Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 44

More Palestinian Attacks on Israel, and Israeli Retaliation

To follow up my earlier post, things have gotten a lot worse since Thursday's attack against Israel by a Gaza-based al-Qaeda affiliate that crossed into Israeli territory from Egypt. My friend Ruth King posts news from the Israeli press:

Southern Israel continued to absorb rocket fire from the Gaza Strip over the weekend, in the heaviest bombardment the country has seen since Operation Cast Lead in early 2009. By Sunday afternoon, over 100 rockets had been fired at Israeli communities since Thursday. More than a million Israelis within rocket range of Gaza have been warned to heed the instructions of the Homefront Command and remain alert.

Israel has retaliated for the rocket bombardment with aerial bombings in Gaza, as violence ignited by Thursday's Palestinian cross-border terrorist attacks near Eilat continues to escalate. Several Palestinians were reported wounded in an IAF raid early Sunday afternoon in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip while attempting to launch a rocket.

Eight Israelis were killed in Thursday's attacks near Eilat, and some 40 were wounded. Two Israelis were killed in subsequent rocket attacks, and several dozen wounded. At least 15 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in Israeli raids, including the leadership of the Popular Resistance Committees, the group behind Thursday's attacks.

There is more here, including the assessment of the Israeli Defense Forces that Hamas is behind the rocket barrage -- in addition to striking Hamas and Palestinian Popular Resistance Committee targets in Gaza, the IDF has rounded up over 120 suspected Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Also, some of the rockets fired from Gaza have hit Egyptian territory -- though this is thought to have been an error: the rockets appear to have been intended for Israel (no one reportedly hurt as a result of these apparent misfires). There's also this: Israeli intelligence believes the long-range rockets Hamas is using to attack Israeli targets were smuggled into Gaza from Libya.

Annals of the Arab Spring: Al-Qaeda Launches from Egypt to Attack Israel

Tension is mounting as Israel comes to grips with the new reality of Islamist Egypt.

On Thursday, a team of 15 to 20 armed al-Qaeda terrorists (members of the Palestinian Popular Committees, an al-Qaeda affiliate) snaked through tunnels from Gaza to Sinai. From there, they hiked 200 kilometers over land, either ignored or facilitated by Egyptian army forces. They were thus able to sneak into Israel through the porous border at Eilat -- porous because Israel has not needed to worry much about its Egyptian border for the last 30 years.

At around noon, the terrorists took up positions along the highway and opened fire at buses and cars. One detonated a suicide belt. In all, eight Israelis were killed and 30 more wounded. The terrorists shot to death a family of four who were just out driving in their car -- father, mother, and their 6- and 4-year-old kids (“resistance” against the “occupiers,” as Islamists like to say). Barry Rubin counts this as al-Qaeda’s first successful terrorist attack against Israel.

From here, the story gets more frightful. Israeli police and defense forces killed several of the terrorists. They pursued at least two of the terrorists into Egyptian territory. At that point, some Egyptian soldiers either joined in the firefight or got caught in it accidentally -- the facts are not yet clear, though a least one eyewitness says a terrorist was firing from an Egyptian army position. Five Egyptian soldiers were killed.

In Egypt, where the public has always been predominantly ant-Israeli -- in contrast to the Mubarak regime, which was pro-American and maintained the peace with Israel -- demonstrations against Israel have broken out. Crowds are burning the Egyptian flag and one demonstrator scaled the 15-story wall of the Israeli embassy, tore down the Israeli flag, and replaced it with an Egyptian flag. (Powerline has pictures, here.) Obviously trying to simmer things down, Israel’s government has expressed regret over the killing of the Egyptian soldiers, but Egypt’s transitional military government -- egged on by the protests -- is saying this expression of regret is “insufficient.”

As is always the case, Palestinians are celebrating the terrorist attacks that killed Israelis -- not only in Hamas-controlled Gaza but in the West Bank, where the “moderates” of Fatah are in charge. As Barry Rubin elaborates, “One Fatah site has such remarks as ‘Our Lord is with the heroes’; ‘[I] call for resistance in the Gaza with rocket fire and suicide bombings and the Glory of God and His Messenger’; ‘Tribute to the Heroes of each attack and no matter what their affiliation’; ‘God is great and victory is coming!’”

