Category: Politics

A Few Words On The Senate

Nate Silver is at his new digs over at The New York Times, and he has his forecast for this year’s Senatorial races. The short version: say hello to 6-7 new GOP Senators: and that doesn’t include the possibility of pickups in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington, etc.

Silver also finds that the possibility of a Republican Senate takeover is not that far off:

The Democratic majority is in increasing jeopardy in the Senate, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight forecasting model. The Democrats now have an approximately 20 percent chance of losing 10 or more seats in the Senate, according to the model, which would cost them control of the chamber unless Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who is running for the Senate as an independent, both wins his race and decides to caucus with them.

In addition, there is an 11 percent chance that Democrats will lose a total of nine seats, which would leave them with 50 votes, making them vulnerable to a defection to the Republican Party by a centrist like Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut or Ben Nelson of Nebraska. On average, over the model’s 100,000 simulation runs, the Democrats are projected to lose a net of six and a half Senate seats, which would leave them with 52 or 53 senators. (Even though the G.O.P. primary in Alaska remains too close to call, that outcome is unlikely to alter the model.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to predict that the GOP retakes the Senate this cycle: while a 20% chance is better than none, it’s not likely. But some of the polls in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Washington show a possibility of the GOP taking those seats—and if that happens, then it’s sayonara to Democratic control of Congress.

All the signs point to this being a “wave” election—and even a 7-seat loss is more than typical for a midterm election. But if this wave is as big as it could be, then the Democrats are in deep trouble. Their House majority is likely to fall, and if they lose the Senate, Obama becomes a lame duck.

In the end, gridlock is the best thing that could happen to this country. If no major bills can be passed, much of the uncertainty that’s killing the markets will be lifted. If businesses can be safe in knowing that there won’t be a major regulatory overhaul (like cap-and-trade/tax) they will be more likely to start expanding again. Divided government helped the US in the early 1990s, and while Barack Obama isn’t the triangulating centrist that Bill Clinton was, a Republican Congress will at least curb some of Obama’s excesses.

Why The Republicans Will Take The House In November

I am making a (not so bold) prediction: the Republican Party will take back the House in November. The days of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will end next year.

Back in April, FiveThirtyEight, a Democratic-leaning but still valuable polling site, looked at the generic ballot measure to predict a possible 50-seat loss for the Democrats. Here’s how pollster Nate Silver explained it:

So, for example, if the House popular vote were exactly tied, we’d expect the Democrats to lose “only” 30 seats on average, which would be enough for them to retain majority control. It would take about a 2.5 point loss in the popular vote for them to be as likely as not to lose control of the chamber. So Democrats probably do have a bit of a cushion: this is the good news for them.

Their bad news is that the House popular vote (a tabulation of the actual votes all around the country) and the generic ballot (an abstraction in the form of a poll) are not the same thing — and the difference usually tends to work to Democrats’ detriment. Although analysts debate the precise magnitude of the difference, on average the generic ballot has overestimated the Democrats’ performance in the popular vote by 3.4 points since 1992. If the pattern holds, that means that a 2.3-point deficit in generic ballot polls would translate to a 5.7 point deficit in the popular vote — which works out to a loss of 51 seats, according to our regression model.

Back in April, the GOP had only a narrow lead in the popular vote. As of today, the Republicans have an average lead of 4.5 on the generic ballot measure. In October 1994, just before the historic 1994 GOP sweep that netted the GOP 54 seats, the generic ballot measure was tied according to Gallup.

What does this mean? If the GOP actually has a 4.5% advantage on the generic ballot, we can use Nate Silver’s historical model to predict the GOP’s possible gains. Adding 3.4% to that 4.5% lead yields us a 7.9% GOP lead in the national popular vote. By Silver’s methodology, that would equate to GOP gains of around 60 House seats.

The GOP currently need 39 House seats to retake the majority, assuming no GOP losses. There are a handful of vulnerable GOP House seats, but even with those, a swing of 60 seats would be more than enough for the Republicans to take the House.

Some Objections

As always, there are some objections to this model. Critics of the generic ballot point out that individual races aren’t between “Generic Republican” and “Generic Democrat.” That is, of course, true. But ultimately, the generic ballot measure does give an accurate prediction as to overall results. Now, in order to get something more than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, you have to fit the data to accommodate the makeup of the various Congressional districts. But this year, the Democrats are defending a lot more Republican-leaning districts than in past years. Even when the data is fitted (which FiveThirtyEight is doing now), it’s likely that a GOP takeover of the House will still happen.

