There will be little or no blogging until at least Sunday, as I will be traveling to a conference today and will be attending panels for the rest of the week.

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Last week I observed that Obama’s real political problem was not the alienation of white men and white independents as some accounts would have it, but rather the disaffection of core Democratic constituencies, which now give Obama dramatically lower approval ratings than they gave him electoral support. Perhaps the administration saw the same thing and went ahead with a final push for health care legislation on the gamble that this would do more to energize their own people than it would provoke resistance. Perhaps if Congress does produce some bill in the near future that gamble will pay off, but in the meantime Obama continues losing ground with self-described liberals.

In 2008, according to CNN’s exit polling 89% of liberals voted for Obama, and now just 73% approve. 67% of those who rarely or never attend church voted for Obama, and now just 52% approve. According to Gallup, conservative approval continues to be higher (27%) than Obama’s share of the conservative vote (20%), and moderate support remains fairly steady. Obama has lost a little ground with Republicans in recent weeks, but this comes entirely from liberal and moderate Republicans (down five points from last week), and the 12% approval is higher than Obama’s share of the Republican vote (9%). His overall approval among Democrats has remained steady over the last couple of months because approval gains among conservative Democrats (up eight points to 75%) keep offsetting losses among liberal Democrats (down five points to 84% this week).

Even when we look at results from the crosstabs of a late February Rasmussen poll of likely voters, we find the same thing. Conservative likely voters are no more inclined to approve of Obama (19%) than conservatives were inclined to vote for him (20%), but he receives just 82% from liberal likely voters, (vs. 89%) 54% from 18-29 year old LVs (vs. 66%), 51% from women LVs (vs. 56%), and 80% from Democrat LVs (vs. 89%). It is difficult to look at this data and conclude that Obama’s political problem has been his lack of “centrism.”

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I challenge the increasingly marginal number of pundits, pols and bloggers who are blaming this incident on the Obama administration to explain to me exactly where and how Obama has changed U.S. policy on Israel in any material or substantive fashion. ~Kevin Sullivan

Of course, he has not, which is what I argue was the mistake that makes this quarrel over this particular settlement expansion ultimately so unimportant. Obama has been facing something of a no-win situation on Israel policy (is there any other kind?). He cannot make material or substantive changes to U.S. policy without calling down ten times the condemnation from Congress and assorted pundits he already has, and if he effectively tolerates the status quo, as he has been doing for the last year, he is declared a foreign policy failure and a weak leader. Because there was no “or else” to the call for a settlement freeze, Netanyahu called Obama’s bluff, and even now that there is a deterioration in relations there is no “or else.” It isn’t hard to guess what will follow. Netanyahu will press ahead, Obama will be made to look foolish, and the hawks who absolutely do not want him to pressure Israel in any way will nonetheless seize on the incident to declare him weak and ineffectual.

One of the most irritating memes in conservative commentary these days is the idea that Obama subverts allies and aids rivals. They have been pushing this one right from the beginning. This is a pretty blatant accusation of treachery and/or naivete, and it isn’t true. Naturally, this latest quarrel with Israel has become another entry on the indictment against Obama for the supposed “squeeze” he puts on allies. The only trouble with this argument is that there is no real squeeze. There is a lot of talk that I assume everyone involved knows will lead to nothing. It’s as if all of the parties know that the entire quarrel is a charade, but now that it has started it has to be played out.

Incredibly, despite the absence of any meaningful consequences for Netanyahu’s government from Washington, the administration is supposedly being very “hard” on Israel while it is being equally “soft” on Iran. There is an Iran gasoline embargo bill pending in Congress, where it has overwhelming support, and it seems unlikely that Obama would veto it if the bill came to his desk. On the other hand, the administration is throwing a public fit over the treatment of the Vice President during his visit to Israel and not doing much more than that. No honest person could conclude from this that it is Israel that has been getting the squeeze.

One thing that I have been noticing over the last few days is how readily foreign policy hawks have been adopting arguments that are normally made by opponents of Iran sanctions but have been applying them to the U.S.-Israel relationship instead. All of a sudden, the hawks have realized that public condemnation and political pressure might backfire and cause the population of another country to rally around the government Washington is trying to pressure. At last they have discovered that hectoring rhetoric and attempts to push a government into doing something it believes it has every right to do are counterproductive! Of course, this insight disappears the minute it might actually be useful in improving our Iran policy.

