SATURDAY,  MARCH 1,  2008

THREE DAYS TO GO

We might well know the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in three days.  Texas and Ohio vote on Tuesday.  It does not appear that Hillary Clinton will do well enough to sustain her campaign, except, possibly, in her own eyes.  She is behind slightly in Texas polls and ahead slightly in Ohio polls.  The momentum is with Obama, a triumph of entertainment over substance.

Human Events has a fine article on what will follow in the general-election campaign.  The voters love Obama, but trust McCain: 

Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at AEI, said the “context of this election is a very unhappy country” but voters will look at the “comparative ground” depending on who would protect them best when the “barbarians are at the door.” 

I've spoken to a certain number of Democrats in recent days who say that they're thinking of voting for McCain.  But these are moderate Democrats, and well informed.  As I wrote last night, these so-called Reagan Democrats are key to McCain's effort.  But on the other side we have, sadly, a hysteria over a candidate that I've not seen in my lifetime.  The limited excitement over John F. Kennedy does not begin to compare to the screaming for Obama.  The country in 1960, when JFK ran, was more mature than it is today, more hardened by the depression, World War II and Korea.  In 1960 we had voters in their thirties who had fought at Iwo Jima and the Bulge.  Growing up in the fifties, I had a young neighbor who'd been a tail gunner on a B-17 over Germany.  That population was not going to go crazy over a young Massachusetts senator, simply because he was dashing.  The women's vote in the 1960 presidential election, by the way, went to Richard M. Nixon, not a matinee idol.

So McCain, more trusted than Obama according to polls, faces a battle of personality.  Which will win out, love or trust?  Let's hope it's trust, but McCain must work to make himself a little loved, the way a grandfather is loved.

SOBRIETY TEST

Victor Davis Hanson, one of the best historians of our time, gives us an adult, well-reasoned look at the world the new president will face:

When President George Bush leaves office, will America once again be liked by most of the world? Not necessarily, since most current problems are either already getting better or not our fault.

When the next president takes office in January 2009, he or she will be confronted by a world that either understandably appreciates America or for self-interested reasons will challenge it.

Yeah, those inconvenient facts.  What are facts compared to "the audacity of hope"?  Or hype?  Or whatever?  Hanson goes on:

For starters, the next American president will have to deal with Vladimir Putin's Russia, which is proud and angry for reasons that go well beyond the Bush administration. Russia is flush with petrodollars, still smarting over lost empire and tired of lectures about human rights from impotent European states.

Iran, which repeatedly snubbed the efforts of the Clinton administration to normalize relations, will still want a bomb, will still intimidate neighbors, and will still threaten Israel. Indeed, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Hitlerian fashion, has called the Jewish state "filthy bacteria" and promised to wipe it off the map. He didn't say these things because George Bush is president, and he won't stop when Bush is gone.

Sen. Barack Obama, who looks more and more every day like he'll be the Democratic presidential nominee, has said he'd be in favor of taking out "high-value terrorist targets" inside Pakistan on our own if the Pakistani government won't. But so far we haven't done that because Pakistan is nuclear and friendlier to jihadists than it is to us. That won't change, either.

Osama bin Laden's attacks on Americans also predated George Bush. The war on terror started only when we finally decided to strike back in 2001. And it will end only when we destroy the jihadists and alter the conditions that created them — or give in and return to the earlier policy of inaction.

You mean it wasn't all BUSH?  Wait a minute.  How can you enter my world with stuff like that?  Who is this Hanson?  Some fascist?  It's BUSH.  Everything was perfect before BUSH.  We had Clinton and...  Wait a minute.  He had that wife.  Old-style politics.  Voted for the war.

You know, there are people who think like that.  And they may decide the next election.

Read Hanson.  He's for grown-ups.

FROM RUSSIA WITH...

Hanson noted Putin's Russia.  For some reason, we keep putting Russia on the back burner, but the threat is rising.  Russia "elects" a new president tomorrow.  A piece in London's Telegraph asks whether, in Putin, Russia has a new Stalin, and whether the "election" has any meaning.  The conclusion is not encouraging:

Russia is a country with more than its fair share of idiosyncrasies, yet even by its standards tomorrow's presidential vote takes peculiarity to the extreme. Those Russians who choose to cast their ballots will be participating in an election that is not really an election, in order to choose a president who, most likely, will not really be a president.

