Likelihood of Success

Lou Dobbs is insufferable. Is he really about to inflict his puffy self on us as a Democratic presidential candidate? I don’t believe it, but one can hope.

UPDATE:  The fascist manufacturers’ lobby is playing right into Glorious Comrade’s hands!

The Times of London:

Tom Bernstein went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him. In 2004 he donated the maximum $2,000 to the president’s reelection campaign and gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee. This year he is switching his support to Obama. He is one of many former Bush admirers who find the Democrat newcomer appealing.Matthew Dowd, Bush’s chief campaign strategist in 2004, announced last month that he was disillusioned with the war in Iraq and the president’s “my way or the highway” style of leadership – the first member of Bush’s inner circle to denounce the leader’s performance in office.

Although Dowd has yet to endorse a candidate, he said the only one he liked was Obama.

This demonstrates only that Bernstein and Dowd were fundamentally cronies, not principled supporters of George Bush.  I say this not because Bush is beyond criticism, but it is inconceivable that a political conservative could support Barack Obama based on how “appealing” and “likable” he is.  They liked Bush’s charisma then; now that the reality has set in, they seek a new boyfriend.  You may not like a man’s leadership style, but the idea that this could make you choose, for his successor, someone who is the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate means that you could not have been a conservative in the first place.

And what, then, of this?

But last week a surprising new name joined the chorus of praise for the antiwar Obama – that of Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, which called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Kagan is an informal foreign policy adviser to the Republican senator John McCain, who remains the favoured neoconservative choice for the White House because of his backing for the troops in Iraq.

But in an article in the Washington Post, Kagan wrote approvingly that a keynote speech by Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was “pure John Kennedy”, a neocon hero of the cold war.

Kagan — who, the article does not tell you, now works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — is in at least a momentary thrall to Obama, as this article demonstrates.  He paints him as an absolute hawk, admittedly focusing on a speech but not so admittedly ignoring Barack’s entire voting record or any aspect of his actual political past.  It’s odd considering Kagan’s own considerable bona fides, much less his current association with the McCain campaign.  But perhaps that article is overstating the case, and challenging Obama with his own words; if so, the Times article is guilty of even more overstatement.

Kagan aside, any move from Bush to Obama says far more about the moving man than either politician.

Haven’t mentioned the brilliance of Mr. Kaus lately. Take a gander at this — it’s a long excerpt but you can handle it. I only regret the excessive use of boldface in the original, but he… he is Mickey. Now you read:

I’ve been trying to figure out why liberal bloggers are always attack the motives of neoliberals, and I think I’ve made some progress. It’s not that the bloggers are lazy punks who attack motives as a substitute for argument and need to constantly reassure each other of their own comparative righteousness because they feel guilty about their lockstep acquiesence in an agenda they themselves may have nagging qualms about. Not that at all! Rather, a) they are thinking of Joe Klein on a bad day, and b) there is a generation gap at work–not that they don’t remember the ’70s, when many of the problems of liberal orthodoxy became glaringly obvious, but that they don’t remember the decade before that.

Specifically, the young’uns seem to assume that in harping on the flaws of liberal orthodoxy aging boomer journalists are betraying their original liberal impulses. So there must be a reason for this disloyalty (careerism, desire to bolster credentials on the Washington party circuit, cash payments from Karl Rove, etc.) But many of us aging boomers aren’t betraying our original liberal principles. We are being faithful to our original New Left principles. What was the first critique of liberal orthodoxy to which I was exposed? The Port Huron Statement. Who was the original archenemy of ’60s radicals? Lyndon Johnson. Where can you find a thoroughly self-loathing indictment of the entire edifice of Great Society liberalism? In the Democratic Platform of 1972 (as Thomas Geoghegan pointed out in a famous New Republic essay, “Miami and the Seeds of Port Huron”). What constellation of doctrines are radical legal scholars–the “Crits”–trying to reveal as a fraud? “Liberal legalism.”

In short, orthodox liberals were the enemy of many who grew up in the ’60s. Still are! We aren’t selling out in attacking traditional Democrats and their interest group supporters. We loyally pursue the ideals of our youth! Though I’m happy to take Karl Rove’s money.

Bottom line: Neoliberals are old enough, or culturally deep enough, to be neo. Lefty punks mostly think they invented the whole thing and, pathetically, romanticize a never-never land of idealized, free-floating hippy (it stops there; never goes to Stalinism — no one does, after all) leftism. And, as Kaus says, anyone — anyone! — who isn’t with the plan, all the way and all the time, is in Rove’s pocket.

It’s not a basis for government or even political success — just ask Ned Lamont. Heck, it’s not even a basis for adulthood.