Zakaria may tend to lift material from other journalists, but even so, he's lifting the right stuff. This one gets posted in full! I mean, this is simply epic. Check it out [emphasis mine]:
But compared with almost any period in U.S. history, we live in bourgeois times, in a culture that values family, religion, work and, above all, business. Young people today aspire to become Mark Zuckerberg. They quote the aphorisms of Warren Buffett and read the Twitter feed of Bill Gates. Even after the worst recession since the Great Depression, there are no obvious radicals, anarchists, Black Panthers or other revolutionary movements — save the tea party.
And here's the upshot of his smackdown:
The era of crises could end, but only when this group of conservatives makes its peace with today’s America. They are misty-eyed in their devotion to a distant republic of myth and memory yet passionate in their dislike of the messy, multiracial, quasi-capitalist democracy that has been around for half a century — a fifth of our country’s history. At some point, will they come to recognize that you cannot love America in theory and hate it in fact?
Ouch! And so... as my Tea Party friends dust themselves off and wipe the figurative blood from their noses, here's a stylistic note for my journo colleagues: it really is incorrect and misleading to refer to the "tea party" in the singular. They should always be referred to in the plural. They have no overarching organization, leadership, common platform, or even history of playing nicely with each other. They run the gamut from billionaire-funded astro-turf operations like Americans For Prosperity to local coffee klatches in Flyoverville, MO.
This is why blithering, bilious idiots like Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint or Ted Cruz can rightly claim to speak for the Tea Parties: they have just as valid a claim to leadership of this brainless millipede of an "organization" as anybody does. To be totally honest, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have the most legitimate claim. They speak directly to the Tea Parties everyday, and humor their every paranoid anti-government fantasy.
The crisis has been resolved, but this respite is temporary. We are bound to have more standoffs and brinkmanship in the months and years ahead. To understand why, you must recognize that, for the tea party, the stakes could not be higher. The movement is animated and energized by a fear that soon America will be beyond rescue.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it plainly at the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington: “We’re nearing the edge of a cliff, and our window to turn things around, my friends, I don’t think it is long. I don’t think it is 10 years. We have a couple of years to turn the country around or we go off the cliff to oblivion.”
Cruz dominated the summit’s straw poll, taking 42 percent of the vote, more than three times his nearest rival. His fundraising committees reported this week that they took in $1.19 million in the third quarter, double the total in the preceding quarter. Cruz’s national approval rating may be an abysmal 14 percent, but to the base of the Republican Party he is an idol.
The current fear derives from Obamacare, but that is only the most recent cause for alarm. Modern American conservatism was founded on a diet of despair. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. began the movement with a famous first editorial in National Review declaring that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” John Boehner tries to tie into this tradition of opposition when he says in exasperation, “The federal government has spent more than what it has brought in in 55 of the last 60 years!”
But what has been the result over these past 60 years? The United States has grown mightily, destroyed the Soviet Union, spread capitalism across the globe and lifted its citizens to astonishingly high standards of living and income. Over the past 60 years, America has built highways and universities, funded science and space research, and — along the way — ushered in the rise of the most productive and powerful private sector the world has ever known.
At the end of the 1961 speech that launched his political career, Ronald Reagan said, “If I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” But the menace Reagan warned about — Medicare — was enacted. It has provided security to the elderly. There have been problems regarding cost, but that’s hardly the same as killing freedom.
For most Americans, even most conservatives, yesterday’s deepest causes are often quietly forgotten. Consider that by Reagan’s definition, all other industrial democracies are tyrannies. Yet every year, the right-wing Heritage Foundation ranks several of these countries — such as Switzerland — as “more free” than the United States, despite the fact that they have universal health care.
For many conservatives, the “rot” to be excoriated is not about economics and health care but about culture. A persistent theme of conservative intellectuals and commentators — in print and on Fox News — is the cultural decay of the country. But compared with almost any period in U.S. history, we live in bourgeois times, in a culture that values family, religion, work and, above all, business. Young people today aspire to become Mark Zuckerberg. They quote the aphorisms of Warren Buffett and read the Twitter feed of Bill Gates. Even after the worst recession since the Great Depression, there are no obvious radicals, anarchists, Black Panthers or other revolutionary movements — save the tea party.
For some tacticians and consultants, extreme rhetoric is just a way to keep the troops fired up. But rhetoric gives meaning and shape to a political movement. Over the past six decades, conservatism’s language of decay, despair and decline have created a powerful group of Americans who believe fervently in this dark narrative and are determined to stop the country from plunging into imminent oblivion. They aren’t going to give up just yet.
The era of crises could end, but only when this group of conservatives makes its peace with today’s America. They are misty-eyed in their devotion to a distant republic of myth and memory yet passionate in their dislike of the messy, multiracial, quasi-capitalist democracy that has been around for half a century — a fifth of our country’s history. At some point, will they come to recognize that you cannot love America in theory and hate it in fact?
Who is the Republican "ruling class," according to Rush? Who are "establishment Republicans?" Any Republican (with half a brain) who acknowledges that Palin can't win in 2012? Rush throws out these terms but I really wish he'd get specific. Who is ruling us? Who exactly is the establishment? What do they retain control of? This sounds like something Democrats and non-establishment Republicans could unite against... right?
No, it's all B.S. As if Republicans were perennial underdogs. As if some stiff-collared Republicans were holding the party down. P-shaw! The GOP is all about stiff collars and established wealth! This is like Democrats lamenting "bad unions." Nobody would buy it for a second! But somehow Rush Limbaugh gets away with this crap.
He has no conscience. Do his listeners? Really, he ought to be ashamed. (But he's too damn rich at your expense to care, ha, ha, ha.....)
