I may have answered Richard’s objections to Barack Obama here, but I think, in judging a political candidate, one has to consider the issue in context: that is, who is the other candidate? The answer to this question should put everything in its proper perspective: Mad John McCain. Richard isn’t quite convinced that Obama in the White House would mean a “return to realism,” but then again, what’s “realism” when we’re measuring it against the views of a man who yearns for a Hundred Year War in Iraq—and throughout the Middle East?

I’m glad that Justin has cleared up my misunderstanding about his position toward the foreign policy of Samantha Power. He knows her for what she is—the princess of the global do-gooders.

But at the heart of my posts yesterday was not merely Samantha Power—whose interventionist fantasies are dismissed easily enough—but the problem of traditional conservatives’ supporting Obama as a “not so bad” option.

Generally speaking, I think Justin is backing Obama for the right reasons. Despite his claims of being a cultist, having a “man-crush,” and suffering from Obamania, he actually doesn’t go in for any of the gooey, transcendental crap that attracts the vast majority of Obamaniacs (and the Obamacons).  At the very least, I think Justin is the first to quote Garet Garrett in an endorsement of the Illinois senator (!). 

All of this is fine, but Obama’s connection with Samantha Power should stand as warning to all traditionalists, paleos, and libertarians who dare see Obama as a lesser-of-two-evils choice in November.

Obama’s actual statements about foreign policy have been rather vague. All we know is that he’s “willing to talk” and wants to “end the war in Iraq.” It’s plausible that these sentiments would materialize as a sane foreign policy—perhaps even that “humble foreign policy” Governor Bush promised us years ago. 

But then it’s equally plausible that Obama would go on a Samantha Power trip and pursue a whole new set of “liberventions” in Darfur, Kenya, the Congo, Burma… With a crushing defeat of McCain in the general and the popular will behind him, Obama would certainly have the political capital to attempt such wild schemes. And his supporters—both the Obamaniacs and Obamacons—would not do much to hold him back. Obama voters of all sorts seem to believe that the senator from Illinois is a messiah sent down to us from some secular leftist god. Obama himself seems to concur, clearly infatuated with the image he and his supporters have fashioned. None of this leads me to believe that the election of Barrack Obama would herald a return to realism.   

I have to say I’m a bit surprised at Richard Spencer’s comments regarding my alleged “defense” of Samantha Power. If you read what I actually wrote—a very brief remark in the “Sniper’s Tower”—I was merely saying that she’s right about Hillary being a monster. Period. So what’s the problem?

As for her views on foreign policy, I dealt with that here—and that ain’t praise.

Dan McCarthy documents a trend that I, too, made note of not too long along—the rise of Obama conservatives.

I find that this new voting block can be divided into two distinct groups—defensive, tactical Obama voters and true Obamaniacs. 

The first group I generally sympathize with. These are people like Justin, Jeff Hart, and perhaps Dan himself who appreciate Obama’s opposition to Iraq, think that he’d invade fewer countries than Clinton or McCain, and find his health-care proposals to be less totalitarian than Hillary-care part II. When I visited Justin in San Fran the other week, he said that “questions of war and peace” trump all else. Particularly since one can’t count on Republicans to stave off socialism at home, I think this is a valid position—although I’m not at all convinced that Obama would actually be as non-interventionist as some presume (if his selection of Samantha Power as a foreign-policy adviser is any indication).       

This defensive, tactical camp is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty tiny, composed mostly of dissident Right intellectuals. 

The real Obamaniacs are a different story altogether. They are ex-Bushites, like Mark McKinnon, and other Republicans of the Gersonian variety. There are others, like Rod Dreher, who are evangelical Christians with some conservative credential and who criticize Obama’s policies, but then simply can’t help but be charmed by him. No one in this group is particularly impressed about the fact that Obama opposed the Iraq war—to the contrary, most of them supported it—nor do they take a “he’d be less totalitarian than Hillary” line.

They like Obama because he speaks their language. Sentiments that electing the senator would miraculous lead us towards “authentic racial reconciliation,” give birth to post-partisan national unity, or make all the world love us again usually compose the political language of the pinkish, over-educated cultural elite. But with a little tweaking, such phrases are commonly dropped at the local Megachurch, the conservative gathering, and wherever Joel Ostein is read. They “put their faith” in Obama as a transcendent leader. One very surprising development of the 2008 election will be the number of former Huckabee supporters who go for Obama in the general. 

Unlike the defensive, tactical Obama supporters, the real Obamacons number in the millions. 

Those of you who have enjoyed, over time, Patrick Foy’s analyses of foreign policy and the Middle East can find more of his stuff at his new Web site, which he announced last week. Check it out here.

Truth-telling is now a hate-crime, as Samantha Power, an advisor to Barack Obama, found out when she told the Scotsman what every conservative—and anyone who’s been paying attention for the past twenty years—knows all too well: that Hillary Clinton is indeed a “monster.” Ms. Power has been forced to resign, to apologize, to grovel for saying what conservatives have been saying for years. It’s all a very big deal, another way for the Clintons to drag Barack Obama down to their level—could anyone go that low?—and more fodder for the talking heads to chew on. If and when Hillary takes the White House, however, her monstrousness will soon become all too apparent, and not just to conservatives.

Is $105 a barrel oil the President’s answer to Al Gore’s Nobel ?

This speculation arises from the writing of someone even Neocons ought to listen to—David Frum.

In his biography of his former speechwriting client, The Right Man , Frum reports:

I once made the mistake of suggesting to Bush that he use the phrase cheap energy to describe the aims of his energy policy.

