Category Archives: Republican Party

Biting Back

Posted on by

Little stories that seem to fit together … Mike Allen and Andy Barr write for The Politico,

A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.”

Barone said in an e-mail that he “was attempting to be humorous and … went over the line.” …

…“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby,” Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. “They wanted her to kill that child. … I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.” …

… About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Of course Barone wasn’t attempting to be humorous. He was being mean and hateful, period. What’s interesting to me is the way the audience reacted. He was speaking to members of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, which means it was not an Ivy League elitist crowd. And they didn’t just sit there, seething but silent; they weren’t having it. They bit back.

Some post-election analysis in the Greensboro Telegram says Elizabeth Dole lost her Senate seat because of negative campaigning.

Instead of fighting back with positive ads that portrayed herself in a positive light and tried to counteract the negative impressions being created of her with the electorate, Dole spent most of her money going after Hagan. …

… The final straw for Dole may have been the “Godless Americans” ad. She had actually been tightening the race in PPP’s tracking polls but much of her crossover support from Democrats fell apart in the days after she went on the air with that message, which may have hurt her perception as a moderate with swing voters.

Note the closing sentence:

That tactic might have worked in a North Carolina campaign 20 years ago. But the state has changed, and Kay Hagan is more 21st century North Carolina than Elizabeth Dole is.

In the recent election both sides used negative campaigns, but not to the same effect. Joni Balter writes for The Seattle Times,

Obama was called a Muslim — as a swearword not a religion — a terrorist, a socialist, a Marxist and every other “ist.” Yet Obama never lost his focus. His advertising pals did their best to portray McCain as George Bush’s clone. Voters found that image scarier. Eeeeeeeeee.

I think voters found the “Bush clone” charge more credible, also.

Obama’s reassuring voice and sometimes boring consistent talk about helping the middle class gave him the edge. Voters wanted a president with a few new ideas. McCain flopped around from message to message, idea to idea.

Mud, even really clever mud, looks trivial in an economic meltdown. The voters may be amazed or numbed by the level of sludge but they clamor for solutions. That is where Obama beat McCain. Because McCain offered few new ideas, the dirt became the message

I think it’s more than just “economic meltdown” causing the change of attitude toward toxic campaigns. I think people are just sick to death of the hate and the lies. Younger people in particular grew up being marketed to in mass media, and IMO on the whole they’re far less credulous about advertising claims than their elders.

Somewhere in the past week I read that a pre-election poll found that something like two-thirds of voters saw Obama as “liberal.” So the GOP worked the “liberal” line — most liberal Democrat in Congress, I think they called him, which isn’t true — and it didn’t frighten anyone. I think for most people the word liberal, like fascist, has become a meaningless pejorative divorced from any political definition. It’s like calling someone a douchebag, in other words. It defines an adversary by the speaker’s dislike of him, and nothing more.

Now, I would like to educate people as to what liberal really means and restore the term to its previous luster. But conservatives had better beware that the term conservative is going down the same road, to mean something like flaming douchebag.

But the larger point is that the country has changed. I think the Atwater-Rove style of scorched-earth campaigning has lost its effectiveness. I’m not saying negative campaigns will go away, but I think the “anything goes” days are over. I think people are sick to death of being emotionally manipulated and lied to by politicians who, when they’re elected, turn out to be really, really bad.

Never Say Never

Posted on by

I wrote yesterday that I hadn’t seen any Democrats talk of a permanent majority. Well, now I’ve found one.

“This was not just a change election, but a sea-change election,” Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, said during remarks at the National Press Club. “This is the end of the conservative era.”

“What you’re seeing in the nation is the emergence of a center-left majority,” Borosage continued. “We are witnessing the creation of a permanent progressive majority.”

Let’s forget the word “permanent,” shall we? That’s nonsense. The pendulum will continue to swing. But the rest of the Politico article linked above makes some critical points.

