Some previously assured right-wingers are starting to sound a bit more sober, as they take notice of current front-runner John Kerry’s veteran appeal (as both war hero and seasoned senator), and the charismatic John Edwards’ apparent strength in Bush country, the Southern states. Which isn’t to say that a Dean hangover is stanching the free-flowing partisan onslaught; plenty of faithful conservatives continue to attack with aplomb. Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn, a particularly ardent supporter of Bush’s foreign policy, writes in the conservative London Daily Telegraph that leader John Kerry, should he indeed land the nomination, is only setting himself up for certain loss with his stale, empty campaign rhetoric:

“If you go to a Kerry rally — something of an oxymoron, but let that pass — the senator’s stump speech is a karaoke tape of floppo populist boilerplate. If he’d downloaded it for free from the Internet, that’d be one thing. Instead, he paid a small fortune to hotshot consultant Bob Shrum, who promptly faxed over the same old generic guff he keeps in the freezer: ‘I (insert name here) will never stop fighting for ordinary people against the powerful interests that stand in your way.’

“This shtick worked so well for Shrum’s previous clients — President Dick Gephardt (1988), President Bob Kerrey (1992), President Al Gore (2000) and President Insert Namehere (2008) that he evidently sees no reason why it shouldn’t elect a fifth president this time round.”

Looking ahead to South Carolina, Steyn likes the glossy John Edwards’ prospects more — but that’s a relative assessment; ultimately, says Steyn, the GOP owns the 2004 campaign.

“Sen. John Edwards, the pretty-boy southern lawyer, does a much better job of this sort of thing … True, his stump speech often sounds less like a political platform and more like a laundry list of class-action suits he’d like to get a piece of — we need to act against credit card companies that charge excessive interest, etc. — and he has nothing of interest to say about the war. But his qualified support — or qualified lack of support — seems to suit a Democratic electorate that recoils from Joe Lieberman’s full-throated backing of the Iraq liberation and isn’t quite suicidal enough to nail its colours to the mast of the fruitcake anti-war Left.

“That’s the real story here: for all Howard Dean’s talk that you can’t beat Bush with ‘Bush Lite’, the candidates who’ll survive … are doing their best not to sound anti-war, anti-tax cuts or anti-guns. In other words, even in the Democratic primary, this election’s now being fought on Republican terms.”

Washington Times contributor Barry Casselman says that all the hubbub over Iowa and New Hampshire misses the point, with a long and winding road ahead for the deadlocked Dems.

“It has been so long since there was a race all the way to the national convention that it is easy to forget that this contest is really about numbers of delegates. Ahead of the initial primaries are states with fabulous riches of delegates — i.e., New York, California, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey. Of course, if Mr. Kerry wins all or most of these by big margins, the race is over. It could happen that way, but it is more likely that as the contest goes south and west, the results will be mixed — with all of the five major candidates accumulating numbers of delegates, and Mr. Edwards and, even possibly, Mr. Dean and Mr. Clark, winning some of these states.”

Rather than potentially strengthening the candidate who does finally rise to the top, the stiff competition, according to Casselman, will prove nothing but happy news for the GOP.

“The leaders of the Democratic Party know that the longer their nomination remains in doubt, the more difficult will be the effort to defeat Mr. Bush. Failing to have an early consensus for Mr. Dean, they are unlikely to have one soon, now that the competition goes into ‘wholesale’ states where enormous amounts of money — and valuable remaining good will between the various interests of the party — will have to be spent. [But] these strategists, consultants, rich contributors and establishment figures of the Democratic Party, as I have suggested, would like the process ended as early as possible, and at the least expense.”

The Edwards factor
Like Casselman, many conservatives had hoped Dean would wrap up the nomination quickly, convinced Bush would trounce him in the election. And after John Edwards’ rise to legitimate contender in Iowa, a number of analysts say he may be the candidate — with his positive message and charming Southern drawl — whom the Republicans fear most. Ahead of the New Hampshire vote on Tuesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks at first seemed to sound a note of trepidation, and even reluctant respect, about Edwards.

“John Edwards is one of the happiest populists in U.S. history. He doesn’t rage against the 2 percent who have seized all [the] power. He sees politics through the prism of his own personal triumph, his rise from being the son of a millworker to becoming a lawyer and presidential candidate.”

