The collapse of even watered-down versions of Marxism has fruitfully pushed a number of leftist British intellectuals into a reconsideration of Adam Smith. The publication in 2001 of Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment set off a flurry of efforts to reclaim Adam Smith from “the Right.” Rothschild rightly saw that Smith was far from the caricature of a heartless demonic elitist so dear to left wing prayer books. Three years later, Gareth Stedman Jones followed up with his book An End to Poverty, which applauded Smith for his anti-statism.

Now, according to January 18 TLS, new books on Smith have entered the lists. Two of them—Ian McLean ‘s Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian and Gavin Kennedy’s Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy—try with a less than scholarly touch to claim Smith for New Labor. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a Scotsman, has written the introduction to the MacLean volume. Brown, playing up the Scottish card, claims that “Coming from Kirkcaldy as Adam Smith did, I have come to understand that his (1776) Wealth of Nations, was underpinned by his (1759) Theory of Moral Sentiments” which saw “neighborliness” as crucial to mitigating the underside of economic competition. By this Brown, following McLean, argues that Smith was as much a theorist of social justice as an economist.

Taken in a Tocquevillian light this might seem innocuous. But, in the name of “neighborliness,” MacLean and Brown want if not to replace then at least to displace “the invisible hand” of markets with the “helping hand” of the state. This argument, depending on how you look at it, is either a hypocritical perversion of Smith or a thoughtful means of reconciling British leftists to global competition.

An answer, of sorts to Brown, comes from the Tory’s shadow chancellor George Osborne in his introduction to a new edition of The Wealth of Nations. Osborne sees Smith as the definitive answer to the shapeless anti-market ideology of the anti-globalization movement which has no positive program but is skilled at playing Cassandra. Osborne accurately sees economic nationalism as the road to perdition. But invoking Smith is scant guide for how either the Brits or the Americans should respond to the neo-mercantilist sovereign wealth funds of China and some of the Gulf States which invest politically in open societies while closing their own borders to foreigners.

Smith who was a moral ironist would no doubt be amused at the attempt by contemporary British politicians to enlist his writings in their causes. He once, after all, define an elected official as “that insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuation of affairs.”

In Florida, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are in a virtual tie heading into the January 29th winner take-all GOP primary. But I would have never known that from talking to people during my trip to Florida last week. That’s because my ambit extended no further than Fort Lauderdale to Boca Raton along the Atlantic coast, an area that’s heavily settled by pro-Rudy people from the New York Metropolitan area. Giuliani will do very well in this heavily Jewish area as there are even Democrats who have switched their registration to the GOP to support him. And he has support further south where refugees from Castro and other Latin American thugs are drawn to both Giuliani and McCain. But it’s not clear how well he will do in the other Floridas, such as the central Florida farming areas, the Tampa-Orlando tourism and high-tech corridor, and the northern tier with close ties to the military that stretches from Jacksonville on the Atlantic to Pensacola snuggled up against Alabama on the Gulf Coast. McCain has ties to this northern tier. He trained in Pensacola and his family spent his years of captivity in Jacksonville. Huckabee has a strong network of Christian support on the Florida Panhandle and Romney has a natural affinity with the Republican business community.

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The Hillary/Obama race vs. gender dustup has just given the country a taste of why the Democratic Party spent so many years in the wilderness. The game of competitive victimization reminds swing voters in general and white men in particular why the Democrats can be problematic.

The night of her unexpected New Hampshire victory on the basis of a strong turnout from blue collar female voters, the press began to explain away the polls that had pointed to an Obama landslide by referring to “the Bradley effect.” That refers to the experience in Los Angeles where Tom Bradley, L.A.’s first African-American mayor, who did far better in public opinion polls than at the ballot box where he failed to win the governorship in 1982. The thesis was that white voters, not wanting to appear racist are reluctant to tell pollster about how they truly feel about black candidates. The implication–laid out without clear evidence by Andrew Kohut, a pollster for the Pew Research Center and picked up by the likes of Maureen Dowd–was that Clinton won on the basis of the racism of lower-middle-class whites.

This is something the many Obama admirers in the press picked up and ran with. The problem, as John Judis shows in a detailed New Republic piece, is that “Obama’s support among New Hampshire Democrats without college degrees slightly increased from the pre-election poll to the exit poll.” Clinton’s late gains, Judis notes came from well educated women who might well have been responding to the now famous incident in a dinner where the former First Lady seemed to tear up under the weight on being doubled teamed by Obama and Edwards.

And that’s when matters began to heat up. People around the Obama campaign, though not the candidate himself, suggested that Clinton had played on her supposed victimization as a woman, to win an election driven by economic anxieties. Obama in this view had been victimized by both his race and his gender. As for race; the supposed “Bradley effect” as well as statements by Bill and Hillary which may or may not have had double meanings regarding Lyndon Johnson’s role in achievements of the Civil Rights Era and the constancy of Obama position on Iraq have led to implausible accusations of racial insensitivity on the part of the Clintons.