The groups Democrats were successfully able to court in 2008, including Hispanics, single women, Asians and youth voters, are a growing part of a electorate, said [Stan] Greenberg, while the base voters Republicans have depended on have become a proportionately smaller part of it.

Conservatives ought to be worried that 66 percent of voters under 30 voted for Barack Obama. A clear majority of voters between the ages of 30 and 64 voted for Obama. Only the 65+ voters preferred John McCain. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the Republican Party.

Certainly, many of those young voters might be persuaded to vote Republican in the future. However, this election shows us that this group won’t be won over by Atwater-Rove style “fear and smear” campaigns. This means the current Republican establishment has no clue how to campaign to them. Also, I think Republicans have bleeped up so badly that younger voters will be wary of them for a very long time. They are not likely to switch allegiances until Democrats bleep up really badly. Which, of course, they are capable of doing.

Back to Stan Greenberg:

“A lot of Republican voters were brought in with gimmicks,” the pollster said. “They had their base and then would try to pick off specific groups of voters on narrow issues.”

Greenberg insisted meanwhile that those who voted for Obama “share a world view.”

I think this is critical. I’ve lectured many times on the patched-together nature of the Reagan coalition. People calling themselves “conservatives” in America really do not share a worldview in the intellectual sense. They share a lot of resentments and biases, yes. They are attracted to the gauzy glow of a shared mythos, and the imagery (e.g., cheesy eagle art), narratives and slogans that go with it.

Other than that, however, conservatives don’t make sense. They want “small government” but a big military. They support war as a solution to foreign policy problems, but they don’t want to raise taxes to pay for war. They want “liberty” but support warrantless wiretaps. They want “free markets” but mostly support corporate welfare. They want government “off our backs” but in our bedrooms. (One could do a lot with that last one, metaphorically speaking, but I think I’ll leave that to your imaginations.)

In other words, they have a laundry list of positions (on which they do not all agree), but the positions do not make an integrated whole. They don’t see how the parts fit together. Well, they don’t fit together. But they should, if they’re going to come together as a philosophy of governance. This give us a clue why a Republican Congress, working together with a Republican president, totally bleeped up large parts of the planet.

Frankly, after the New Deal coalition broke up in the early 1970s, Democrats didn’t have much in the way of a worldview, either. Less ideological than Reagan Republicans, Dems have been great at thinking up programs to solve this or that problem, but beyond “good government” they had no glowing worldview to unite them or make the Dem brand distinctive. They had no talent for pointing to the shining city on the hill.

Republicans, on the other hand, were great at pointing to the shining city on the hill. They developed a religious faith that if they were true to their ideology, it would lead them to the Promised Land. But, as I’ve said, their ideology is a disjointed mess. And as the luminous Saint Ronald fades from memory, if not from rhetoric, they’ve forgotten the shining city and have fallen back on stoking hate, fear and wedge issues to keep the coalition together.

[Update: Yes, I know Saint Ronald stoked hate, fear and wedge issues also, but he made these nasty things sound virtuous and positive. A large part of Reagan’s appeal was that he could make bigots feel good about themselves again. There was genius to that. No one who has come after has been able to match him.]

The hopes many of us have pinned on Barack Obama is that he personifies the best of both sides. He has the rhetorical skills to show us the shining city, while at the same time he’s got the smarts to see how the parts fit together, how the details add up to a big picture. If he gets anywhere in the ball park of being the president he promises to be, he’ll be a great president.

(This morning I changed the default blog category, the stuff that is listed after “Filed Under,” from “Bush Administration” to “Obama Administration.” Boy, did that feel good.)

I’ve been having a lot of fun reading conservative commentary on where conservatism should go from here, and I hope to write about that sometime over the weekend.

The Myth of Liberal “Overreach”

Posted on by

So far I haven’t seen a single Democrat, or independent liberal for that matter, claim that the election of Barack Obama means there will be a permanent Democratic majority forever and ever amen. The best outcome most of us hope for is that Dems will at least keep if not increase their seats in Congress in the 2010 midterms and that President Obama gets a second term. Beyond that, anticipation dissipates into the Unknowable Unknown.