But Brooks did his part to tear Edwards down, perhaps looking to taint the freshman senator from North Carolina with a Howard Dean-esque anger complex.

“The emotional climax of his [January stump] speech comes when he describes how he used to represent ‘people like you’ against teams of highly paid, distinguished corporate lawyers. ‘And you know what happened? I beat them, and I beat them, and I beat them again!’ The crowds go crazy, but they are not only applauding; they are applauding and smiling at the same time, a result that was not generated by all the other candidates who have used the Two Americas theme over the years.”

Sounding oddly conflicted, Brooks deemed Edwards a half-baked yet convincing candidate — he appeared almost to be wishing Edwards in the direction of an unrefined, Dean style of campaigning.

“The crucial question for Edwards is whether he can move from charisma to character … There is grace in his performance but no sense of struggle. Yet Edwards’s rise could not have been achieved without moments of anger, resentment and humiliation. If in The February Speech he can communicate that struggle, that sense of difficulty, which is shared by millions, then he will be a less polished campaigner, but a most persuasive one.”

“Compassionate counter-proliferation”
In his State of the Union speech last week, President Bush continued to extol the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in part by pronouncing that the U.S. had backed its rhetoric with the necessary muscle: “For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America.” But James A. Phillips, a research fellow at the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation in Washington, is applauding what he deems a softer side to the president’s tough-talking foreign policy.

“President George W. Bush’s warning in his State of the Union Address that America refuses to live under the shadow of the threat of weapons of mass destruction serves notice to the leaders of those countries that they can not rest easy if they continue to support terrorism and procure terror weapons. [His] State of the Union speech clearly commits the Bush Administration to a policy of compassionate counter-proliferation. The outlaw regimes in Iran, North Korea, and Syria ignore this at their own peril …

“Significantly, the President did not utter the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’ which was coined in his 2002 speech. And he stressed the need to export democracy as a long-term antidote to terrorism, calling for a doubling of the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy. Perhaps he has become a ‘kinder, gentler’ leader like his father did toward the end of his first term. He did note that ‘different threats require different strategies,’ a remark that suggests that the remaining members of the Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea (and Syria, which is an unindicted co-conspirator) will not necessarily face the same relentless frontal attack as Iraq did.”

Phillips doesn’t mention that the National Endowment for Democracy, a nongovernmental grant-making organization that has drawn past criticism for serving as a partisan tool of U.S. foreign policy, had a rather modest budget, according to Slate, of $35 million in 2003.

The passion for Mel Gibson
Right-wing Christian ideologue and media pundit Hugh Hewitt is repaying actor/director Mel Gibson with lavish praise for the invitation he got to one of Gibson’s exclusive pre-screenings of the controversial forthcoming film “The Passion of the Christ.” Gibson has tried to keep his production hermetically sealed for months, shutting out mainstream Christian, Jewish and interfaith leaders from screenings. But based on a leaked version of the script, many of those religious leaders are deeply concerned that the film will unleash a wave of anti-Semitism — an accusation Gibson has forcefully rejected. Hewitt clearly anticipates the severe criticism that the film is likely to draw upon release, and he’s giving Gibson a resounding thumbs up.

“The Passion of the Christ is a phenomenal work of art; a moving and inspiring film that will certainly be shown again and again for generations to come. Though I am a follower of Jesus Christ, I do not believe that one needs to be a believer in the divinity of Christ to appreciate the majesty of the movie and its extraordinary commitment to authenticity and an objective recounting of the story of the passion and death of Christ as relayed through the Gospels.”

Leading Mel’s choir of hand-picked religion experts-cum-film critics, Hewitt gets to the point of his valentine to Gibson:

“I do not understand the accusations of anti-Semitism, for except for Pilate and his soldiers, all of the players are Jewish, the most noble, the flawed, and the corrupt. I do understand the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, and how it perverted the Gospels to its cause, but this film is not part of that shameful legacy. Should anyone try and pervert the movie to that end, there will be millions of Christians condemning such a kidnapping.”

And with Mel casting himself as the persecuted artist turned martyr throughout the pre-release media melee, Hewitt puts forth some bona fide gospel to reassure him:

“‘If the world hates you, you know it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.’ John 15:18-19. These words of Jesus are a guarantee that the maker of The Passion of the Christ is in for a rough go of it, as well as its cast and crew. If anyone knows Mel Gibson, please pass along my thanks.”