So to recap as we head into September, with the Muslim Brotherhood poised to take over Egypt and the Palestinians -- encouraged by Israel’s enemies at the U.N. -- poised to declare statehood unilaterally, we have al-Qaeda now active in Israel; a successful terrorist attack inside Israeli territory through Egypt; Israel and Egypt in a faceoff over the killing of Egyptian soldiers by Israel after those soldiers allowed (and perhaps even facilitated) an attack on Israel; and the Palestinians -- with whom Israel is expected to make peace -- celebrating the murder of a Jewish family and the killing of other Israelis.

John Hinderaker has been following events closely, and his posts are here and here. Barry Rubin’s analysis is here. As Barry says, “This isn’t just another terrorist attack -- it’s a major escalation, a new phase in the Arab-Israeli conflict . . . it is the bitter fruit of the U.S.-backed downfall of the government of President Husni Mubarak in Egypt, opening the Egypt-Israel border as a new front in the war.” 

History, Hardliners, and Humility

Liberty must always be exercised, and may only be maintained, “in a way of subjection to authority.” This sounds like it could have been written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the trailblazer of the modern Left, whose “social compact” decreed that any dissenter from “the general will” would be compelled to obey -- meaning “nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” Or it could be the handiwork of any of a thousand Muslim jurisprudents teaching that submission to Allah and His law is the essence of Islam.

#ad#But it is neither. Those are the words of John Winthrop, the legendary founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the man Paul Johnson, the peerless British historian, calls “the first great American.”

As Johnson recounts in A History of the American People, on July 3, 1645, Winthrop delivered a speech on the tension between order and liberty. His conception of the latter was, by our standards, bracingly narrow and circumscribed by religious duty. “It is of the same kind of liberty whereof Christ hath made us free.” In Winthrop’s view, “if you stand for your natural, corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in your own eyes, you will not endure the least weight of authority.#...#But if you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and lawful liberties, such as Christ allows you, then you will quietly and cheerfully submit under that authority which is set over you#...#for your good.”

These sentiments, and the context of our founding as a nation, are worth remembering when we think about sharia, Islam’s legal system. Or, better, when we think about why we think about sharia.

I’ve been involved in that thinking for a few years now. For me, the subject has two objectives for non-Muslim Americans. First, sharia is a useful barometer for distinguishing real Muslim moderates from Islamists. The latter seek to undermine American liberties, but some have been able to pose as moderates, because they do not employ terrorist tactics in the pursuit of their extreme ends.

Second, focusing on sharia is the most promising strategy for empowering authentic moderate Muslims. Sharia, as classically construed by authoritative scholars, is strewn with tenets that run counter to Western principles of liberty -- in the areas of freedom of conscience, equality, free expression, economic liberty, the settlement of policy disputes without violence, what “cruel and unusual punishments” should be unacceptable, and so on.

This comparison between Western and Islamic cultures is not perfect. To begin with, there is no universally accepted version of sharia. But that is a cause for optimism: It yields hope that a credible construction of sharia could develop that both embraces Western principles and marginalizes the fundamentalist interpretation. On this score, much of the criticism against those of us who focus on sharia is misplaced.

#page#Naysayers claim that we’ve got sharia wrong, that it doesn’t really exist at all outside the realm of private spiritual guidance, or that various overlooked nuances complicate or nullify such categorical claims as that apostasy from Islam is a capital offense under sharia.

#ad#But these criticisms are fundamentally flawed. It’s absurd to insist that sharia is merely some airy, aspirational set of guidelines, when it is actually enforced as the law of several countries. And I’m confident that, whatever nuances there may be in Islam’s rich jurisprudential history, there is a classical consensus on what sharia holds; Reliance of the Traveller: A Classical Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, for example, is readily accessible and has been certified as accurate by al-Azhar University, as well as by the governments of several Muslim countries. But all that is beside the point. I’ve never claimed the authority to say what is or is not the true sharia or the true Islam. What matters is that the interpretation of sharia that rejects Western principles is a credible interpretation adhered to by a substantial percentage of the world’s Muslims -- substantial enough to be considered mainstream. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant; they believe it, and many are willing to act on it, to our considerable detriment.