There’s also the question of whether these numbers are still good. Has the electorate changed dramatically since previous elections, due to demographic shifts? Possibly, but this election will not be like 2008. The young and minority voters that helped lift Obama into office are not nearly as energized as they were two years ago. They’ve gone back to their traditional voting habits. Midterm elections do not tend to look like big Presidential election years—and if the Democrats are counting on the Obama coalition to materialize now, they’re going to be disappointed.

Finally, there’s the argument that the Tea Party will alienate moderates and help the Democrats. That’s certainly what the left want to believe, but so far it hasn’t happened. The one race where that’s a factor is Nevada’s Senate contest between Sharron Angle and Harry Reid. Angle is, to be honest, a lousy candidate, but one that’s learning as she goes. That race went from a sure-fire GOP pickup to a toss-up, but it’s not in the bag for Reid either. The Tea Party isn’t going to save the Democrats because Tea Party activists are more likely to back Republican candidates than to stay home. And so far, the national mood is more on the side of the Tea Partiers than it is on the Democrats. The Tea Parties are simply not a big enough negative to the Republicans to hurt them.

The Voters Are Mad As Hell, And They’re Not Taking It Anymore

The most important factor that will hand the Republicans control of the House is the national mood. Voters are angry. They feel like they were ignored in the health care debate. They are sick and tired of a Congress that lectures them while letting Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters run free on the taxpayer’s dime. In 2008, they were promised hope and changed. Now millions are unemployed and feeling hopeless about the future. Nothing has changed in Washington, it’s as broken as ever. President Obama’s numerous vacations adds to the sentiment that he simply doesn’t care.

Voters are angry, and the Democrats are the party in power. The Democrats failed to listen to voters, preferring to slur them as “teabaggers” and “racists.” Now they face the wrath of an electorate that’s ready to send a message to Washington.

The good news for the GOP: this anger will give them the House. The bad news? If they don’t do better than the Democrats in the next two years, that anger could be turned on them.

Like They Have A Target Painted On Their Backs

Target, the Minnesota-based retail giant, is being attacked as being “anti-gay” by the usual crowd of radical left-wing groups, including MoveOn.org. Why is Target being attacked? Because they’re actually hostile to gays and lesbians?

No, they’re not. They’re actually one of the most “progressive” corporations out there. They give generous benefits to same-sex partners, and have sponsored local and national GLBT events.

So why in the world is Target “anti-gay?”

Because they had the temerity to donate to Republicans. But not even directly. Target gave $10,000 to a pro-Republican PAC called MNForward. MNForward is supporting Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota. And allegedly Emmer is somehow “anti-gay”, despite taking the very sensible position that the real issue here is jobs, not battles over cultural wedge issues. Not only that, but MNForward isn’t a social-issues organization: they are expressly about pro-business issues like taxes and regulation.

So, to these radical left-wing agents provocateurs, Target is “anti-gay” despite not being remotely anti-gay because they gave to a group that supports a Republican candidate for governor who doesn’t care that much about gay marriage. And somehow, that justifies an astroturfed smear campaign against Target.

If all of this sounds more than a little idiotic, you’re right. It is.

The reality is that the gay rights issue is a convenient bludgeon. These groups, largely funded by Emmer’s opponent, Mark Dayton, are just out to intimidate Minnesota corporations so that they no longer feel safe donating to Republican or conservative organizations. It is, to be blunt, a campaign of fear and intimidation designed expressly to prevent Minnesotans from participating in the political process. If the right had done it, the cries of “MCCARTHYISM!” would echo from the rooftops.

But this sort of behavior is par for the course from the radical left-wing, who have used such campaigns successfully in the past. Sadly, it appears that Target is buckling under the pressure, having “apologized” for their donation. This sort of behavior only encourages these groups.

These groups, especially the execrable MoveOn.org, represent the most disgusting part of American politics. Stewed in the juices of Alinskyite activism, they have a no-holds-barred attitudes towards political intimidation, and will do nearly anything to support the radical left in this country. Their values are representative of the farthest and most radical reaches of the Democratic Party.

It’s time they were called out for what they are. A smear campaign won’t stop me from shopping at Target—if anything, it makes me want to go there more as a sign of solidarity. And like cockroaches, these groups scurry when the light is shined upon them. Mitch Berg, one of Minnesota’s greatest natural resources, has been doing amazing work in tracking these groups down and exposing their astroturf campaigns and where their funding is coming from. The mainstream media doesn’t do this kind of in-depth journalism anymore, and so it falls on talented and dogged amateurs to do it. I assume that everyone who reads this humble site also reads Shot in the Dark, but if you don’t, you damned well should.