Add to this the fact that Vladimir Putin is also only sort-of stepping down - he will instead return as prime minister - and you have a classic example of what the Kremlin once called "managed democracy".

Most Russians will take a Putin-Medvedev package so long as Putin stays in charge

Everyone in Russia has known for the past three months who their next president will be. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy prime minister and a longtime Putin acolyte, was chosen by a small group of Kremlin cronies at a papal-style conclave in December and presented to the people.

The article points out that life for the average Russian has actually improved, economically, under Putin.  But then there is the Stalin side:

In exchange for the promise of prosperity and stability, however, Russians have been asked to sacrifice democracy. Freedom of expression has been curtailed, the independence of parliament crushed and concepts of transparency and accountability ditched.

Just as Putin has used the trappings of Soviet and Tsarist rule to make Russia appear formidable again, so he has resurrected some of the more unwholesome attributes of the communist past. Local human rights activists say that Putin has jailed hundreds of people - possibly many more - for political reasons.

That's only the start.  The article paints a picture of Putin's prison system that makes Guantanamo seem like Disneyland.  There is clearly a return to the atmosphere, the chill, of the old Soviet Union.  Of course, Western leftists are looking the other way.  No change we can believe in there.

But don't worry.  "Hope" will cure all.  Just ask that well-known foreign-policy guru, Hoperah Winfrey.

GAZA, THE INVASION

I urged readers last night to watch the Israel/Gaza situation carefully.  It's building to a flash point, which Washington might - I repeat, might - actually welcome, as it could force Hamas from power, and show that Iran, which influences Hamas, can be pushed back.  Today's Jerusalem Post has a sharp analysis of the possibly impending conflict:

The potential risks of an IDF invasion of Gaza are now substantially higher than they were before Hamas was armed with anti-tank weapons, mines, bunkers and possibly even anti-aircraft rockets.

But political considerations, and not military factors, are now holding back such an operation. Without a viable "exit strategy" and at least some support from Israel's key ally, the United States, the Olmert government clearly prefers to leave sending in the troops as a last resort.

After a week such as this, though, that option now looks more than ever like simply a matter of increasingly reduced time.

Remember, too, the impact that an eruption in the Middle East could have on our presidential campaign, especially if the conflict widened.  A concerned electorate might well turn to experience and military knowledge, and you know where they'd find it. 

GOD AND BUCKLEY AT YALE

William F. Buckley, Jr., who died this week, achieved his greatest early fame by writing a book in 1951, "God and Man at Yale," which skewered his alma mater for what he considered its abandonment of religious values, and for a variety of other sins.  The book was prescient, for in a way it predicted the decline of our universities that was accelerated by the fashions of the 1960s. 

There's been enormous coverage of Buckley's death, and his influence, but I hadn't seen anything on how Yale reacted.  The Yale Daily News did an excellent obituary, and I thought readers of Urgent Agenda would be interested.  Here it is.  A key quote:

“Prior to Bill Buckley, there was a sense of impending doom in conservatism,” former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told the News on Wednesday. “But he punctured the intellectual foibles of so many liberals and so many academics. He created the sense that conservatism was at least an intellectual peer of liberalism.”

And this:

University President Richard Levin said Wednesday that despite Buckley’s incisive attacks on the University during his undergraduate years, he remained a loyal, committed friend of the University over the years, returning to campus often.

Indeed, he even taught at Yale: As an undergraduate, due to a shortage of Spanish professors, he led an introductory class in the language. Later, he would teach in the residential college seminar program.

And, as Buckley continued to return to Yale, in the public realm, he seemed indelibly linked to the institution.

“His reputation as a social critic and conservative thinker was very much shaped by his work at Yale and his book about Yale,” Levin said. “No doubt he was a great Yale figure. He was provocative, controversial, challenging — but we’re proud to have him as part of the Yale family.”

But?  Hmm.

And I'll be back later.

Posted on March 1, 2008.