The hope, of course, is that between Muslim reformers who embrace our liberty culture, and the millions of Muslims who are peaceful, moderate people regardless of what their scriptures may literally command, alternative constructions of sharia will eventually discredit and marginalize the Islamist interpretation. It is a tough row to hoe, given the intellectual firepower and tradition that supports treatises like Reliance of the Traveller. But it is not impossible.

And that brings us back to the comparison between Western and Islamic cultures. The lack of consensus about Muslim law is not the only thing that makes the comparison imperfect. There’s also the fact that I’d have been more accurate saying “contemporary Western culture.” Whatever ideas we have about liberty today, we have not always had them. And I am not talking about the Dark Ages, either.

One cannot read Johnson, in the context of our sharia contretemps, without being startled by America’s founding. Winthrop’s beliefs about the need for submission to God’s authority in civil life were widely shared. Nathaniel Ward, a pastor in the colony, sounded positively jihadist: “I dare aver that God does nowhere in his world tolerate Christian states to give toleration to such adversaries of His truth, if they have the power in their hands to suppress them.” Winthrop, Johnson recounts, ran the colony as “a theocracy.” Government was based on God’s law, loyalty oaths were mandatory, Sabbath observance was strictly enforced, and brutal corporal punishments were carried out: Philip Radcliffe, for example, was whipped and had both ears cut off for “invectives against our church and government.” Others were executed, usually by hanging, for what, in effect, was the preaching of novel religious doctrines.

Nor would we today recognize the original Virginia settlements as consonant with what we think of as our way of life. In Jamestown, too, religious duty blended seamlessly with civil law. We need not belabor the centrality of slavery to the developing agricultural economy. But for a time, a bachelor in Virginia was permitted to purchase a wife from among the young, unmarried women sent from England in order to make the colony more attractive. The price was 125 pounds of tobacco.

The objective here is not to argue moral relativism, as in, “Who are we to condemn sharia with the skeletons we’ve got in our closet?” What I am suggesting is that we go about our righteous business without righteous indignation. A little humility is in order -- and I need to remember that, too, just as much as I need to say it.

Cultures are dynamic. They change drastically over time. There are grounds for concern that Islam’s will have a harder time evolving -- the blights on our history are rooted in human failure to apply Judeo-Christian doctrine, not in the doctrine itself. Islam’s problems are more about Islam than about Muslims. Still, our society evolved and flourished because of our religious principles, not in spite of them.

It took a very long time to find the right balance between the sacred and the secular, and there is good reason to believe that our most serious problems today are caused by too much suppression of faith, not too little. But Islam has to be given a fair chance to strike this balance. We can’t tolerate jihadist atrocities, and we must fight Islamist efforts to erode our freedoms. But it will not do to smirk and say that Muslims have already had 14 centuries to get it together. How would we have done under that test?

We have had to come a very long way to arrive at what we are rightly proud to call Western culture and American civil liberties. Our current battle is about preserving that inheritance for ourselves and making sure the Muslims in America who want it are free to have it. In factoring sharia into that battle, we need to be as humble as we are forceful.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Re: Probing the S&P Probe

Kevin, the First Amendment has never been a source of much protection from prosecution. That's because our jurisprudence distinguishes the criminalizing of speech itself from the use of speech as evidence to prove other crimes. The former is very rare -- limited to things like unauthorized disclosures of classified information (the prosecution of which almost never happens). The latter is routine.

Most uses of speech as evidence involve circumstances no one would have a problem with. If boss tells button-man, "Whack him," I doubt many people would entertain boss's claim that he should not be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder because the First Amendment allows him to express himself. Where things get more complicated, though, is when criminal statutes are so vague that prosecutors are unleashed to investigate behavior (including speech) that offends their sensibilities as if it were criminal. In those circumstances, the useful distinction between criminalizing speech and merely using speech to prove conduct that is clearly criminal melts away. 

