The piece was just the latest bit of evidence of the rift in the Republican Party between the establishmentarians who once defined it and the right-wingers who have largely taken it over. And perhaps no one in Washington is more sensitive to that rift than David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and prominent neoconservative.

A few weeks after Lofgren’s piece was published, I called Frum to ask what he thought of it. “I think there’s a lot of truth to it,” he said. It’s a “little too much of a stark morality play,” he added. “The story I would tell is not of a golden age that ended in 2009. What I see is a gradual accumulating breakdown.”

Even with the caveats, it was a striking admission. Frum, a man who dedicated years of his life to the GOP, has, over the course of President Barack Obama’s tenure, been inching toward the conclusion that his party is full of cranks and an obstacle to the normal working of government. He’s still a conservative, he says, and he still wants the Republican Party to succeed. But as the Tea Party has come to dominate the GOP, Frum has been transformed in a remarkably short period of time from right-wing royalty to apostate.

Frum’s website, Frum Forum, which launched on the day of Obama’s inauguration, is a quixotic outpost of sober, anti-populist, pragmatic conservatism far removed from the prevailing tone of the conservative media. His writing, once aggressive and hyper-confident—he co-authored a book with Richard Perle in December 2003 titled An End to Evil—now seems almost elegiac.

Meanwhile, his wife, Danielle Crittenden, once best-known for her criticism of feminism, has now turned her fire on the right. In a 2010 piece defending her husband from his conservative detractors, she blasted “the thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and the Becks … a trait we once derided in the old Socialist Left.” She recently took a job working for the liberal doyenne Arianna Huffington as managing blog editor of the Huffington Post Canada. Though they were once a conservative power couple—Frum says they have a “mind meld”—it’s no longer clear where the Frums belong. “I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” Frum says. “I have three dogs.”

Frum is deeply critical of Obama in his writings, but his criticism often dovetails with the discontents of the left rather than the fevered accusations of the right. While many conservatives see the president as a socialist bent on radically transforming American life, Frum faults Obama for being passive and equivocal in the face of an obstructionist Congress. “A big part of my criticism of him is simply on the grounds of being good at the job of being president,” Frum explains. “The president has to be effective, and he has to use the instrumentalities of presidential power.”

Had Lyndon Johnson been in the White House during the debt-ceiling debate, Frum argued to me, Johnson might have called powerful congressmen into a back room and explained how the administration would allocate funds when the money started running out. Frum imagined him taking charge: “I just want you all to know that any bill with a South Carolina ZIP code, that’s going to be a lower priority. Any bill with a Texas ZIP code, that’s going to be a lower priority. Any bill with a California or New York ZIP code? That’s going to be a high priority.” Obama clearly has no taste for such hardball. Frum is one of very few Republicans who finds this disappointing.

Frum often seems to share the liberal perception of the Republican base as febrile and unhinged—and he’s unafraid to say so publicly. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2009 about various anti-Obama conspiracy theories, he denounced the “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps.” In Canada’s National Post this August, he wrote that Michele Bachmann’s “religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times.”

Of course, the right-wing populism of the Tea Party is hardly a new thing. And Frum himself hasn’t always been turned off by the conservative id—quite the opposite. He served the proudly anti-intellectual George W. Bush and then painted an admiring portrait of him in the 2003 book The Right Man, concluding that the president’s courage and rectitude trumped his tendency to be “dogmatic” and “ill-informed.” It’s true that the GOP has moved even further rightward in recent years. But Frum has changed too, and reading him one often senses a man in the midst of a painful ideological evolution.

***

Born in Canada to successful parents—his father was a wealthy real-estate developer, his mother a well-known broadcast journalist—Frum came of age in the 1970s, a time he chronicled in his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse. It was a time when liberalism seemed calcified, unable to adjust its deepest assumptions in the face of rising social disorder. “One of the things that moved a lot of people in my cohort to the right was the encounter with fossilized thinking on the liberal left,” he says. Neoconservatives fancied themselves clear-eyed realists, unwilling to be bound by dishonest pieties and cant.

Flash forward to 2010, when Frum was fired from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, for disparaging Republican intransigence on health-care reform. Frum was not, it is important to note, advocating liberal policies. Rather, he was pointing out that Obama’s health-care reform plan drew on ideas that came out of the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Frum argued that if Republicans took part in the process of reform, they could push the resulting law in a more conservative direction. “David subscribes to old-fashioned notions like when your ideas have an opportunity to make it into law that you see that as a good thing,” says Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein. “A lot of people don’t if the other party is going to be the one with its name on the bill.”

Of course, it’s not as if Frum was a political innocent, suddenly shocked to his senses by the discovery that partisanship could trump civic duty in Washington. His conflict with his former confreres goes beyond tactics. Unlike many conservatives, he’s keenly aware that our current economic catastrophe began under Republican leadership. And unlike many conservatives, he’s chastened by it.