There are also a few crucial things that the hawks are missing that make these arguments a poor fit for Israel policy. Israeli settlement policy really does violate international law, Israel really is “flouting the will of the world” (to the extent that such a thing exists), and Israel really is more isolated today than it has been in decades. All of the things that the administration has falsely claimed about Iran’s nuclear program and its diplomatic and economic position in the world are far more true of Israel’s international position in the wake of Lebanon, Gaza, Dubai, the latest settlement announcement, and the serial incompetence of Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry. Unlike in Iran, the U.S. actually has leverage and influence in Israel, but while Washington strives mightily to conjure up some way to punish Iran it refuses to use the means available to it to try to make Israel stop doing what Washington has called on it to stop doing for decades.

It’s quite possible that the “pressure track” wouldn’t work on Israel any better than it would work on any other state, but it isn’t even part of the discussion. One reason for this is because the U.S.-Israel relationship is similar to the relationship between Russia and Iran or China and Iran. The major power patron doesn’t really believe that there is anything wrong with the client’s controversial policy, and will never bring itself to pressure the client to change the policy. Some elements within the major power’s political class may even seen the client’s policy as a desirable or useful thing. The client relies on support from the major power to shield it from the opprobrium and opposition of hostile and unsympathetic states, and the major power is invested enough in supporting the client that it isn’t really ever going to jeopardize the relationship over an issue that ultimately makes no real difference to the major power’s interests.

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Ross:

But of course I would say that, since I favored the Iraq War, beginning to doubt its wisdom only once the invasion was underway, whereas Daniel Larison opposed it unhesitatingly from the start. So it makes sense that I would be drawn to accounts of the war that emphasize how complicated everything was, whereas Larison would say no, things were always perfectly clear, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. When I look at the disastrous period from 2003 till 2006, I see a series of tragedies for which Americans, and in particular the American elite, bear a collective responsibility. When Larison looks at that era, he sees a disastrous policy, with disastrous consequences, that was foisted on America by the Bush administration and its supporters and enablers — which is to say, by people like me. And all my talk about the need for art that admits of nuance, that allows for good intentions, and that leaves room for real tragedy sounds to him like so much self-justification.

This is understandable, and fair enough. But I’d still challenge Larison to sit through a movie marathon composed of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Rendition,” “Syriana,” “Redacted,” “Lions for Lambs,” “W.,” “In The Valley of Elah,” and “Green Zone” and not walk out admitting that I have at least something of a point.

As I later tried to make clear in the comments to the original post, I do think Ross has “something of a point” as far as his critique of the films is concerned. Happily, I think I will be able to skip the marathon. However, what appeared to me as the most glaring oversight and mistake that Ross made was the neglect of any mention that the flaws that mar these movies are some of the same flaws that helped create the disaster that the movies are inadequately portraying. As I wrote yesterday:

If Paul Greengrass makes a heavy-handed tendentious film filled with caricatures, maybe his reputation as a director takes a hit and some people waste their money on a mediocre movie. If people in government and the media have the same flaws, it results in the launch of an unnecessary war that wrecks an entire country, kills thousands and adversely affects the lives of millions. Which seems like the bigger problem that deserves more criticism? Which one is more responsible for the state of our political debate?

Ross might say that we have been over and over the disastrous consequences of the war, and we have heard all about the ideological blindness and recklessness of the war’s architects, so it is not up to him to rehearse these things in a column devoted to film criticism. Maybe it wouldn’t have been up to him to do this if he had just been writing a general review of Green Zone, but it becomes necessary for him to acknowledge some part of this when he provides a description of the story of the Iraq war “properly told” that only a die-hard war supporter would accept. It becomes necessary to give some indication that he knows he is doing something something strange and provocative when he calls for more sympathetic and nuanced understanding of the war’s architects while discussing a war that the previous administration sold to the public by rejecting and openly mocking concern for complexity, nuance and shades of gray before the war started. As I wrote in my comment section:

Ross objects to terrible simplifiers when it comes to storytelling, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but he really needs to take account of the much greater damage the terrible simplifiers did in actually waging the war.

What Ross’ post from today does not address is the period from early 2002 until the invasion in March 2003. It was during the year leading up to the war that much of what I am talking about took place. It was during this critical period when advocates for invasion and regime change were the last ones in the world arguing “how complicated everything was.” Everything was quite simple, straightforward and obvious for them. That was the era when ostensibly serious people talked about “the Arab mind” (“all these people understand is force!”), “draining the swamp” and creating a democratic beacon for the rest of the region. That was when we heard about the ease of Iraqi reconstruction, how “we did it in Germany and Japan and we can do it again!” and, yes, how we would be greeted as liberators. Iraq would be the model leading to regional transformation, and the destruction of Hussein’s regime would serve as a “demonstration effect.” All of this was fantasy unmoored from reality. It was not complicated by all the pesky details of Iraq’s history, culture and politics.