The only certainty is that all compounded things will decay. Nothing lasts forever, in other words.

This has not stopped a number of conservatives from wagging fingers at us and warning us not to expect a permanent Democratic majority. Of course not, dears, but nobody thinks in terms of “permanent majorities” except you. Oh, and clue: As long as there are human beings, history will not end.

The disconnect may be that conservatives don’t grasp the meaning of the word “permanent.” James Antle, associate editor of the American Spectator, writes,

After Tuesday, the Republican remnant in Washington is fearing the worst. While they seem to have dodged a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, they will have less ability to shape and block legislation than at any time since Jimmy Carter’s administration. Conservative Democratic senators are few, and many moderate Republicans from blue states will feel pressure to cave into Obama’s agenda. Republican opinion leaders warn of a big, and perhaps permanent, shift to the left.

It’s happened before and could happen again.

A permanent shift to the left happened before? But it didn’t last, did it? That means it wasn’t permanent.

Conservatives also are warning us not to “overreach,” meaning don’t go all New Deal on us. Antle continues,

But these concerns could be as overwrought as Democratic worries that their party would forever be shut out of power by an ascendant right wing after November 2004. Undivided American government leads to overreach, and overreach leads to defeat. It took four years of Carter to bring about eight years of Ronald Reagan. It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress.

Let’s think about this. Did Reagan sweep Carter out of office in 1980 because of “overreach”? Did George Bush and the GOP win in 2000 because the Clinton Administration was guilty of “overreach”? That’s not how I remember it. There were many factors that caused Dems to lose those elections, some of which were the fault of Dem administrations and Dems in Congress, and some of which were not. But “overreach” was not one of those factors.

Carter lost in 1980 mostly because he seemed weak and ineffectual, not because he “overreached.” His actual policies were middle-of-the-road for the time. Among his achievements were deregulation of the airline and telephone industries.

Regarding “It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress” — let us note that President Clinton won re-election easily in 1996. And, frankly, I think it’s possible that he would have been re-elected in 2000 if he could have run for a third term.

So what “overreach” is Antle talking about? If you want to see an example of “overreach,” let’s see — invading Iraq? the Patriot Act? The Terri Schiavo episode?

Disintegration

Posted on by

The Right is splintering into McCain and Palin camps. C’est une hoot.

Faux News, a wholly owned subsidiary of the upper echelon of the Republican Party, is leading the charge against Palin.

Even I think the “she’s so dumb she doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story is farfetched. The larger point is that the string-pullers want to make Sarah Palin the scapegoat. They are swift-boating their own.

The puppets are not having it. Erick Erickson of Redstate announces Operation Leper:

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

I think the whispering campaign is being facilitated from higher up than the McCain campaign, but that’s a hunch. I’m not exactly a GOP insider. Certainly most of the whispering is coming from the McCain campaign, but if higher-ups didn’t want Palin to be the scapegoat, you know Faux wouldn’t be repeating the whispers.

My sense of things is that most of the Right blogosphere is siding with Palin, not McCain. But there is disintegration among rightie bloggers, too. For example, there has been some sort of falling out between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged. I don’t quite understand what’s going on with this, but there it is.

I may not be a GOP insider, but I do know that the talking points memo that went out from On High to the GOP minions yesterday had these two bullet points:

  • Warn Democrats that they’d better not pursue a culture war.
  • Warn Democrats that they’d better not push for card check.

I know this because every representative Republican bobblehead on cable news yesterday brought up these two points. And I believe these are points that otherwise would not have been on anyone’s mind yesterday, especially card check. If you haven’t heard about card check, go here for an explanation.

Regarding culture wars, I wonder if the GOP realizes that the anti-reproductive rights movement could be turning into more of a liability than an asset. The alliance with the so-called “pro life” crowd certainly didn’t help the GOP Tuesday. I’m guessing there are closed-door discussions going on right now about whether to cut the cord, so to speak, with the Fetus People. If the FPs are dumped, they will be dumped slowly and gently and gradually so that nobody, including them, notices.