He gave me a sharp, squinting look, as if he were trying to decide whether I was the stupidest person he’d heard from all day or only one of the top five.

Cheap energy, he answered, was how we had got into this mess. Every year from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s, American cars burned less and less oil per mile travelled. Then in about 1995 that progress stopped. Why?

He answered his own question: because of the gas-guzzling SUV. And what had made the SUV possible? This time I answered. ‘Um, cheap energy?’ He nodded at me.
Dismissed.

Thanks to John Lanchester,  for noting this exchange last March inThe London Review Of Books

With sadness I announce that Ron Paul has ended his presidential campaign … well, I think he has … maybe… Lew Rockwell, who usually knows all this stuff, senses that it might very well be over … perhaps. Here’s the video—if any of you all out there can make heads or tails of it, I encourage you to comment. 

Throughout the Cold War, a whole industry of Kremlinology popped up in which PhD-ed analysts would interpret the significance of who was sitting next to the Great Leader at the latest Great Harvest festival in an attempt to understand the inner-workings of the opaque Soviet regime. I think we might need similar efforts in exegesis to understand what the hell the Paul campaign is actually doing. At any rate, the fact that major news organs are going with “it’s winding down” as a newsbite does not speak well for the campaign’s efforts in communications.     

So, it will all “soon wind down”—but when? In the next few weeks? In November? why announce this? And then there’s the equally ambiguous, “I will make every effort to visit any state where the enthusiasm for liberty exists.” OK…

After thoroughly confusing us about his presidential run, Paul goes on to thoroughly demoralization those who want to build a broader movement. 

Paul says, “Let’s hope that one day we can look back and say that this campaign was a significant first step that signaled a change in direction for our country.” But then he offers little in the way of direction. Paul “still likes the idea” of a major march on the DC mall, but then senses that this might be a logistical hassle for the campaign—another quasi-indication that he’s still running for president, sort of—and thus hopes that his supporters will arrange it.  Perhaps sometime in June would work?

Yes, the freedom movement should be a “grassroots effort” and not a “top-down, rigidly controlled operation.” But there’s a difference between inspiring the troops and passing the buck—Ron Paul is clearly doing the latter. 

The groups Paul says will be the new institutions of the broader movement, the Liberty PAC and the FREE Foundation, are both based in Lake Jackson, TX, Ron’s home district, and have actually already been around for years. FREE is run Mark Elam, the campaign’s “media director” who, judging by the embarrassing back-to-the-’70s quality of the official videos, won’t exactly be remembered as the Leni Riefenstahl of the freedom movement. Elam seems to hold multiple posts under the Ron Paul umbrella—state coordinator for Texas, national media director. Why exactly Paul would entrust this man—who can’t put together a coherent YouTube video—with so much responsibility is beyond me.

The campaign succeeded in online fundraising and it was generally competently run by Lew Moore and Kent Synder—who were able to grab up some delegates in caucus states even if they never developed a real ground game in New Hampshire. But the Paul campaigns forays in traditional PR and communications cannot be considered anything but an absolute disaster. 

While the aesthetically challenged Elam was hired as media director, the campaign never brought in a team of professional speech-writers and opinion journalists to help craft talking points and a clear message that would have appealed to Republican voters. Thus when Paul was given the opportunity to directly confront John McCain in a nationally televised debate, he asked a tedious, soon-forgotten query about the president’s working group on financial markets. Only rarely did Paul speak of being the only “real conservative” in the field, and more often allowed himself to be defined as a Daily-Kos cut-and-run liberal—sometimes even playing this up such as when he mentioned on “Leno” that he has much in common with Kucinich and is well-liked among Obama supporters.

Only well after the great opportunity of New Hampshire had passed did the campaign hire a full-time blogger and writer, the rock-solid paleo-libertarian (and Taki’s contributor) Dan McCarthy. Most other campaigns had had bloggers and staff writers for over a year.

Should we be surprised that the end result of a year of slap-dash public relations and cronyism is a major public statement on the future of the campaign that no one really understands? 

I’m relieved we’ve been spared reviewing American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau, as John Derbyshire has done an excellent job in The New Criterion.

Although it seems to contain a great deal of purple prose, including quotations from the little green book of Chairman Gore, and scandalously omits Ortega Y Gassett’s On Hunting, it does include this luminous passage from my favorite environmentalist-biological, the great E.O.Wilson :

“After the sun’s energy is captured by the green plants, it flows through chains of organisms dendritically, like blood spreading from the arteries into networks of microscopic capillaries…During the long span of evolution the species divided the environment among themselves…Through repeated genetic changes they side-stepped competitors and built elaborate defenses against the host of predator species that relentlessly tracked them through matching genetic counter-moves. The result was a splendid array of specialists, including moths that live in the fur of three-toed sloths.”

There’s more on E.O. Wilson in the archives of my blog, .Adamant

There were several surprises at the climate change conference I attended in New York. The seriously interesting scientific presentation by Roy Spencer contrasted with the belated revelation that the Discovery Institute, reincarnated as ” a think tank devoted to free market ideas” was among the sponsors of the event, whose organizers told the media it was convened to refute the contention of Jim Martin of the Colorado department of the Environment, who told The Denver Post that :

“You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.”

Seeing the conference banquet fill a hotel ballroom, Heartland Institute chairman Jim Bast crowed:

” Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?”

All scientists present were then asked to step forward for a group photo, in which The New York Times reports, 19 appear. 22 is the Guinness record for phone booth stuffing