In the short run, this is good news for the Obama campaign which has done its best to keep its fingerprints off the matches being lit by the press but stands to benefit greatly in the upcoming South Carolina primary if the accusation shift African-American voters away from Hillary Clinton.

On one level none of this hair-trigger “sensitivity” should be taken too seriously. All the parties involved are marvels at playing double games. A practical effect of the race versus gender game may be increased pressure on Hillary Clinton to choose Obama as her running mate should she win the nomination. But it raises the issue of whether Americans who are neither black nor female will be allowed to ask serious question about the two leading Democratic candidates without potential accusation of bias of one sort or another.

The Barack Obama phenomenon puzzles me. I recognize that he is a handsome, articulate politician who seems, for the moment at least, to have the capacity to square circles. In recent months I’ve asked my students and former students, who are exceptionally thoughtful young people, whom they were supporting for president. Roughly three-quarters of them, including some who described themselves as independents or Republicans, support Obama, almost all with enthusiasm.

When I asked why they liked him, their responses, even from those who were articulate, were almost all vague. Race played some role in their views, but it didn’t seem to be primary. Mostly they told me about their disdain for both President Bush and the Democratic Congress, and the need for “change,” with little elaboration as to what that change would be.

What’s odd is that I get the same leap of faith with no clear basis of support from older and in some cases politically savvy and highly intelligent people. With these older folk, not all of whom are liberal, neither Obama’s lack of achievements, nor his woolly foreign policy statements, nor dubious episodes in his career such as his infatuation with a Black Nationalist minister and involvements with shady Chicago characters has any effect. I’ve had a half-dozen variants of the following conversation:

Usually Thoughtful Friend: “Obama has big ideas.”

Fred: “What are these ideas?”

Friend: “He’s a very bright guy who went to Columbia and Harvard.”

Fred: “Again, what are these ideas?”

Friend: “Diplomacy and civility are important.”

Fred: “Who would argue with that?”

Friend: “I can’t explain it, he’s just got something.”

If I continue to press, what I’m told, in a tone of voice suggesting that there’s an unspoken consensus on the subject, is that “this election is about character and personality.” If they’re Bush critics, I ask, “But isn’t that what W ran on in 2000? “Yes,” comes back the answer, “but this is different.”

So what’s this all about? Some of it is that Obama represents an opportunity to ditch Hillary now that Dems think they’ve found a better horse. But for those I’ve talked to who are older partisan Democrats who’ve reconciled themselves to the loss of white middle class male voters, Obama’s appeal in part is that he incarnates the Democratic Party. He is both a highly educated member of the upper middle class and a half-minority. As one of my acquaintances put it, referring to the way Obama blends an educated articulation of policy positions with the uplifting cadences of the African-American preacher: “Who better to represent us?” Some continue: “Who better to heal our racial wounds?” When I press them on this point, explaining that I live in the most racially diverse neighborhood in the U.S. and that I’m not looking for a priestly President who can absolve me of my sins, I’m told that such absolution is a good thing—whether I want it or not.

Among the younger people I’ve talked to, he draws adulation from both starry-eyed young liberals and those who see him as beyond partisan politics. That’s an impressive feat, a tribute to his ability to project an image of rectitude unsullied by the ordinary trench warfare of politics. But there is a two part question that seems to stop all of the Obama admirers, young or old, that I’ve talked to in their tracks. Can he, I ask, govern? Could he be a commander in chief? The most common reactions, I get is “that’s beside the point,” or “I’m not sure,” or “I haven’t thought about that,” or “you’ve got a point, but . . . .” The election to date—with Huckabee as Obama’s GOP counterpart—is turning into an episode of American Idol where the performance is the thing, albeit with a religious twist.

There’s a good deal to agree with in John’s post on the Bloomberg presidential candidacy. His characterization of the politically “ambiguous coloration” of the pols and former pols gathering in Oklahoma is apt. It should be added that they’re all former big-time political players who, having been sidelined, would be given a chance to return to center stage by way of a Bloomberg candidacy. Bloomberg, with their backing, wouldn’t have to win, but would only have to help reframe the political agenda to provide himself and his backers with moral victory—money being no object.

Fundamental to John’s argument is the fact that political participation is up and thus post-partisanship will have no appeal. But look at matters through Bloomberg’s eyes. Suppose that by February 6, when more than half of the delegates have been chosen, the nominees are Huckabee and Obama; the former unacceptable to large sections of his own party, the latter who, having never run so much as a candy store, has a record that makes John Kerry’s look impressive. Then both parties, with the election ten months away, will suffer from a splenetic outpouring of buyer’s remorse. (This at a time when less that 30 percent of the country has a positive sense of either the GOP President or the Democratic Congress.)

Many independents and weak partisans—to judge from poll numbers that find that 58 percent of the electorate thinks it is “very important” that the next President be able to cross party lines to work with political opponents—may look on both Huckabee and Obama as the products of a hyper-polarized political process that has failed. Bloomberg, sheltered for the past four years by a financial services boom that has come to an end and a very friendly local press, would find such opponents irresistible. But the outcome could surprise people.