However, my first prediction for 2012 is that by then abortion as a national issue will have quietly been forgotten. It might not survive to 2010, in fact. It will still have potency in some states, of course, but it will be kept local. Unfortunately, fighting same-sex marriage will be ramped up to take abortion’s place as the “central front” of the culture wars.

More interesting fallout:

Take a look at the “McCain Belt” — places where McCain did better than Bush did in 2004.

The map linked above inspires dumb hillbilly jokes, and as a hillbilly-American myself, I know a lot of ’em. But I will refrain. For now.

This will not surprise you — the “Impeach Obama” campaign already is underway.

Don’t Forget to Breathe

Posted on by

The final pre-election polls show Obama in the lead. I would have said “comfortably” in the lead, but you know us lefties. We always expect a cartoon anvil to drop out of the sky and flatten us.

The Right is still running a signature right-wing campaign. They’ve got the illegal immigrant aunt, more 1960s terrorist ties, claims that Obama will destroy entire industries/ban Christianity/start another holocaust. A vote for Obama is a choice to go to hell.

Good thing the election is tomorrow, or in a few more days they’d be claiming Obama wants to eat your baby. With fava beans and a nice chianti.

Michael Tomasky theorizes why the smears aren’t working the way they used to:

That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism – indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven’t quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can’t believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I’m still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

I believe we are looking at an enormous political re-aliagnment, bigger than 1980. More like 1933. But these things don’t begin and end neatly. The re-alignment has been going on for a while — at least since Katrina — and I don’t expect it to end tomorrow. I’ll have more thoughts on that later.

The Audacity of Desperation

Posted on by

Some wingnut found a Weather Underground newsletter from 1975 (I didn’t know the Weather Underground was still around in 1975), and documents that the words “organizers,” “communities,” “audacity,” and “socialism” appeared in close proximity in the same paragraph.

Wow! This proves that Barack Obama is a Marxist! Oh, wait …

This paragraph from the newsletter actually frightened one of the commenters —

… the system itself is inhuman, and socialism is a real alternative; the energy crisis is the fault of Rockefeller and the oil companies, not the Arab people; unemployment is caused by capitalism not “illegal aliens” stealing jobs; war in Indochina or the Mideast is part of the problem, not the solution; political and social action can change things.

I’m not entirely sure why the wingnut found this disturbing. All of these issues were issues in 1975, as I remember. The Yom Kippur was was in 1973 and was still on peoples’ minds in 1975. Also in 1973 OPEC enacted an oil embargo on the U.S., which caused a lot of aggravation. In 1975 we had just pried ourselves out of a war in Indochina, but there was an ongoing war in Lebanon. Most of the issues we are facing now have been going on for a long time.

This post and the commenters also bring up the rumor that Bill Ayers must have ghost-written one of Barack Obama’s books, apparently based on the observation they both speak English and use some of the same words. The Times of London tells us that Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah, are connecting the dots. And if they can’t find dots to connect, they make some.

Fox contacted Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Oxford who wrote a software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases. Fox offered Millican $10,000 to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s books.

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work.

Of course not. The $10,000 was just to satisfy idle curiosity.

Update: Alert blogger Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money shows us the Obama-Ayers-Weather Underground conspiracy is broader than even I had imagined.

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the term “audacity” also appears no less than twelve times in chapter seven alone of US Army Field Manual 3-0. This can only mean that the Weather Underground has already successfully seized control of the United States Army!!!!!11!!1! Has anyone investigated the connections between David Petraeus and Bill Ayers? No one is safe!!!

Further, the Weather Underground had a circular logo. So does Obama. So does Mozilla Firefox.

Is there no end to this?