Working from profound misunderstandings that told them that Iraq would be like eastern Europe c. 1989, war planners apparently believed Iraq’s transition to democracy would be quick and easy and would facilitate an early exit. War supporters did not want to hear about the complexities of Iraqi society with its ethno-sectarian tensions, nor did they seem to be all that interested in the strategic problem of empowering the political forces most sympathetic to Iran. The inconvenient truth that Hussein hated the salafi jihadists he was supposedly sheltering was ignored or mocked as naive, and suddenly a regime’s support for one kind of terrorist group necessarily implied support for all kinds of terrorist groups. Doubts, questions and contrary evidence that opponents assembled against the case for war were largely just brushed aside as annoying impediments to the the war that was going to happen no matter how bad the arguments for it were.

Then the war that the administration and its allies wanted came, they have all moved on to other things, none of them (except maybe Scooter Libby) has paid any penalty personally or professionally, and the war still goes on. On the whole, they remain unrepentant, because they do not believe there was anything wrong in what they did. The more shameless among them have even taken to lecturing the rest of us on how truly noble the entire disaster was. It was not very long after the latest exercises in pro-war celebration that Ross’ column appeared, and it seemed to be a product of the same impulse for revisionism in a bad cause and an attempt to rehabilitate people who have not yet even been fully and properly disgraced. It would have helped Ross’ argument and made the column much better if he made clear that this was not what he was trying to do.

Do we gain anything from these movies? Probably not much. After all, they are ultimately just movies. Do they reinforce polarization that the actual disastrous policies created? To some extent, they must, and the more time that passes while the war’s architects remain unaccountable the deeper that polarization in some circles will be. It would be better if this were not so, but this is so far down the list of causes of the state of our political discourse that I have a hard time being concerned about it. Indeed, I have been trying to think of examples when a government embarked on a profoundly flawed and outrageously destructive policy and that policy received sympathetic contemporary artistic treatment from artists who were obviously aligned with the government’s staunchest critics. I have not yet come up with one. It could be that Ross is expecting something from filmmakers and movie studios that they are never going to provide, because it is exceedingly rare for artists to paint a sympathetic portrait of their fundamentally unsympathetic political opponents.

We may have to settle for our inadequate stories about Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that they are good stories. Even so, I cannot stress enough how the refusal of most remaining war supporters to acknowledge error and to accept responsibility for the tremendous human costs of a war our government started with their backing make such storytelling inevitable. “Art as revenge” does not tell us much about the human condition, but if there is no real accountability that may be all we are going to get.

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Walter Russell Mead continues to demolish a view that no one of any consequence in America holds:

But whatever happens in the Washington policy wars, one thing should be clear. This is not a battle between ‘the Jews’ and the rest of the United States over our policy in the Middle East. It is a battle between opposing conceptions of America’s interests in the Middle East, and gentiles and Jews can be found on both sides.

Mead manages to mar what was otherwise a reasonably good reflection on changing American public attitudes towards Israel with yet another attack against a claim that no one makes. He continues to discuss public opinion about Israel as if it were not being shaped on a regular basis by the public statements of politicians and government officials and media portrayals of Israel’s conflicts. According to Mead, U.S. Israel policy simply emerges from the will of the voters. I know of no other area of foreign policy about which Mead or anyone else would make such a far-fetched claim.

Public sympathy for Israel derives in significant part from the constant affirmations of U.S.-Israel ties by elected representatives and members of every presidential administration for at least the last forty years. This is also shaped in no small part by the relatively more favorable media coverage that Israel receives here in the U.S. compared to everywhere else in the world. Given the near-constant and lopsided nature of coverage and commentary on the subject, what is more remarkable is that sympathy for Israel is as low as it is. Considering that the question is a comparative one and asks respondents to choose between two sides that they have been used to perceiving in dramatically different ways, it is a little amazing that there is any sympathy for the Palestinians at all.

