Playing the Expectations Game

Slate for April 22 has yet another headline referring to the torture of detainees by various intelligence agencies. Speaking of intelligence, it is an article of faith on the liberal side of the free press that the Bush Administration didn't have any. There is a real problem for the anti-Bush group in how to portray W and his cronies as the worst threat to American liberties since George III, while also making clear that the Bushites were stupid, incompetent, and unqualified for their high positions.

Today's torture story synchs up with that image, and that's why it will be persuasive to many people. The assertion is made that before they adopted the program of harsh interrogation, the Bush people didn't do their homework. They didn't realize that some of these tactics were defined as torture in government manuals, they didn't realize that people had been prosecuted for engaging in some of them, and they even know that our training program was designed to render them ineffective - so how could they work on Al Qaeda?

Actually, there isn't enough "there" there to make that last point. After the Korean War, when it became obvious that a lot of American soldiers succumbed to torture, the military began counter-interrogation training. What we don't know is whether it was actually any good, or whether other countries adopted similar programs. Now, if John McCain is an example, the Vietnam-era military may have stood up to torture better than their predecessors in Korea. On the other hand, McCain was regarded as exceptionally heroic, he was an officer, he came from a naval family ... maybe we cannot generalize from his case.

Anyway, there is more to come of this story.

Republican Depression

I've been visiting a few Web sites on the Republican side of the fence. While there's a lot of energy on blogs like The Daily Kos, many conservatives are writing articles with titles like: "Six Things McCain Should Do to Salvage His Campaign," "There May Still Be Hope for McCain," "Oh, God! It's Going to Be a Disaster!" Well, not that last one. Here's an example by the well known and prolific Victor Davis Hanson, who frequently contributes to Commentary.

Hanson is saying that the supposed "nastiness" of McCain's campaign is merely an excuse for former supporters, or potential supporters, or people who might be expected to be supporters, to distance themselves from a losing cause. Maybe he's right, but I think there's more to it than that.

McCain likes it best when he's talking about national security. He's not an expert on economic matters, despite years on the Senate Commerce Committee, and he's not comfortable talking about the economy. Even so, he has economic advisers, he has speechwriters, he knows people who do know about the economy: So why hasn't he been able to articulate some kind of compelling, large-scale plan for dealing with the economy? I think that there are a couple of possible answers.

1) McCain is so ignorant of economic matters, and so uncomfortable discussing them, that he and his advisers are afraid to have him try to articulate a complex plan in public. I don't think this is really it, because he does know how to use a Tele-Prompter, but maybe it is. In which case, I'd really worry about how President McCain would deal with issues outside his comfort zone.

2) All of the plans his advisers have come up with would anger some constituent group. This is a possibility. You will have noted that both he and Senator Obama have dodged questions about what programs they'd have to cut, which promises they'd have to break, and which groups would have to suffer, because of the cost of the economic rescue plan. It's also obvious that some of McCain's supporters are really unhappy about "socialism," and here's McCain himself proposing that the government become the biggest mortgage banker in the country.

In any event, I think, pace Hanson, that some people are genuinely turned off by the negative tone of the McCain campaign. (They don't like negatives from Obama, either, but he's ahead, so he's doing less of that.) Moreover, it demonstrates a paucity of ideas relevant to popular concerns. That is, if McCain had a really good answer on the economy, he'd be pushing it instead of going negative. That he and Governor Palin are spending so much time attacking Senator Obama and his positions, serves as a marker that they don't have good proposals of their own.