RUSH: What did I tell you, cut 16? You've got to hear this. This is ruling class member David Frum who... (sigh) What would be the most descriptive and honest way to describe David Frum? David Frum remains a guest on Democrat talk shows because he wrote a phrase for a George Bush speech during the first term. It is said that David Frum came up with the slogan "axis of evil." So David Frum wrote three words, and for that he has guest emeritus status. Well, that plus he frequently rips conservatives. He's from the "Reagan is over" crowd, the "era of Reagan is over" crowd. So he was on a television network not to be named last night, and he was asked about something that Newt Gingrich said. It doesn't really matter what he was asked. It's his answer. Basically the question was: "What do you think is Gingrich's consideration here? Is he trying to get an edge on a possible rival?"
FRUM: I do think that there is a lot of concern in senior levels of the Republican Party. People in that kind of orbit are worried about the down-ballot effect of a Palin candidacy. 2012 is shaping up to be a very good year for Republicans in senatorial races. It maybe in the Republican interest to have 2012 be a rather lower-intensity year rather than a higher-intensity year. If it's a lower-intensity year, you're gonna lose the presidency anyway, but your more educated, older, more affluent voters are coming out as a bigger part of the electorate then you can have even bigger gains in the Senate.
RUSH: That, by the way, in tone is the "new civility." That is ruling class-speak. But what he's saying here is that establishment Republicans, if Palin's anywhere near the presidential candidacy -- if she's anywhere near this run -- that that's just too divisive to try to beat Obama in 2012. They may as well just cede the presidential election in 2012 and try to pick up a few Senate seats, is what the erudite and brilliant ruling class (I don't know if he's a member or wannabe) David Frum suggests. It's just gonna be too volatile. Beating Obama, especially if Palin's around, is not possible.
Just don't even think about doing that. Just go for the down-ballot wins and forget the presidency. And he says, "[T]here is a lot of concern in senior levels of the Republican Party. People in that kind of orbit are worried about the down-ballot effect of a Palin candidacy." So it's a great year. In other words: "The Republican leadership, we gotta great chance to pick up Senate seats, not so much the presidency. Let's not even focus on that. We'll just cede that." Now, I don't know that that's true. I don't know that that's the establishment Republican view, but this is what the exalted, celebrated, erudite, ruling class member, David Frum, says. Just FYI.
I wouldn't call Reagan-Admin guy Bruce Bartlett's op-ed the "final nail in the coffin" of the already discredited "starve the beast" theory; I'd say it's more like chopping off its head and stuffing its mouth with garlic. Anyhow, the point is: it's dead. Only hysterical twits like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin still sell this theory's stinking corpse, as the decay and rot it has spread is evident throughout America.
I believe that to a large extent our current budgetary problems stem from the widespread adoption of an idea by Republicans in the 1970s called "starve the beast." It says that the best, perhaps only, way of reducing government spending is by reducing taxes. While a plausible strategy at the time it was formulated, STB became a substitute for serious budget control efforts, reduced the political cost of deficits, encouraged fiscally irresponsible tax cutting and ultimately made both spending and deficits larger.
Once upon a time Republicans thought that budget deficits were bad, that it was immoral to live for the present and pass the debt onto our children. Until the 1970s they were consistent in opposing both expansions of spending and tax cuts that were not financed with tax increases or spending cuts. Republicans also thought that deficits had a cost over and above the spending that they financed and that it was possible for this cost to be so high that tax increases were justified if spending could not be cut.
Dwight Eisenhower kept in place the high Korean War tax rates throughout his presidency, which is partly why the national debt fell from 74.3% of gross domestic product to 56% on his watch. Most Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the Kennedy tax cut in 1963. Richard Nixon supported extension of the Vietnam War surtax instituted by Lyndon Johnson, even though he campaigned against it. And Gerald Ford opposed a permanent tax cut in 1974 because he feared its long-term impact on the deficit.
By 1977, however, Jack Kemp, Dave Stockman and a few other House Republicans concluded that the economy was desperately in need of a permanent tax rate reduction. Kemp believed that such a tax cut would so expand the economy that the revenue loss would be minimal. He also thought that much spending was driven by slow economic growth--welfare, unemployment benefits and so on--that would fall automatically if growth increased.
But the Republican Party's economic gurus--Alan Greenspan and Herb Stein, in particular--were not comfortable supporting a tax cut without stronger assurances that the deficit would not increase too much. At a time when inflation was our biggest national problem their concerns were not unreasonable.
After enactment of California's Proposition 13--a big property tax cut with no offsetting spending cuts or tax increases--on June 6, 1978, there was an immediate change in attitude among Republican economists who were previously skeptical of a permanent cut in federal income tax rates. They could see that a tax revolt was in the making and that Republicans could very possibly ride it all the way back into the White House in 1980.
On July 14, 1978, a few weeks after the Prop. 13 vote, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which would have cut all federal income tax rates by about one-third. A key witness was Greenspan, who had recently served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and was undoubtedly the most respected business economist in the United States. He was the first Republican to articulate what came to be called "starve the beast" theory.
Said Greenspan to the committee, "Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending."
["...and trust there is a political limit to deficit spending." We're still waiting to find that limit, Alan! - J]
Citing Greenspan's testimony, conservative columnist George Will endorsed Kemp-Roth and STB in a column on July 27, 1978. "The focus of the fight to restrain government has shifted from limiting government spending to limiting government receipts," he reported.
On Aug. 7, 1978, economist Milton Friedman added his powerful voice to the discussion. Writing in Newsweek magazine, he said, "the only effective way to restrain government spending is by limiting government's explicit tax revenue--just as a limited income is the only effective restraint on any individual's or family's spending."
By 1981 STB was well-established Republican doctrine. In his first major address on the economy as president on Feb. 5, Ronald Reagan articulated the idea perfectly. As he told a nationwide audience that night, "Over the past decades we've talked of curtailing spending so that we can then lower the tax burden. ... But there were always those who told us that taxes couldn't be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance."