In the end, Minnesotans of both parties should stand against this kind of political intimidation. Target is not “anti-gay” for giving a donation to a Republican group any more than they are “anti-Christian” because they have a strong corporate commitment to gay rights. Here in Minnesota we don’t slam our neighbors because they disagree—and MoveOn.org’s disgusting tactics will probably alienate far more moderate Democrats than it will impress. Minnesota isn’t New Jersey, and we rightfully have a low tolerance for hardball politics. We don’t need a bunch of radical left-wing activists attacking one of our most important employers in the middle of an already-painful recession. These tactics won’t play well here, and Minnesota’s voters should make it clear to all Minnesota politicians: regardless of party, we will not tolerate political intimidation. MoveOn should move on somewhere else.

All The Things I Missed…

I’ve been outside the world of politics for the past year, and what a year it has been! When I started my job, Obama’s approval ratings were still sky-high, and the Tea Party movement was just getting started. Now, we face a political dynamic that’s looking a lot more like 1994 than 2008. What a long, strange year it’s been!

The passage of the health care bill was a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats. They sold their souls for a watered-down version of the single-payer European-style system they wanted and will likely lose the House as a result. The health care bill was the classic version of why laws and sausages are made in much the same way. It was an unholy mish-mash of bad ideas wrapped in false promises, and presented as though it were the greatest bill ever. It was a 2,700 page monstrosity that has already begun wreaking havoc with private employers. What the Democrats failed to realize is that many employers have their open-enrollment periods in November—which means that the immediate effects of the health care bill will be felt right around Election Day. When employees, who are already struggling, learn that their insurance premiums are going through the roof and their HSAs are less useful than before, that’s not exactly going to make them happy.

The economy is the albatross around the Democrats’ necks. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5%, and the real figure (counting unemployment, discouraged workers, and workers taking the only jobs they could get) is more like 20%. We’re facing a crisis of unemployment. And the reaction from the Democrats has been to do exactly the wrong things. More taxes, more regulations, more social experimentation. The results have been predictable: the level of joblessness is at crisis levels. We can’t have a functioning economy when we’ve got a developing underclass that are essentially shut out of employment. If this trend continues, the effects on both our economy and society will be dire.

As I write this, the last combat troops are leaving Baghdad. Remember when Sen. Harry Reid said that the war was “lost?” Thank heavens that we didn’t listen to him. We still have 50,000 troops left in Iraq, and we may have close to that number in the country for a very long time. The truth is that Iraq’s journey is just beginning. But what has happened in Iraq is something extraordinary: in 7 years Iraq has gone from the iron grip of tyranny to a failed state, to a developing nation that has the chance to prosper and flourish. The future of the Iraqi people is now in their hands, as it should be. We can and should help where asked, but now the main threat to the future of Iraq isn’t related to terrorism, but corruption. That may be a more dangerous enemy than al-Qaeda, but the Iraqi people have the ability to fight corruption and establish a better life for themselves. I cannot, nor can anyone else, say whether or not they will succeed in rebuilding their country. I hope and pray they will. But a chapter has been turned, and a battle has been won. Our military did an amazing job under intense pressure. We have never fought a war quite like this, and the conflicts of the future will be far less deadly because of the lesson’s we’re learned in Iraq.

Afghanistan is another story. I don’t know if we can “win” in Afghanistan. I’m not sure what the goal is—other than to keep the Taliban and al-Qaeda at bay. Can we rebuild a nation that’s never really been a nation in modern times? I’m not so sure that we can. Especially not when elements of the Pakistani government are working to destabilize Afghanistan. Yes, we need more troops and a better strategy to have any hope of success—but we also need to realize that Pakistan is part of the problem, and to find ways of ensuring that Pakistan is an ally rather than an enemy.

Finally, some site news. I’m planning on revamping the site in the next few days to have a new HTML 5 template that will look great on all sorts of devices from Droids to iPads. So forgive the dust as that transition gets underway.