This is why, last year, the Supreme Court sharply limited the noxiously vague "honest services" fraud statute (18 U.S. Code, Sec. 1346). Prosecutors were using it whenever they detected any kind of potential deception or undisclosed self-dealing that seemed offensive to them but wasn't covered by a statute defining an obvious, concrete crime. Henceforth, the honest services theory applies only in fraud schemes that involve bribes or kickbacks. Those are readily understandable offenses, and if someone makes statements that are meant to carry out or cover up such schemes, I don't think there ought to be a First Amendment defense.

The problem here is that the S&P probe could be based on the discredited and now invalid "honest services" doctrine. If it is, that would be an abuse of power -- and that is a possibility that can't be dismissed given the current Justice Department's track record.

The SEC and DOJ also investigate securities fraud cases using a deception theory under Rule 10b-5 of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. It is very broad, potentially punishing any person who, directly or indirectly, makes untrue statements of material fact (or makes material ommissions) or otherwise employs deceptive practices in connection with the purchase or sale of securities.

In such a case, you'd have to show the defendant was engaged in a deception rather than an honest error, that he had a duty to speak truthfully, and that he was actually involved in the purchase or sale of securities. The prosecution is almost never required to prove the defendant's motive, but I would think you'd have to show a rating agency had some powerful incentive to lie. Sounds like a very tough case to me, but I don't pretend to know the evidence or the theory behind the government's investigation. When such a fraud scheme can be shown, though, statements of opinion about the strength of securities are commonly used as evidence.

Bottom line: I don't think the use of speech as evidence is as problematic as the vagueness of the "crime" it is used to establish.

Annals of the Arab Spring: Obama Administration Backs Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

Before running off on his latest vacation, at the conclusion of his three-day, publicly-funded campaign swing, President Obama boldly called for Bashar al-Assad to step down -- in the midst of what is the Iran-backed Syrian president's brutal, months long repression of his opposition, a campaign in which thousands have been killed and are missing.

As John Bolton observes, calling on Assad to step down doesn't tell us what Mr. Obama is prepared to do to make that happen. John suggests that the answer is nothing, and that this will expose the U.S. to the "charge of just being a rhetorical power" -- in this instance, sounding off but "giving Assad and his Iranian cohorts license to continue the brutality[.]"

I wish that were all there was to it. At the Hudson Institute, Herb London takes note of various reports that the State Department is backing the Muslim Brotherhood's efforts (supported by the Islamist regime in Turkey) to replace Assad, just as the Brotherhood will soon be replacing Mubarak in Egypt. 

This underscores, yet again, that the phenomenon we are seeing in the Middle East is not "the Arab Spring" but the Islamist Ascendancy. The unavoidable fact is that there is not a robust democratic movement in the region -- not in the sense of Western democracy. Yes, there is a faction seeking secular democracy ("secular" in the sense that they want real pluralism, not sharia). The Brotherhood and other Islamists say they want "democracy," and many Americans (particularly in media and government) are taken in by these claims. But the Brothers don't want democratic culture -- they want sharia. What they suddenly like about democracy is popular elections. Democracy, as they construe the term, is just a route to power, which would enable them to Islamize their societies. 

While we should support authentic democrats in sensible ways, we must not overestimate their strength. The movement makes up less than a quarter of the public in the region. That's why real democrats were so decisively trounced in the Egyptian referendum (78–22 percent), and why the Brotherhood is now poised to become the power center of Egyptian politics.

Still, it is one thing to be realistic about what our friends can accomplish. It is quite another thing to side with our enemies at the expense of our friends. That is what the Obama administration appears to be doing. Herb writes:

In an effort to understand and placate Syrian opposition groups, Secretary Clinton invited them to a meeting in Washington. Most of those invited, however, have links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Missing from the invitations are Kurdish leaders, Sunni liberals, Assyrians and Christian spokesmen. According to various reports the State Department made a deal with Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood representatives either to share power with Assad to stabilize the government, or replace him if this effort fails.

One organization, the Syrian Democracy Council (SDC), an opposition group composed of diverse ethnic and religious organizations, including Alawis, Aramaic Christians, Druze and Assyrians was conspicuously -- and no coincidentally -- omitted from the invitation list.

From the standpoint of Foggy Bottom it is far better to promote stability even if this means aligning oneself with the goals of presumptive enemies. This, however, is a dangerous game that not only holds U.S. interests hostage to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also suggests that the withdrawal of American forces from the region affords the U.S. very few policy options.