Unfortunately there is no evidence that the big 1981 tax cut enacted by Reagan did anything whatsoever to restrain spending. Federal outlays rose from 21.7% of GDP in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983, before falling back to 21.3% of GDP by the time he left office.
Rather than view this as refutation of starve the beast theory, however, Republicans concluded that Reagan's true mistake was acquiescing to tax increases almost every year from 1982 to 1988. By the end of his presidency, Reagan signed into law tax increases that took back half the 1981 tax cut. His hand-picked successor, George H.W. Bush, compounded the error, Republicans believe, by supporting a tax increase in 1990.
When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, one of his first acts in office was to push through Congress--with no Republican support--a big tax increase. Starve the beast theory predicted a big increase in spending as a consequence. But in fact, federal outlays fell from 22.1% of GDP in 1992 to 18.2% of GDP by the time Clinton left office.
Although all of evidence of the previous 20 years clearly refuted starve the beast theory, George W. Bush was an enthusiastic supporter, using it to justify liquidation of the budget surpluses he inherited from Clinton on massive tax cuts year after year. Bush called them "a fiscal straightjacket for Congress" that would prevent an increase in spending. Of course nothing of the kind occurred. Spending rose throughout his administration to 20.7% of GDP in 2008.
Nevertheless STB remains a critical part of Republican dogma. On April 8 Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told right-wing talk show host Sean Hannity that the Republican response to health care reform would be to "starve the beast" by refusing to fund it. On April 14 Sarah Palin begged her followers in Boston to "please starve the beast" by resisting any tax increase, no matter how large the budget deficit.
Despite its continuing popularity among Republican politicians, at least a few conservative intellectuals are starting to have misgivings about STB. In 2005 free-market economist Arnold Kling admitted he had been wrong. "Cutting taxes did not help to reduce the size of government," he conceded.
For some years Bill Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute has argued that STB actually increased spending and made deficits worse. His argument is that the cost of spending is ultimately the taxes that will have to be raised to pay for it. Thus fear of future tax increases was the principal brake on spending until STB came along. By eliminating tax increases as a necessary consequence of deficits, it also reduced the implicit cost of spending. Thus, ironically, STB led to higher spending rather than lower spending as the theory posits.
In the latest study of STB, political scientist Michael New of the University of Alabama confirms Niskanen's analysis. "Revenue reductions by themselves are not an effective mechanism for limiting expenditure growth," New concluded. "The evidence suggests that lower levels of federal revenue may actually lead to greater increases in spending."
In effect STB became a substitute for spending restraint among Republicans. They talked themselves into believing that cutting taxes was the only thing necessary to control the size of government. Thus, rather than being a means to an end--the end being lower spending--tax cuts became an end in themselves, completely disconnected from any meaningful effort to reduce spending or deficits.
Starve the beast was a theory that seemed plausible when it was first formulated. But more than 30 years later it must be pronounced a total failure. There is not one iota of empirical evidence that it works the way it was supposed to, and there is growing evidence that its impact has been perverse--raising spending and making deficits worse. In short, STB is a completely bankrupt notion that belongs in the museum of discredited ideas, along with things like alchemy.
Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward.
When I read this article I finally understood why Sarah Palin ditched her job as Alaska's governor: as somebody who believes gov't is inherently evil, Palin couldn't stand herself anymore. We can only hope that if she runs for president and wins that she'll become disgusted with herself again, this time for being the Big Governor In-Chief, and quit again.
President Obama took aim Saturday at the angry rhetoric of those who denigrate government as "inherently bad" and said their off-base line of attack ignores the fact that in a democracy, "government is us."
Obama used his commencement speech at the University of Michigan to respond to foes who portray government as oppressive and tyrannical -- and to warn that overheated language can signal extremists that "perhaps violence is ... justifiable."
Just 45 miles from the immense Michigan Stadium, capacity 106,201, the GOP's 2008 vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, told an anti-tax gathering Obama's policies are "big government" recipes that are "intrusive" in the lives of average Americans.
Obama urged both sides in the political debate to tone it down. "Throwing around phrases like 'socialists' and 'Soviet-style takeover,' 'fascists' and 'right-wing nut' -- that may grab headlines," he said. But it also "closes the door to the possibility of compromise."
"Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party," Palin said at an Arkansas GOP fundraising event Tuesday, according to CBS News.
I guess Palin's kinda like, you know, right. I'm sure it will be an agonizing choice for all those independent-minded Tea Partiers. Which party? Which one??? It's so close, they could go either way! I can't bear the suspense.
See this article and read a paranoid, anti-Obama, anti-government, pro-Palin teabagger gun nut in his own words. Before he got arrested, that is.
Sure, you Obama hatas will say Girard is an outlier, but not in terms of what he said and believed. I get e-mails from you folks saying the same things that Girard posted on public forums. No, Girard is an outlier because he acted with the courage of his nutty convictions: he stockpiled guns and supplies and prepared for the day when Big Socialist Guvmint was going to come for him.
Well, it finally did. That's called a self-fulfilling prophecy, folks.
The original teabagger when it wasn't cool, Ron Paul, summed up what's happened to the scatterbrained Tea Party movement: "Everybody likes to join what looks like a popular movement, then they want to come in and influence that movement."
In other words, a bunch of natural Republicans got all excited about being "activists," so they glommed onto this astroturfed movement started by FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, and the billionaire Koch brothers, which then became something like a real grassroots movement when it added thousands of natural Republicans, but in doing so became just an outlet for white Republican anger. Now it's nothing new. It's just re-branding.
Want proof? Here's the teabaggers' big effort coming down the freedom pipeline: the Contract From America. Gee, sounds kinda familiar, doesn't it?
Their issue areas support Ron Paul's assertion that the Tea Party has been infiltrated by neoconservative ideology: there is not one reform initiative related to National Defense, although defense makes up 20 percent, or $738 billion, of the FY 2011 federal budget, and would seem to be a prime target for spending cuts.