As I have said before, however, sympathy is not what creates policy, and for most voters U.S. policy towards Israel is not a major issue one way or the other. Except for a relatively small portion of the electorate that bases its voting almost entirely on national security and foreign policy, and except during exceptional periods when national security and foreign policy are foremost in the minds of voters (e.g., 2002 or 2006), the substance of foreign policy positions does not matter very much to most voters. To the extent that policy substance does matter, it is usually for the signal it sends or the attitude it conveys. For example, I doubt that most voters gave much thought to Obama’s actual proposal to negotiate with authoritarian governments, and for the purposes of winning over voters the proposal was mostly symbolic. It was meant to convey the message that Obama was reasonable and not a reflexive hard-liner. Voters disenchanted with the previous administration’s aggressive, confrontational approach were likely to find this attractive.

Meanwhile, public opinion towards Iran has been getting progressively more negative, and it seems undeniable that this is a product of government statements and media coverage. Even in the midst of the quarrel over the settlement announcement, we see pundits, bloggers, politicians and reporters all intoning gravely about how the quarrel might adversely affect cooperation against the supposedly dire Iranian threat. Small wonder that a majority of the public accepts the ridiculous idea that Iran is a great threat. If claims are repeated often enough by trusted public figures, large percentages of the population accept these quite readily. Even when claims are false and shown to be false, public acceptance of them outlives their debunking for some time. Even after no WMDs were found in Iraq, the conservative media cocoon was able to repeat the lie often enough and maintain the fiction that they had been found. They managed to convince perhaps as much as 50% of the public that this was true years after everyone should have known that it was not.

Sympathy also does not tell us what the public wants the government to do. Neither does it tell us what the majority thinks about specific Israeli actions. According to a Rasmussen poll taken at the beginning of the Gaza operation, just 44% of respondents supported the military action, but approximately 99% of elected representatives in Congress were in favor of it. Only 31% of Democrats supported the action, but one would never have known that from watching the Democratic majorities in Congress or the Democratic President-elect.

If that WPO poll is to be believed, just 21% of Americans actually want the U.S. to take Israel’s side in the conflict with the Palestinians. Our actual policy is not in line with the preferences of a vast majority of Americans. No doubt Mead’s “Jacksonian Zionists” are overrepresented in this 21%. So there are obviously very engaged, activist groups that take great interest in this policy, and they will tend to have an outsized impact on the content of the policy. That’s no surprise. That’s part of how interest group politics works. Smaller, highly mobilized constituencies that make one issue or set of issues their primary focus are usually going to be able to bring more pressure to bear on politicians than unmotivated, disorganized and less intense people who might take a different view. They pay more attention, they spend more time working to advance their preferred policies, and they keep track of how representatives vote and are prepared to remind voters of this at election time. The less attentive, less engaged people do not have much to offer a politician in a competitive race: they cannot mobilize voter turnout, and they cannot effectively penalize a politician for going against them. This tends to reward relatively extreme groups that can nonetheless claim to represent a broad cross-section of the public. When there are no countervailing, opposing groups that can compete effectively, that makes an interest group’s task that much easier.

Generic surveys of sympathy for other countries are very much like generic size of government questions or that poorly-designed Pew survey on foreign policy everyone is so fond of citing. They are not nearly as meaningful as some people would like them to be. If a majority says that it wants a smaller government with fewer services rather than a larger one with more services, that is as much a statement about how the respondents want to see themselves as it is a statement of their political preferences. When we look at other polling, we find that on almost every specific budget item there is no real constituency for spending cuts. The Pew survey report blared that “isolationist” sentiment was at an all-time high, and yet in the same survey found roughly two-thirds of respondents in favor of attacking Iran if it acquired a nuclear weapon. So much for minding our own business! My guess is that the majority’s sympathy for Israel works in a similar fashion. Given a choice between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israelis are going to win overwhelmingly every time because Americans identify much more easily with them and Americans have been told constantly that they are on our side, but that still does not necessarily or automatically translate into majority support for the “total, absolute and unvarnished” commitment to Israel that Biden affirmed during his trip.

As I have been trying to make clear with the examples offered here, public opinion is changeable and malleable. Public opinion is pushed in one direction or another far more often that it does any pushing of its own. This is probably more true of foreign policy topics, where most of the public is less informed, less interested and less attentive. So it falls to the activists and interest groups to influence policy and shape public opinion in the hopes of creating a political consensus in Washington in favor of their preferred policies. Despite the near-certainty that they are wildly unrepresentative of majority opinion on their main issues, the activists and interest groups will then pretend that they speak for the majority of the public.

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