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When someone argues for moral equivalency between the American government and Al Qaeda and suggests Bush is leading America toward fascism, we tend to assume the person is a leftist. But those same views are widely shared by parts of the libertarian right.

This isn’t entirely new: in the 1930’s the pro-communist left and the isolationist right both decried Roosevelt as a fascist war-mongerer. In the 1960’s both the New Right and New Left were sure that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was the incarnation of “friendly fascism.” The common thread was that both the anarcho-libertarians of Young Americans for Freedom and the anarcho-socialists of The Students for a Democratic Society saw the compromises of politics and the bureaucracies associated with governments as the spawn of soul-slaying managerialism. They (like Ron Paul) both adored Randolph Bourne, the American critic of WWI, entirely unaware of the appeal German romanticism and proto-fascism had for him. You could hear those common chords in Tim Russert’s interview with Ron Paul on Meet the Press this past Sunday:

MR. RUSSERT: But let me go back to this ad. You do not believe that Mike Huckabee, that ad commercial represents the potential of fascism in the form of a cross.

REP. PAUL: No. But I think this country, a movement in the last 100 years, is moving toward fascism. Fascism today, the softer term, because people have different definition of fascism, is corporatism when the military industrial complex runs the show, when the—in the name of security pay—pass the Patriot Act. You don’t vote for it, you know, you’re not patriotic America. If you don’t support the troops and you don’t support—if you don’t support the war you don’t support the troops. It’s that kind of antagonism. But we have more corporatism and more abuse of our civil liberties, more loss of our privacy, national ID cards, all this stuff coming has a fascist tone to it. And the country’s moving in that direction. That’s what I’m thinking about. This was not personalized. I never even used my opponents names if you, if you notice.

MR. RUSSERT: So you think we’re close to fascism?

REP. PAUL: I think we’re approaching it very close. One—there’s one, there’s one documentary that’s been put out recently that has generated a lot of interest called “Freedom to Fascism.” And we’re moving in that direction. Were not moving toward Hitler-type fascism, but we’re moving toward a softer fascism. Loss of civil liberties, corporations running the show, big government in bed with big business. So you have the military industrial complex, you have the medical industrial complex, you have the financial industry, you have the communications industry. They go to Washington and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s where the control is. I call that a soft form of fascism, something that is very dangerous.

Paul, the provincial, is as blissfully unaware of the history of 1300 years of Jihad as the Daily Kos and most of its readers. Here’s his exchange with Russert on Al-Qaeda:

MR. RUSSERT: It sounds like you think that the problem is al-Qaeda—the problem is the United States, not al-Qaeda.

REP. PAUL: No, it’s both. It’s both—al-Qaeda becomes violent. It’s sort of like if you step in a snake pit and you get bit, you know, who caused the trouble? Because you stepped in the snake pit or because snakes bite you? So I think you have to understand both. But why, why produce the incentive for these violent, vicious thugs to want to come here and kill us.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think there’s an ideological struggle that Islamic fascists want to take over the world?

REP. PAUL: Oh, I think some, just like the West is wanting to do that all the time. Look at the way they look at us. I mean, we’re in a, we’re in a 130 countries. We have 700 bases. How do you think they proposed that to their people, saying “What does America want to do? Are they over here to be nice to us and teach us how to be good democrats?”

MR. RUSSERT: So you see a moral equivalency between the West and Islamic fascism.

REP. PAUL: For some people, some radicals on each side that when we impose our will with force by a few number of people—not the American people—I’m talking the people who have hijacked our foreign policy, the people who took George Bush’s foreign policy of a humble foreign policy and turned it into one of nation-building which he complained about.

But for all the similarities between the heirs of the New Right and the New Left, Paul, a Texan still carries some burden peculiar to right-wing libertarians. Abe Lincoln is a very bad guy, the father of Leviathan state that’s lead to today’s incipient (it’s always incipient) fascism. And while there are and have been card-carrying left-liberal Lincoln haters (Gore Vidal, John Updike, and Edmund Wilson, to name a few) this is largely an affectation of the right. Paul, unaware that Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1888 and Saudi Arabia till 1962, had the following exchange with Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. “According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery.”

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn’t have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the—that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We’d still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I’m advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn’t sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

Still, for all their similarities, the heirs of the New Right and the New Left do have some fundamental differences. In part because the leftists are afraid that we will pollute the world with our capitalist-liberal democratic ideals, while the rightists are worried that the rest of the world will pollute our founding traditions with statist and socialist effects. But the common bottom line is neo-isolationism.

Mike Huckabee’s durability is built on more than his religious appeal. The former governor is also tapping into the country’s economic anxieties. As yesterday’s Wall Street Journal explained, “On the eve of the election year, Americans are displaying increasingly severe doubts about the nation’s economic engagement with the rest of the world.” Attitudes toward even legal immigration, often a bellwether of public sentiment, are turning negative. A new Journal poll found that as recently as this past June voters were almost evenly split over whether immigration helps more than it hurts the country. Now, according to the article,

a large majority says immigration hurts more than it helps. According to the poll, 52 percent said immigration hurts the country more than it helps, with only 39 percent seeing immigration having a positive contribution.