Here's my analysis: the Tea Party movement is Palin's bargaining chip for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination; she'll threaten to run as a third party candidate and split the conservative vote if she doesn't get the GOP's backing.
Is Palin still the best the GOP can come up with? I guess we can't blame Palin, like Giuliani before her, for living out the GOP ethos of making money for oneself first and foremost. She's just being a good little selfish person, which in the end benefits all of us thanks to the invisible hand, or something like that:
"Sarah Palin, the former politician turned Fox News contributor, spent $63,000 of SarahPAC's money on copies of her book, "Going Rogue," an ABC News report revealed on Monday."
"SarahPAC claimed over $2 million in donations at the end of 2009. Approximately $65,000 went to Palin-friendly candidates, while over $1 million paid for her travel and related expenses."
"Obama knows the long odds against a right-wing populist winning the presidency, no matter how good she looks in a skirt or running clothes, brandishing a gun. He shouldn't be too cocky, however, because the death of the center is ultimately a problem for him and the whole country. If the Palinistas seize the GOP, they probably cannot take the White House. But their brand of no-prisoners partisanship sure can tie up Congress."
The really beautiful thing about the culture war, from an entertainment standpoint, is that it is fundamentally irresolvable. There isn't a concrete set of issues involved, where in theory both sides could give in a little and find middle ground, reach some sort of compromise.
That's because there are no issues at all. At the end of this decade what we call "politics" has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments and the really cool thing about it, if you're a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day's news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant — like who's wearing a flag lapel pin and who isn't, who spent $150K worth of campaign funds on clothes and who didn't, who wore a t-shirt calling someone a cunt and who didn't, and who put a picture of a former Vice Presidential candidate in jogging shorts on his magazine cover (and who didn't).
It doesn't matter what the argument is about. What's important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they're blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.
And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we've now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.
Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming's sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book's significance, because in some ways it's really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.
Palin — and there's just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.
The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring.
Listen to Rush any day of the week and you'll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or not, but at least he tries. The poor guy nearly killed himself this summer trying to find enough horseshit to arm himself with against the health care bill, coming up with various fairy tales about how state health agencies used death panels to try to kill cancer patients who just wanted to live a little longer, how section 1233 is Auschwitz all over again, yada yada yada.
Rush is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn't the action.
Sarah Palin's battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that's far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.
Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush's meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word "fuck" in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there's one thing Sarah Palin knows, it's herself!).
Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally, I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people who get onto crowded subway cars with big backpacks on and/or talk in the Amtrak quiet car and/or drive 57 mph in the fast lane or, my personal favorite, walking with glacial slowness in a horizontal row four overweight tourists across on a New York City sidewalk. We all get into furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work, this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first hour or so.
Not health care, not financial regulatory reform, not Iraq or Afghanistan, but — assholes.
Sarah Palin is on an endless crusade against assholes. It's all she thinks about. She doesn't really have any political ideas, in the classic sense of the word — in fact the only thing resembling real political convictions in Going Rogue revolve around the Trans-Alaska pipeline and how awesome she thinks it is.
Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way. The book is really about her battles with these people, how much they did and do suck, and how difficult and inherently unfair life is for a decent hardworking American gal who just wants to live life, serve God, and try to be president without being bothered all the time.
Viewed through the prism of this particular brand of insanity (Palinsanity? does that work?), Katie Couric's notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin — which is mean! Who among us can't sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye?
You'd have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo whose two favorite Supreme Court cases are Roe v. Wade and Roe v. Wade and who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being. And that other reality, the reality where one worries about a national political candidate having the brains of an innertube, is less immediate than the five-foot airspace radius around the Palin bobblehead. It's harder for the average person to connect with, I guess.
Palin's extraordinary ability to inspire major national controversies around these injustices done to her immediate person is going to guarantee her some kind of major role in American politics for the next dozen years. In this regard she is going to have a willing ally in her supposed keen enemy, the mainstream media, which likewise loves nothing more than a political narrative that has nothing to do with politics. It'll be a virtually endless war over nonsense like this latest Newsweek cover, which hilariously is being seen as one or the other of a) a liberal media plot or b) a sexist assault on a prominent female politician by the male-dominated media world when in fact, as all of us in this dying print media business know, the magazine's motive was grounded entirely in the nihilistic desperation to sell newsstand copies.
And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country's first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn't know this, another reason she's such a perfect political tool.
With Going Rogue, the 2012 reality show has already begun. As brainless political theater, she can't be topped. It's just too bad for conservatives that she happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed-off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman's Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire, she's "brilliant — fuckin' shame it's gonna end our careers, but still."
Palin won't rule out running with a dancing chimp either.
Seriously though, this just confirms everything I've been saying about the long, downward slide of the GOP. Its leadership is coming from un-elected, unaffiliated "rogues" and rightwing bloviators on FOX and talk radio. It's sad to see a once proud party reduced to this.
It's no secret that former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck share great respect and admiration — so their fans can be forgiven for wondering: Is a "dream ticket" of Palin-Beck ticket completely out of the question?
Perhaps not.
Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea. But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality.
"I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet," Palin tells Newsmax. "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."
[Yeah, he's very effective at self-promotion, a quality which Palin surely admires. - J]
Gee, great minds think alike. I just posted on this topic and here I see somebody saying the same thing: the GOP is in soooo much trouble right now.
Trying to don my moderate, apolitical hat for a moment, I'd argue that this is not a good thing for America. We've only got 2 parties, which even on a good day is inadequate; but with 1 party on a metaphorical acid trip lost in the woods, that leaves the other party to run things pretty much as they see fit. That's great if you have total faith in that party and see no good that could come from a loyal, reasonable opposition. But it's not so great if you have big misgivings about the effects of absolute power -- and absolute access to lobbyists' campaign donations -- on America's money-driven political process.