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“Despite my fears, there were no clashes between protesters and police: In fact, the anti-Bush protests were surprisingly small and unenergetic compared to the last British protests I witnessed, back in October 2002.

“But — and here’s the catch — the reason for the comparative quiet was that Bush and Blair surrendered the streets of London to the radicals. The original plan for the visit contemplated that Bush would drive in a royal coach down the Mall from Buckingham Palace to Whitehall. It contemplated an address to Members of Parliament. Tens of thousands of cheering schoolchildren waving British and American flags would also have been nice …

“By agreeing to let the President be bottled up inside the palace, the trip’s planners reduced the risk of confrontations — but only by broadcasting to the British public their tacit acknowledgment that the visit was unpopular and unwelcome.

“By eliminating from the president’s schedule events with any touch of spontaneity or public contact, the trip planners made the president look as if he could not or would not engage with ordinary British people. Unless you see it, you can hardly believe the incredible feebleness of the American communication effort in the UK. The US ambassador is nowhere to be seen, and nobody else seems to have the mission to speak up for this administration and this president. The cocooning of the president has demoralized even those who ought to be America’s friends.”

Frum should tell it to his old colleague Karl Rove, whose election strategy clearly does not include TV footage of Bush confronting protesters in the streets.

Minneapolis-based syndicated columnist and blogger James Lileks (“the Bleat”) rips the “ignorant” producers at ABC’s “Nightline” for skipping over Bush’s big foreign policy speech in London in favor of the Michael Jackson pedophilia melee last Thursday. Citing a “Nightline” electronic newsletter to its viewing audience saying that “the staff was split” about which story to cover, Lileks is incredulous:

“You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they’re all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last [Thursday] night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period.

“Nightline, supposedly the Thinking Person’s Late Night Show, was split about whether a repudiation of 50 years of foreign policy was slightly more important than the arrest of a washed-up, crotch-grabbing yee-hee! squeaking nutball who was probably the horrid pedophile everyone already thought he was.

“The question is whether this reflects the mood of the country, or whether it reflects the mood of our Olympian betters who hand down the news from their lofty aeries. I think it’s the latter. I hope it’s the latter. Of course Jackson is an item of interest, but it’s a below-the-fold story. It’s an artifact of the noisy empty 90s, the Jerry Springer era, the time when the networks sought out the people pasted to their sofas shoveling in Doritos and watching hapless fools throw folding chairs at their ex-lovers. Watching the [networks] fall over themselves covering Jackson makes you suspect that they yearn for those days, because they are profoundly ambivalent about the conflict in which we are engaged.

“They fear Islamic terrorism, but it’s an abstract fear now. Their distaste of Bush is much more tangible and immediate; it’s part of the atmosphere in the newsroom. This is his war, not theirs. If it is a war at all.”

In an early salvo in what is certain to be a crucial debate over whether Bush’s invasion of Iraq has actually made terrorism worse, Lileks blasts war critics as spineless appeasers prepared to sell out America and Israel.

“‘It’s going to take another attack to convince the fence-sitters’: I hear this all the time. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the next attack on American soil will jolt those who’ve moved on, who’ve forgotten the aching, clammy dread we all felt after 9/11. But others will believe that we brought it on ourselves. You already read it around the web — the bombings in Turkey were a response to Britain’s assistance for toppling Saddam; what did we expect? In other words: if we fight back, we get what we deserve. If we do not fight back, and we are attacked again, you can blame it on the crimes for which we have not yet sufficiently atoned. The only proper posture for the West is supine. Curl up and let them kick until they’re spent. Give them Israel and New York and perhaps they’ll go away.

“This is either going to end on their terms, or ours. Which would you prefer?”

For his part, Gen. Tommy Franks, who retired in August 2003 after commanding U.S. forces during the invasion of Iraq, takes a darker view of another catastrophic attack on U.S. soil. According to NewsMax.com, a right-wing news site based in Palm Beach, Fla., Franks says such an attack could result in the U.S. government being dissolved in favor of a military state. (NewsMax quotes from an interview with Franks in the Dec. issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine.)

“Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government …

“Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that ‘the worst thing that could happen’ is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

“If that happens, Franks said, ‘… the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.’ Franks then offered ‘in a practical sense’ what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

“‘It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world — it may be in the United States of America — that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.’”

