After listening to these autobiographical excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, read out loud by Obama himself, I’m left with the conviction that, in the 2008 election we are facing the mother of all cultural battles. ~Stanley Kurtz

This is one thing, and probably the only thing, that Kurtz and I can agree on.  The campaign seems primed to be more divisive and contentious than usual because the two campaigns are so heavily dependent on the symbolism of each candidate’s biographies, and so they are bound up with all of the cultural arguments that each candidate’s personal associations bring to mind.  The culture clash will be intense (to some extent, it already is), and its expressions will be particularly harsh because they will be targeting the candidates personally.  As I said last month:

The problem with candidacies defined so completely by biography, as Obama and McCain’s candidacies clearly are, is that everything in a candidate’s biography then becomes more or less fair game, and the political incentives for using the candidate’s family and friends to attack him become very great.  Far from having the most high-minded and respectful campaign in memory between two media darlings, we are probably about to embark on one that will be remembered for its bitterness and the sheer volume of third-party personal attacks made, because it is precisely in the candidates’ integrity and biography that their electoral strength resides.

It seems to me that Dionne’s claim that the culture wars are coming to a close in this cycle is an example of the kind of error that political writers, including myself, make often enough: we very much want some major change to happen or disappear (or sometimes we fear a change, but also welcome it because it validates our critique of the status quo), and so we think we have found evidence that it is happening or disappearing.  In my view, this is what pro-war advocates of the “surge” have done almost since the beginning of 2007, and it is what supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” do whenever they see a restrictionist lose an election (meanwhile they conveniently overlook the massive popular opposition to their legislation).  Sager posits that the GOP is not “libertarian” enough, and holds that this is the reason why the GOP is failing in the West without ever looking beyond what he wants to see.  Some liberals will predict, or rather express the hope, that the “Religious Right” is dying, evangelicals are abandoning the right, and so on.  They very much want this to be true, and when they discover that it isn’t you get complaints about it, such as What’s the Matter with Kansas?  Meanwhile, the liberals raising alarms about theocracy are making a different, but related error: because they have feared religious conservatives for decades, they need to talk about sinister developments that they can blame on religious conservatives and so justify their increasingly unhinged fear of these people. 

For my part, I was telling anyone who would listen for all of 2007 and part of this year that the war would doom the GOP, because I was sure that something so profoundly wrong had to cost the GOP a chance at the White House, and yet McCain, the ueber-hawk, is the Republican nominee and is doing just fine in the polls.  I kept forgetting that openly antiwar candidates simply haven’t won presidential elections while there is an ongoing war, and for the most part you don’t have many examples of openly antiwar candidates running for President in these circumstances.  Nonetheless, McClellan and McGovern both lost in landslide defeats.  Now it is true that Iraq is unusually unpopular, and more unpopular at this stage of the war than Vietnam, so this might be the year when that changes, but it doesn’t seem to be happening as I expected.  As I have said before, arguments over Vietnam, like arguments over Iraq, are not simply arguments over a military campaign overseas.  If they were, cost-benefit analysis and simple pragmatism would offer the obvious course of action: get out and get out now.  National polling shows that two-thirds of the country want us out within two years, but this obscures the fact that disapproving of the war does not mean that all the current opponents of the war embrace a thoroughgoing antiwar narrative; many of them certainly would not share my characterisations of the war as immoral and illegal.  So, instead of being arguments about policy, they are arguments about “values” and American identity.  Simply put, the party that has tended to be antiwar during the last 36 years has also been the party on the losing side of these other arguments, even when they have been right on the policy question, and so they have lost time after time in presidential elections where these arguments are most powerful.  An Obama-McCain contest will be an almost perfect test of this proposition.

Update: Let me clarify this last paragraph.  When voters are asked a simple question about whether they approve/disapprove of the war, there is a huge majority that disapproves.  Where I have erred is to mistake that huge majority of disapproving voters, or even a huge majority that wants withdrawal of most forces within two years, to be an indication of an inevitable rejection of the party and candidate who argues for continuing the war.  As a strict matter of policy and pragmatism, you would, or at least I would, think that the 65% or so who want us out within two years would not back McCain, since he proposes to do the exact opposite of what they say they want.  This is where the question of “values” comes in.  This operates on a few levels.  The first is the problem that antiwar candidates keep running up against, which is that they are smeared and attacked for lacking in patriotism or being anti-American; they are necessarily in a difficult position, because they very actively criticise the government, which their opponents manipulate and twist into an attack on the country itself.  So even though it is almost always an outrageous lie that the antiwar candidate is “anti-American,” if this lie is repeated often enough then enough voters get the impression that they would be backing someone who is not patriotic if they voted for him.  This is absolute garbage, but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that garbage doesn’t have an effect in politics.  Then there is a question of stopping an ongoing war, even when a majority agrees that it has not been worth it and was a mistake.  Huckabee got a lot of mileage out of talking about national honour, and McCain talks about it all the time, and this is a subject that can be very readily demagogued to the disadvantage of the antiwar candidate, as if it dishonoured veterans and war dead to end a futile and unnecessary war.  It is appalling that people who support the initiation of aggressive war can talk about honour with a straight face, but they get away with it.  Then there is another, more incidental matter of conflicting “values,” and this is where the foreign policy debate and what we conventionally think of as the culture wars intersect: with some notable exceptions on the right, antiwar voters are overwhelmingly on the cultural, as well the political, left, and so being antiwar has become conventionally identified not just with being on the left politically but also culturally.  Therefore, antiwar candidates are associated with the baggage of the cultural left even if they personally reject it. 

Thus the Middle American candidate who said, “Come home, America,” was tarred as the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.”  Now, obviously, Obama is not McGovern, as I have said many times.  You cannot imagine him saying, “Come home, America,” but he is still being targeted with the same kinds of smears.  It is happening again.  So when I say that the argument isn’t about policy, but about “values” and identity, it is to these factors that I’m referring.  This is why McCain’s first general election ad is almost entirely free of any policy-related material and is extremely heavy on symbolism and efforts to manipulate the audience’s patriotism to McCain’s advantage.  That is why the voice in the ad asks, “What must a President believe about us?  About America?”  This is the language of a litmus test, and it is a litmus test of the candidate’s Americanism.  This is unfortunately how pro-war candidates win.  If the election were about Iraq, the GOP would be blown away, which is why they are making arguments about the war into an argument about the definition of America and a referendum on Americanism.  This is very depressing development.  This is a reality of American politics that I had successfully ignored in the past, but it can’t be ignored for long.

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