James Poulos makes a very strong case for the inexpressible sadness that must accompany any serious reflection upon the dust up surrounding 15 year-old Miley Cyrus and those "artistic" semi-nude photographs she had taken for a Vanity Fair spread. I don’t normally follow the comings and goings of Disney Channel television personalities--mainly because we don’t get the Disney Channel. But one cannot have an eight year-old daughter today and not be at least semi-conscious of the phenomenon that is "Hannah Montana." That being said, this "fluff" story seems much less fluffy. The thing does merit the kind of serious reflection Poulos offers.

Poulos argues:

I’ve argued before that our problem isn’t honoring the sexual power of young women, it’s in aggravating that power for the purposes of dishonoring it. Miley’s evocative portrait alone doesn’t contribute to this problem. But the premise of the picture, and so much of what brought it into being, does.

David Brooks describes, well, not exactly class conflict in the Democratic Party. Obama is the bobo candidate and HRC, a bobo herself, has become the default candidate of the working class Catholics from places like Scranton and Fresno. I have several questions, beginning with: if the bobo Clinton can win among working class Catholics, why can’t the Obobobama? The next is: is Clinton’s relative success with downmarket white and Hispanic voters in the Democratic primaries "authentic"? Is she appealing to them on her own merits or simply as the anyone-but-Obama candidate?

Then, finally, there’s this: one of the "facts" about at least some churches that social scientists have pointed to is that they can bridge class divides, with educated professionals worshipping alongside guys who work in garages. Jeremiah Wright’s church isn’t alone in being that way. Of course, I recognize that the distribution of socioeconomic "types" varies from denomination to denomination, with the Episcopal "center of gravity," for example, differing from its Southern Baptist or Pentecostal counterpart. I also recognize that this varies somewhat from congregation to congregation, especially to the degree that the congregations are located in socioeconomically defined neighborhoods. And now, finally, for the question: does the catholicity of the Catholic church do more to bring folks together across socioeconomic divides or does its parish system encourage a kind of separation? A couple of generations ago, one could, in certain northeastern and midwestern cities, speak of the Polish parish, the Irish parish, or the Italian parish. Ethnicity to some degree qualified catholicity. Can one now speak of upscale or bobo parishes and of downmarket or working class parishes? Or not?

Now that Reverend Wright has spoken thrice at length, and answered questions at length, we have learned much about what he thinks, how he thinks, and how fond he is of himself. There was nothing American, or post racial, or post ideological, about any of this. On the one hand, this may be an intelligent man, a well educated man, even a deeply religious man. On the other hand, he sounds like an idiot, a fool, even a fraud.

We can speculate about why this man did what he did, and why he did it now. But that would be speculation based on effect. The effect is to destroy Obama’s presidential campaign. It is now certain that Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee for president. The door has opened through which the superdelegates can walk--never mind Indiana voters--in good conscience not only arguing that Obama is not electable, but arguing that he shouldn’t be elected because the twenty year association is too tight, too revealing. Wright is no Martin Luther King, Jr. challenging us to live up to our standards, calling us to be our better selves.

Instapundit links to serval comments about Reverend Wright’s latest sermon (if that’s the right word for it). In particular, he points us to this piece by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (no conservative he), which highlights Wright’s praise of Louis Farrakhan and the belief that Zionism is racism.

Two questions: How can Zionism be racism when any Palestinian (or anyone else for that matter) may become a Jew if they choose? On the other hand, it is impossible for a Jew to become a Palestinian. Perhpas it’s more proper to say that Palestinian nationalism (or even Arab nationalism more broadly) is racism. After all, the latter are, or, at least, they seem to have come to be, genetic groups.

Second question. In an earlier sermon, Wright suggested that he subscribes to the belief that Jesus was black. Is that belief inherently anti-Jewish? Unless I am mistaken, it is an implicit denial that Jesus was a Jew.