It would seem far more desirable to back the democratic influences -- the political organizations that require cultivation and support -- despite their relative weakness at this moment. It is these religious and secular groups that represent the real hope for the future and the counterweight to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

As I outline in The Grand Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood wants to destroy America, the West, and Israel. The current administration is helping the organization acquire power. Obama officials maintain that the Brotherhood is "moderate," "largely secular," and appear to believe it would become even more moderate and secular by being given the responsibilities of governance. (How's that working out with Hamas, the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch?) 

Secretary Clinton famously embarrassed herself by proclaiming Assad a "reformer." If she now thinks the Brothers are the real reformers, she's in for more embarrassment -- and we are in for worse. 

Iraq Backs Syria . . . at Iran's Urging

The Bush administration repeatedly stated that our benchmark for success in Iraq was the creation of "a unified democratic federal Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself, sustain itself, and is an ally in the War on Terror" -- to quote the 2007 Iraq Strategy Review published by the National Security Council. President Bush himself insisted that "by helping Iraqis build a democracy" we would not only "undermine the terrorists" but "gain an ally in the war on terror," and "inspire reformers across the Middle East" -- and, he added, "this will make the American people more secure.

I have argued, to the contrary, that newly "democratic" Iraq is becoming an Islamist satellite of Iran, hostile to the U.S., hostile to Israel, and hostile to non-Muslims, homosexuals, and other minorities. I won't rehearse the back-up for those claims. I simply point to this report from last Friday's New York Times, detailing that under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (the Islamist prime minister the U.S. has backed in the interest of promoting democracy), Iraq -- nudged by Iran -- is supporting the Assad regime in its brutal crackdown in Syria:

As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

“The unrest in Syria has exacerbated the old sectarian divides in Iraq because the Shiite leaders have grown close to Assad and the Sunnis identify with the people,” said Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East.

He added: “Maliki is very reliant on Iran for his power and Iran is backing Syria all the way. The Iranians and the Syrians were all critical to bringing him to power a year ago and keeping him in power so he finds himself in a difficult position.”

Iraq and Syria have not had close relations for years, long before the American invasion. During the sectarian violence here that broke out after the invasion, Iraqi leaders blamed Syria for allowing suicide bombers and other militants to enter the country.

But Syria and Iran have had close ties, a factor in the recalibration of relations between Syria and Iraq. Last year, Iran pressured Mr. Assad into supporting Mr. Maliki for prime minister, which eventually helped him gain a second term. Since then, Mr. Maliki and Mr. Assad have strengthened relations, signing trade deals and increasing Syrian investment in Iraq.

The rest is here, including Maliki's interesting take on Syrian "democracy," which bodes ill for the future of Iraqi "democracy." ("Mr. Maliki said that the protesters should use the democratic process, not riots, to voice their displeasure, though Syria does not allow competitive, free elections. He put most of the blame on the protesters and said little about the government’s ending the bloodshed.") 

There is no doubt that Assad's opposition includes Sunni Islamist elements allied with the Muslim Brotherhood (which the late, unlamented Assad the elder mercilessly crushed), and some al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists, too. We shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that, if Assad were toppled, whatever came after him would necessarily be good for the U.S. But the fact is that the Iranian regime is the number one American enemy in the region -- promoting anti-American terrorism by both Shiite and Sunni jihadists, including al-Qaeda, with which Iran's government has been cooperating since the early nineties. If Iraq is supporting Assad, Iraq is supporting Iran's terrorist rulers, and that means Iraq is no ally of the United States. But I think we already knew that.

That Wyoming Ruling: There's Always More than Meets the Eye

I posted yesterday afternoon about a ruling by a federal district court in Wyoming, striking down regulations by which the Obama Interior Department was trying to delay the issuance of drilling leases. The ruling was especially notable, I opined, because it was issued by a judge appointed to the bench by President Obama -- Nancy Freudenthal, who is the chief U.S. district judge in Wyoming. 

