Moderately Overlooked

As historians such as Rick Perlstein and Sam Tanenhaus mull the rightward progression of the GOP and conservatism from the age of Nixon to the age of Beck and Hannity, historian Maarja Krusten starts with her mother, a Nixon fan right through Watergate's bitter end, especially because of his foreign policy. Today, she doesn't watch Fox News, and she reasons that you can't balance the budget without more revenue. Her daughter concludes:

Nixon was a moderate and a pragmatist. He was not a conservative. Nor were all his supporters. Did some Nixon voters later vote for Reagan and become Fox News fans? Absolutely. Yet there also were people such as my Mom. There’s a lot in the mix. As with all issues Nixonian, working through the motives and objectives requires discernment.

Among other things, one discerns that moderates are dissed, devalued, and demoted. We don't have a cable station. Few if any Republicans would dare utter the word "moderate" without swearing or spitting. At first blush, we indeed appear to be a dwindling tribe. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates has fallen from 43% to 35% since 1992. During the same period, self-identified conservatives increased from 36% to 40%, while the liberals edged up from 17% to 21%. That means we've lost 4% each on both ends of the spectrum, a symptom, Gallup says, of our increasingly polarized politics.

But those numbers, while great news for Fox News' and MSNBC's ratings, aren't so great for the GOP's general election chances in 2012. Conservatives are prone to saying that moderates are really liberals. Spend three minutes on FreeRepublic, and you'll get the picture. Stipulating their point for the purposes of argument, that makes the U.S. electorate 56% (liberals plus moderates) to 40% conservatives. Nixon's oft-quoted dictum was that Republican candidates always had to scurry to the center to contend in general elections. This year, primary-season contenders will have had to spend so much time in birtherland and Obama-ignored-Easterland that reclaiming a sufficient share of the center back from the president may be impossible.

The Anglican Muslim

Zuhdi Jasser is an Arizona doctor and Muslim who appears on television regularly to warn Americans about the dangers of Islamic radicalism, but without going far enough for those who favor anti-Islam jihad. T. A. Frank writes:

To those on the left, Jasser wants to deliver a wake-up message that danger is afoot. To those on the right, Jasser wants to say that Islam is perfectly compatible with modernity and mainstream American life. In short, he wants to stress that Islamism is a more serious threat than we think and a less serious threat than we think. Not surprisingly, the nuances of such a message come through with less than perfect clarity on Glenn Beck.

The end result is that Jasser is unpopular with basically everyone. Many Muslims reject his message, and so do most Americans on the left. On the right, those on the extremes are equally unfriendly. The virulently anti-Muslim commentator Debbie Schlussel, for instance, accuses Jasser of “saying the usual bullcrap, i.e., that Islam is a peaceful religion.”

Amid such warring camps, it’s hard to say anything useful. Jasser, for his part, believes that both his country and his fellow Muslims are better off for his efforts. I doubt it. There’s a balance between reaching out to skeptics and allowing oneself to be coopted, and Jasser seems to have negotiated this balance unsuccessfully. Still, while the path he has chosen is lonely and perhaps all wrong, it takes undeniable courage to walk it.

Glenn Scary Glenn's Off

Glenn Beck apologizes for comparing reform Judaism to radical Islam. Conservative Joe Scarborough says Beck is "losing it." Blogger and former Bush aide Peter Wehner calls him "the most disturbing personality on cable television."

The Price Of A Nuclear-Free Iran

It's easy to make fun of Glenn Beck for associating Shi'ite Muslims' longed-for messianic 12th imam with the Antichrist. Indeed it's easy to make fun of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad for longing for the 12th imam.

Theology aside, it's not so funny if Iran really is embarked on an apocalyptic project that involves using a nuclear weapon against Israel or anyone else. And yet there's also evidence that, Iran's fanatical-sounding front man notwithstanding, the Iranian government is engaged in rational decision-making about whether to build nukes at all.

As Richard Nixon used to say about the U.S. and Soviets, we have irreconcilable ide0logical differences with Iran. But that doesn't mean we can't make a deal. Because of the uncertainty Iran sows about its ultimate aims, we obviously can't permit it to have nuclear weapons. I'd rather be open for business now than at war in five years.

Needler And Thread

Is Glenn Beck using his TV pulpit to freight, um, weird LDS stuff?

Sugar Blues

Ross Douthat went to Glenn Beck's rally and had an experience that sounds a little like what it must've been like to go to the Iowa state fair in 1954:

It was a long festival of affirmation for middle-class white Christians — square, earnest, patriotic and religious. If a speaker had suddenly burst out with an Obama-esque “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” the message would have fit right in.

But whereas Obama wouldn’t have been Obama if he weren’t running for president, Beck’s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no “get thee to a voting booth” message. It blessed a particular way of life without burdening that blessing with the compromises of a campaign, or the disillusioning work of governance.

Let me boil all that down to its essence:

A festival..for middle-class white Christians...[which] blessed a particular way of life.

An event described like that doesn't need to be explicitly political to be a little ominous, especially when we have a black president whom many of these same folks (if we go by recent polls) think is pretending to be a Christian (thanks in part to Beck's own accusations) while secretly favoring the global triumph of Islamic law. The racial component loomed even larger on Saturday than it would have if Beck had not, inadvertently or not, chosen the anniversary of Dr. King's speech and if there hadn't been a largely African-American counter-demonstration going on nearby.