Here’s the story. You can get to the opinion here. The opinion for the 6-3 majority was written by John Paul Stevens and joined by Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts. Justice Scalia authored a brief concurrence, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito. Both opinions agree that the inconvenience imposed on voters by the law is, generally speaking, minimal. Where they seem to differ is in the view they would have judges take of individual claims of a burden on voting rights. While he rejects the facial challenge offered in this case, Justice Stevens is open to arguments by individuals who assert unreasonable burdens. Scalia’s position is less accommodating.

Here is the transcript of his National Press Club appearance this morning. You can read press accounts here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s Rev. Wright’s defense of his 9-11 remarks:

You have said that the media have taken you out of context. Can you explain what you meant in a sermon shortly after 9/11 when you said the United States had brought the terrorist attacks on itself? Quote, "America’s chickens are coming home to roost."

REVEREND WRIGHT: Have you heard the whole sermon? Have you heard the whole sermon?

MODERATOR: I heard most of it.

REVEREND WRIGHT: No, no, the whole sermon, yes or no? No, you haven’t heard the whole sermon? That nullifies that question.

Well, let me try to respond in a non-bombastic way. If you heard the whole sermon, first of all, you heard that I was quoting the ambassador from Iraq. That’s number one.

But, number two, to quote the Bible, "Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For whatsoever you sow, that you also shall reap." Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles.

Stated simply, Rev. Wright believes that the U.S. engages in "terrorism." From his conversation with Bill Moyers, it seems that he believes that any time civilians are killed in time of war, it is terrorism. There’s apparently no difference in his mind between targeting civilians and what just war theorists call collateral damage. His reasons for perhaps holding this view may be expressed in his response to a question about his remarks about the U.S. government’s role in the spread of the AIDS virus:

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

REVEREND WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz’s book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola," whoever wrote that question? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"? You’ve read it?

***

REVEREND WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven’t read things, then you can’t -- based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the -- one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

Let me repeat what Rev. Wright said: "I believe our government is capable of doing anything." We have, in other words, a terrorist government, which will, in its turn, provoke terrorist responses.

Oh, and in case you wondered about the distinguished medical authorities on whose work Rev. Wright bases his prophetic arguments, here’s the Wikipedia entry on Dr. Leonard Horowitz, written by an acolyte.

. . . of R-E-S-P-E-C-T for Hillary Clinton is offered by Bill Kristol on the pages of today’s New York Times. If the liberal media cannot be depended upon to show her a little, Kristol argues that it falls to conservatives like him to do their job while they get over their crush on Senator Obama. Kristol, clearly, is having fun playing the devil’s advocate but he’s also got a serious point. He extols Clinton’s virtues as a candidate--scrappy and dogged, cunning and patient. Her massive failings have been telling too. In addition to exhibiting a kind of brazen insensitivity to the truth, she’s also shown a kind of chutzpah that could serve a candidate well, given the right electoral conditions. She is Bill Clinton, light . . . and if she fails it will be because of the "light." But if she succeeds (now or in the future) it will be because of the "Bill Clinton" and her willingness to be brazen.

So, it seems to me, that if Kristol’s prediction and assessment is correct and Obama wins the nomination even though Clinton is the stronger candidate, then Peter Lawler should revisit his pessimism over McCain’s chances. I’m willing to bet that my "optimism" (if that’s what it is) may be in need of some checking. So I appreciate Peter’s constant assault on it. But I begin to wonder (and only wonder, I’m not yet asserting) if the war and the controversy surrounding our entering it is fading into a position of background noise in this election. Do people other than vociferous supporters or detractors really think long and hard about it anymore? I think most people realize that the war is what it is and that the time for debating about whether or not we should have invaded is long past. The only question now is whether or not we should retreat. The candidates who seem to advocate retreat are both rather squishy on the point. Only incredibly naive voters really believe that the election of Barack Obama will initiate a precipitous withdrawal of our forces. This is why Obama plays up his initial disapproval of the invasion to the great delight of his young and his ideological supporters; he’d rather talk about the past than the future in this instance. But those of us who remember the thing (because remember, many of Obama’s supporters were too young to now remember it!) and who were not on then on the same ideological train do not now see him as some kind of Cassandra who was possessed of some special wisdom unknowable to the rest of us mere mortals. Instead, I think his original position on the invasion feeds into the perception of him as young, foolish, and vaguely anti-American. His crowing about it now makes him look even more young, more foolish and, worse, entirely self-important. All he’s saying is, "I told you so!" and, as Peter pointed out noting the role of chance in things, that’s a very easy thing to say right now. Too easy.