A decade ago voters had a slightly negative of the internationalization of the American economy. Today only 28 percent view it positively and again support comes largely from managers and professionals. Add to this growing concerns over the seemingly ineluctable increases in inequality, and it’s clear that there’s an opening for a populist candidate (just not John Edwards).

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The Democratic National Committee has nicknamed Huckabee “glass jaw.” They’re convinced that he would be “roadkill” in the general election. I agree. But a column by Jim Pinkerton, one of our best political writers, forced me to take a second look at my thinking.

Pinkerton, who worked in the 1980 GOP general election campaign, rightly remembers Democratic “politicos insisting that Reagan was the weakest Republican opponent that Jimmy Carter could face as he sought re-election that year.” Pinkerton also notes that candidates from the landlocked heartland—such as Huckabee of Arkansas—are generally far stronger in November than are candidates from the coasts or Great Lakes states, such as Hillary and Obama. This too is true.

But Jim goes on to argue that Huckabee could carry all the states that Bush won in 2004. And that’s where the case for Huckabee goes awry. The national trends are moving strongly against the Republican Party, which is losing ground with increasingly libertarian younger voters, Latinos, independents, and moderate and fiscally conservative Republicans. In 2004 Bush carried six states—Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico—with 52 percent or less of the electorate, which equaled 73 electoral votes. Add in Virginia, which Bush carried with 54 percent but is currently trending blue, and you get 86 electoral votes. If you add these to the 252 electoral votes Kerry received, none of which are in jeopardy from a Huckabee candidacy, you get an outcome in 2008 in which the Democrats win handily 338 to the Republicans’ 200 electoral votes, taking scores of state and local Republicans down with them.

Or to put it in different terms, a Huckabee candidacy would mean that the GOP had failed to learn the lessons of 2006. In that year, the base came out for the Republicans who lost badly anyway, because swing voters and GOP moderates deserted them in droves. Nothing since then has pushed these voters back into the Republican column. I predict that if the GOP insists on nominating yet another religiously-oriented “compassionate conservative” in 2008, it can expect to turn over a sizable majority of the House and a possibly veto-proof majority in the Senate to the new Democratic President.

Mike Huckabee, at 52, and Barack Obama, at 46, are the youngsters in their respective primaries. Both present themselves as breaking with the conventional hyper-partisan politics that emerged from the 1960’s and has intensified in the last decade. But both also represent a return to one of its most politically debilitating themes—the cult of authenticity. The ideological hothouse of the Iowa caucuses have unintentionally, though not accidentally, recreated the fervor for authenticity that found its home in both the New Right and the New Left.

Who could be more authentically representative of Rove-era Republicanism than Mike Huckabee, a pioneer-stock evangelical Baptist who wants to reclaim Americans for Christ? In Huckabee’s words: “I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”

This clearly has a considerable appeal in the Iowa caucuses, where upwards of 40 percent of the participants are themselves Evangelicals. As of now Huckabee, whose affability and quick wit make him an appealing figure, has a two-to-one lead over his nearest rival, Mitt Romney. (Huckabee took a jab at Romney’s inauthenticity on cultural issues when he insisted that social conservatives need a candidate who speaks “the language of Zion as a mother tongue.”) But as the 2006 elections made clear, this is not the kind of platform likely to be able to create the broad coalition necessary to win a presidential majority.

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Speculation is swirling about who tipped off Ben Smith of the Politico about the peculiar methods used to bill police protection for then Mayor Giuliani when he, though still married, was visiting his girlfriend Judith Nathan in the Hamptons. Was it Fran Reiter, a former Giuliani Deputy Mayor now working for the Hillary Clinton campaign? Was it New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson hoping to help his fellow Democrats? Was it former Governor George Pataki, who was either at odds with or overshadowed by Giuliani when both were in office? If this has the look of an Agatha Christie plot, where a dozen suspects all have good motives, that’s because Giuliani’s path to success was paved with the numerous enemies he made turning New York around and advancing his own ambitions.

The Politico article was not a dirty trick as Giuliani told Katie Couric, but it was a hit piece. It’s been followed in short order by another in the form of a front-page New York Times article suggesting that Giuliani sometimes exaggerates the numbers he uses to describe his successes. STOP THE PRESSES—A POLITICIAN WHO EXAGGERATES! How does this distinguish Giuliani from other politicians? Well, says the Times, he uses a lot of statistics and that means—according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania—that “He’s given us a lot of work up until now.”

Giuliani has repaid the money used for the police protection. But the peculiar billing methods go to two of his biggest vulnerabilities. First it opens the character issue by reminding people that Bernard Kerik, Rudy’s trusted lieutenant whose most recent corruption case has yet to go to trial, was also involved with a girlfriend while married during the closing years of the Giuliani administration. More importantly, it’s a back-door path into the fact, as columnist Michael Goodwin of the Daily News noted to me, that Rudy is the first serious Presidential candidate who is on his third marriage. Giuliani’s affair with Judith Nathan while in office and while still married to Donna Hanover is such an obvious vulnerability that the campaign’s inability to get its response straight suggests important weaknesses in its general operational abilities.