Gen. Franks divines such sinister intentions in Saddam’s anti-American speeches:

“‘I, for one, begin with intent … There is no question that Saddam Hussein had intent to do harm to the Western alliance and to the United States of America. That intent is confirmed in a great many of his speeches, his commentary, the words that have come out of the Iraqi regime over the last dozen or so years. So we have intent.”

But perhaps because of the missing WMD, the general’s rhetoric and logic get all tangled up when it comes to Saddam’s capacity to carry out attacks:

“‘If we know for sure … that a regime has intent to do harm to this country, and if we have something beyond a reasonable doubt that this particular regime may have the wherewithal with which to execute the intent, what are our actions and orders as leaders in this country?’”

In the annals of clear and inspiring battle cries, “We have something beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular regime may have the wherewithal to strike” is not among the finalists.

Rummy Inc.
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saluted Congress for its passage of the 2004 Defense Authorization Act:

“While news from Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror dominate the headlines, here at home progress is being made on another important front: the critical work of military transformation. Today, President Bush will sign into law landmark legislation that will help bring the Defense Department out of the industrial age, and into the information age.”

In the spirit of the Bush administration’s self-professed corporate style of governing, Rumsfeld explained the benefits of the Department of Defense overhaul like a true CEO. There will be streamlined labor negotiations:

“The bill … authorizes national-level bargaining authority, so the DoD can negotiate with unions at the national level, instead of renegotiating the same issue with 1,300 different union locals.”

And some sort of environmental benefit:

“The legislation will also clarify key portions of two environmental laws. Our military must protect the nation while preserving our environmental heritage. These reforms will allow us to train our forces, while maintaining the department’s high standard of environmental stewardship.”

And downsizing:

“This legislation is an important step forward on the road to transforming the department. Already, we have reduced management and headquarters staffs by 11 percent and streamlined the budget and acquisition processes by eliminating hundreds of pages of unnecessary rules and self-imposed red tape.”

All of which Rumsfeld capped off with some of his special clarifying syntax (normally reserved for press conferences):

“But this [legislation] is only a step. Transforming is not an event. There is no moment at which the DoD moves from being untransformed to being ‘transformed.’”

Hey, baby, want to go back to my pad, drink some wine and commit spiritual suicide?
In last Saturday’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks argued that conservatives should embrace gay marriage because encouraging marriage, whether for gays or straights, will help stop society’s decline into immoral, egotistical “contingency.” This is familiar conservative high-moral-sermon territory, but more than a few readers may have choked on their coffee when they read Brooks’ weird lead:

“Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.”

Brooks did not say whether those who have had several sexual partners in a year and a half are also committing spiritual suicide.

Spank me, please (or at least buy my doll)
Like an impetuous child in an elevator, right-of-Attila shock shrew Ann Coulter delights in wildly pressing all the hot little buttons just to see what will happen. This habit got her exiled from the “respectable” right: the über-conservative National Review Online dropped her weekly column from its site in late 2001 and after she wrote (and they published) a notorious column in which she called for the U.S. to “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

But even if she’s regarded by mainstream conservatives as a self-promoting freak, Coulter continues to be a major player on the far right. Her “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right” was a runaway No. 1 bestseller, with more than 400,000 copies in print.

In her latest column for right-wing clearinghouse Townhall.com, Coulter is in classic form, flailing at the Democratic presidential candidates for shamelessly exploiting personal tragedy and suddenly discovering their Jewishness.

“The Democrats have discovered a surprise campaign issue: It turns out that several of them have had a death in the family. Not only that, but many Democrats have cracker-barrel humble origins stories and a Jew or lesbian in the family. Dick Gephardt’s campaign platform is that his father was a milkman, his son almost died and his daughter is a lesbian. Vote for me!…

“Howard Dean talks about his brother Charlie’s murder at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. Bizarrely, after working on the failed George McGovern campaign, Charlie Dean went to Indochina in 1974 to witness the ravages of the war he had opposed. Not long after he arrived, the apparently ungrateful communists captured and killed him. ‘Hey fellas! I’m on your s– CLUNK!’…

“In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats’ other big idea — too nuanced for a bumper sticker — is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There’s Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew — along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering …”

