Sitting Down With Our Enemies

Barack Obama fulfilled a campaign promise yesterday, even before his inauguration, by negotiating with his enemies.

President-elect Barack Obama spent Tuesday evening at a dinner party with several prominent conservative columnists, including William Kristol and David Brooks of The New York Times, according to an Obama transition pool report.

Mr. Obama, who has been staying at the Hay-Adams Hotel in advance of his inauguration next week, arrived at 9 Grafton Street, an upscale address in Chevy Chase, Md., at 6:34 p.m. The Montgomery County property tax records list this address as the home of the conservative Washington Post columnist George Will, the host of the dinner party. Also attending the party was Charles Krauthammer The Washington Post. Together, some of the columnists at the dinner party have been some of Mr. Obama’s severest critics.

I'm of two minds on this. Much like elevating Rick Warren, this elevates the likes of Kristol and Brooks as if they are serious folk whose ideas must be respected. However, it's only a dinner, and as I said, it was a campaign promise. Not to mention the fact that it's straight out of the counterinsurgency textbook:

One of the more frustrating aspects of counterinsurgency involves talking to the people who were recently shooting at you -- sometimes while they're shooting at you. Often that gets misinterpreted as softness, but it's more of a recognition that the only way to achieve a true victory is by co-opting your opponents. What looks like a decisive victory one day can easily be overturned by a simmering sense among the vanquished that they have no place in the new regime, and therefore have little recourse besides resistance. The objective in launching these sorts of parleys with your opponents is two-fold. First, to see if they can be placated, and whether the price of doing so is acceptable. And second, to visibly demonstrate to the broader population that you've taken every reasonable step at reaching out to these adversaries -- so if they rebuke you and you counterattack, you look like the reasonable party and they look like the rejectionists. It's generally a sound strategy, and it's achieved real results.

One final point - the Obama mantra of talking to people who disagree with him has so far not spread to his liberal critics. Hopefully that dinner will be organized soon. It should be - otherwise there's a certain imbalance to the effort.

UPDATE: The report is that Obama met with liberal columnists this morning.

Today's group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others.

While I'm glad Rachel was in the room, these aren't CRITICS, by and large, nor are most of them even liberals. This is the typical thinking in Washington, where the range of policy ideas ranges from the Weekly Standard to The New Republic. Put the President-elect in a room with Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer, Katha Pollitt, Katrina vanden Heuvel, maybe a few liberal bloggers. That would say something.

More on the Conservative Crackup

This is getting pretty hilarious. The right-wing elites, the royalists who believe they own the party and must never give anything to their whackjob base except a few friendly words and a meaningless phrase about being pro-life in the party platform, is having a full-on snit fit over the prospect of Mike Huckabee and his Christian Army sweeping to the nomination. They're literally going out of their skulls about it. Peggy Noonan, who earlier called the base of the party "idiots," is now saying that Ronald Reagan would be rejected by the modern GOP. Charles Krauthammer is appalled of the temerity of these voters, to think they can actually pick the candidate of their choosing. Winger bloggers like the Ace of Spades and Dan Riehl are claiming they'll vote Democratic if Huckabee is the nominee.

This is, frankly, a scream. The uptight economic conservatives had no problem with the Jesus freaks in their coalition as long as they didn't actually have any power. George Bush loved the Lord because he "changed muh heart," but he was a Kennebunkport man at the root, dedicated to the anti-tax, corporate-welfare, crony-capitalism, shock-doctrine agenda. Huckabee isn't just putting on the airs of the religious right, he is one of them. And he believes in the whole Bible, and won't cotton to the massive payouts to the upper classes and the endless march of the war machine.

These guys love to claim that Democrats have no religion and worship no God and live in a world of moral oblivion, but boy, they sure squirm around when faced with an actual religious figure as their standard-bearer, don't they? I'm not sure if this is because they think Huckabee would get killed in November and expose the Republican Party as a small regional phenomenon, or if they just don't want to give the theocons actual power for fear of the havoc they would wreak, for fear of the religio-political amalgam that would result. In fact, we've already seen hints of this, with anti-science nuts in powerful positions of government and some military leaders, particularly in the Air Force, who see themselves as Christian warriors.

But this is clearly a case of the GOP making their bed and now wanting to avoid lying in it. They worshipped at the altar, sometimes literally, of the fundie forces out in the so-called Heartland, and their little bait-and-switch isn't working anymore. There have been a number of gleeful commentaries about this, but the best is clearly from the great James Wolcott.

(Bush's compassionate conservative shtick) doesn't sound so very different to me than the compassionate conservativism Mike Huckabee is espousing, as when he rebuked Mitt Romney over wanting to deny college aid to children of illegal immigrants. But now that Mike Huckabee has flapped his arms and scattered the pigeons, jeopardizing the candidacies of expensive empty suits such as Romney and Fred Thompson, not to mention Giuliani's big-state gameplan, the media's collective bobblehead brain trust has rediscovered the virtues of secular firewalls and tucking faith in the vest pocket rather than draping yourself in velvet yards of it. For the last seven years we've been subjected to hero-worshipping prose about Bush's faith and fortitude and his appealing to a "higher father" for guidance and succor, and saintly photographs of the presidential seal forming a golden halo around Bush's warrior profile (Lucianne.com loved running such jawline porn). And for longer than seven years, Democrats have been caricatured and reviled as the party that harbors hostility and sneery condescension towards people of faith and established religion, a godless sect barely indisguishable from a postmodern pagan cult [...]

There was a certain smugness in being able to count on the evangelical wing voting Republican and being sewn up as part of the permanent Rovian majority. But now the permanent Republican majority is a leaking sandbag and the front runner status of a Mormon or thrice-married Catholic threatens to incur the resentment of evangelicals, who don't enjoy feeling they're just allowed to be along for the ride as long as they don't dictate the parade route.

And let us say: Amen.

UPDATE: I forgot this gem from David Frum:

It also has to be admitted: Many of us on the conservative side have fed this monster. (Rightly) aghast at the abuse of expertise by liberal judges, liberal bureaucrats and liberal academics, we have sometimes over-reacted by denying the importance of expertise altogether.

Oh that's rich. It's also misplaced. Conservatives were NEVER interested in government. They may be prioritizing "heart" or "values" now, but it was the principle of "limited government" then, which meant the same thing: do nothing of substance to anyone but the CEOs. They're just upset that people have taken notice.