With such a long list of enemies, Giuliani can expect more unflattering revelations. He’s likely to weather them in a somewhat weakened state. But the effect of these political wounds is uncertain because there is no one clear alternative to Rudy. As he has from the start, Rudy is being held aloft not only by his record of achievements but by the absence of a strong alternative.

Right now Giuliani is being helped by the rise of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in Iowa. Should the former Arkansas governor win in Iowa, it would be a major blow to Giuliani’s primary rival at the moment: Mitt Romney. But while Huckabee and Giuliani have only nice things to say about each other (for the moment), if Huckabee emerges as a top tier candidate—in effect displacing the hopes once vested in Fred Thompson—he could become a serious danger to Rudy come the January 29th Florida primary. The Giuliani campaign sees Florida as its firewall, the place where it halts its foes cold and seizes the lead. But Huckabee is rising rapidly in the Florida polls gaining seven points last week alone. If his surge continues, he could reshape the election.

If the findings of a new Pew poll are any indication, race—or more specifically, the declining prospects of African-Americans—ought to be at the very center of the presidential campaign. Today, notes Juan Williams, summarizing the grim numbers,

only 20 percent of black Americans think life is generally better for black people than it was five years ago, the lowest positive response to that question in polls going back 24 years. Only 44 percent of black people expect life to get better; that’s well below the 57 percent who predicted a better life for black people when the same question was asked in 1986.

And yet, race is playing the smallest role in any election since 1964. Part of the reason for this is the absence of a black Democrat using the presidential primaries to campaign indirectly for the leadership of black America. There is no Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton in the contest. Barack Obama’s appeal, though it has a racial element, is primarily to the same sorts of upper-middle-class Americans who once thought Adlai Stevenson a model of gentlemanly intellect. But more importantly there has been a shift in attitudes that make it harder to use race as a political issue. The Pew Poll found that

71 percent of whites and 59 percent of Hispanics feel that personal behavior—values, education, hard work—is what holds back those black Americans still trapped in poverty. But what is most striking is that a small majority, 53 percent, of black Americans agree that “blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.”

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The Washington Post and the New York Times may have missed it, but the New York Sun got it. The key moment for the Democrats as a party during last night’s debate came when Barack Obama stumbled on the same question about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants that had tripped up Hillary Clinton two weeks earlier.

For two weeks Obama and Edwards had attacked Clinton for her flip-flopping “politics of parsing” because she seemed both to support and oppose the licenses. (Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Clinton had taken “two weeks and six different positions to answer one question.”) But last night Clinton, having pushed New York Governor Eliot Spitzer into entirely abandoning his plan to issue driver’s licenses, responded with a crisp “no” when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the moderator, asked for a straight up-or-down answer on whether the candidates supported licenses for undocumented workers. Last night it was Obama who wanted it both ways. Asked the question, Obama launched into a discussion of how “When I was a state senator in Illinois, I voted to require that illegal aliens get trained, get a license, get insurance to protect public safety. That was my intention.” But when Blitzer pressed him for a yes-or-no answer, the usually exquisitely articulate Obama froze. Visibly off-balance, he replied that “I am not proposing that that’s what we do.” He then went on to say, “I have already said I support the notion that we have to deal with public safety.” A frustrated Blizter responded, “This is the sort of question available to a yes or no answer.”

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Journalists bored with Hillary Clinton’s seemingly certain anointment as the Democratic nominee finally have what they’ve been anticipating. After two terrible weeks for Hillary Clinton, commencing on October 30 during a Democratic candidates debate with her weaselly answer to the question of whether she supported New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to issue drivers licenses to illegal aliens, a national poll from USAToday/Gallup that had Barack Obama down 30 points just nine days ago now shows them virtually even. (The Rasmussen daily tracking polls, which have generally been more accurate than Gallup, have Hillary losing some ground but still leading by 21 points.)

Still, even if the USAToday poll was skewed, this has to be a considerable boost for Obama. It comes, I’d say, from two sources. The first is that the Clinton campaign has made, recently, one gaffe after another. The debate on October 30 was followed by Hillary’s complaints about the men ganging up on her and by Bill accusing them of attempting to swiftboat her—neither of which played well. And this week she’s had to admit that her campaign planted questions in an Iowa audience. It’s been as if her once flawless campaign was doing its best to confirm her critics’ complaints about her.