Cash For A Clunker Of A Policy

Law prof Richard A. Epstein has a withering look at the “Cash for Clunkers” program that gave car buyers a $4500 check to trade in an old car for a new one. As with any government program, the intentions of the program and the reality of the program were not quite at odds with each other:

Yet exactly what does the American people get for this expenditure? On the bright side, the beleaguered automotive industry gets yet another shot in the arm. But that cheery argument repeats the common mistake that I addressed two weeks ago: Using tax dollars to stimulate one industry necessarily impairs the recovery prospects of everyone else. To make matters worse, some stimulus payments are just outright gifts, because lots of last week’s eager sellers might have traded in their clunker in the near future anyhow. And no one has a clue as to how many miles would be put on these clunkers anyhow.

The problem with the “Cash for Clunkers” program is that it won’t provide much stimulus, but it will burn through billions in in taxpayer dollars. Is the possible increase in overall gasoline efficiency worth the $1 billion now spent and the billions more that may be spend reviving the program? It’s doubtful we’ll know, because the actual results don’t matter. Congress is essentially buying support by raiding the public fisc under dubious pretenses.

Two thousand years ago, the called it panem et circenses—but “Cash for Clunkers” seems to have much more consonance, even if the concept remains essentially the same.

The Lesson Of Sarah Palin

Ross Douthat has the best take on the Sarah Palin brouhaha out there:

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard…

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Douthat has it exactly right: Sarah Palin was despised by the left because she represents a culture that is alien to the left’s worldview. She’s a female, she’s attractive, she’s actively pro-life, she’s rural, she’s plain spoken, and she’s conservative. To the left, such a thing just should not be. She embodies values that stand in very clear contrast to those of the left, and were she to obtain national popularity she could be very influential.

The former governor was not prepared for the race in 2008, and the McCain campaign did an extremely poor job of preparing her for what she would face. Douthat is right that she would have been wise to turn down McCain’s offer, although it is understandable that she did not.

But, Douthat notes, Palin is still relatively popular. She has a net positive approval rating, even after 10 months of constant fire. If Palin wanted to return to politics—and perhaps she does not—a Sarah Palin that had spend some time learning policy and crafting her positions could still be a potent political force.

Right now the lesson of Sarah Palin is that if you’re not prepared for the national stage you will be eaten alive. But there is a possibility, however small, that the lesson down the road might very well be that counting Sarah Barricuda out is a very unwise idea.

Capping Prosperity, Trading It For Poverty

As the media fixates on the death of Michael Jackson, Congress stands ready to enact the largest and most regressive tax hike in history in the guise of “cap-and-trade.” Jim Lindgren explains why this bill is so dangerous:

The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over the next few decades, would do more damage to the country than any economic legislation passed in at least 100 years. It would eventually send most American manufacturing jobs overseas, reduce American competitiveness, and make Americans much poorer than they would have been without it.

The cap-and-trade bill will have little, if any, positive effect on the environment — in part because the countries that would take jobs from US industries tend to be bigger polluters. By making the US — and the world — poorer, it would probably reduce the world’s ability to develop technologies that might solve its environmental problems in the future.

Cap-and-trade is a joke—it is a policy that has already failed in Europe and in virtually guaranteed to fail here in the United States. By giving in to the demands of radical environmentalists, Congress is preparing to take our current recession and plunge it into depression.

As the media focuses once again on celebrity, the advent of the next Great Depression comes closer. Cap-and-trade is terrible policy enacted for foolish reasons, and we will all pay the price for it if we allow it to pass.

Analyzing The Sotomayor Supreme Court Nomination

President Obama has picked Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit as his nominee to replace David Souter as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor was considered the front-runner for the spot, along with Judge Diane Wood, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan.

Ilya Somin has a detailed critique of Judge Sotomayor’s record and finds her minimally qualified. As he puts it:

…[H]er record is far less impressive than that of most other recent nominees, such as Roberts, Alito, Breyer, and Ginsburg. Each of these was a far more prominent and better-respected jurist than Sotomayor, and Breyer and Ginsburg were leaders in the development of their respective fields of law. Sotomayor also seems far less impressive than Diane Wood and Elena Kagan, reputedly her top rivals for this nomination. The current nominee’s qualifications are likely better than Harriet Miers’ were; but Miers’ nomination failed in large part because of her relatively weak resume. Among the current justices, probably only David Souter and Clarence Thomas had professional qualifications similar to or worse than Sotomayor’s.

It would be hard to find a less qualified nominee than Harriet Miers, but Sotomayor does not strike me as a strong candidate. She is, to be sure, qualified for the position, but a seat on the Supreme Court is the pinnacle of the American legal profession. The Supreme Court has housed some of the greatest minds in the practice: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Robert Jackson, and even the current Court has incredibly talented judges such as Stephen Breyer (on the “left”) and Antonin Scalia (on the “right”). Does Sotomayor match up with those legal minds? Her record, at least on a cursory glance seems to suggest not.

