Yesterday’s election results, virtually guaranteeing a spirited contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all the way to the Democratic convention, have provided just about the first political event that Republicans can celebrate since November of 2004. Some may not look it that way, admittedly. Some would prefer to see Hillary defeated sooner rather than later, just out of pure antipathy for the Clintons and a desire to see them disappear. However, I don’t believe even if Hillary were defeated for the nomination, that she would fade away quietly. On the contrary, I think she would cross her fingers that Obama would lose in November, and she would make her plans for 2012. But, in any case, it is nice to have many more weeks of the Clinton/Obama show ahead of us. They’ve only just begun to fight, methinks.

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Barry Gewen considers whether Ray Davies should be called a poet.

Davies’s words, I think, can make a claim on our attention beyond those of the other British bands (yes, even Lennon-McCartney) for a couple of reasons. There is, for one thing, the careful, craftsman’s attention to quotidian detail. When George Orwell celebrated England during the depths of World War II, he didn’t reach for the sunshine patriot’s abstract symbols of God, King and Country, but for the daily realities of suet pudding, heavy coins, bad teeth and old maids riding bicycles. That was the true England for him, the one worth caring about, the one ordinary people fought and died for. Similarly, Davies’s England consists of little shops, strawberry jam, Tudor houses, Sunday roast beef and millions of people swarming like flies around the Waterloo underground station. It’s a specificity that, like Orwell’s, bespeaks a humane, empathetic sensibility.

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In the City Journal, James Q. Wilson asks: Why Don’t Jews Like The Christians Who Like Them?

The evidence about evangelical attitudes is clear. In 2006, a Pew survey found that evangelical Christians were more favorable toward Israel than the average American was — and much more sympathetic than either mainline Protestants or secularists. In another survey, evangelical Christians proved much likelier than Catholics, Protestants, or secular types to back Israeli control of Jerusalem, endorse Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and take Israel’s side in a Middle Eastern dispute. (Among every religious group, those who are most traditional are most supportive of Israel. The most orthodox Catholics and Protestants, for instance, support Israel more than their modernist colleagues do.)

Evangelical Christians have a high opinion not just of the Jewish state but of Jews as people. That Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn’t seem to bother evangelicals, despite their own conservative politics. Yet Jews don’t return the favor: in one Pew survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much smaller fraction — about 16 percent — of the American public has similarly antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.

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