The other is precisely those men about whom Hillary was complaining. Obama and Edwards, notes Ben Smith in an astute column for the Politico, have become, in effect, “arms-length allies in their attempt to take her down.” (“The differences between Sen. Clinton and myself are much more dramatic,” said Edwards, “than the differences between Sen. Obama and myself.”) But an Obama surge comes at a considerable cost to the Democrats as a party. It cuts them off from the legacy of Bill Clinton—the only example of an effective Democratic President in recent memory. And it brings a contentious issue—driver’s licenses for illegals—back into focus. Hillary muffed her answer on this during the debate, but she was right to see the tensions in trying to both uphold our immigration law and manage a large population of people who can commit crimes or spread disease but who are unknown to authorities. Obama sees no such tensions; he’s unambiguously in support of driver’s licenses for undocumented workers—a policy opposed by nearly 80 percent of all Americans. Licenses for illegals would make for a fat political target come the November elections. Obama’s rise may end up hurting the Democrats big time.

The New York Times recently ran a lead Sunday Magazine article on the “The New Gilded Age.” The article tastefully failed to note that most of the monied people discussed were Democrats. It’s further evidence, I’d say, that liberal Democrats are having a hard time owning up to the nature of their party. In his new book The Squandering of America (reviewed in the November issue of COMMENTARY), liberal economist Robert Kuttner describes his dismay at discovering that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has gone upscale. “I have attended Democratic fund-raising events in the Park Avenue homes of investment bankers,” he writes, “where there was plenty of enthusiasm for human rights, morning-after pills, and climate change, but nary a word about financial regulation or social investment.” Kuttner’s ideological soulmate, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, lodges a similar complaint about the Democrats’ refusal to close “the hedge fund tax loophole—which allows executives at private equity firms and hedge funds to pay a tax rate of only 15 percent on most of their income.” The Democrats, he concludes are “wobbled by wealth.”

What’s striking about their complaints is that none of this is new. Writing in COMMENTARY in 1972, Joshua Muravchik and the late Penn Kemble noted that “The purpose of the McGovern quotas (for the delegations to the Democratic National Convention) was not to make the convention more representative of the Democratic electorate as a whole, but to favor the affluent liberals within the party and to diminish the influence of its lower-middle and working-class constituents.” The McGovernites succeeded and the Democrats became far more of an upper-middle-class party.

And they’ve only become more of one since then. Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation, writing yesterday in the Financial Times, notes that “Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the eighteen states where Democrats control both Senate seats.” This pattern holds in the House as well. Iowa’s three richest districts are represented by Democrats, the two poorest by Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi represents a San Francisco district containing more than six times as many high-end households as her Republic counterpart, John Boehner. Nor is this just a matter of wealth. Democrats, notes economist Joel Kotkin, predominate in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, where income inequality is the most pronounced in the nation.
“The demographic reality is that, in America,” says Franc, the Democratic Party is the new “party of the rich.” The question for 2008 is whether that economic reality will enter into the political debate.

Director Jonathan Demme’s documentary on Jimmy Carter—Jimmy Carter Man from Plains—has been drawing dozens of the former President’s devotees to the theaters. The film couldn’t be better timed. What with the shock of skyrocketing oil prices, a feeling of political malaise, the renewed threat of Iranian extremism, and an economy that no longer conforms to tried and true assumptions, it’s starting to seem like the Carter years all over again. (As it did then, it feels now like we’re in a kidney stone of a period that will pass only with great difficulty.)

If you let your memory roam a bit during last Tuesday’s Democratic Party debate, you could, listening to Barack Obama (who is nearly as unctuous as Carter) speak of how only he could deal “honestly with the American people,” hear further echoes of the Carter era. Evidently, such honest dealings require the good will of the Iranian leadership. Carter reached out to Khomeini as “one man of God to another.” Obama, holding out the promise of membership for the Persian state in the World Trade Organization, says he too wants to “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran.

But it was John Edwards, like Carter a Southern liberal, who took the most Carter-like approach. President Carter spoke of the need to put aside “our inordinate fear of Communism.” A would-be President Edwards similarly complained that we have been “governed by fear” of terrorism; he promised to put an end to the “politics of fear.” Carter and his spokesmen, such as UN Ambassador Andrew Young, spoke insistently and repeatedly of the need to “restore America’s reputation.” Edwards also speaks about “restoring our good name” in the world.

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Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s silver-tongued performance at the October 18 Values Voters forum in Washington, DC, together with his rising poll numbers in Iowa where he is in second place, has shaken up the GOP. Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who’s never needed to employ a speechwriter, was greeted with a standing ovation. In what has to be the first ever presidential candidate shout-out to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Huckabee made his case for the little guy. “It’s a lot better to be with David than Goliath,” he declared. “Or with Elijah than 850 prophets of Baal. Or with Daniel and the lions than the Babylonians.”

Huckabee drew sustained applause when he told the crowd that “We do not have the right to move God’s standard to meet the cultural norm but we need to move the cultural norm to meet God’s standards.” But he struck a note with broader appeal when he drew laughter and applause by telling the crowd, “It is high time for us to tell Saudi Arabia that in ten years we will have as much interest in their oil as their sand; they can keep both of them.” “For too long,” he continued, “we have financed both sides of the war on terrorism; our tax dollars pay for our military to fight it and our oil dollars—every time you fill the tank—is turned into the madrasahs that teach terrorists and the money that funds them.”