On the Couch

Posted on by

Nate Silver’s data say that if the election were today, the electoral college vote would be something like 350 to 188 in favor of Obama. Still, Dems faint in terror at the least discouraging news; the wingnut faithful (although not the GOP party itself) are only now telling themselves that McCain might lose. Nah, he couldn’t.

Rush Limbaugh’s gut is telling him McCain can win (or is it gas?) and John H of Power Tools tells us,

From Drudge: Zogby’s polling yesterday had John McCain pulling into a one-point lead, 48-47, over Barack Obama. That result is an outlier, I suppose, but Obama has never been able to seal the deal with the voters and quite a few remain undecided, one in seven according to a recent AP poll. Throughout the campaign, McCain has made a series of runs where it looked as though he might catch up, only to fall back again. And the state by state polls continue, for some reason, to look worse for McCain than the national numbers.

Still, I have a feeling that once you get past his core constituencies, Obama’s support is very thin. The fact that he has had to try to cast himself as a tax-cutter is revealing. Does anyone really believe it? True, there’s a sucker born every minute, but still… If there really are voters who have contemplated voting for Obama on what are essentially conservative grounds, it would not be surprising if some of them shift their allegiance between now and Tuesday.

I’m not even going to comment on that.

Y’know what? If the poll numbers were exactly reversed, right now the GOP would be making open preparations for the inauguration — “measuring the drapes,” as it were — and the Dems would have written off the election and be debating how to re-organize for 2012.

If Obama wins narrowly, the Right will console itself in the belief that ACORN stole the election and the majority of the people are still behind the rightie agenda. IMO the deepest, darkest, most terrifying nightmare lurking under the bed for righties is that they aren’t the majority. That’s a reality too terrible for them to face, even if God rubbed their noses in it.

Wingnutism is built on the foundational belief that only righties are the real Americans, and all others are freakizoid elitist not-Americans with deranged ideas. If the wingnuts were to realize that most Americans do not, in fact, think as they do, I’m not sure how they would react. Truly, brains would explode. But I don’t think they would ever admit they aren’t the majority. I don’t think they are capable of it. Obama could win every state in the Union on Tuesday, and they still wouldn’t admit they had truly lost.

Center-Right?

In recent days I’ve heard, over and over again, that America is a “center-right” nation, and Obama had better not forget that, else he push liberalism too far. John Meacham of Newsweek writes,

Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal–a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that ‘the majority is to govern’ has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

Which “past Democratic presidents” are we talking about? Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy certainly were not politically imperiled. Harry Truman didn’t lose public support because of liberal policies, but because of Korea. Jimmy Carter was not, in fact, particularly liberal in his domestic policies (any righties reading this who now are choking and sputtering should do some research), and pushing liberalism too far was not what cost him re-election. Bill Clinton wasn’t notably liberal, either.

IMO only Lyndon Johnson fits Meacham’s mold. Lyndon Johnson pushed liberalism (in the form of his Great Society programs) further than the white majority was ready to go at the time. Of course, that little Vietnam War dustup cost him some support, too.

And isn’t it astonishing how well the right-wing narrative has been imprinted in our brains? Meacham warns that Obama had better not take the too-liberal path that has tripped up so many Democratic presidents, even though it didn’t?

Here’s my problem with the “center-right” claim: Wingnuts see themselves as being “center-right,” even though on any global politcal spectrum they’re hanging off the extreme right end by their fingernails, and Obama’s policy proposals as they are would be considered center-right just about everywhere but here. Those of us who really are liberals quickly acknowledge that Obama is less liberal than we are. So where is the center?

Chris Cillizza writes,

If Obama does win next Tuesday, there will be significant excitement and expectation within the Democratic base that a progressive agenda — universal health care, removing the troops from Iraq — will quickly be passed into law.

If that happens, expect Republicans to use such an agenda as fodder in 2010 for the need to have divided government in Washington.

I can see the Republican campaign now. We warned you people that if you elected Democrats you’d get affordable health care and we’d get out of a pointless war in Iraq. You didn’t listen. And how you’re sorry, huh?