It's not easy to flip a congressional district that's been Republican since the late 1800s, but after being willingly hijacked by the right-wing media -- after getting steamrolled by Fox News' embrace of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman -- Republicans managed to hand Upstate New York's 23rd District to Democrats last week. And they did it just in time for the newly elected Democrat to help (barely) push health care reform through the House of Representatives during Saturday night's historic vote.
Doug Hoffman was, first and foremost, a media candidate (a media creation), which means we are entering a very new and different realm in American politics. We're entering a sort of Fox News Era where media outlets -- where alleged news organizations -- essentially co-sponsor political campaigns. We've moved well beyond the time when Fox News, for instance, leaned right and gave conservative candidates more air-time and tossed them lots of softball questions. We're now watching unfold a political reality where Fox News literally selects candidates and then markets them through Election Day.
There's a reason Hoffman described Glenn Beck as his "mentor" and pledged his "sacred honor" to uphold the "9 Principles and 12 Values" of Beck's 9/12 Project. There's a reason Sean Hannity wanted to "declare" Hoffman the election winner, and why Fox News' on-screen graphic read "Conservative Revolution?" when Hoffman was being interviewed (i.e. prematurely crowned) by Hannity on the eve of Election Day.
Hoffman's outsider bid, originally opposed by the Republican Party, was a media production, plain and simple, which means his loss was a media loss, as well.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich had it right when he toldThe Washington Times that Hoffman's rise as a third party candidate was the "result of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News." Gingrich, who originally opposed Hoffman's candidacy, added: "This was not an isolated amateur; this is an entire movement."
Indeed, it's a media movement that's doing it's best to obliterate the line between journalism and politics.
As I've been noting for some time, Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House. So it makes sense that, as a purely partisan player, Fox News would immerse itself in backroom horse-trading. It makes sense that rather than covering the campaigns and the candidates, Fox News would insert itself as a political player within Republican contests and throw its support behind a specific candidate, the way it did in NY-23.
The looming problem for the GOP, though, is that the right-wing media can't pick winners and stands poised to rip the Republican Party apart. (Did you notice how Limbaugh last week claimed "Newt" had "screwed the whole [NY-23] thing up"?)
It's yet more evidence that during President Bush's pro-war tenure, far-right radio and TV talkers, along with fringe bloggers, convinced themselves they represented the mainstream -- the majority -- of the GOP. But they don't. They represent the radical CPAC wing of the GOP, and it shows on Election Day. We saw that in 2008, when bloggers and talkers opposed Sen. John McCain in the GOP primaries yet were completely unable to sway Republican voters in the process. In the immortal words of Republican strategist Mike Murphy, "These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination."
What's different now, though, is that the right-wing media have become even more powerful within conservative circles, while the Republican National Committee and traditional Republican leaders have receded even further into the background. (Does anyone really see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the leader of anything?) That power vacuum means it's Fox News that sets the conservative agenda in America. It's at Fox News where partisan strategies are hatched, rallies are marketed, and smear campaigns are launched. And it's Republican politicians and traditional Beltway professionals who are forced to play catch-up to the conservative media.
In other words, in just the last 12 months, the balance of power within the conservative movement has completely swung in the direction of the right-wing press, which is stoking the flames of the GOP civil war. It's a partisan press corps that no longer documents internal Republican squabbling; it initiates the infighting.
National political parties go through all kinds of evolutions; all kinds of natural expansions and contractions over time. (Barry Goldwater, for instance, oversaw perhaps the GOP's most radical contraction in modern times.) It's quite rare, though, for the catalyst of that change to be external media forces. Sure, permanent Beltway insiders such as Bill Kristol have routinely hopped back and forth between "the role of Republican flack and alleged journalist without changing even a comma in his prose 'style'," as columnist Eric Alterman noted last week.
But what we're seeing unfold in 2009 is something entirely different. This isn't a few conservative pundits dipping their toes into Republican political waters during election cycles and trying to generate an electoral wave. And this isn't like 1994 when AM talk radio morphed into an RNC echo chamber and helped spread the Republicans' anti-Clinton message.
This is a case where huge swaths of the conservative media, including television, radio, and online, have shed any façade of being journalists and embraced their king-making role. Or, if savaging a GOP candidate is what's needed, as was the case in NY-23 and Dede Scozzafava, then they'll do that as well.
Looking forward, it's inevitable that during the 2012 GOP Republican primary season, there will be, for the lack of a better term, a Fox News candidate in the field.There will be a far-right darling of the Tea Party movement (cough, cough, Sarah Palin) who has both the official (Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin) and unofficial (Fox News) endorsement of the right-wing media.
But will that do any good in the real world? Ask Doug Hoffman.
Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Malkin, among others, all put their reputations on the line in NY-23, touting the contest as a referendum on the anti-Obama, Tea Party movement in America. And they lost, big time. Not unlike the way the same right-wing media leaders put their reputations on the line in early 2008 and went all-in against McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary. (FYI, McCain wasn't sufficiently conservative.) Result? McCain won the SC contest in a walk.
See a pattern here? Me, too. The Republican Party is now attached to a political movement -- a media-led movement -- that cannot win elections. It's a movement that cannot even win elections in traditionally red districts (NY-23) or in very red states (SC). By refusing to separate itself from media players who claim the president of the United States is a racist and a Nazi, the GOP may be assigning itself a permanent minority status.
And I'm sorry, but belated and feeble attempts by Republican leaders such as Rep. Eric Cantor to create the slightest glimmer of daylight between the GOP and the right-wing media aren't going to do the trick. (For the record, comparing health care reform to the Holocaust was the line Limbaugh and company recently crossed, according to Cantor. Good to know.) Republican politicians in 2009 have made it blindingly obvious that they lack both the courage to consistently stand up to the far-right media's hate merchants and the resources. Meaning, without the energy of the fringe activists who insist Obama is destroying America on purpose, the Republican Party would be virtually kaput today.
