’s natural gas. The Georgian crisis was draped with the idea that Russia had to protect South Ossetia, but the truth of the matter is that these last few days have been about nothing but realpolitik. Putin and Medvedev are trying to get money and power—and that is all too easy when the Russian Army can act as private enforcers.

President Saakashvili made a crucial mistake in provoking the Russians over Ossetia, although it’s not clear how much the Georgians were themselves provoked by Ossetian agents working at the behest of the Kremlin. The Georgian Army can’t match the strength of the Russian Army, and the United States was not about to get themselves involved in any conflict between the two. The Georgians unleashed something they could not control, which in war can be fatal.

Some are saying that the Georgians were warned of the danger. Whenever “unnamed sources” in government speak, it’s bound to be self-serving CYA. The US intelligence community seems to have been caught off guard once again—although appearances can be deceiving. Making sure that we’re not caught flat-footed in a situation like this is critical in the age of information-centric warfare. If the intelligence community can’t seem to notice the significance of major Russian troop movements, how can they be expected to track al-Qaeda?

The final question is what lies ahead. The Russians’ hegemonic ambitions in the region are not going to go away any time soon. Georgia and Ukraine are American allies—democratic states that are worthy of our protection. At the same time, Russia can be a powerful ally or a fearsome enemy, and we are better off with them being the former. We are caught in the kind of power politics that were supposed to have been a relic of the Cold War. Our brief holiday from history is over.

The latest Zogby Poll has some interesting shifts in the race. Now, to be fair, Zogby’s polls are not that reliable and it is early in the race, but the poll does fit with other polls showing a softening of the race between McCain and Obama. On average, Obama is ahead, but not nearly as far ahead as he should be.

The conventional narrative is that the GOP brand is in the toilet, McCain is not an attractive candidate, and voters are hungry for “change.” The Democratic base is energized and the Republican base is demoralized. By all accounts, Obama should be beating McCain like a rented mule.

David Brooks hazards an answer: voters don’t know who Obama really is. It’s an interesting theory: Obama has a personal narrative, but it’s a postmodern one. As Brooks mentions, it’s as though he’s been grooming himself for higher office, but not ever really doing the things that are truly necessary. His lack of real experience and his stratospheric rise are connected and prevent him from either gaining or losing too much.

The Huntington Post has a piece that also asks whether Obama’s lack of substance is his Achilles Heel:

Despite the McCain campaign’s effectiveness, however, the best campaign against Barack Obama is not being run by his opponent, but by Barack Obama. It is Obama’s campaign that presents their candidate as an ever-changing work-in-progress. It is his own campaign that occludes our ability to know this man, depicting him as authentic as a pair of designer jeans.

Both analyses hit on something important: Obama is an unknown quantity. During the primaries he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton. Now, understandably, he’s run to the right. With McCain, voters know what they’re getting: he’s shifted his views somewhat (as all politicians do), but he’s done nothing like Obama’s pivots on public financing, FISA, offshore drilling, etc. A careful politician knows how to pivot without flip-flopping. For all of Obama’s personal magnetism, he’s not an experienced candidate.

Surprisingly, I agree with the Huffington Post article. Obama’s campaign is the best packaged and marketed campaign in modern political history. That is also it’s major flaw. The Obama team is in the process of building hype, but pure hype can’t improve a product. The iPhone was hyped, but largely delivered. Snakes on a Plane was the coolest thing ever until it actually came out and people realized it was as horrid as the title made it sound. Right now, the Obama campaign is closer to Snakes on a Plane than the iPhone.

McCain is the anti-candidate. In the end, his model works. Obama will clean up with young voters, liberals, and minorities. But that isn’t enough to win an election, not in an increasingly older country with independent voters who are up for grabs.

Obama has run a fascinating campaign that is well worthy of study and analysis—yet it is definitely underperforming. It isn’t the hype machine, the organization, or the technology that is failing to deliver, but a lack of real substance. Obama can continue to run the campaign he has, but it is the candidate and not the campaign that is causing the problems.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago has died at 89. His influence helped foster in the end of the Soviet empire and the dawn of a new age of freedom. His willingness to speak out against the evils of the Soviet system helped forge the moral case against Communism.

Nearly every artist seems to claim to “speak truth to power”—and most of the time it is more about stroking their egos. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn actually did speak truth to power, and in so doing changed the world.

RIP