If that happens, expect Republicans to use such an agenda as fodder in 2010 for the need to have divided government in Washington. … Governing and campaigning are not the same thing. And, in a country that — if the Post/ABC survey is to be believed — still tilts center-right, Obama must be careful not to drift too far to the left in the heady early days of his administration.

Yeah, he doesn’t dare actually accomplish anything he promised in order to win the election. Americans don’t really want any of that stuff, even though they elected him because of what he promised. Makes sense.

The Post poll Cillizza talks about said that just 22 percent of likely voters called themselves “liberals” while 38 percent called themselves “moderates” and 37 percent claimed to be “conservatives.” The problem with self-identifying polls like this is that hardly anyone know what “liberal” or “conservative” means any more. If you asked people to define liberal, you’d probably get some nonsense about liberals loving to raise taxes, put everyone on welfare and otherwise waste money. By that definition, I’m not a liberal, either. However, that’s not what liberalism is.

To get a real measure, it would be more accurate to give people some sort of typology test, something like the famous Myers-Briggs personality test, to test actual attitudes and opinions on issues. I bet the results would show the nation is a lot more liberal than it thinks it is.

Update: See Thers at Whskey Fire.

Hate Versus Hope

Posted on by

Like many of you, I suspect, I am skeptical that Barack Obama will be able to accomplish many of his proposals before 2010, or even in his first term. Money is too tight; emotions are too raw. Yes, we can, but it ain’t gonna be easy.

However, I want voters to vote Dem on Tuesday if for no other reason than to send a loud and clear message that the days of Atwater-Rove hate, fear and smear campaigns are over. I want conservatives to understand that if they want to win elections, they’ve got to have something more to offer than the demonization of their opponents. Of course, that would put hacks like Ed Rogers out of work. And what’s not to like about that?

Last night, after the half-hour infomercial, the McCain campaign ran a standard hate ad. Ominous music, unflattering photo of Obama, whispery voice telling us we can’t trust him. How many times have we all seen that same ad? The identities of the candidates change, but it’s the same damnfool ad. I suspect that ad worked against McCain more than for him.

I think the best thing about the infomercial was that it gave voters another look at Obama, so they can see for themselves he’s not frightening or radical. McCain called it a “gauzy feel-good commercial.” Yeah, it was. So what has McCain given us except murky, feel-bad commercials?

Seems to me that every time I see McCain or Palin they’re wiggling their fingers in the air and saying boogaboogaboogabooga. Not exactly a plan for governance. Of course, that was all the plan Bush ever had, either.

As I’ve said before, if you look at the two candidates’ web sites you see that Obama’s “issues” section has ten times the detail as McCain’s “issues” section. So who’s the empty suit?

Even when he stops smearing Obama and addresses issues, McCain offers little else but slogans. For example, if you go to McCain’s economy section and scroll to the bottom of the page, there’s a video called “The McCain Economic Plan.” It is comically insubstantial, consisting mostly of McCain decisively telling us how decisive he is. The only specific offered is the promise to build nuclear power plants.

McCain-Palin supporters are scarier than McCain. This is not to say there aren’t jerks on the Dem side, also, like the asshole in San Francisco who hung Sarah Palin in effigy recently. Keith Olbermann made the guy the Worst Person in the World, and he richly deserved it. I hope the Secret Service let him know that threats to candidates are taken seriously.

But seems to me that all we hear from McCain-Palin people is hate. Well, that and ignorance. This was in the New York Times today:

People at McCain and Palin rallies often accuse Democrats of just wanting handouts. “A lot of people on the other side just want free money,” said Susan Emrich, at a McCain-Palin rally in Hershey on Tuesday. A real-estate agent, she wears a T-shirt that says, “I’m voting for Sarah Palin and that White Haired Dude.” Ms. Emrich would like to attend another rally later that day in nearby Shippensburg, but can’t. “I have to work,” she explains. “I’m a Republican.”