“A lot of conservatives are trying to cope with the disappointing economic results of the first decade of the 21st century, and the final catastrophe of 2008,” he says. “It’s sobering that part of that decade saw the longest period of unified Republican power at the national level since the 1920s.” Some conservatives are coping through denial: “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are now trying to move the economic crisis forward in time,” in order to lay the blame at Obama’s feet, argues Frum. Others have doubled down on their orthodoxies. Frum shifted his thinking.

In April, he published a piece on his website titled “Two Cheers for the Welfare State,” the culmination of a seven-part response to “Beyond the Welfare State,” a National Affairs essay by Yuval Levin. Frum’s piece explained how the economic crisis prompted his move away from the “radical free-market economics I embraced in the late 1970s.”

“In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the free-market assumption and expectation that an unemployed person could always find work somewhere has been massively falsified: at the trough of this recession, there were almost 6 jobseekers in the U.S. for every unfilled job,” he wrote. “Nothing like such a disparity had been seen since the 1930s. The young faced the worst job odds. … GK Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built.”

Frum has come to embrace some quintessentially liberal ideas about the role of chance as opposed to virtue in economic fortune. “Success is not always a matter of luck,” he says. “But as I get older, even the ability to work hard is itself a product of luck. Being born with a certain set of mental attributes, brain chemistry. Every once in a while you encounter a little kid who’s not that likable. Their life is going to be so much worse because they’re not that likable. Did they ask to be not likable?”

And yet, despite all of this, he remains a committed Republican. Frum hopes for a President Mitt Romney who will govern the country as a technocratic moderate, as he did Massachusetts. (A record, of course, Romney is now running from.) “There’s a style and a sensibility in the Republican Party right now that I find myself removed from,” he says. But, he insists, “you can do more good for the country by working for a better Republican Party than by leaving it to the extremists. What have they done to deserve that inheritance?”

Yet the power of individuals to define a political party, or a political movement, only goes so far. Despite Frum’s devotion to the GOP, the gulf between his ideas and actually existing Republicanism may not always be bridgeable. He can barely countenance the idea that the 2012 Republican nominee might be Rick Perry, and he is convinced the Tea Party phenomenon is more transitory than it seems. But what if it’s not? What if the choice comes down to Obama or Perry? Could he really vote Republican then? “As a parent of teenagers,” he says, “I’ve gotten very good at postponing difficult questions.”

• The always-wise David Ignatius says the flotilla incident has hopefully revealed to the Israelis—and the world—that Turkey is serious about regional hegemony. The next step, he adds, is to make this the whole world’s problem. [WP]

• Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) says President Obama’s demand for a full settlement freeze led to the fiasco. Somehow. [The Hill]

• The Israeli government is not apologizing. [LAT]

• Noah Millman points out that, for better or (quite possibly) worse, the blockade receives broad support from the Israeli public. [The American Scene]

• Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Israel that people there are scared that their damaged reputation will make them look vulnerable. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Israeli novelist Amos Oz says the fiasco has shown the limits of the power of force. [NYT]

• David Frum says Oz’s dovishness would be more workable if he had more counterparts in Hamas. [Frum Forum]

• Thomas Friedman puts the incident in the context of fraying relations between “two of America’s best friends.” [NYT]

• Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister and one of Europe’s most prominent liberals, called the raid “a very grave mistake” from Israel’s perspective. [Ynet]

• Hussein Ibish dissects why Israel’s attempt to sell its counter-narrative is failing. [Ibishblog]

• Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret finds himself an unlikely diplomatic correspondent. [Haaretz]

• Israeli novelist David Grossman says the fiasco is merely the natural extrapolation of the cruel and unwise blockade itself. [Guardian]

“There is no mention that Palestinians voted Hamas into power in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections,” Tablet Magazine contributor Kirchick argues.

There is similarly no mention of the murderous anti-Semitism spewed in Palestinian schools, television, radio, and newspapers, or the medieval propaganda sponsored by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even Egypt. And, perhaps most tellingly, there is no mention of the poll, conducted just last month by An-Najah National University in the West Bank, which found that 77 percent of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution.

The foundational error in Beinart’s piece is a grievous misunderstanding for why the Arab-Israeli conflict persists to this day: Arab intransigence.

Beinart responded to this line of argument by claiming, first, that his essay was less concerned with the motives behind the Israeli government’s actions than the far less explicable ones behind the American Jewish establishment; and, second, that “Arab intransigence” (and worse), while far from irrelevant to the conflict, is also not necessarily the main motivating factor. In the West Bank, he says, continued Israeli settlements are at least as responsible for Palestinian anger as Yasser Arafat’s decade-old rejectionism; and in Gaza, the Israelis (and the Americans) blew it by not encouraging a Hamas-Fatah unity government.

