President Bush’s Speech to the Knesset on Israel’s Sixtieth Anniversary implied that Obama was soft on ‘terrorist and radicals’.  The gloves are now off between the liberal and conservative interpretations of the American national interest.

Bush Challenges Obama

Bush has raised the pressure on Obama’s determination to talk with the sort of people that the radical Right has termed as little better than Nazis or Soviets.

Bush also re-asserted in the strongest possible terms, with no concession to Palestinian sensibilities, his personal and American support for Israel.

He maintained his strong stance against Iran, echoed in the intense and ongoing pressure by US officials on Europeans to support sanctions.

Obama, in his response, seemed happy to risk the loss of some pro-Israeli sentiment to establish himself as the natural national representative of resistance to neo-conservatism in his struggle with the far more ambiguously placed Hilary Clinton.

The Bush-McCain camp and the Obama camp are now feeding off each other at the expense of the old New Democrat machine.

The ‘Islamo-Fascist’ model seems to work in binding together not only much traditional conservative opinion but also those authoritarian Democrats who may not be best pleased that Hilary is being ousted by a black liberal.

Moderate Republican Discomfort

Yet the converse is true – younger ‘for change’ Republicans may be finding Obama to be a more inclusive figure, like Cameron in the UK, and one who offers no real threats to economic libertarian principles.

Many Republican centrists are discomfited by Bush’s policies. They will not automatically feel loyal to their President or to his analysis of the situation in the Middle East. The theory of Islamo-Fascism makes good headlines but lousy historical analysis.

Perhaps we are seeing another periodic shift in the balance of forces within the US, with an older national-populist attempt to preserve American power facing off a younger generation that is attempting to re-think what American power is for.

The older generation is, ironically and for all its conservatism, more statist than the new wave of ‘Jeffersonian’ liberals. We may be coming to the end of that long cycle of big Federal Government operating globally that began in the interwar period – or not as the case may be!

The Edwards Factor

The endorsement of Obama by John Edwards is the ‘et tu Brute’ for Clinton, who might otherwise have assumed the backing of the old trades union machines who implicitly had Edwards as preferred test candidate in the early stages of the contest. 

Edwards is also a campaigning liberal and progressive (albeit of a different sort from Obama) and could make a formidable Vice President in due course. McCain does not yet have an equivalent.

As a strong foreign policy progressive (closer to the thinking of British Foreign Secretary Miliband or even Kouchner), Edwards' endorsement suggests that 'talking' will not necessarily mean the abandonment of liberal interventionism.

It limits any suggestion that an Obama Presidency might become isolationist. Indeed, from her implicit protectionist statements to gain blue collar votes, it is Hilary Clinton who seems to offer the greater threat of a turning inward at this time.

The issue now is whether the language of ‘appeasement’, which might strike a strong cord with older generation whites and with the Jewish vote, has any real meaning for anyone under 35, black or Hispanic – or for workers more concerned with economic degeneration.

Bush already sounds defensive and the battle is looking increasingly like a generational and cultural conflict which could go either way on the day.

Total Political War and the Lieberman Factor

The other factor in the propaganda war is an assessment of whether national security will have the resonance that it had immediately after 2001, at least outside obsessive anti-Islamist, pro-Zionist and New York circles.

Bush has broken an unwritten rule in implicitly attacking a political opponent on foreign soil. This could only happen if the President and his team did not mind the precedent being set for the future because they felt that the country was getting soft on a 'core value'.

The ideological commitments of neo-conservatism have demanded total political war. Obama, backed by Edwards’ progressivism, will no doubt respond in kind once he has disposed of his party rival.

The political issue will then be how much each candidate can detach disillusioned members from the others’ camp.

The Bush-McCain universe now includes the Lieberman faction which echoes in its relationship to Islamism, the old Scoop Jackson response towards liberal tolerance of the rise of communism. 

Lieberman's is an authoritarian nationalist liberal mentality that always sits uneasily with both libertarian liberal and isolationist or populist values on the centre-left.

McCain should also be able to rely on a shift of former pro-Israel Leftists to the anti-Islamist camp and those who fear the influx of migrants for cultural reasons. We have already seen some fairly vicious e-propaganda, circulating in California, suggesting that Obama is a Muslim traitor.

On the other hand, many Republican realists (and those who might share Pat Buchanan's resentment of the ‘damage’ allegedly done to American interests by Bush) are going to need persuading that McCain remains a realist and has not gone native with the neo-cons.

There are neo-con and federal lobby elements of many sorts in the Clinton and in the McCain camp but not in the Obama camp. This may become a material issue for many naturally Republican figures.

McCain's Strategy

McCain appears to have recognised the problem of being pigeon-holed to the Right. He is already talking of including Democrats (presumably Lieberman-like conservatives) in his administration.

He is also talking about being more accountable in a pitch to detach Democrats who are worried by the new youthful radicalism of the Obama camp.

While the Clintons and their immediate circle will remain loyal to the Democrat Party, their supporters are a reasonable target for a Vietnam war veteran with serious experience. From this perspective, his policy of reform of Medicare and Social Security may prove critical.

The general expectation is that, Obama having been honed in a bruising dispute with Clinton and Bush having pulled McCain into a situation where he represents Republican continuity rather than a breach with the recent past, this is going to get dirty and possibly personal.

The two sides are going to offer very different models of what America is in the world. The Palestine-Israel issue is already looking set to be a material factor in who will be the next President of the United States.

While Obama will reassure Israel and talk tough on terror, he will stand his ground on dialogue and dialogue without pre-conditions is not what Tel Aviv wants.

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