WTF does that mean? Does Ms. Emrich assume all Democrats are welfare recipients? And then there’s this:

When you ask Republicans what they think of Mr. Obama, the word “socialist” comes up more often than not. They mention that he is a smooth talker, and not in a good way. A lot of them seem to have real problems with Michelle Obama, too, though they cannot pinpoint why.

Of course not.

And they do not much care for that Joe Biden, either, or whatever his name is — many cannot immediately summon it.

Can we say “low-information voter”? See also Sean Quinn’s account of a McCain rally in Miami.

Last night on “Hardball,” Tweety interviewed Tom DeLay. Why? I flipped the channel; there are more entertaining ways to pollute one’s mind than watching DeLay. But now I’m sorry I did. Joan Walsh wrote,

DeLay, of course, was one of the most corrupt, hypocritical and divisive pillars of the 1990s GOP revolution, and he’s hugely to blame for his party’s sad fortunes today. But he still gets around the cable shows, and to see him on “Hardball,” just a half hour before I was on, spewing hate about Obama, was kind of unsettling. Obama’s a radical and a Marxist, he insisted, more radical than Al Gore, John Kerry or Barney Frank. He threw out Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. Ultimately I lost track of the times he called Obama a “Marxist.” But appearing right after DeLay, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz mopped the floor with him, to Matthews’ apparent surprise and enjoyment. Obama should send her flowers. I should send her flowers.

Walsh on the informercial:

So that experience shaped the way I watched Obama’s 30-minute infomercial, and it was a perfect tonic. Maybe it was a dull for a moment or two, but Obama can stand to be a little dull, when he has the likes of DeLay and other vicious hit men tarring him as a dark and dangerous Marxist socialist “redistributionist.” He’s fighting for the right to be one of us: normal, sometimes dull and yet presidential, and his ad did it all tonight.

Can we turn American politics into something other than a freak show? Yes we can!

The Future of the Republican Party

Posted on by

Photo: © Ba-mi | Dreamstime.com

Last weekend I outlined a maybe-future post called “advice to conservatives.” I was thinking about how conservatism could adjust to reality after a Democratic victory and, basically, not drive over a cliff.

However, this morning I think they’re unstoppable. The kindest thing we can do for them is locate the cliff they’re speeding toward and wait at the bottom with the body bags.

I give you, for example, “Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party” in today’s New York Times. She’s the bright, shiny thing the true believers are drawn to now, like moths to a flame.

I give you “The Sarah Party,” by Robert Stacy McCain:

I saw the Republican Party today, standing in line to see Palin at Shippensburg University. The line stretched for more than half a mile — people waiting outside for hours on a windy 40-degree day — and though the doors opened more than two hours before the event, security still wasn’t able to get everyone through the metal detectors by the time the rally began. Let’s see Buckley or Kathleen Parker or Ken Adelman draw a crowd like that.

This is my personal favorite, by a blogger at Redstate:

The McCain campaign should purchase a half hour on the same networks, or at least ONE of the networks, and let it be known in advance what it will be, because it will be VERY news-worthy and cause people to want to tune in. They should announce that for half an hour, Sarah Palin will take questions from Dan Rather, live, unedited, no area off limits. … a strong performance by Governor Palin with America watching should pretty much guarantee McCain the election.

The above is not a joke. The guy really believes this. Redstate also has “The Seven Reasons McCain-Palin Are a Lock to Win,” which some of you might find amusing.

The Right is wrestling with two competing theories at the moment. Theory One is that McCain actually is winning (see “lock to win” article linked above), and the polls are misrepresenting reality because either the pollsters or the media reporting on the polls are in the tank for Obama. The other theory is that the only reason Palin-McCain are losing is that the media is [sic] in the tank for Obama. That a majority of the American people might actually prefer Obama is, of course, unthinkable.

(I personally think that whatever breaks Obama is getting from media come from media recognition of Obama’s popularity — being nice to him gets better ratings, especially among the younger demographic — recognition that he’s probably going to win, so no one wants to piss off his communications and PR people; and guilt over the role some of them must realize they played in getting The Creature “selected” in 2000 and 2004.)