Maybe Beinart’s most provocative point comes at the end of his response:

[Various entrants into the debate] are all Jews. In some sense, therefore, Israel’s crimes—unlike those of Hamas or Ahmadinejad—are committed in our name. We have a special obligation to expose and confront them. And we have a special obligation not to use the crimes of Israel’s enemies to excuse behavior that dishonors a Jewish state, and the Jewish ethical tradition that we all consider precious.

That … is going to anger people all over again.

A Kaleidoscopic Community [Foreign Policy]
Peter Beinart Misdiagnoses … Everything [Jewlicious]

Beinart’s Blind Spot [Foreign Policy]

Why Israel Has To Do Better [The Daily Beast]

Flynt Leverett is fielding questions from an audience at the New American Foundation for a panel titled “What the Iranian People Really Think,” and the crowd—at least the Iranian part of it—is starting to get hostile. When Leverett cites poll numbers suggesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad most likely won Iran’s heavily contested June presidential election, the Iranians sitting near me in the glass-box conference room direct a chorus of groans and sarcastic laughter toward the podium, where the 51-year-old think-tank celebrity sits with his hands folded in front of him.

During the question-and-answer portion of the evening, the voices of the Iranian questioners tremble with anger. What do you know, they ask, about Iran or its people and how the Islamic Republic treats them? Leverett handles the questions with a confidence born of being one of the most influential Iran experts in Washington—a position that he has earned despite having neither an academic background in the field nor the ability to speak Farsi.

Leverett’s wife and colleague, Hillary Mann Leverett, a neatly dressed, seven-months-pregnant brunette who sits in the front row and watches her husband, is a bona fide Iran expert who served on the Iran desk of George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, where her husband worked on broader Middle East issues. But Flynt Leverett subscribes to the realist school of foreign policy, which holds that knowing the internal mechanisms of a regime and the particular characteristics of a language and culture are largely irrelevant to understanding its geopolitical actions. Despite their fondest hopes, the Iranian opposition members in the audience aren’t going to return to a newly democratic Iran any time soon because, as Leverett has explained in a string of recent articles including a New York Times op-ed, the current Iranian regime isn’t going anywhere—so we better deal with it.

In Leverett’s opinion, the White House has made a hash of engagement with Iran, and the mullahs appear to respond better to his overtures than they do to requests from the Obama administration: unlike the president, the Secretary of State, or any other American diplomats or officials, Leverett has actually scored a precious invitation to Tehran. “We do not have a visa,” Leverett explained to me in an email. “Which as I am sure you have heard is a cumbersome process.” Still, it’s quite a coup. Access equals influence in Washington, and the fact that Leverett gets to go to Tehran, an itinerary envied by policymakers and access-peddlers, underlines his status as one of the most important Iran experts in town.

The curious dance between Washington’s Iran experts and the foreign government whose actions they are supposedly analyzing has parallels in the ways that totalitarian governments like the Soviet Union and Mao’s China manipulated Western public opinion by only granting access to scholars and policy hands who would toe the party line. Similarly, the Iranian government today decides who in the West will be granted the kind of access that will allow them to speak with authority about the regime to Washington. Western scholars and policy wonks alike understand that access to the regime is a form of currency that can make you powerful, or rich, or both. Washington’s ambitious and talented, its romantic opportunists looking to attach themselves to a beautiful cause, and those eyeing fat commissions for opening Iran’s energy resources to U.S. companies, all see access to the Iranian regime as the biggest prize in the foreign policy game.

Yet unlike Maoist China or Soviet Russia, both closed societies, Iran is a divided country where crowds have protested in the streets for over half a year. The regime there is split into two dueling camps. In addition to representatives of the democratic opposition, Washington hosts a team of experts who advocate the party line of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—let’s call them the “reformers”—who are critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, but, unlike the democratic opposition, have no wish to bring down the system. But a second team of experts supports Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, and no one makes their case better than Leverett. “Flynt has a good understanding of how that government works,” says his New America colleague Steven Clemons. “He sees Khamenei as the guy that matters. What he believes is that Khamenei is a shrewd calculating operator who moves Iran’s strategic interest.” Leverett’s colleagues were surprised by the invitation. “I was pleased as punch that New America has been designated twice by the regime as an institution off-limits,” Clemons told me, adding that he respects the Leveretts’ right to hold differing policy positions.

The opposition camp has been critical of Leverett for his collaborations with Mohamed Marandi, director of Tehran University’s Institute for North American Studies and the son of Khamenei’s personal physician, who appears to have facilitated Leverett’s upcoming visit. “The University of Tehran is the institution which has applied for our visas,” Leverett explained to me.