This last line is not the obvious anti-Semitic slur it initially appears to be, but a less obvious one. It’s Coulter’s ironic put-down of Democrats, whose pandering she contrasts with the true suffering of Jews. In Coulter’s mind, it seems, you can’t be a “real” Jew and a Democrat — a weird, convoluted position that creates a whole new category of partisan anti-Semitism. But lest someone accuse Coulter of this, she immediately stakes out her pro-Jewish bona fides by making the absurd claim that the evil Democrats — who until the current Bush administration were always more pro-Israel than Republicans, and continue to be staunchly pro-Sharon — are planning to sell out Israel to the terrorists:

“The Democrats’ urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children. Their humble-origins claptrap is designed to disguise the fact that liberals think ordinary people are racist scum. Their perverse desire to discuss the deaths and near-deaths of their children is designed to disguise the fact that they support the killing of more than a million unborn children every year. (Oh, by the way, what did their milkman and mill worker fathers think about abortion?)”

Having gotten that borderline-psychotic screed off her chest, Coulter turns to flogging her newly expanded line of personal merchandise. Just in time for the holiday season, it’s the Ann Coulter “talking action figure,” whose advertisement gets the final word on the page:

“Amuse your conservative friends and annoy your liberal neighbors with the brand new Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure. This incredibly lifelike action figure looks just like the beautiful Ann Coulter, and best of all… it sounds like Ann, too! This highly collectible doll comes in a display box with information highlighting Ann’s unique contributions to America’s political discourse. If you can’t get enough Ann Coulter, you’ll want to order the Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure today!”

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Read more of “Right Hook,” Salon’s weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.

Terry Gross: I’ll read what the People magazine thing said…

Bill O’Reilly: Why? Why read it? Why read it?

T.G.: Because I want people to hear it–

B.O.: Why? Why?

T.G.: Because… You’ll hear when I’m done why.

B.O.: Look, I’m getting the feeling in this interview, all right, that this is just a hatchet job on me. All right? And I don’t like it. Now there’s no reason for you to read that People magazine review. If they want to read it, they can go and read it.

T.G.: But this isn’t the review of the book–

B.O.: Now wait a minute, hold it, hold it.

T.G.: –it’s the review of how you handled it.

B.O.: It doesn’t make any difference how I handled it.

T.G.: I think it’s OK to ask you to be accountable for the things that you said.

B.O.: Accountable for what? You know, I came on this program to talk about “Who’s Looking Out for You,” and what you’ve done is thrown every kind of defamation you can in my face. All right, did you do this to Al Franken? Did you? Did you challenge him on what he said?

T.G.: We had a different interview.

B.O.: Yeah, a different interview, OK. Fine. “Fresh Air”? Is this what “Fresh Air” is? I’ll get a transcript of this interview, of the Al Franken interview. You want me to do that? And compare the two?

T.G.: You’re welcome to–

B.O.: And compare the two?

T.G.: You’re absolutely welcome.

B.O.: All right, why don’t you tell your listeners right now. Were you as tough on Al Franken as you are on me?

T.G.: Uh, no, I wasn’t.

B.O.: No, you weren’t. OK. Why?

T.G.: Well, Al Franken had written a book of political satire.

B.O.: Oh, oh, he was satire now, was it? By calling people “liars” and distorting their faces on the book cover, that’s satire now, is it? And my book “Who’s Looking Out for You” is designed to help people, to show them how they have to know how to read people in this society to succeed, yet you’re easy on Franken and you challenge me. This is NPR. OK, I think we all know what this is. I think we all know where you’re going with this.

T.G.: Well…

B.O.: Don’t we? Yeah, don’t we?

T.G.: Well, you can think whatever you want to.

B.O.: I am. I mean, I’m evaluating this interview very closely.

T.G.: Obviously you are.

B.O.: Now, we’ve spent now, all right, 50 minutes of me defending defamation against me in every possible way, while you gave Al Franken a complete pass on his defamatory book, and if you think that’s fair, Terry, then you need to get [into] another business. I’ll tell you that right now. And I’ll tell your listeners if you have the courage to put this on the air: This is basically an unfair interview designed to try to trap me into saying something that Harper’s [magazine] can use. And you know it, and you should be ashamed of yourself. And that is the end of this interview.

T.G.: Oh, so you’re not even going to give me the chance to ask you a follow-up question? You have to make a speech and then have the last word?

T.G.: You’re gone?

T.G.: OK, I guess that’s the answer to that question. He’s walked out.