The problem, of course, is that for years the educated elites of the GOP — George Will, Peggy Noonan, et al. — have provided a facade of something resembling rationality that somehow obscured the demagoguery, fear-mongering, resentment-stoking and bias-baiting that the GOP relies on to keep its base together. But the keepers of the facade are in the lifeboats, so to speak, and the seething core of ignorance, fear, resentment and hate is exposed for all to see.

No doubt the elites already are planning ways to chip away at the Obama administration, reassemble the facade, and whistle the base home to the kennel. The danger to them is that Sarah Palin may not follow the script. Right now the plebeians are in love with her, and the patricians may find that Palin’s whistle is louder than theirs.

I’m not saying Palin has a serious chance of being the GOP nominee in 2012. There’s talk she’ll have a hard time being re-elected governor of Alaska; we’ll see. I’m saying that when the election is over the GOP will have to deal with her, somehow, whether the elites like it or not, because a chunk of the base will feel more loyalty to her than to the GOP establishment.

At TPM, Linda Shapiro talks about the part of the base that is running away from Palin: “Of the 70 odd conservative politicians, pundits and newspapers that have turned from McCain to endorse Obama this fall, 38 of them have cited Palin as a significant contributor to the decision.”

You see the problem. Is “the base” the “70 odd conservative politicians, pundits and newspapers”? Or the people who flock to Palin rallies? The GOP needs the former for legitimacy and the latter to win elections. Palin already is a wedge driving these two constituencies apart. What will the GOP do?

Update: Here’s another piece of the puzzle. Jonathan Martin writes at The Politico that conservatives are planning a big post-election powwow to set the future course of conservatism.

One of the topics of discussion will be how to fashion a “national grassroots political and policy coalition similar to the out Reagan years,” said the attendee, a reference to the development of the so-called New Right apparatus following Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory and Reagan’s election four years later.

“There’s a sense that the Republican Party is broken, but the conservative movement is not,” said this source, suggesting that it was the betrayal of some conservative principles by Bush and congressional leaders that led to the party’s decline

I think “the conservative movement” is kidding itself, but let’s go on.

But, this source emphasized, the meeting will be held regardless of the outcome of the presidential race. “This is going on if McCain wins, loses or has a recount — we’re not planning for the loss of John McCain.”

Either way, Sarah Palin will be a central part of discussion.

If the Arizona senator wins, the discussion will feature much talk of, “How do we work with this administration?” said the attendee, an acknowledgement that conservatives won’t always have a reliable ally in the Oval Office.

Under this scenario, Palin would be seen as their conduit to power. “She would be the conservative in the White House,” is how the source put it.

What makes Palin more of a “conservative” than McCain, especially if they’re talking about the Reagan model of conservative?

Should McCain lose next Tuesday, the conversation will include who to groom as the next generation of conservative leaders – a list that will feature Palin at or near the top.

I would love to know who has been invited to this meeting, and who hasn’t. Here’s a clue:

Few believe that the Republican party will respond to another brutal election by following a path of moderation, but conservatives are deeply dispirited and anxious to reassert the core values they believe have not always been followed by Bush, congressional leaders and their party’s presidential nominee . Many on the right, both elites and the rank-and-file, see a rudderless party that is in dire need of new blood and old principles: small government, a robust national security and unapologetic social conservatism.

Rush Limbaugh, a powerful figure in the party whose influence has spanned years of the GOP in and out of power, gave voice to this frustration Tuesday, saying candidly that “there is no elected or political leadership in Washington or in the Republican Party that people can rally around,”

This is a guess, but I’m thinking that this meeting is for people, like Limbaugh, who made their bones in the party by being the spearheads of the Lee Atwater-Karl Rove political attack machine. If so, this is less about “movement conservatism” than it is about how the Republican Party will choose to market itself in the future.