The frustration with Bush may turn out to help McCain. This is, in part, because I think the general frustration with Bush (not the particular frustration of the Left but the frustration that gives him a 69% disapproval rating) stems from a perception of incompetence in performance more than it does with a real questioning of the decision to invade. I argue this because I think there were two important turning points in public opinion. The first was Fallujah. The second was Katrina. Had either or both of those things gone in a different way (as they well could have done), I think we’d be in a very different position vis a vis public opinion right now. McCain seems to sense this and is running a campaign that touts his competence and, significantly, his toughness. This makes his "competence campaign" very different from that of Michael Dukakis’ similarly themed campaign. That’s because when Michael Dukakis went around talking about how "competent" he while as he sat inside of tank, one had very good reason to believe that his claim was a wish rather than a statement of fact.

Jeremiah Wright, who keeps insisting that politics isn’t part of his job description, keeps on keeping on, this time with the very sympathetic Bill Moyers. Our South Dakota friend Ken Blanchard watched the interview and provides these comments.

I’d add that Rev. Wright’s view of prophecy is a little less far from politics than he’s prepared to admit. And I’d note that prophets are also accountable for actually speaking truth to power. A prophet who gets his facts wrong, who perhaps willfully misrepresents the state of affairs, is a false prophet. I agree that not all of Rev. Wright’s statements are exceptionable, that there are some genuine sins to which he points in his sermons. But there are also some difficult political choices that he’s willing to condemn (on God’s behalf) without further consideration. And there’s a narrative about America that owes its provenance, not to serious theological reflection, but to a leftist political agenda, that he’s (mis)representing as God’s word to his audience.

As I noted above, Rev. Wright says that politics isn’t part of his job description:

"I am not a politician," he said. "I know that fact will surprise many of you because many of the corporate-owned media have made it seem like I have announced I am running for the Oval Office. I am not running for the Oval Office. I’ve been running for Jesus a long, long, long time, and I’m not tired yet."

But he’s making a lot of speeches.

Yours truly appears this morning in the Wall Street Journal explaining why the candidates are full of hot air when it comes to fighting global warming. If you are a glutton for punishment, you can find a more complete analysis of the matter in my latest Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, just released last week in time for Earth Day.

Now back to our regularly scheduled Obamamania programming.

Frank Rich is hardly an objective observer, and we shouldn’t believe everything he says. Nonetheless, he does well to remind us how hard the Iraq war will make it for McCain to win. It’s the main reason the president’s is very, very unpopular; 63% of Americans, more than ever before, now believe invading was a mistake. It seems to be the reason the Democrats seem poised to capture what seemed to be a very safe House seat in Mississippi--not a hotbed of McGovernism.

Let me call your attention to the observations made by our darling Kate a couple of threads below (a post on the Iraq War etc. by Joe): We may have had some fine reasons to invade Iraq, but, as some of our NLT interlocuters sometimes remind us, we have reasons to invade lots of countries. The big issue is that the invasion didn’t work out, and for that reason has hurt more than helped us. I’m not getting into any deep analysis here, except to say presidents (and their parties) who don’t win wars that were expected to be no big deal (and who prematurely gloat mission accomplished) pay the electoral price. It’s going to be very hard, I think, for Mac to make the case that the invasion was not only warranted but prudent, and the ONLY problem was incompetent execution. Nor can he really say that the surged has won the war or even moved us very close to some political solution.