What I didn't realize at the time was that Chief Judge Freudenthal is married to Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat who, up until this year, was the governor of Wyoming. I stumbled on this fact in the course of reading more of Michelle Malkin's diligent reporting on the Obama Interior Department's aggressive campaign to stifle energy exploration by strangling industry in red tape and process. Turns out that back in 2010, with Interior's Bureau of Land Management sitting on more than $100 million worth of unissued oil and gas leases, the local press noted that Governor Freudenthal had written to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to urge action on the backlog. 

Governor Freudenthal's term ended in January of this year (he was replaced by Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican). Governor Freudenthal was an early Obama supporter for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. After Obama was elected, Freudenthal recommended that President Obama nominate his wife -- a lawyer with lots of energy and environmental law experience, who was then a partner in a Cheyenne firm -- to become a federal judge. She was nominated in 2009 and confirmed in early 2010. There are only three federal judicial slots in Wyoming, and Mrs. Freudenthal filled a vacancy that had been open since 2006 because the Judiciary Committee, once it was under Democratic control, would not give a hearing to President Bush's nominee, Richard Honaker.

I imagine we will be hearing more about this from the enviro-activists. I am not contending that there is anything improper about all this -- I simply don't know. From what I've been able to gather, Governor Freudenthal was urging that the Interior Department act on the leases one way or another, not necessarily that they be granted. Chief Judge Freudenthal's ruling essentially invalidates the rules on which Interior was relying in order not to act -- and by the time she ruled, her husband was no longer governor. On the merits, what the former governor and the judge have done seems appropriate and legally grounded. But it is peculiar to find a wife, as a judge, rendering a decision on a matter in which her husband, as governor, played an active role -- seeking action from the government agency against whom the wife ultimately ruled precisely because the agency failed to act.

Obamacare Isn't the Only Administration Scheme That Had a Bad Day in Court

Lost amid the attention rightly paid to the Eleventh Circuit's Obamacare decision is the fact that, also on Friday, a federal judge in Wyoming invalidated the Obama Interior Department's attempt to slow-walk environmental reviews of industry applications to drill for oil and gas on federal lands nationwide.

Consistent with a disturbing Obama pattern, the administration was seeking, in effect, to rewrite congressional statutes by executive fiat. As Michelle Malkin explains, during the Bush years, Congress had mandated an expedited review process in order to expedite the development of oil and gas resources in places where the required environmental impact analysis had already been done, or where impact figured to be minimal. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar simply ignored the law and tried to impose the administration's own preference -- which is to strangle development, like the bureaucracy strangles most everything else, in miles of red tape and months of process.

As Michelle observes, the ruling in favor of a petroleum industry group (Western Energy Alliance) is all the more remarkable because the judge who issued it, Nancy Freudenthal, was appointed to the bench by President Obama. 

Reminder: 'Ten Years of the War on Terror'

Just a reminder: Commentary magazine will be hosting a forum tomorrow night about where we are in the War on Terror as we approach the ten year mark since the attacks of September 11, 2001. It will be held at the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West, and Commentary's editor, John Podhoretz, will be moderating a panel focused on Abe Greenwald's essay in the new issue, "What We Got Right in the War on Terror." Abe will be on the panel, as will Ross Douthat of the New York Times and ... your humble correspondent. Details here -- I think it's $10 to reserve seats on-line, and $15 at the door. Be great to see some Cornerites there.

Bachmann Can Win

I've been listening to people on our side from Fox pundits to Ann Coulter spout their theories about why Michele Bachmann can't win. I think they're off base. The ground is shifting under our feet, and yesterday's formulas about who has what experience, who appeals to what niche, and who has a "path to victory," are outdated.

The dynamic force in politics today is the Tea Party -- not as an entity, but because it's not an organization. It is a grass-roots movement of ordinary Americans in a right-of-center country who have common sense and think Washington and the Big Government, Big Spending ruling class have to be swept away. Political pundits are not good at understanding and gauging the effect of mass movements.

Pawlenty's attack on Bachmann didn't work for the same reason the conventional wisdom about Bachmann's candidacy doesn't work: You are not going to impress ordinary Americans, who think the system is broken, by bragging about how much experience you have in the system. I'm not saying Pawlenty was a bad governor -- from everything I've read, he seems to have done a very good job under difficult blue-state constraints. But a case built on governing experience, which tells voters: "I know how to make this system work and get better results" is not going to bowl over people who think the system needs dramatic overhaul. They don't want to hear about the results you're going to get in Washington; they want to hear how you're going to transfer money and power out of Washington. They want to know how you're going to stop Washington from destroying our present and stealing their kids' future.