Disillusioned "Right Wing" blogger Rick Moran, recently bemoaning what he sees as the rise of an "anti-reason" movement on the far right, may have put it best when he asked, "What is it that possesses certain conservatives to fool themselves so spectacularly into believing that they can create a majority out of a minority?"
His definition of "anti-reason" conservatives, who now anchor the right-wing media, seemed dead-on, as well: "[T]hose who reject reality in favor of persecution complexes, wildly exaggerated hyperbole, and a frightening need for vengeance against their imagined 'enemies.' "
Moran actually penned that lament before the votes were counted in the NY-23 congressional race. And incredibly, the "anti-reason" fanatics Moran described were encouraged by the results in Upstate New York, which, in a strange way, actually made sense. Of course anti-reason conservatives would celebrate as a victory the fact that a district that hadn't elected a Democrat to Congress in nearly 150 years did so last week. Of course they'd announce that it was good news that by backing a candidate who did not even live in the district and who, according to a local newspaper editorial board, was woefully ill-informed about local issues, the movement had helped toss a Republican seat to the Democrats.
Anti-reason conservatives watched Hoffman go down in defeat and immediately announced they were going to targetmore Republican candidates, which means the right-wing media stand poised to unleash even more wingnuttery on the GOP establishment.
Grab the popcorn. This is going to be fun to watch.
Kind of an interesting article, because it shows you the evolving Tea Party-GOP-talk radio dynamic currently in action. Here we have a politician who eschews her party and instead embraces talk radio, FOX jocks, teabaggers, "Birthers," "Deathers," "10thers," and just about every other kook theory or group out there. That kind of popularity is double-edged sword, because it is fleeting, and the paranoid people who give it to her see creeping socialism in every Democratic proposal, and they demand the same low rhetoric and hysterical tone from their favorite politicians. Together, they drag the GOP farther to the Right, away from the mainstream of America -- away from where the GOP needs to be to win elections.
So basically, all of this is good for the Michele Bachmanns and Sarah Palins out to make a name for themselves, but but bad for the Republican Party. Bad, that is, assuming the GOP wants to be relevant.
As a Democrat (or at least a liberal) you kinda just have to sit back and observe this in awe, shaking your head wondering, "What the hell are they thinking?"
The thousands of restive conservative protesters milling outside the west front of the Capitol last week definitely didn't seem in the mood to listen -- but there was at least one voice they wanted to hear.
The chant started from the back of the crowd, and rolled forward like a wave: "We want Michele! We want Michele!"
Michele Bachmann doesn't say she finds GOP leadership irrelevant. But with health care reform gathering momentum as the Democratic bill entered final debate in the House, she took her typical route around, not through them.
The swarms of Tea Partiers who descended on Washington on her week-old call didn't come to see John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The top Republican leaders in Congress were guests at Michele Bachmann's party.
"When we came down to this final hour, as the clock is ticking 11:59 on this health care reform, Speaker Pelosi is posed with her health care bill to take over 18 percent of the American economy," the Minnesota congresswoman said Thursday, drawing an angry roar from the audience set to swarm Democratic congressional offices on her instructions. Bachmann grinned. "Oh come on, don't hold back," she said. "Tell them how you really feel!"
In many ways, Michele Bachmann is the ideal political creature of the Tea Party era. Her path to power doesn't lie in moving up the GOP leadership ladder, but in ignoring it entirely, drawing her power more from cable TV hits than committee assignments.
And that power is growing: A University of Minnesota study released in August found she had already doubled her media appearances from the previous year. In 2008, when she was running for re-election, Bachmann hit the airwaves every 16.6 days, Minnesota researchers said. In 2009, that frequency had nearly doubled, to once every 9.1 days.
Nearly all of those appearances made news, featuring a supremely confident and combative Bachmann.
"If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism," she said in March on CNN contributor Bill Bennett's national radio show. "The Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels -- that's what they're very good at -- they're trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren't able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated."
One summer pledge to battle health care reform generated even more media heat and liberal outrage. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing," she told Colorado conservatives in August. "This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."
Since Bachmann's arrival in Washington in 2007, she's grabbed attention not so much for what she's accomplished as for what she has said. Her statements are sometimes debatable, occasionally incendiary, always quotable. In October, she told conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation that she refused to "cower in fear," and worry about media chatter. "They're irrelevant," she said of mainstream journalists. "And I don't play by their rules."
Her target audience, and core constituency, is the outraged conservative voter who feels powerless in the Obama era. And they're listening.
"You've gone to the town hall meetings and been at the tea party rallies, only to be ignored by the Left," the congresswoman wrote in a fundraising message this fall. "Well, I've heard you loud and clear and you're saying: 'Enough is enough!' "
Her polarizing voice sounds like money -- to members of both political parties.
"Polarizing people are double-edged swords, and I think that on balance ... she's hurting the Republican Party," says veteran Democratic consultant Jennifer Palmieri.
Even Republicans concede Bachmann, 53, is playing a high-stakes game.
"If you're going to play that kind of role as a passionate person who, who goes out there and really says stuff, you better have pretty good instincts," says Tony Blankley, one-time press secretary to former House speaker Newt Gingrich. "Because if you have bad instincts, you're going to pay a price.
"But on the other hand," he adds, "nobody follows somebody who's just muttering."
Bachmann relishes her underdog status -- a fortunate trait, given her timing: She ran for a seat in a GOP-controlled Congress, but took office as part of the smallest Republican freshman class in six decades.
[...]
When she entered Winona State College, Bachmann was a Democrat and along with her future husband, Marcus, even worked for Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign. But she grew disillusioned with the Carter presidency. Reading a tartly written Gore Vidal history book on a train ride back to school one year, something just clicked, she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an interview a few months into her first term.