Leverett was offended when I asked if the Revolutionary Guard had played a role in his invitation, and yet there’s little doubt that his co-author is personally and professionally close to the regime—and publicly justifies some of its most brutal actions. Since the June elections, Marandi has been the Ahmadinejad government’s key spokesperson in the English-language media, and he recently defended the regime’s sentencing opposition members to death. His true occupation may be even more unsavory. “He passes himself off as an academic, but he’s with the Ministry of Intelligence,” says Ramin Ahmadi, co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentary Center and a professor of medicine at Yale.

Of course, if you need to make the case that you have a genuine channel to the regime’s inner sanctum, it’s hard to do better than to partner with a hard-core regime man like Marandi. In the realist view, Leverett’s strong stomach and lack of sentimental attachments is proof that he is coming from the right place. “Flynt comes from a very strong national-interest point of view and emphasizes energy security,” says David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and a frequent guest at dinner seminars at the Leveretts’ Northern Virginia home. “They’re background dinners, usually about eight to 10 people, weapons experts, energy experts, Iranian nationals, with varied points of view on the Middle East,” he says. While Frum explains that Leverett’s “domestic politics are on the conservative, not liberal, side,” it is also true that Leverett’s fame and acceptance in Washington policymaking circles rests on the fact that he was lionized by liberals for his opposition to the Bush administration’s Iran policy.

The story of Leverett’s rise and fall and rise embodies the upside-down weirdness of the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when obscure Middle East experts and Washington bureaucrats occupied center stage of the national debate. It’s safe to say that in less turbulent times, and under a less controversial president, no one would have ever heard of Flynt Leverett. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Leverett earned a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University, earned a doctorate in politics from Princeton, honed his Arabic-language skills in Damascus, and joined the CIA during a period when the agency was not especially known for running agents, or paying much attention to Iran.

In 2001, after a decade at the agency, Leverett landed a plum position on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, then headed by Richard Haass, and was subsequently named senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council staff. In the interagency process that coordinates policymakers in the bureaucracies across Washington—defense, state, White House, CIA—Leverett earned a reputation for committing what are known as “process fouls.” “That’s when you intentionally exclude other policymakers,” says a former senior-level Defense Department official. “Leverett did that to us all the time, withholding a paper and cutting us out of the debate because he feared, rightly, we were going to disagree with him.”

But it was Leverett’s disagreements with the president that, in his account, compelled him, as he wrote in 2005, “to leave the administration.” However, as another former member of the Bush NSC staff explained, Leverett did not leave his post by choice. “The job of a director on the NSC staff is bureaucratic,” says the former Bush official. “If there’s a deputies’ meeting, you take notes. When you get a letter from a foreign government, you log it in and draft a response.” Leverett continually missed deadlines and misplaced documents, and the NSC Records office had a long list of his delinquencies. His office was notoriously messy—documents were strewn over chairs, windowsills, the floor, and piled high on his desk. For Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser and a famously well-organized “clean desk” type, repeatedly missing deadlines and losing important letters was simply not tolerable behavior for an NSC officer, and Leverett was told to leave.

Returning to the CIA briefly before retiring from government service in the spring of 2003, Leverett moved on to the Brookings Institution, and then the New America Foundation, as he began to reinvent himself as an Iran expert with the help of his wife. Hillary Mann Leverett claimed that after rotating back to the State Department from the White House in April 2003 she had received a fax from a Swiss diplomat acting as an intermediary on behalf of the Iranians, offering what the Leveretts would come to call the Grand Bargain. According to the Swiss fax, she said, the Islamic Republic would cease support for terrorist organizations, terminate its nuclear weapons program, and recognize Israel if the United States would in turn guarantee that it had no designs to topple the regime.

So why didn’t the Americans bite? As the Leveretts explained in a series of interviews and their own articles, including, most famously, a 2006 op-ed in the New York Times published with redactions ordered by the Bush White House, it was because of Bush and the neoconservatives, who intended to lead the United States to war again.

As the missed Grand Bargain became another proof of Bush’s incompetence, Leverett and his wife found themselves the center of a great deal of positive attention among reporters, talk-show hosts, and Democratic politicos. The couple was profiled in Esquire, and Flynt enjoyed a guest spot with Jon Stewart. The problem is that it wasn’t the neocons who dismissed the plausibility of the offer; rather it was Flynt Leverett’s putative allies, including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Other staffers don’t remember it at all. As a former colleague on the NSC staff recalls, “this historical document arrives and Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley don’t remember it, and only Flynt does. It was either a concoction of the Swiss ambassador, or of the Swiss ambassador and the Leveretts together.”

Even as the legend of the Grand Bargain has been discredited, the tale—a narrative describing a sensible, realistic Iran eagerly courting a stubborn Washington, with the Leveretts in the middle of things—served its purpose. It not only identified the couple as critics of the Bush administration, it also certified them as experts about the Iranian regime—and as instruments through which the regime might influence Washington.