Also stressing the event's benignity, Reihan Salam put it this way:

They don’t feel as though their values are reflected by the country’s economic and political elite, and they worry about losing their economic and cultural autonomy, sensing that the further centralization of power will hurt rather than help that cause, a premise we can’t expect committed social democrats to understand.

If so, I wish Beck and Sarah Palin had actually made it political, or at least policy, by giving a three-hour seminar on marginal tax rates and the dangers of ballooning deficits and galloping federal growth. From Jane Mayer's New Yorker article about the libertarian sugar daddies who are sweetening the Tea Party, we learn that there's a rational motive behind all this, namely lower tax rates and less growth-stultifying regulation for the sugar daddies. I can understand that and, to a certain pragmatic moderate centrist extent, applaud it. But when policy preferences come cleverly hidden behind racial semiotics, no matter how gosh-darn middle America cuddly it may look on the surface, we're not going in a good direction or having the useful debate the country needs and deserves.

Transformers II

The New York Times this morning, in an article about Glenn Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally:

[Sarah Palin] said she was asked not to focus on politics but did say, in a veiled reference to Mr. Obama, “We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want; we must restore America and restore her honor.”

Veiled? Not really. The Times also reported this morning in an article about President Obama as commander in chief:

Where George W. Bush saw the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as his central mission and opportunities to transform critical regions, Mr. Obama sees them as “problems that need managing,” as one adviser put it, while he pursues his mission of transforming America.

The second article, carefully reported by Peter Baker, brings to mind President Johnson's error of fighting the Vietnam war "on the the political cheap," as Norman Podhoretz famously said, because he didn't want it to sap the energy of his own ambitious and transformative domestic initiatives. His misjudgment cost him his presidency and helped deliver a poorly conceived and conducted war to Richard Nixon's doorstep. While Vietnam was a much larger commitment, Obama runs a comparable risk by trying to keep Iraq and now Afghanistan from consuming too much of his and voters' attention. For one thing, as Baker makes clear, his approach has contributed to the military's skepticism about their commander in chief:

The schisms among his team...are born in part out of uncertainty about his true commitment. His reticence to talk much publicly about the wars may owe to the political costs of alienating his base as well as the demands of other issues. Senior Pentagon and military officials said they understood that he presided over a troubled economy, but noted that he was not losing 30 American soldiers a month on Wall Street.

Obama's understandable and perhaps justifiable ambivalence about the the wisdom of continuing and expanding the Afghanistan war, so abundantly on display during last autumn's agonizing reappraisal, may persist. And yet Obama insists not. This part of Baker's article is riveting, because it reveals our sometimes stoic-seeming president's humanity as well as his Johnsonesque unwillingness to choose between guns and butter:

Last year, he flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet soldiers’ coffins. During a later meeting with advisers, Mr. Obama expressed irritation at doubters of his commitment. “If I didn’t think this was something worth doing,” he said, “one trip to Dover would be enough to cause me to bring every soldier home. O.K.?”

Dueling Hypocrisies

Charles M. Blow writes today:

I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.

He really doesn't find it curious. He's a smart guy, so he understands it completely. Reverse the polarities in his condemnation of hypocrisy -- challenge the Glenn Beck critics who aren't upset about the cultural center and mosque -- and you take in a category of liberal-minded people like Charles M. Blow and get yet another reminder of the persistent and sometimes exhausting divides over what's sacred in our civic life.

That's why the Constitution comes in so handy, preserving Beck's right to speak and Muslims' to worship where they choose. How upset people get about those freely exercised rights is a different question. I find I'm upset about neither. I'll add that I'm squishy on neither the threat of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism nor the saintly heroism of Dr. King.

Or We Could Just Get Over Ourselves

Republican leaders think there shouldn't be a mosque near the World Trade Center because of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Civil rights leaders think Glenn Beck shouldn't have a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28 because of what happened on Aug. 28, 1963.

Hoffman's Fault!

Glenn Beck:

And you win by three points? That's a victory? You've double‑teamed an accountant and you only won by three points. Boy, you guys are good... That's like the Yankees playing a high school team and winning by three runs. Oh, wow!

Tell Laura They Love Her (After All)

Surveying the right's underwhelming reaction to the legalization of gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont, Frank Rich at the New York Times detects a sea change:

On the right, the restrained response was striking. Fox barely mentioned the subject; its rising-star demagogue, Glenn Beck, while still dismissing same-sex marriage, went so far as to “celebrate what happened in Vermont” because “instead of the courts making a decision, the people did.” Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the self-help media star once notorious for portraying homosexuality as “a biological error” and a gateway to pedophilia, told CNN’s Larry King that she now views committed gay relationships as “a beautiful thing and a healthy thing.” In The New York Post, the invariably witty and invariably conservative writer Kyle Smith demolished a Maggie Gallagher screed published in National Review and wondered whether her errant arguments against gay equality were “something else in disguise.”

More startling still was the abrupt about-face of the Rev. Rick Warren, the hugely popular megachurch leader whose endorsement last year of Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, had roiled his appearance at the Obama inaugural. Warren also dropped in on Larry King to declare that he had “never” been and “never will be” an “anti-gay-marriage activist.” This was an unmistakable slap at the National Organization for Marriage, which lavished far more money on Proposition 8 than even James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.