On his own show later that day, O’Reilly was in self-congratulatory mode:

“Time now for ‘The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.’ I had to stop an interview with NPR today because the conversation got completely out of hand. It was supposed to be about my new book, ‘Who’s Looking Out for You’ — I say ‘supposed to be’ … The program is called ‘Fresh Air’ and I knew the people were not gonna be fair, but I decided to let it play out. That program gave one of the smear merchants running around the country a total pass when it interviewed him. But in my conversation they were much more aggressive, and I actually enjoyed telling the woman off, and I think you’ll enjoy hearing it. If you want to know the ridiculous truth about NPR and ‘Fresh Air,’ go to BillOReilly.com or listen to the ‘Radio Factor’ tomorrow. Very interesting.”

A Yankee for president?
Newly hired New York Times columnist David Brooks is off to a weird start. On Tuesday — after an early Times column in which he had expressed great dismay at the hatred that many on the left feel for George W. Bush — Brooks extolled the hateful, embittered Northeastern worldview, as reflected in the nasty, brutish behavior of Yankees and Red Sox fans.

“Last week I visited Tucson, and then flew back to attend a Yankees-Red Sox playoff game. It occurs to me that some of my friends in the Southwest may be watching the series on TV, and may be alarmed by some of the behavior they are seeing on the field and elsewhere…

“My friends should remember that the Yankees-Red Sox series is a contest between two Northeastern teams, and while the Northeast is no longer a particularly important region of the country — we haven’t sent a person to the White House in 43 years — we do have a distinct way of doing things, which we cherish.

“For example, while most people in the Southwest seek pleasure and avoid stress, we in the Northeast do not have that orientation. The place in their culture that is occupied by the concept ‘happiness’ is occupied in our culture by the concept ‘cursing at each other.’

“So when you go to a game at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park you will see lawyers, waiters and skinheads sending off enough testosterone vapors to menace the ozone layer. If a Martian came down and landed in the stands of a Yankees-Red Sox game, he would get the impression that human beings are 90 percent men and 10 percent women in tight T-shirts, and that we reproduce by loathing in groups…

“A few years ago some singers from the Pacific Northwest tried to pioneer something called grunge rock. But watching people from Washington State trying to appear grungy is like watching Norwegian kids try to rap. The effort is there, but the essence is missing.

“We know that our region is not the future. Every year, people move out of the Northeast to Scottsdale and other places where it is considered fashionable to coordinate your toenail polish with the color scheme of your Lexus.

“Those of us who are left here know we will never be happy. If God had meant for us to be happy, he would have had us born in Aspen. We know that every year the political center of gravity in this country moves farther south and west, because most voters do not appreciate the importance of sarcasm when selecting their leaders.

“But at least in the era of our decline we have our internal feuds to sustain us. You may deprive us of our greatness, our honor, our very lives, but you will never take away our rage.”

The GOP gets in bed with Hollywood
Not only has the outcome of the California recall pushed the country to the political right, says Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal, but it also proves that Arnold’s political savvy includes a critical “cool” factor. Likewise, Henninger lauds the stiff-collared GOP for seeing the wave of the future — getting hip to Hollywood in the age of celebrity. The charisma-deficient Dems, he says, may just have to drop the gloves and go for the new governor’s jugular:

“Once the tectonic plates of this recall-cum-gubernatorial election stopped shifting, the one political monument lying in pieces was the traditional notion of just who and what constitutes a ‘moderate’ … I think the definition of political “moderate” has shifted seismically to the right…

“If after this week the definition of a GOP moderate now sits halfway between the center and what the avowedly conservative Tom McClintock represents, then the ‘center’ in American politics is migrating steadily to the right in a measurable and significant way. And of course by definition this would move the Democratic base even further leftward from the mainstream. It’s too early to know how permanent California’s shifts are, but I suspect that a lot of voters who participated in or watched this election for the first time feel comfortable in this new political place — where Arnold is…

“No matter the special circumstances in California, these rightward shifts in the political landscape are remarkable because they are so difficult and rare…

“There’s one last, large intangible that Arnold has slipped into the political waters: He’s cool.