CORRECTION, Feb. 11: Due to a transcription error, an earlier version of this article quoted Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation as saying he was pleased that the think tank had been removed from the list of U.S. organizations shunned by the Iranian government. In fact, Clemons said he was pleased that New America is shunned by the Iranian government. The article has been corrected.

Jews, who have excelled at intellectual pursuits, understandably are swayed by the notion that the presidency is a knowledge-based position requiring a background in the examination of detailed data and sophisticated analysis. … Palin’s intellectual unfitness in the eyes of Jews was exaggerated during the course of the campaign as they, like other Americans, received an incomplete image of her abilities and talents.

(Of course, an image may be incomplete but not inaccurate. Just saying.)

Responding to Rubin, David Frum has a different idea:

More than any politician in memory, Palin seems to divide her fellow-Americans into first class and second class citizens, real Americans and not-so-real Americans. To do her justice, she has never said anything to suggest that Jews as Jews fall into the second, less-real, class. But Jews do tend to have an intuition that when this sort of line-drawing is done, we are likely to find ourselves on the wrong side.

Then again, perhaps, as Frum puts it in  a throwaway line, Jewish attitudes toward Palin are “another manifestation of the old rule about Jews being like other people, only more so.” In 2008, 53 percent of voters went for Barack Obama; 78 percent of Jewish voters did so. It should be similarly unsurprising that most Jews disapprove of Palin—and disapprove of her like Ahab disapproved of the whale.

Why Jews Hate Palin [Commentary]
Do Jews Hate Palin? [FrumForum]

In 1985, John Barnes was finishing up his yearlong tenure as a legman for the Evans-Novak Political Report. Barnes was an Israel supporter, and he wondered why Evans and Novak heldsuch an antagonistic position toward the Jewish state. “I always thought it was an issue best not to bring up,” Barnes said in a recent interview. But his curiosity finally got the best of him. During their last dinner together in Washington, Barnes finally asked. Novak “put it on Evans,” as Barnes recalls. The pair had not written much about foreign policy after starting their column in 1963, but that changed when Evans traveled to the Middle East to cover the Six Day War in 1967. Two days after a ceasefire took effect, Evans found himself on the Jordanian side of the Jordan River with an Arab army regiment, when an Israeli fighter jet “appeared out of nowhere and strafed them.” According to Barnes, Novak said that the “relationship between Rowley and Israel was downhill ever since.”

Evans had always been a moderate establishment Republican. But the post-ceasefire strafing incident, Barnes said, changed his view. When Barnes later asked Evans about the Middle East, “he basically made the point that he thought that the Islamic world was enormous and big and important,” and that America’s close relationship with Israel put the United States at risk of enraging Muslims. That stance, Barnes added, rubbed off on Novak. “I think they had a bit of a deal to some extent, that they would indulge each others’ hobby horses,” Barnes said. “Evans with Novak’s supply-side economics; Novak with Evans’s views on the Middle East.”

“We ran hundreds of columns critical of Israel,” Novak said in a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, “all of them written by Rowley Evans,” who was “very committed on the issue.” This explanation was confirmed by Evans’s widow. “Rowley brought Bob around to his point of view on the Middle East,” she said in a 2003 profile of Novak for Washingtonian magazine. “It cost them a lot. They lost some papers because of pressure from the Israeli government and certain Jewish organizations. But Bob never complained.”

Still, while an unfortunate brush with the Israeli military might have provided Evans with a reason for viewing Israel with a skeptical eye—and his partner with an amusing anecdote—it doesn’t sufficiently explain how a man like Novak, someone with strong opinions about everything, came to see the Middle East in the way that he did. Indeed, heard today after his death, it sounds like just what it was meant to be at the time: an excuse. After all, Evans retired from the column in 1993 and passed away in 2001. And it was over the past 15 years that Novak’s writing on American Jewry and Israel—unaffected by Evans’s presence—took on its most controversial form.

In 1997, Novak wrote a series of columns attempting to resuscitate the reputation of Louis Farrakhan, encouraging Republicans to give a hearing to the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam Leader, who, he wrote, was “knocking on the GOP’s door.” The brainchild of this effort was Novak’s friend Jude Wanniski, the Reaganite supply-side guru who later became a crank, penning screeds denying Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds and promoting political cultist Lyndon Larouche. Novak believed that a Republican alliance with Farrakhan could have “vast future implications,” fruitful ones. For a man now lauded as one of the most perspicacious political commentators of his era, this was a curious, if not dangerous, assessment.

But Novak’s real provocation of American Jewry waited until after the September 11 attacks, which he blamed on America’s support for Israel. Two days after the attacks, he wrote that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel” and that “the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.” Was this neo-isolationism, befitting of the paleoconservative right to which Novak had a close ideological kinship?  If so, he took it a step further when, the following month, he referred to senior Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Abu Hanoud as a “freedom fighter” on CNN.