Kate can’t think well of a decision to invade that may have wrecked her party in the short-term. Excessively ideological Republican thinking, she suspects, may give us really, really excessively ideological Democratic unified government. People are even connecting the out-of-control gas prices with the lack of respect we now get from the oil producing countries, and, rightly or wongly, they conclude we’re dissed because we haven’t prevailed on the battlefield--a battle we need not have waged.

Yesterday, I participated in a blogger conference call with Douglas Feith, whose new book attempts to set the record straight about Bush Administration decisionmaking in the run-up to and early stages of the Iraq war. I have to stress that I haven’t yet read the very long book, so I’m not going to offer a review of it. Rather, I want at the moment just to say a few words about Feith’s project and about some of the arguments that don’t depend upon close acquaintance with his insider’s knowledge of the events about which he writes.

As I’ve noted, his project is, above all, to provide a record that challenges the conventional wisdom about the Bush Administration’s deliberations. Consider, for example, his book’s website, which provides links to all the sources cited in his roughly 100 pages of footnotes that are available on the internet. His readers (and critics) can check the evidence for themselves. Feith also told us that he relied on notes he took of the meetings he attended. His view of these meetings is by no means impartial, and can be challenged. But, all things being equal, I would find a person who is willing to own his views more credible than someone disagrees anonymously.

So the defenders of the conventional wisdom--like the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank--will in the end have to rely on something more than ridicule to respond to the evidence. And other defenders, like the Post’s Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung--both of whom have written books that touch on Feith’s subject--will actually have to spend more than six hours with an incompletely edited manuscript in order adequately to characterize it. Will they? Well, thus far, the Post has declined to commission a review of the book, so perhaps they won’t have to.

One of the themes in our conversation with Feith that interested me the most is what he calls "strategic communication," the sustained effort to make the case for the Administration’s policy and explain it to the American people. For those of us who supported President Bush, this has been a source of immense frustration, as he and his subordinates have only sporadically sought to guide the public discussion. Feith offered a contrast between the Bush and Reagan Administrations on this point. While he praised the speeches delivered and arguments made by principal figures in the Bush Administration, he argued that, outside the limelight, the Administration failed. Here’s how he put it in the book:

White House officials did not generally encourage subcabinet officials to do speeches, interviews, or op-eds in support of our Iraq policy or our war on terrorism strategy. They chose to rely almost entirely on the President, Vice President, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice. That made it easier to keep official pronouncements “on message,” but it also meant writing off important audiences—including journalists, academics, and intellectuals—that could not be satisfied with generalizations delivered at a distance.

In the Reagan Administration, by contrast, there was a sustained effort to reach out to such audiences: officials were sent out with general themes, having the latitude to tailor them for specific audiences. Whether this would have made a big difference, I don’t know, but without the attempt, we’ll never know.

With great regret, Feith also cites the public release of the Duelfer Report, where apparently no concerted attempt was made to affect the public response to its simplest message. Yes, no stockpiles of WMD were found, which was the big headline. But, as Feith points out, the report also demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had retained his chemical and biological weapons facilities, his materiel, and his tech teams, so that the programs could have been started up within 3 - 5 weeks. The report also cited evidence of a clear intent to revive all the WMD programs, as soon as the West’s head was turned (as, indeed, it was turning). Once again, it might have been difficult to shift the press off the easy headline, but, Feith argues, no one made the effort, not even putting out a one page fact sheet aty the head of the report. The result, he says, was "a blow to American credibility from which we haven’t recovered and from which we may never recover" (as close as I could come to a direct quote while furiously taking notes).

If he were in the business of pointing fingers, this would have been a golden opportunity to blame someone. I asked him whose fault it was. His only response was that there’s plenty of blame to go around.

I lived in New York City for 15 years, not a great qualification for assessing Barack Obama’s claims about small-town Americans – the ones who have grown “bitter” about their economic prospects and, as a result, “cling to” guns, religion, anti-immigrant sentiments or cholesterol maximizing diets. But bear with me.

