Ross Douthat

I've spent the last couple of weeks gently tweaking my panicky, paranoid liberal friends who just can't help fretting that Obama's seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls will be undone on election day. But now that the day itself has arrived, I know what they mean: Even though I don't really see any way that McCain can win this thing, I've been conditioned - by the stalemate in 2000, by the exit-polling disaster in '04, even by New Hampshire flipping for… More »

It almost goes without saying, but John Podhoretz offers some reasons (and there are more, I think) why nobody should be rooting for a McCain victory in the electoral college if he can't win the popular vote. More »

For election eve, a potpourri of links related to the future of the Right ... ... Yuval Levin, who's almost always more sanguine than yours truly, discusses what reform conservatism might mean. (And see Jonah Goldberg's response as well.)... Allahpundit parses the final Fox poll, and offers some astute thoughts on how the Joe the Plumber gambit and the selling of Sarah Palin worked out - or didn't.... Peggy Noonan and Kathryn Jean Lopez, in conversation.... Bill… More »

This is simultaneously immensely, immensely sad, and such a remarkable coincidence as to feel like a small, inscrutable brush stroke of Providence.(Don't start with me, Hitchens ...) More »

Less conservative-bashing in the popular culture, and more stuff like this: More »

I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine about the defeat that's almost certainly about to be inflicted on the American Right. Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the "whither conservatism" battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many… More »

After the election we're going to read a lot of analyses like this one from Mark McKinnon, arguing that second-guessing is unfair, and that in an impossible year for Republicans, Steve Schmidt and company did the absolute best they could. Today, before McCain roars back in the last three days and renders all the second-guessing moot (feeling jumpy, liberal America?), I want to draw a line in the sand and say No. Allowing that this was a hard time for a Republican… More »

I've written before about Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity) - and I've argued before with Will Wilkinson about whether it's possible to envision a successful society in which the liberal impulses dominate completely, and the conservative impulses are stigmatized and/or essentially… More »

Musing on what might have been if Al Gore had won Florida in 2000 - namely, a Democratic Party rallying around a presidential nominee named Joe Lieberman in 2008 - Yglesias throws in this curveball:And of course there's also a universe in which John McCain accepted John Kerry's offer of the VP slot, and the two of them ran and won a bipartisan ticket committed to ending the incompetence of the Bush administration and prosecuting the war in Iraq the right way.… More »

On the "'spreading the wealth' as racial appeal" question, Yglesias writes: "Well, obviously you could read just about anything as a coded racist appeal. And I think a case could be made that you'd be right to. The simple fact of the matter is that the politics of economic conservatism in the United States have a lot to do with the politics of race. I always think it's worth recalling the practical constituency for libertarian economic policies as seen in the 1964… More »

Peter Gammons, before last night's demi-game:When this World Series finally ends, there will be a great deal of discussion about how to avoid this sort of misery. The first will be to figure a way to shorten the schedule. Say the schedule was reduced from 162 to 148 games (records or no records; the Steroids Era made too many baseball records meaningless), then the division series and League Championship Series could be played between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6, with the… More »

... I should note that the design of this last-ditch McCain ad - which actually uses the word "welfare," as opposed to just talking about "spreading the wealth," a distinction that makes a difference - makes John Judis's "race and Joe the Plumber" argument seem at least slightly more tethered to plausibility: More »

That was a pretty exciting three and a half inning victory. (Seriously! And it ended before midnight! Maybe the postseason needs more rain-suspended games.) I was especially happy for Brad Lidge, after the great post-Pujols flameout in Houston ... and yes, I was still rooting for Tampa Bay fans to learn the meaning of postseason suffering. So sue me. Incidentally, if you're Joe Maddon, with a runner at third and one out for the Phillies in the bottom of the seventh… More »

As I've said before, I'm been somewhat baffled by the McCain campaign's decision to spend its final weeks accusing Barack Obama of being a "spread the wealth" liberal, given that this is more or less how Obama has been campaigning all year long: Taxing the rich to pay for health care and and middle-class tax cuts isn't his domestic agenda's dirty little secret; it is his domestic agenda! But now, thanks to John Judis, the McCain strategy becomes crystal clear: I… More »

Dave Weigel weighs in on the subject here; Daniel Larison here. I think that liberals trying to understand the conservative mind, circa 2008, should take this passage from Larison to heart: ... never underestimate the Republican desire to get on the high horse of anti-racism and egalitarianism, to say nothing of the even greater desire to demonstrate that they are in no way racist ... The small cottage industry out there cataloguing the "real racism" of liberals… More »

Question asked ... and question answered.And yeah, I understand that when Yglesias suggested that Slate leaned rightward, he was probably thinking of the tendency of some liberal-run media outlets to challenge/provoke their liberal-leaning readership by publishing lots of counterintuitive arguments and writers, to the point where you can see why hardened left-wing partisans would accuse them of being operationally conservative. (It's worth noting that Matt's… More »

Yesterday, Culture11 hosted an interesting back-and-forth between John Schwenkler and James Poulos on the question of where the Iraq War (remember that?) fits into the Republican Party's current woes. I think there are strong points in both pieces. Schwenkler is clearly right, I think, that the Iraq War is the dark matter of GOP decline - even now that almost nobody's focusing on it, it's still exerting a downward pull on the Republican brand. The absence of WMDs… More »

I think Chris Orr is completely wrong about this:... while there are plenty of 2012 GOP presidential aspirants who have reason to be unhappy with the McCain campaign's decisions over the last couple months (and, in particular, the Palin choice), a case could be made that no one's nearish-term prospects have been hurt more than Bobby Jindal's.Though rarely explicit (and certainly not exclusive) a large portion of the GOP's closing argument this cycle has been to… More »

For some reason, The New Republic has decided to embarrass the talented and perceptive John Judis by digging out of its archives a piece that he wrote announcing the death of conservatism ... in, er, 1992. The piece "holds up remarkably well," Max Fisher writes by way of introduction, which I suppose is one way of descriping an essay that sounds an awful lot like the epitaphs for conservatism being penned amid the current Republican crisis - but that has the… More »

McClatchy has a piece on the Bush Administration's successes curtailing homelessness - a subject I've written about before. Because spending has risen even as homelessness numbers have fallen, the reporter describes the policy shift as "radical" and "liberal." Ed Morrissey basically concurs:Was this one of Bush's more liberal policies? I'd say yes. By providing a housing solution free of charge, federal and state governments had to cough up a lot of money. As… More »