Novak was also a major voice in propagating the notion that the Iraq War was ultimately a war fought for Israel. In December 2002, in a column titled “Sharon’s War?” he wrote that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war.” One of the officials Novak later implicated in this plot was David Frum, who worked in the Bush administration as a speechwriter in 2001 and 2002. In a review of Frum’s White House memoir, The Right Man, Novak wrote in The American Conservative:

While Frum calls himself “a not especially observant Jew,” he repeatedly refers to his Jewishness. It is hard to recall any previous presidential aide so engrossed with his own ethnic roots. Frum is more uncompromising in support of Israel than any other issue, raising the inescapable question of whether this was the real reason he entered the White House.

When not accusing others of being fifth columnists for Israel, Novak was making contentious historical analogies. In a 2007 column datelined Bethlehem, “Worse than Apartheid,” Novak asserted that “the separation barrier in most places is a big, ugly and intimidating wall, not merely a fence,” and that Palestinians in the West Bank were in a sorrier state than black South Africans under white rule. That same year, Novak endorsed Ron Paul for president, a candidate who has flirted with anti-Semitism and questioned America’s relationship with Israel.

In light of this fraught relationship with American Jewry and Zionism, it’s difficult to believe that an incident on the Israeli-Jordanian border really accounted for Novak’s worldview. It’s fair, then, to consider what role his own alienation from Judaism and late-in-life adoption of Roman Catholicism might have played.

Novak was born into what he described as a “not very observant” Jewish family in Joliet, Illinois, in 1931. While his father was not bar mitzvahed and his grandfather was “not a very good Jew,” Novak was bar mitzvahed and joined a Jewish fraternity at the University of Illinois. Aside from these affiliations, he remained non-observant, and detached from Judaism, for the rest of his life.

It was not just Judaism, however, that turned off Novak, but religion in general. His first marriage in 1957 was rough from the start after he refused a demand by his father-in-law that a Presbyterian pastor deliver a blessing at the ceremony. For Novak, getting married at a Unitarian church was compromise enough. The marriage lasted a year, and when Novak married for the second—and final—time in 1962, the ceremony was held at an Episcopal church on Capitol Hill. In his memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, Novak writes that he attended infrequently and stopped altogether as he was “repelled by the pastor’s political (liberal) sermons.” Yet it wasn’t just the lefty preaching of the clergyman that annoyed him. “In retrospect I believe I really was uncomfortable with the Christian liturgy,” he wrote.

Both he and his wife, Geraldine, had long harbored a “spiritual hunger,” and that seeking was encouraged by a small circle of devout Catholic friends, most prominently Jeffrey Bell, a former Reagan aide and himself a convert to Catholicism, who provided his friend with some Catholic literature after Novak fell ill with spinal meningitis in 1982. “I thought Bell was wasting his time if he expected me to become a Catholic,” Novak wrote. A decade later, Bell introduced Novak to Father C. John McCloskey, who could boast of a series of high-profile conversions, ranging from the abortion doctor-turned-anti-abortion activist Bernard Nathanson to television personality Lawrence Kudlow (two men who were also born Jewish). Though Novak credits Bell and McCloskey, as well as his wife’s search for a church where she could feel at home, with bringing him into Catholicism, the event that ultimately convinced him to make the leap of faith occurred at Syracuse University in 1996. Novak was preparing to deliver a speech to a group of college Republicans when a female student wearing a cross around her neck turned to him and said, “Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever.” Novak returned to Washington and began attending mass more frequently. He was baptized on May 22, 1998. After he converted, Novak wrote that he “heard nothing from my many Jewish relatives.”

Meanwhile, much of the Jewish pundit class has treated news of Novak’s passing delicately. While noting that Novak had Jewish “issues,” Commentary editor John Podhoretz eulogized him as “a difficult man in many ways, but I always found him interesting, lively, and friendly.” My colleague John Judis at The New Republic was even more nostalgic: “I miss Novak as a columnist, and miss the kind of columnist he was, who wasn’t content to air his hallowed opinion of facts that were already drearily familiar to readers.” According to Barnes, Novak’s polemical and charged attitude toward Israel and his embrace of less-than-philo-Semitic figures at home wasn’t enough to alienate him from all of American Jewry. While working at The Boston Herald in the late 1980s, Barnes befriended some conservative students at Brandeis University. “They asked me if Novak would come speak at Brandeis, of all places,” Barnes said. “And he did! I thought it was pretty gutsy. Most of the students there were Jewish and though I didn’t take notes of what he said that night, I remember him talking about the Middle East. By and large, he was civilly received. There was no guerrilla theater. Imagine that.”