Taking a shot at Mitt Romney, he drew cheers when, speaking in the cadences of a man at the pulpit, he insisted “it’s important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language.” The argument took. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council concluded that Huckabee “comes out of here clearly as a favorite.” The rank and file attendees concurred. In an event where all the major candidates spoke, Huckabee was the runaway winner with 50 percent support (with Romney a distant second at 10 percent).

Huckabee’s rise has brought a sharp response from some (like conservative doyenne Phyllis Schlafly) who consider him too soft on illegal immigration. But the big guns have been fired by low-tax, free-trade, business Republicans (such as John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth) who are mindful of Huckabee’s verbal volleys aimed at the financial sector’s sizable profits. These Republicans don’t see how Huckabee, who has expressed some doubts about free trade, can win the top spot. Still, they fear that he has established himself as a strong candidate for the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket, where he could alienate the fiscally conservative swing voters who deserted the GOP in 2006.

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Michael Bloomberg has been a PR genius as New York’s chief executive. The press, as in a Time magazine story, has been known to swoon over the grandeur of his ideas and give him credit for promises alone. But the press-savvy mayor has had a monkey wrench thrown into his undeclared presidential campaign.

While he was running Bloomberg L.P., the mayor was accused of sexual harassment by a female employee. The matter was settled out of court, and it never became a serious issue when Bloomberg first ran for office in 2001. While the New York Times reports that “Bloomberg’s aides have collected data on the requirements for getting on the ballot in all 50 states,” the mayor has been slapped with a lawsuit from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington on behalf of three women who argue they were discriminated against when they asked for maternity leave. “The EEOC said the women’s claims of discrimination due to gender and pregnancy “were echoed by a number of other female current and former employees who have taken maternity leave.”

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Broadly speaking, the political mood of the public can be gauged in terms of its shifting calculation of risk and reward. If, as in the period from about 1980 to 2004, the promise of new rewards outweighs the fears of accompanying risk, the market-oriented Republicans will be the beneficiaries. But if, as in the period from 1932 to 1966, the fear of risk is more salient than the hope of enhanced rewards, the result will be movement away from free-market policies and towards the presumed protections of government regulation.

For all its benefits, globalization (and the accompanying issues of massive illegal immigration) has brought to an end the period that privileged risk over reward. The Republican Party seems unable to face up to this shift. Some of my GOP friends blame it all on Bush. They rail at the failings of the Bush administration with the kind of vitriol usually reserved for leftists. Others, taken aback by the plunge in Republican party identification, trot out consoling ploys along the lines of “You should have seen the other guy!” Take, for example, Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma. While he acknowledges the unpopularity of the GOP, after a wave of scandals, the setbacks in Iraq, etc., he also emphasizes the misfortunes of the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Cole sees the 2008 election as shaping up like the one in 1992, when incumbents of both parties had a hard time. It’s true that Congress as a whole has only a 29 percent approval rating, lower than that of President Bush. But the problem for the GOP is that, as Washington Post columnist David Broder notes, half of the voters blame Bush and the Republicans; only 25 percent place the onus on the Democrats.

Another excuse Republicans are likely to make is that America is still, largely, a center-Right country. That’s true—but the center has shifted towards the Left. On a range of key issues, from trade to health care to economic inequality, the number of Americans who share some classic Democratic concerns has risen, notes the Wall Street Journal. A recent Pew poll found that “Three-quarters of the population is worried about growing income inequality. Pew also showed that two-thirds of those polled favor government-funded health care for all.” At the same time, Pew reports that “Support for a government safety net for the poor is at its highest level since 1987.”

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As mayor, Rudy Giuliani endeared himself to conservatives around the country, as much for his enemies as for his accomplishments. When Giuliani attacked big-spending, culturally elitist, Al Sharpton-allied Democrats, he scored big with hordes of GOP primary voters. Now, in defending General David Petraeus, he is using the same tactic against the McCarthy-like attacks of the Moveon.orgers, widely loathed by conservatives and disdained by moderates. But in attacking Senator Clinton—the likely Democratic nominee—for refusing to disavow Moveon.org, Giuliani has also pulled off a two-cushion bank shot for both himself and the leading Democrat.

His criticisms not only allow Giuliani to define himself, once again, by who his enemies are: it does the same for Hillary. The ranters on DailyKos and the Moveon.orgers have, as Matt Bai’s recent book The Argument points out, little in the way of a positive agenda. Like the Islamists they try so hard to ignore, their strongest suit is unyielding hostility. And Clinton has long been one of the objects of their hostility: they despise her for her middle-of-the-road position on Iraq and for the moderate politics of her husband’s presidency.

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Washington Post columnist and Georgetown professor E. J. Dionne has written a thoughtful essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education on what he calls “The Liberal Moment.” With one eye on the polls—which show plunging support for Republicans among the young, Hispanics, and independent voters—Dionne writes that “American liberals and the Left now have their greatest political opening since the 1960’s and their greatest opportunity to alter the philosophical direction of the public debate since the 1930’s.” He’s right. But will liberals be able actually to seize the opening?

