If It Acts Like A Nation...

...perhaps Palestine might not have to wait as long as some peace talk skeptics fear to be a nation.

Nixon Blues

Photo by Monica Almeida/New York Times

Adam Nagourney's article in the New York Times about demographic changes and their political impact in Orange County, California stresses deepening ethnic diversity and a decline in GOP registration. The first odd thing about the article is its photo of white people behaving awkwardly at a blues festival in Irvine, which fails to illustrate the new ethnic reality nor indeed anything about politics.

Odder still is the headline: "Orange County Is No Longer Nixon Country." That's really old news. Since the presidential election of 1980, it's been Reagan country, in recognition of the insurgent who had battled Nixon for the nomination in 1968, savaged Nixon's foreign policy co-architect Henry Kissinger, and set the stage for winning the presidency by running a bruising primary campaign against Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, in 1976.

For years the big Orange has been Reagan red in a blue state, with Yorba Linda showing about nine acres of purple. When I was director of the Nixon library foundation from 1990 to 2009, doctrinaire local conservatives called me out for such Nixon policies as wages and price controls and the abandonment of the gold standard (for which Jack Kemp genially denounced me) and the creation of the EPA. The former editor of the Orange County Register's libertarian-leaning editorial page, Ken Grubbs, once told me that my library predecessor, ex-Nixon aide Hugh Hewitt, was a "heterodox conservative." What the heresy was, he didn't say. But influential Orange County Reaganites could rattle off an endless list of Nixonian detours from the Way.

You could say Orange County was episodically Nixon country in 1960, 1968, and 1972, when it went for the Yorba Lindan for president. But the conservative vs. centrist GOP divide was evident even then. In 1962, some relatively moderate Republicans such as the late Arnold Beckman and Bob Beaver banded together to create the Lincoln Club, which, Beaver told me during long conversations in his Fullerton family room, had as its mission "to get the crazies under control" and promote Republican candidates who could win general elections. In Beaver's view, the crazy-in-chief was the late Joe Shell, who called liberals socialists (sound familiar?) and battled Nixon for the GOP nomination to run for governor in 1962. Shell said it was the other way around, that Nixon was the race's richard-come-lately. His partisans argued that his impact on Nixon's November loss was overrated. Be that as it may, Nixon always believed Shell had hurt him. He was a founding Lincoln Club member and kept up his dues.

But by the 1990s, the Lincolnites were firmly ensconced in Reagan country, where they remain, and then some. The club's Sept. 2 speaker is former Rep. Dick Armey, chair of FreedomWorks, which stirs plenty of sugar into the Tea Party. As the Lincoln Club turned right, some local moderates created a competing organization, the New Majority, that abhorred "litmus tests" (as in Supreme Court nominees' positions on abortion) and what it called the exclusion of women and minorities. One of the group's key founders told me, "We got tired of our wives complaining about the pro-life movement's total dominance of the Republican Party." Of course they wanted winning candidates who might lower their taxes, too. With the U.S. right now tilting libertarian as opposed to Falwellian, the New Majority may have lost some of its motivation. The organization's anemic Orange County web page features an address by that promoter of multiple family values himself, Newt Gingrich, but it's three years old.

So there's no doubt that the Orange County GOP has left Nixon behind. It happened 30 years ago. But the tendency of our community as a whole is firmly in the direction of the broad, centrist terrain he inhabited as a policymaker and tactician. Yes, Orange County's changing. But the road to Obama country, if the OC ever makes it that far, still passes through Yorba Linda.

Empty Hot Seat

Ali Abunimah (who advocates a one- rather than two-state solution in the Middle East):

No serious analyst believes that peace can be made between Palestinians and Israelis without Hamas on board, any more than could have been the case in Northern Ireland without Sinn Fein and the I.R.A.

The Heart Of A Peacemaker

This LA Times analysis makes clear that the new round of Middle East peace talks that begins this week in Washington is the direct result of President Obama's willingness to run a substantial personal political risk. Hear, hear.

New Life, Again And Again

A fifth of the American people may believe Obama's a Muslim, but a fourth believe in reincarnation.

High Lonesome Trio

Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris performing in 1987. "Those Memories of You" is by Pam Tillis.

Like Confining God To Sundays

Photo by Tom Sewell/LA Times

Our very green sprout of an incoming U.S. poet laureate, M. W. Merwin, interviewed at his home in Maui by Dean Kuipers, discusses the ecology of the imagination:

Merwin spends his afternoons in the muck of the streambed, and when his famously elliptical poetry arrives, he jots it on an envelope or in a spiral notebook.

"I've never believed that the imagination, the thing that made poems, is separate from the rest of life at all. It's a part of it," Merwin says. "But we have a tradition as a society that is saying the rest of life is there purely for us to exploit without any concern about the consequences of it. It's very short-term and in my view it's suicidal."

Yessiree...

...but no ma'am.

And Obama Says The Left's Giving Him Trouble

The elbows on the flanks are a lot sharper in the Middle East. Palestinian President Abbas is under such pressure from Hamas that he's saying the peace talks could die aborning if West Bank settlements continue. And way over on the Israeli right, the AP reports:

The spiritual leader of one of the hard-line parties in Netanyahu's coalition caused a stir by saying in his weekly Sabbath sermon that the Palestinians and Abbas should "perish from the world."

Of all people to be using "final solution" language...

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.?”