We are not in the Seventies anymore, or even the Nineties. I remember thinking, during my old boss Rudy Giuliani's campaign in '08, that the strategists who had the candidate's ear were nuts. They concocted this plan to sit out some of the "smaller" primaries and forge the big make-or-break stand in Florida, weeks later. I don't pretend to be a political strategist, but I don't think you have to be to know the assumptions premised on a bygone media era are obsolete. Campaigns and primaries are no longer regional events; they are televised extravaganzas. The candidates who thrive are the ones who stay in the public eye and shine when the light is on them.

The press now covers the Iowa straw-poll more intensely than it used to cover the California primary. To draw an analogy, let's say the World Series were played between Kansas City and Pittsburgh. They may be small markets, but it's still the World Series -- as an event, it's not two comparatively small towns, it's a national showcase covered by national media and talked about 24/7 on sports talk-radio, ESPN, and all the would-be ESPNs sprouting up across the country.

Small state primaries, caucuses, and -- we're seeing -- even straw polls are the same thing. They are mass-media events that capture the public's attention. If they're playing the games, you've got to be competing in them and you've got to shine. If you do, you've got a shot; if you don't, you're forgotten. You're not campaigning to Iowans; you're campaigning to America.

Michele has been campaigning to America. She is also smart, attractive, and telegenic. She's got charisma, as well as sharp eyes and ears for the issues on which she can separate herself and the biting examples/phrases that will get her points across. She is in Washington but not of Washington. By being very public on Obamacare, overregulation of business, the budget-deal shenanigans, and the debt ceiling, she's gotten to a place where she is seen as putting Washington -- both parties -- on trial in a very public way that resonates with the Tea Party. And by Tea Party, again, I mean a mass movement of ordinary, commonsense Americans, many of whom used to be known as "Reagan Democrats." These are folks who think the country is broken. While they're stunned by the Obama Left's brazenness in governing against the public will, they have no faith that the Republican establishment is the answer to fixing what is wrong. They see Bachmann as outside the establishment.

Michele also appeals to them as a person of strong religious faith who lives it in her life without hitting you over the head with it. She thinks conservatism is compassionate because she's convinced it leads to prosperity, and prosperity will lift people in a way government can't. And she doesn't apologize for thinking that way -- she embraces it. She actually looks like she's having fun.

You can't dismiss that just because she hasn't spent the last two or three decades climbing to the next public office. The permanent political class has failed the country. Therefore, not being a part of it is an advantage, not a minus. And the question is not whether a "mere" member of the House has a "path to the nomination." It is how Bachmann performs in the spotlight in comparison to Romney, Perry, Obama, or whoever else. I don't see how you can watch the interviews she did yesterday -- some hostile, all challenging -- and not start thinking: "Well, she's poised, she's got a supple mind, her answers always manage to bring it around to the point she wants to make, and she makes it. She thinks that giving Obama a $2.4 trillion blank check is crazier than forcing drastic cuts in government programs (the big divide between the Tea Party and the ruling class). And she works hard but she looks like she's enjoying herself. Man, those guys have their work cut for them if they want to outshine her."

None of this necessarily means she will win. Mitt has run a good campaign so far -- good in the debates, a frontrunner keeping unforced errors to a minimum. Rick Perry is an impressive, savvy guy, and he'll do well. Obama is the media's guy -- they won't scrub his background, they'll try to cover for him when he screws up, and they will help his campaign try to destroy whoever is nominated on our side. This is a long haul, with miles and miles yet to go -- and since the world does not stand still, we don't now know what events we'll be talking about next summer and fall. But I think it's clear that Michele is connecting with the dynamic movement in the country -- a movement that the punditocracy has repeatedly and vastly underestimated. And that's a big part of why they've so underestimated her. The people who say she can't win are the same people who dismissed her as a serious candidate -- as someone who could get as far as she's already gotten.

She can win. She may not win, but it's a mistake to dismiss the possibility.