Dionne invokes the late social scientist Michael Harrington, arguing that the Left must embrace a program that “will radically improve the conditions of life of everyone in the society,” because “the politics of noblesse oblige simply will not mobilize a majority that includes a very large number of people who are not poor yet are still suffering from relative deprivation.” But the very mechanism by which the Left once was able to accomplish those goals—Keynesian pump-priming—has been obviated by the globalization of economies. And today the most frequent and vitriolic attacks on attempts by Democrats to use market mechanisms to advance liberal goals come from the Democrats: specifically, from the netroots activists. (The netroots, in other words, bring to the Democratic party the same blind and destructive partisanship Dionne rightly condemns in Karl Rove.)

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John Edwards’s vision of American economic suffering is neatly summed up in this quote, from 2004 campaign:

Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one: One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life.

That second America refers to the middle- and working-classes, and particularly the poor. The government’s annual statistical report on household income and poverty—which this year indicated a drop in poverty from 12.6 percent in 2005 to 12.3 percent in 2006 but a net rise of 11.3 percent since 2000—seem on its surface to support Edward’s point of view.

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Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote on Sunday about the strengths of an independent ticket for 2008 with Michael Bloomberg as the presidential and Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel as the vice-presidential candidate. Broder cites Hagel on Bloomberg: “A guy like Bloomberg could have deep credibility as a candidate because” he’s a “proven leader.” Leadership, Broder himself goes on to say, “is precisely what Bloomberg demonstrates every day as mayor.” Broder and Hagel have it exactly wrong. As the recent and easily-preventable deaths of two fireman in the Deutsche Bank building fire of August 18th made clear, Bloomberg is a hands-off mayor who—in everything from Ground Zero to subway breakdowns to ferry crashes to repeated Con Ed blackouts to school bus snafus—has been anything but a leader.

Standing on the edge of Ground Zero, the Deutsche Bank building survived 9/11. But it was so badly damaged that the asbestos and other chemical compounds used in its construction spread throughout the building, turning the structure into a toxic pile of rubbish, “a vertical Love Canal.” Though scheduled for demolition, under Bloomberg’s “leadership” all but the top floors of the building are still standing, six years after 9/11.

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A front runner in a presidential campaign, such as Rudy Giuliani, has to expect robust attacks. Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney have criticized strongly his record on immigration and gun control. These are issues that create problems for Giuliani, but as long as his 9/11 reputation is secure, their effect will be limited. That’s why the recent assaults on his 9/11 record are potentially more significant. So far, however, it’s Giuliani’s good luck to have been subjected largely to inept criticism of his role at Ground Zero. Last month a video, made by the International Firefighters Association, which is tied to the Democratic Party, denounced him for failing to respond effectively to the 1993 World Trade Center Attack. Giuliani didn’t take office till January 1994.

Now comes a piece from Time magazine, written in the spirit of the Nexis word-game school of journalism. In her piece, reporter Amanda Ripley says that “an analysis of 80 of Giuliani’s major speeches from 1993 to 2001 shows that he mentioned the danger of terrorism only once, in a brief reference to emergency preparedness.” Her argument is that Giuliani has overstated his experience with and interest in terrorism.

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Hypocrisy is an abiding weakness of most politicians. Republicans tend to specialize in hypocrisy regarding sex and family—think of Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, or Robert Livingstone—while Democrats go in for financial or class hypocrisy—think of John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, or John Edwards.

Recently, I went with friends to a talk by former Senator Edwards at New York’s Cooper Union, to hear, in the candidate’s words, how he plans to “dramatically reduce poverty.” Laudably, he wants to cut the current poverty rate of 12.6 percent by a third within a decade. But he offered few specifics. Those that were trotted out, such as more job-training programs, sounded like leftovers from the Great Society days. But if Edwards is retrogressive about poverty, he’s been very progressive in building up a fortune of as much as $62 million.

Tim Middleton of MSN, evaluating the former Senator’s new financial disclosure statement, describes Edwards as a man “of the people and profits” with “substantial investments in limited partnerships, sub-prime mortgage lenders, and an offshore hedge fund.” Edwards has (to some degree rightly) criticized offshore hedge funds as unpatriotic, and sub-prime lenders as piratical. He’s described the sub-prime lending business as the “wild west of the credit industry, where . . . abusive and predatory lenders are robbing families blind.”

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For all the hubbub about the innovative format of last night’s debate among Democratic presidential candidates, what was striking was how little effect the new format actually had. The debate was still, essentially, a group press conference in which—a few brief exchanges aside—the candidates displayed their placards. Take their rhetoric on the economy. As in earlier gatherings, the candidates handed out the same semi-populist doom and gloom about a country losing economic hope while only the very wealthy improve their lives. To listen to the candidates, you’d think the poor were sinking deeper into poverty due to predatory lending practices, while a cabal of insurance, pharmaceutical, and oil companies were conspiring to turn the U.S. into a giant New Orleans.

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