Judge Sotomayor is not widely considered to be an expert or leading light on a particular field of law, as Stephen Breyer was in administrative law. She has not shown the intellectual caliber of someone like Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Instead, she seems to have been picked because she is a female Hispanic with an interesting life story that meets the basic qualifications.

Now, that is not to say that Judge Sotomayor is an intellectual lightweight—generally one does not get nominated for a Circuit Court of Appeals or even graduate from a top-tier law school without possessing a strong intellect. Moreover, Judge Sotomayor is no less qualified than the Justice she is replacing—which is damnation by faint praise given that David Souter was the least intellectually gifted and least competent member of the Court.

It should not be surprising that Obama picked a left-wing candidate. That part was a given. President Obama was not going to pick out a candidate more conservative than the decidedly liberal Justice Souter. Her personal ideology should not be at issue: Justices Breyer and Ginsberg were both strongly liberal judges, but were well-qualified nominees whose nominations were consented to by the Senate in a bipartisan manner.

However, as Prof. Somin adeptly points out, her judicial philosophy is a legitimate reason for combatting her nomination:

I am also not favorably impressed with her notorious statement that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Not only is it objectionable in and of itself, it also suggests that Sotomayor is a committed believer in the identity politics school of left-wing thought. Worse, it implies that she believes that it is legitimate for judges to base decisions in part on their ethnic or racial origins.

The role of a judge is to dispassionately and fairly apply the law without preference or bias. It remains an open question whether Judge Sotomayor will follow the law or undermine the rule of law by giving preference to those based on gender, race, class, or her own personal feelings. If it is the case that she will, respect for the rule of law demands that the Senate refuse to consent to her nomination.

Judge Sotomayor was not the worst pick that President Obama could have made (Secretary Napolitano was the least qualified of the four contenders), but Judge Sotomayor was not as qualified as Judge Wood or Elena Kagan. However, politically, Sotomayor may be the more confirmable.

In the end, President Obama could have picked a legal heavyweight—but instead he picked someone based largely on personal rather than judicial qualities. Judge Sotomayor may be qualified to sit on the Court, but it is unlikely that she will be one of its brightest stars. Given that she is replacing the execrable Justice Souter, it is hard to see her being any worse. Still, there are liberal candidates, and liberal female candidates that President Obama could have nominated that would be stronger picks for the Court. It is likely that Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed, and probably on a bipartisan basis, but she is not the kind of distinguished jurist that will make a strong contribution to American jurisprudence. She will, however, be a reliably liberal vote on the Court, which seems to be President Obama’s primary criterion for picking a nominee.

Liar, Liar, Pantsuit On Fire

Charles Krauthammer has a typically great column on the ongoing debate over “torture” after Nancy Pelosi’s denial that she knew anything about waterboarding. Pelosi, assuming that the liberal press would cover for her, has now gotten caught up in a web of her own lies. So much so that the press has the scent of blood in the water:

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Rep. Pelosi has ended up making a laughingstock of herself—her desperate attempts to backpedal from her own words are Clintonian in audacity without the skill of Slick Willy. Even the mainstream press has caught on.

Krauthammer puts the political impact of all this succinctly:

The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions — our blindness to al-Qaeda’s plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama’s own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed “high-value information” — and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

In the end, that’s correct. The “torture” issue will never have legs because the average American doesn’t share the sense of moral outrage that some have over that issue. In war, bad things happen. People get killed. Killing is a moral wrong, yet it is part of the nature of warfare. In the same vein, a practice like waterboarding may be credibly called torture, and torture is a moral wrong. Yet it is also a part of war. Pelosi doesn’t care about the morality of torture, she wants to score political points for partisan reasons. Some have a legitimate, rational, and moral objection to these practices, but they are a distinct minority.

In the end, Pelosi’s dissembling masks the real issue here. Waterboarding someone who was directly responsible for the inhuman September 11 atrocity is morally and politically different than the mistreatment of detainees. The abuses of Abu Ghraib and others are examples of acts that harm America’s reputation and dishonor our military. Yet the focus is not on those acts, but on the waterboarding issue. Were this a moral rather than a political issue, detainee abuse would be placed in its full context, rather than being used as a truncheon against the Bush Administration.