The first New York election I saw up close was the 1989 mayoral race, when David Dinkins won a narrow victory over Rudy Giuliani. New York was a grim place that year, mostly because of a terrible crime problem. The “Central Park Jogger” had been brutalized that spring, and the story dominated the news and water-cooler conversations. This was the time when “No Radio” signs began appearing in the windows of cars parked overnight on the street, pathetic appeals to crack addicts to please break into the next parked car in order to steal anything that might be sold or traded for drugs.

Race relations were tense after Yusef Hawkins, a 16-year-old black kid, was shot to death in Bensonhurst. The city’s finances, always heavily dependent on Wall Street, were precarious after the market sell-off in October 1987.

So, what did Dinkins and Giuliani argue about? One of the most debated topics was abortion, an issue about which the mayor of New York has no legal authority or practical capacity to make any difference whatsoever.

That, weirdly, was the whole point. New Yorkers had little hope that a mayor could actually accomplish something – could make the streets safer, the taxes lower, or the government more effective. So the election became an affinity contest. Since the city government couldn’t do anything, voting for its office-holders was an expressive rather than an effective act. We don’t expect any of the candidates to make things better, the voters were saying, but since we have to watch one of these guys on the TV news for the next four years, let’s pick one who understands and respects what we care about, rather that someone who disdains us and the way we see the world.

Sen. Obama’s unfortunate foray in extemporaneous sociology was premised on the observation of a similar phenomenon: “Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.”Like the New Yorkers in 1989 who didn’t believe the city government could do anything to address their most pressing problems, the voters in small towns where factories have closed and young people have drifted away don’t believe the national government can do anything to address their most pressing concerns. Since the promises about economic revival made to them by both Republican and Democratic presidents have proven worthless, people stop voting on that basis, and turn to selecting the candidate whose worldview validates their own.

Obama’s argument borrows from the one made famous by Thomas Frank in his book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? Democrats have embraced Frank’s thesis enthusiastically but perhaps too literally: If working-class Reagan Democrats want jobs and economic security, that’s what we’ll give them. Doing so will, once again, make these voters Democratic Democrats and all this foolishness about culture wars will be forgiven and forgotten. As a Pennsylvania state legislator told Byron York, his constituents are bitter because “they’re just tired of losing their jobs, losing opportunities, losing their young people, just because we haven’t had that federal help, that little push to keep those steel mills here, keep those coal mines here, and create manufacturing opportunities.”

The problem, as Noam Scheiber argued in The New Republic after the 2004 election, is that “Democrats have run up against the limits of what they – or anyone else – can do to create and protect good jobs, the top economic priority of working-class voters.” Restricting trade hasn’t helped America’s heavily protected textile industry, which lost half its jobs in a decade. Stronger unions aren’t likely to help, either: “The heavily unionized German manufacturing sector has lost about 25 percent of its jobs since 1991.”

Obama delivered his analysis to a group of Democratic donors, discussing the kind of campaign his party needs to run. That context reveals one more way in which his comments were tone-deaf. Working-class voters don’t need to “get persuaded” that we can make progress – they need to get shown. It’s not a problem that well-crafted ads and speeches – or well-funded campaigns – can address. Following Obama’s now-famous comments, Brett Lieberman of the Harrisburg Patriot News talked with voters in small Pennsylvania towns, and found out that they don’t expect Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Obama to improve their lives by bringing good jobs to their towns.

Since this kind of demonstration would require Obama not only to win the presidency, but then to enact policies that succeed spectacularly where those of his predecessors have failed, maybe it’s time for a different tack. As the candidate running to break free from the stale gridlock of Washington’s old debates, Obama might try saying that no one knows how to restore the economic vigor of rust-belt industrial towns, and politicians should stop pretending we do.

He could follow the lead of the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, who argued last year that, despite repeated and expensive federal efforts to revive it, Buffalo, New York was the 13th most populous city in America in 1930 but now has a population 55% smaller than it had then, making it the 66th largest city in America. Glaeser recommends urban triage rather than urban renewal. The government should emphasize policies to help people in dying industrial towns – including policies that help them get out of those towns. Equip people with marketable skills and portable insurance, and upward mobility will naturally entail geographic mobility.