"He was kind of mocking the Founding Fathers and I just thought, 'What a snot,' " she told the paper. "I just remember reading the book, putting it in my lap, looking out the window and thinking, 'You know what? I don't think I am a Democrat. I must be a Republican.' "
But she says she didn't see politics in her future. She headed off to study law at Oral Roberts University, and later at the College of William & Mary Law School. She married Marcus, worked as a tax attorney, and had five children of her own, along with a succession of 23 foster children.
Her entrance into politics came relatively suddenly -- she jumped into a state Senate race a decade ago over dissatisfaction with school regulations, and quickly became one of the most high-profile culture warriors in the Minnesota legislature, a leader in the fight against same-sex marriage.
That embrace of hot-button issues continued when she made her way to Washington. Name a controversial conservative cause of the Obama era, and she's been an icon to devotees: She's a core member of a group of Republican lawmakers who continue to push for government investigations into alleged Democratic ties to controversial community group ACORN. She's been a hero to "10thers," who believe the 10th Amendment of the Constitution rules out a major government role in health care reform; "Birthers," who question whether President Obama was born in the United States (though Bachmann -- who helped block a resolution affirming Hawaii as the president's birthplace -- recently told CNN's Larry King she has "no reason to doubt" he was born there); and "Deathers," who claim government cost-cutting under President Obama's health care plan would prevent older Americans from receiving necessary medical care.
While other Republican lawmakers have publicly struggled with the role of conservative voices like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck -- offering mild criticism and backing away from their comments, serving up vague praise with conditional disclaimers -- Bachmann has embraced them wholeheartedly.
As anyone following the hysterical "debate" over health care reform knows, President Obama and his fellow socialists are trying to create death panels in order to pull the plug on grandma and kill off other undesirables, just like Hitler did in Nazi Germany. Or so the wingnuts would have us believe.
Because we like to chronicle and catalog political insanity, here are the 10 most patently ridiculous quotes about health care reform from the likes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michele Bachmann.
1. "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." —Sarah Palin, in a message posted on Facebook about Obama's health care reform plan, (Source)
2. "Obama's got a health care logo that's right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook … Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate." —Rush Limbaugh, Aug. 6, 2009 (Source) 3. "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." —a July 31 editorial in Investor's Business Daily warning about end-of-life counseling in health care reform. Hawking, in fact, lives in England and has been treated by their National Health Service, which, by his own account, saved his life (Source)
4. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes." –Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), on what is needed to defeat health care reform, Aug. 31, 2009 (Source)
5. "You have three people in the White House that are in love with eugenics or whatever it is you would call it today. … Please dear God, read history. Please dear God read the truth of what these people have said in their own words, and ask yourself this one question: Do you trust these people enough to give them control over who lives and who dies? Because that's what health care is when you have no other choice but to go to the state." —Glenn Beck, comparing health care reform to Nazi eugenics (Source)
6. "Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner." —Betsy McCaughey, former New York lieutenant governor and originator of the "death panel" lie, July 16, 2009 (Source)
7. There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life. And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. ... We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma." —Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Aug. 12, 1009 (Source)
8. "We're gonna have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, 'You're dead.' It's a death sentence." —FOX News Channel's Sean Hannity, June 19, 2009 (Source)
9. "That's why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress, and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions." —Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a pro-lifer who completely missed the irony of using the same slogan as the pro-choice movement (Source)
10. "Exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system." —Rush Limbaugh, June 12, 2009 (Source)
Election night at the Biltmore in Arizona is a hilariously dismal scene, like a funeral for a family member nobody liked, who died owing everyone money. The rats here are already bailing off the ship with lightning speed, like L.A. Dodgers fans leaving a playoff game to catch the latest episode of Entourage. The exodus, in fact, begins about eight seconds into John McCain's concession speech, which incidentally starts off on the classiest of notes: with the remaining crowd cursing the name of the new president.
"A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama," McCain begins.
"Boooooo!" bellows the crowd. Outside the hotel, a wine-drunk young woman in a fluffy white ball gown probably last worn at a Liberty University frat mixer angrily flings a would-be celebratory pompom she has been clutching into my face. "I can't listen to this shit!" she yells, scooting away.
I peel the plastic pompom bits off my face and stick them in my bag, where they are soon joined by a McCain-Palin "Victory 2008" Election Night T-shirt — bought for gloating purposes at a rapidly plummeting discount. Republican-souvenir prices haven't been this low since Watergate.
By the time McCain finishes his short, commendably gracious speech a few minutes later, almost all the Republican revelers have begun to flee the premises. The few who stick around are trying to suck the last value out of the meals and cocktails they so willingly overpaid for earlier in the night, when there was still a chance they'd end up with something to celebrate. At the hotel exit, a pair of Arizona State students are grumbling about the food.
"We paid, like, 10 bucks for a burger," says 18-year-old Emily Zizzo.
"We were outraged," agrees her 20-year-old friend Dori Jaffess.
I ask them why they think McCain lost. Dori says a big reason is that "a lot of big movie stars came out for Obama." I ask her which ones.
"Um, Puff Daddy?" she says. "Although I don't know if Puff Daddy came out for Obama."
"There's Oprah," adds Emily.
"Yeah, Oprah," says Dori.
A few yards away, a pair of thirtysomething women in an advanced wine slog have gotten into a screaming match with a Hispanic cameraman. One of them, 33-year-old Kristen McEntire, is already spinning out a conspiracy theory to explain McCain's defeat, suggesting that the media called the election in some key states before the polls closed, tricking hordes of would-be McCain voters into staying home. Obama, she assures me, is a "novelty" who will "go away within the next couple of years."
"Um," I say. "Go away?"
"I just don't think America's ready for a black president," she explains. "And I don't mean that in a racial way whatsoever."