“Like it or not, the force field of celebrity is part of the cultural physics of our era, and it looks as if the first party to get totally wired-in to a mega-celebrity is, incredibly, the GOP. Something weirdly attractive was coming off the Schwarzenegger camp’s victory stage on TV round about midnight [last week] — Arnold, Maria Shriver (a get-out-of-jail-free card for many centrist Democrats feeling trapped in an inhospitable party), Jay Leno’s funny introduction, Rob Lowe nearby, Eunice and Sargent Shriver, the extended Shriver clan, and a sea of young, attractive faces. Liberal pundits will mock this scene unmercifully, but in terms of mass-market politics it was as hip as any politician could ever hope for. Arnold, with all that media reach and the aura of living wholly inside the country’s popular culture, may be changing ideas of who can live comfortably on election day among the Republicans.

“A lot of what I am suggesting depends on the mythic Arnold having some real-world success as governor … But what we just had in California was a virtual national election; everyone was watching. It’s possible that with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory a dam burst in the center of American politics. If any significant number of younger voters, independents impatient with a relentlessly tired-sounding Democratic party, and conservatives start to flow together inside the broad, new political space Arnold has staked — a space also covered by George Bush — then Democrats have a problem. Which is why California’s Democrats, rather than govern, will soon decide they simply have to bring Arnold down. If so, Arnold should make sure they do it out in the open. We’ll all want to watch this one, too.”

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To parry this charge requires another big book about bygone bohemia, this one set 100 years ago: Christine Stansell’s “American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century.” Stansell rescues the notion of bohemia from its would-be debunkers, those skeptics who have, for half a century, found implausible the notion of a place whose residents live artfully and on principle. But she does so without seeming to be on a crusade: Stansell, a feminist historian at Princeton, writes narrative history, not polemic.

She acknowledges instances of hypocrisy among the footloose and the ragtag, but she also argues persuasively that bohemian life has always been a step toward the middle class. “Bohemia’s self-designated types always existed in symbiotic relation to bourgeois culture rather than in opposition to it,” as she puts it. “While bohemias signaled dissent from the profiteering of the cultural marketplace, they also provided their affiliates the means to parlay that dissent into successful careers.” Stansell’s comfort with this paradox of bohemian culture — a paradox that, year after year, makes both left- and right-wing pundits’ blood boil — might even incite readers to wonder why the bohemian fantasy regularly invites so much sadistic dissection.

Rolling out her subject in miniprofiles of picturesque artists and radicals (Emma Goldman, John Reed, Neith Boyce, Mabel Dodge, Floyd Dell), Stansell evokes the scene that sprang up in downtown New York when 19th century immigrants attempted to construct, episodically and haphazardly, a Paris-style cafe culture. At the time, alcohol was clubby, remote and expensive; coffee and tea were more democratic, and the displaced Europeans who initially gathered at the coffeehouses were eclectic, unaffiliated and largely down at heel.

Soon, students, journalists, organizers and socialites showed up — for politics or art, for reasons good and evil — to inspect the foreigners. These interlopers scoffed at 19th century squeamishness about class mixing. With their growing passion for urban “contact” (a shibboleth in Walt Whitman’s populist poetry, which they read avidly), they saw slumming as redemption rather than corruption.

Discussions of free love, feminism, abstract painting, naturalism in fiction, trade unionism and radical politics flourished among the caffeinated polyglots. The years between 1890 and 1919 thus saw the evolution of Greenwich Village. Its cafes, salons, private homes and clubs provided a social infrastructure for women looking to delay or renounce marriage and men looking to delay or renounce making a living.

Not every New Yorker got to savor the spiciness of life downtown. In spite of bohemia’s claims of inclusiveness, Stansell shows, women and African-Americans often couldn’t transcend mascot status. She’s less forthcoming, however, on bohemia’s other contradictions. The ad hoc alliance between collectivist politics and individualist art, between union organizers and free-loving art-world nudists, represents an unlikely coupling that some — Richard Rorty comes to mind — have blamed for leaving a schizo legacy for the American left. Can you lavishly express yourself and, at the same time, march in unison with a political movement? Stansell spends little time on this crucial question; art and politics are, to her, simply alternative modes of expression available to hearty souls.

In its many redemption fables, “American Moderns” occasionally strikes a note of jubilation, leaving no doubt that Stansell, whose last book, “City of Women,” was about antebellum New York, is an “I love NY” historian. If you love New York too, the satisfactions of this book may resemble self-satisfactions. Even if you don’t, vicariously snubbing the Victorians is always enjoyable. In Stansell’s telling, America’s first bohemia was a splendid and efficient racket: It kept its adherents hopeful in straitened circumstances, made their lives feel significant and ultimately made bourgeois citizens out of them.