Pelosi’s lies are political in nature, just like this whole attempt at a partisan witch-hunt. Even for those who legitimately and truly oppose torture, tying their wagons to such a despicably partisan crusade only undercuts the seriousness of their position. If the anti-torture campaign will be spearheaded by outright liars like Rep. Pelosi, it will never be taken seriously.

Passing Blame To The Wrong Party

Daniel Larison, of the paleo-con American Conservative takes a look at the woes of the GOP and the conservative movement and puts the blame on national-security conservatives.

It wasn’t that the Bush Administration went on an orgy of spending that made a mockery of conservative principles, or that social conservatives had a message that tended to alienate rather than include, it’s that the the strong national security message of the GOP caused them to lose:

Like their short-sighted cheerleading for a “surge” in Iraq, which failed on its own terms, and their subsequent carping this year that the Pentagon budget increase is too small, the mainstream right’s apologies for torture are not only morally bankrupt but also divorced from the reality of the intelligence, or lack thereof, these methods provided. Much as liberals needed their internal critics to challenge the welfare status quo over the last three decades, conservatism desperately needs similar internal dissent concerning the warfare state. But there is almost none.

One reason for the lack of dissent and accountability is that the majority of the GOP was deeply implicated in supporting and defending the war in Iraq, the signature failure of national security conservatives. To a large extent, the party has defined itself around the ideological fictions used to justify and continue the war long after the country had turned against it. This process was aided by the disappearance of antiwar Republicans in Congress. Never numerous in the first place, most have been replaced by Democrats during the past two cycles.

Now, this argument is wrong, but it isn’t fundamentally wrong. It is wrong on the facts. The surge did work, it worked better than had been expected, and as a testament to how well it worked, the Obama Administration has not disavowed it. President Obama, were the Iraq issue as toxic as it is claimed, could have withdrawn all U.S. troops ASAP. Instead, Obama’s war strategy is not that much different than what a President McCain’s strategy would have been—a gradual and conditional withdrawal over the next year to two years. Moreover, the Obama Administration is hardly rejecting the idea of a hawkish foreign policy. During the debates, Obama needled McCain about getting bin Laden. Hardly the act of someone who wants to push for a more restrained war. Obama has been sending more drones into Pakistan, even though such actions may be dangerous. Rather than de-escalation, Obama plans to put more troops into Afghanistan and has signaled a muscular U.S. foreign policy.

The truth of the matter is, doves don’t win elections in the U.S. Muscular foreign policy is widely accepted by both political parties in the United States. The idea that the GOP lost because they embraced “hegemony” is something only someone inside the intellectual bubble of academia could take seriously.

Moreover, Larison divides the GOP into three wings: social, fiscal, and national security conservatives. The reality is that both social and fiscal conservatives also tend to be national security conservatives. There isn’t a separate wing of conservatives that believe in a strong national defense but not social issues or fiscal ones. Rather, both socially-minded and fiscally-minded conservatives tend to be interested in national security issues. That’s why it’s not that surprising that Evangelicals tend to be supportive of “torture” against suspected terrorists—there is no hard and fast line between social conservatives and national security conservatives. The Reagan coalition was largely built around national security issues, and a strong national defense has been one of the common issues shared by a vast majority of Republicans and conservatives.

There is, however, an element of truth here as well. The GOP lost in large part due to the war in Iraq, a war that was never convincingly explained by the President and suffered from poor management from 2003–07. The “surge” was the product of the Administration finally listening to the people fighting the war rather than dictating from the top down. President Bush never convincingly explained why we were in Iraq so long and why the sacrifice of American blood and treasure was worth it. There was truth in the adage that we were “fighting them over there rather than over here,” but that logic was never followed through.

The GOP has many problems, but “interventionist” foreign policy is not one of them. The Obama Administration continues to play lip service to the idea of a more “humble” foreign policy while still engaging in interventions abroad. Isolationism has not played a major role in U.S. politics since the end of World War II, and for good reason. America’s superpower status demands world leadership, and we can’t have one without the other. If the GOP becomes a policy that abrogates its positions on a muscular U.S. foreign policy, they will lose. While Iraq hurt the GOP in 2006 and 2008, the GOP’s foreign policy positions helped re-elect President Bush in 2004 when Kerry’s weakness on national security proved to be fatal.

The real lesson here is that if you’re going to fight a war, fight it well and keep the American people fully engaged in the conflict. To argue that the lesson conservatives should learn from the last election cycles is to abandon a deeply-held and popular principle of conservatism and embrace a discredited and dangerous isolationism is to learn exactly the wrong lesson.