James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

What made Britain’s first and only Jewish prime minister so prescient? Adam Kirsch, fresh off his absorbing biography of Disraeli, observed that what his subject and Obama have most in common is literary origin. Both men used their writing as a “laboratory” in which to test to the same question that would mark their political careers: “is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you?” Yet while Obama is no doubt the elegant yield of an evolved zeitgeist, it remains to be seen if he can precipitate the next stage in that zeitgeist’s evolution. Disraeli’s great virtue was to understand that the world of the 19th century, of which he was that paradoxical oddity—a romantic conservative, a baptized Jew—was changing under the dual engines of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, and that the Tories must also change or perish. Rather than remain fixed in some curmudgeonly idyll for a feudal past, responsive only to cooked-up resentments against so-called “elites” (he proudly was one), he fashioned a pragmatic materialism that set about to answer what Thomas Carlyle called the “condition-of-England question.” Acting out of a mixture of principle and expediency, Disraeli pioneered the Third Way, avant la lettre.

Following Edmund Burke, he believed that the customs and institutions that were already in place in England, and had been for centuries, could be harnessed to lessen the plight of the working-class, who might otherwise threaten those customs and institutions with violent revolution. This philosophy used to guide the thinking American Right in its heyday—the 1950s—so much so that up until Richard Nixon, some of the most sweeping civil rights and healthcare initiatives were undertaken by Republican presidents. Whittaker Chambers, once a revered sage on the National Review masthead—not least because he was the most famous ex-Communist in existence—termed his own brand of activist conservatism “Beaconsfieldism,” after the peer title Disraeli was given in 1876, and luxuriated in until his death a few years later.

Of course, to hold the current mealy crop of GOP leaders and tacticians to the standard of Beaconsfieldism is to be laughably disappointed. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Queen Victoria’s favorite politician, who was a student of the blue book and the dark, Satanic mill, calling England a “nation of whiners,” as Senator Phil Gramm did in reacting to the financial market crisis last year. Nor can one envision Disraeli kowtowing to crass demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, who today burble on overpriced airwaves that any and all attempts to expand the role of government is “socialism.” Disraeli would have looked at his watch or sighed extravagantly in the face of such witless bloviation. He was by no means a socialist, but nor was he afraid of heeding the warnings of his radical opponents in order to undermine their revolutionary goals with gradualist measures. He was one of 5 MPs to vote for leniency for the leaders of 1830′s Chartism, probably because he sympathized with their chief plaint for universal male suffrage, which is why, three decades on, he railroaded the Second Reform Bill of 1867 through parliament despite party pressure not to do so (the Tories were then in opposition).

Indeed, a full hundred and fifty years before John Edwards coined the phrase “Two Americas”—itself borrowed from Michael Harrington’s seminal work The Other America—there was Disraeli’s concept of “Two Nations,” consisting of the rich and poor. In his novel Sybil, which was subtitled “The Two Nations,” Disraeli explained that these two binary constituencies were “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones; or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different foods, are ordered by different manners, and are governed by the same laws.” Everything that informed the sentimental fiction of Dickens and the hard-nosed non-fiction of Orwell is captured in that diagnosis, and it’s a wonder, knowing the man who ventured it, that Engels could write to Marx in 1867, a year that saw industrial workers vote overwhelmingly Conservative, “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself.” Had it?

During his second term as prime minister, beginning in 1874, Disraeli passed a whole tranche of progressive legislation that caused Alexander Macdonald, one of the first Labor MPs, to conclude that “the Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.” These bills included the Artisans Dwellings Act, which mandated slum-clearing and public housing works; the Employers and Workmen Act, which made it legal for trade unions to strike; the Rivers Pollution Act, which regulated the disposal of waste; the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, which established standards of safety and purity; and the Factory Act, which limited the work hours of women and children. “Tory men and Whig measures” was how one of the characters in Sybil satirized such an approach to governance. (Today, anyone on the right who advocated similar policies would be sneeringly called a “RINO,” Republican in Name Only, by a pundit or blogger determined to keep the GOP out of power for the foreseeable future.) All told, however, this list of accomplishments was more than what Disraeli’s career-long rival Gladstone could ever boast in terms of social welfare reform.

There aren’t many Disraelian figures dotting the landscape at present, although the Canadian David Frum, who has become a preeminent gadfly of movement conservatism, has done his part to uphold a kind of Beaconsfieldism modified for the 21st century. In a Newsweek cover essay he wrote last March, directed primarily against Limbaugh, Frum argued that the Republican Party was about thirty years out of date and almost autistically out of touch with popular demands. Instead of placing free market healthcare reform at the top of the economic agenda, the call of the hour was for more tax cuts. Instead of acknowledging that the rising generation of voters was quite comfortable with gay rights and incorporating new immigrant groups, the response was to drum up populist hysteria about a liberal assault on American “values.” (Disraeli also understood how minorities should be conscripted, not alienated by the right. “[T]he persecution of the Jewish race,” he wrote, “had deprived European society of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally.”)