It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do.
They lost in every way imaginable, on every political front. The symbol of their anti-gay crusade, Colorado congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, was beheaded. The party that had made so much hay running against Mexicans saw noted anti-immigration crusader Bill Sali of Idaho ousted along with several other members of the Immigration Reform Caucus. The GOP's grasp on the so-called "moral values" issue likewise went up in roaring flames, with Rep. Vito Fossella of Staten Island the poster child — his morals were once so perfect that he refused to be seen with his gay sister, and now he's a national joke, bounced after being caught drunk driving and having unprotected, babymaking sex with a married Air Force officer.
The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!
I witness the whole pathetic mess summed up a week before the election, on a baseball field in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The campaign has scheduled an outdoor rally, with a joint appearance by McCain and Palin, at this crucial moment in the race. But now there is driving snow and sleet, trees downed on roads all around, and the campaign — with no alternate indoor plan — is forced to cancel the event at the last minute. I watch as locals keep pulling up to the field, looking for the candidate, a lonely, rain-soaked "Country First" banner whipping back and forth above the stage. The whole scene captures the essence of the McCain run perfectly: Instead of a plan, they had an endless succession of dumb ideas scrapped at the 11th hour in favor of even dumber ones.
It was like that all election season. McCain kicked off his campaign with a stump speech that emphasized his inspirational personal story and experience. Then he picked someone even less experienced than Obama as his running mate and switched to a strategy of attacking his opponent's relationships with people like Bill Ayers. When that petered out, he switched to a new line of attack, trotting out the socialism business and claiming Obama was running for the office of "redistributionist-in-chief." The McCain camp tried running against the press, they tried running against Washington, they tried running against the Bush administration, they even tried running against the "liberal feminist agenda" — the latter just a few weeks after Sarah Palin called herself a feminist.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, after all, represented two completely different approaches to Republican conservatism. McCain comes from the school of politicking that goes after as many votes as possible by waving a flag and saying as little as possible, which is to say he was basically a third-way Democrat with a Goldwater fetish. His basic plan heading into the general election seemed strikingly similar to that of the dipshit vice president character from the uninspiring but weirdly prescient Chris Rock movie Head of State, who ran on a platform of "I've been vice president for the last eight years, I'm a war hero and I'm Sharon Stone's cousin."
McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.
Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.
Palin is exactly the kind of all-or-nothing fundamentalist to whom the career of John McCain had long existed as a kind of sneering counterargument. Up until this year, McCain had firmly rejected the emotional imperatives implicit in Bush-Rove-Gingrich conservatism, in which the relentless demonizing of liberals and liberalism was even more important than policy. While other Republicans were crusading against gay marriage in 2004, McCain bashed a proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment, calling it "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans." While the president and other Republicans wrapped their arms around the Falwells of the world, McCain blasted those preachers as "agents of intolerance." He talked of seeing the hand of God when he hiked in the Grand Canyon, but insisted loudly that he believed in evolution. He even, for Christ's sake, supported a ban on commercial whaling. If there's anything that a decent Republican knows without being told, it's that whales are a liberal constituency.
But McCain didn't care. Back then, his political survival didn't depend on keeping voters artificially geeked up on fear and hatred for Mexicans or biology teachers or other such subversives. He was, after all, a war hero, and Sharon Stone's cousin.
In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?
On Election Night, even those at McCain's farewell party seem to sense that their candidate had taken a seriously wrong turn. "It might have been better if he hadn't tried to appease the hardcore conservatives so much," sighs Tawnya Pfitzer, a 36-year-old Arizona doctor. "I think he should have concentrated on what made him who he is."
Maybe. But it probably wouldn't have made a difference.
We've dumbed this process up so much over the years, in fact, that it had lately become hard to imagine an American presidential election being anything but an embarrassment to the very word "democracy." By 2004, that once-cherished ideal of political freedom and self-governance that millions of young men and women gave their lives to protect as recently as WWII had been reduced to the level of absurdist comedy. You had a millionaire Yalie in an army jacket taking on a millionaire Yalie in a cowboy hat, fighting tooth and nail for the right to be named the man "middle America most wants to have a beer with" by a gang of Ivy League journalists — a group of people whose closest previous exposure to "middle America" was typically either an episode of Cops or a Von Dutch trucker hat they'd bought for $23 at Urban Outfitters.
In short, it was an utterly degrading bourgeois/ruling-class media deception that "ordinary Americans," if they had any brains at all, ought to have been disgusted by to the point of rebellion. But ordinary Americans, alas, would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of eternity mesmerized by the endless and endlessly condescending I'd Like to Have a Beer With You sideshow, leaving the boring policy stuff to the people who actually pay for the campaigns. Things could have just kept getting dumber and dumber, and no one would have been surprised. There was certainly no trend that suggested our presidential elections were bound to return to being great, sweepingly important contests of ideas. But that's what happened.
Like millions of Americans, I watched Barack Obama's victory on Election Night in a state of amazement. The only thing that gave me pause was the question of what kind of country this remarkable figure was now inheriting. Some of the luster of Obama's triumph would come off if the American presidency were no longer the Most Powerful Office in the World but simply the top job in a hopelessly broken nation suffering an irreversible decline.
Of all the problems facing this country by the end of the Bush years, the biggest is the absence of a unifying national idea. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. We tried being a "world policeman" in Somalia, which didn't work so well. We tried retaining our Cold War outlook by simply replacing communists with terrorists. We created two bubble economies that blew up in our faces, and headed into 2008 a struggling capitalist state with a massive trade deficit and an overtaxed military that suddenly had to ask itself: For the supposed world leader in the community of nations, what exactly is it that we're still good at? Who are we, and what do we represent to the peoples of the Earth here and now — not in 1775 Concord, or 1945 Paris, or 1969, from the surface of the moon?
When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.
For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.