In the face of a seemingly unstoppable Democratic majority, what conservatives need most, according to Frum, is “every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction.” What they need, in other words, is a refresher course on the most eminent of Victorians.

There’s also a fair criticism that Obama’s history was somewhat shaky. He referred to the “tolerance” exhibited by Islam in Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. But Cordoba is a part of Andalusia and had been reconquered by Christian Spain in 1236, a good two centuries before the forced expulsion and murder of most of Sephardic Jewry. (Muslims, who were tolerated for a spell longer, may have helped Jews find shelter or safe-crossing, but is this really what Obama meant?) And while it’s true that John Adams, in signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, secured the first recognition of the United States by a foreign power—Morocco—Obama left out of this cozy footnote the fact that the treaty marked the formal end of years of piratical kidnapping of sea-faring Americans, and the confiscation of their goods and vessels, by the Ottoman-ruled Barbary States. (There is a chilling passage in Michael Oren’s book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to Present, in which Adams and Thomas Jefferson are told by the pasha of Tripoli that there could be no peaceful coexistence between nations because “[i]t was… written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”)

Nevertheless, as Greenwald’s colleague Max Boot—the most intriguing neoconservative writing on this administration’s foreign policy—points out, this was a speech delivered to a proximate Muslim audience with a global one in mind, and with the intention of winning that global audience over to, if not exactly a pro-American position, then less of an anti-American one. For all the gauziness in Obama’s rhetoric, there were some diamond-hard statements about rejecting terrorism as a means of “resistance,” not judging a true democracy by a state’s mere capacity to hold elections (a crucial point, as Obama was delivering his remarks in the capital city of a dictatorship that masquerades as a democracy), and enfranchising and educating women in Arab countries. It’s true that Obama was deficient in standing up for half the population in the Middle East, which is held in a state of second-class citizenship if not outright servitude. David Frum’s sharpest point against the speech was to note that Obama’s endorsement of the choice for Muslim women to don the hijab in Western countries was an instance of an American president “intervening in an internal Muslim debate–and not only intervening, but intervening on the more reactionary side!”

Obama’s tendency to acknowledge, or apologize for, America’s past sins has been mistaken for supplicancy: how dare he project anything other than unremitting confidence in the world’s only superpower? Doesn’t he know that self-criticism is viewed as weakness by those hostile to that superpower’s interests? Letting aside the fact that Obama’s election was itself an act of national self-criticism, such thinking reflects a curious evolution of the conservative case against him as he graduated from candidate to president. Where conservatives used to deride his prospective foreign policy and cry, “Words, words, words,” they now pore over every detail of his language, while tacitly endorsing his actual foreign policy. (On Obama’s Afghan “surge” strategy, Bill Kristol’s new neoconservative think tank, The Foreign Policy Initiative, was exultant.) Sometimes their only criticism of him is no criticism at all: Greenwald’s earlier post was titled, “Now He Even Sounds Like Bush.”

As for perceived weaknesses, recall that George W. Bush ran in 2000 with the purpose of exercising “humility” abroad, and at no point after 9/11 and his subsequent about-face as an interventionist did he point out some of the more uncomfortable facts about Islam’s role in human rights abuses. Much as we may pine for Orwellian standards in speechmaking, no international platform can be articulated by a U.S. president without cant or breezy euphemism. Indeed, Obama’s greatest problem may well have been a category mistake. There is no such thing as an umma—that is, a greater Islamic community—in the 21st century, as Lee Smith at Slate shrewdly notes. Islamic identities are today forged as much by irredentist nationalisms as they are by Koranic injunctions, and so any presumption of a global religion is bound to do more alienating than ingratiating.

But as for those sections of the Cairo speech which turned a gimlet eye on the American past, Obama did no more than speak the truth, or tread where others have to lesser fanfare. Condoleeza Rice first compared the situation in Palestine to the American civil rights movement, and Gershom Gorenberg’s recent cover story in The Weekly Standard implicitly did as well by asking why it was that there was no Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Had Obama really wanted to placate Iran, he would not have repudiated Holocaust denial or quoted from the Torah.

As for his status as a “rock star” to Bedouin and sheik alike, Michael Crowley at The New Republic, who witnessed the speech, observed that “[w]hether for cultural reasons, or the awkwardness of instant translation, applause was sporadic and muted. (His call to halt Israeli settlements, for instance, went strangely unnoticed.)” This is one way of saying that the loyal opposition at home misses a more fundamental point of Obama’s style abroad: he can drop his world-citizen C.V. and heed the call of the muezzin all he likes, but so long as Bin Laden still loathes him and U.S. troops remain on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’ll never be confused in the Middle East for the capitulationist commander-in-chief some of his more feverish enemies at home wish he were.