Republican Party

Pin It

Senator Chuck Grassley Is a Silly Man

by Elias Isquith on May 10, 2013

Ku xlarge

Anyone vaguely familiar with the internet might already know that, on Twitter at least, Chuck Grassley is a deeply, earnestly, unpretentiously silly man. But wouldn’t you believe it — the same holds true for his conduct as a United States senator

Years back, there was the time he obliquely sanctioned talk of death panels by decrying a hypothetical government mandate to “pull the plug on granny.” Now we have this, his first legislative salvo in opposition to immigration reform:  

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he worried that the current bill is “legalization first and enforcement later.”

“We need to work together to secure the border first,” said Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the committee. “People don’t trust the enforcement of the law.”

Mr. Grassley has offered 77 amendments, including one that was approved Thursday that would require continuous surveillance of 100 percent of the United States border and 90 percent effectiveness of enforcement of the entire border. Currently the 90 percent rate applies only to high-risk sectors of the border.

Deploy government resources sparingly, precisely, and intelligently — no, no a Republican would never advocate such a thing. So why only 90 percent effectiveness? Why settle? Go for 110 percent, I say! No — make that 125! Until the border is patrolled by drones who have their own drones; and until all the drones’ drones have heat-seeking lasers, we cannot go forward with immigration reform. Thank goodness Chuck Grassley is around to make sure that doesn’t happen.

{ 2 comments }

Pin It

Outreach, Rand Paul Style

by Elias Isquith on April 14, 2013

040813 politics rand paul heads to howard university republicans

I’ve been thinking lately about Rand Paul’s recent attempt at what is called minority outreach at Howard University, “the historically black college” (apparently the mandatory phrasing). I’ve been thinking about what, exactly, Paul did wrong. And I’ve been thinking about whether it’s fair of me to focus on where he misstepped instead of where he succeeded

I’ve spent as much time as I have on this because I’m quite aware of the liberal malady of knee-jerking cries of racism when it comes to the GOP. The fact that I didn’t have much of a sense of Rand Paul (besides his being Ron’s son and, y’know, named Rand — as in Ayn) until he blew up my RSS with his artless critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that didn’t help either.

As tends to be the case with Ayn Rand fanatic-styled libertarians, Paul appears to be really, really bad at the whole empathy thing. The flip way he talked about segregation was an obvious sign; but the way he approached the Howard students — arrogant, condescending, defensive — was nearly as bad. You would think an intelligent, accomplished adult would be capable of at least asking himself, How might this sound to somebody who is not me?, when reading over his speeches.

There’s an incongruity between the gesture and the execution of the outreach, too. On the one hand, there’s his decision to do it at all, which is conceivably admirable and indicative of an open-mindedness of spirit. But on the other hand, the way he comported himself during his remarks and the back-and-forths afterwards was nearly the complete opposite; he was closed-off and combative. He lied about his previous positions. And (least of all) he was awkward. Truly, truly awkward.

I was trying to imagine what Paul was — or more accurately wasn’t—thinking. Because his was a distinct kind of social buffoonery, like volunteering to lead the pre-dinner prayer when you don’t know it and are a strident New Atheist to boot. It wasn’t just maladroit, it was casually so; it was as if Paul didn’t care if his ostensible audience, Howard University students, felt that he might as well have said, “Pipe down! Respect your 19th century Republican elders!”

Ultimately, I came to a conclusion. This was a publicity stunt. This was not “starting a conversation.” It had all the trappings of an almost Obama-esque display of post-partisan outreach and inquiry, but the real point for Rand (and, some would say, Obama) is a chance to bask in the reflection of his self-righteousness writ large nationwide.

It’s well known that Senator Paul wants to run for president in 2016, representing a “new” Republican and a hybrid Tea Party-Ron Paulite coalition. Everything he’s done since 2012 — the 13-hour filibuster over drones, now this address at Howard — has only added fuel to that fire. His filibuster, the argument ad absurdum about a drone strike at a Starbucks, was beside the point, a paranoid distraction from the drone program’s real problems of transparency and due process.

Howard was another missed opportunity. Paul could’ve expounded on his vision of a Left-Right coalition assembled to end the War on Drugs. Or he could’ve extended libertarianism’s open hand by renouncing the PATRIOT Act, stop-and-frisk, and countless other routine violations of our civil liberties. But all we got instead, besides some schadenfreude-y videos, was one more example.

Just one more example of what it looks like when a politician uses the desire for change as an excuse to seize the spotlight.

{ 42 comments }

Pin It

The GOP’s Self-Inflicted Wound

by Elias Isquith on April 13, 2013

Paul ryan fiscal cliff jpeg 1280x960

Ezra Klein flagsan interesting Gallup result showing rare uniformity in American public opinion. Turns out near everyone, Republicans included, thinks the GOP is intransigent. And they don’t like it:

[Twenty-two] percent of Democrats, 17 percent of independents, and fully 26 percent of Republicans complained that the GOP refuses to compromise. That’s rather remarkable: It turns out that the GOP’s rigidity is the top complaint of both Democrats and Republicans. It easily beats “nothing,” even among Republicans!

This reminds me of a Twitter back-n-forth I had last week with frequent commenter and blogger in his own right, CK Macleod. Specifically, we were talking about Ben Carson; but the general topic was same-sex marriage (SSM) and the odd spectacle of seeing the conventional wisdom shift right in front of our eyes. Not even 10 years ago, campaigning for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was a clear winner for an embattled incumbent Bush.

And now? Now most Republicans — excluding the Bachmanns, the Kings, the Brouns and basically all the Congresspeople ThinkProgress makes bank shaming every single day— greet expressions of homophobia with silence or vague distaste. Cool. But their fundamental opposition to SSM is unchanged. Their silence is not their assent to changing social norms over sexuality and marriage. It’s much more like closing one’s eyes and hoping the world outside can’t see, either.

Anyway, as CK and I note, Republicans made a strategic error in regards to gay marriage when they settled on total opposition. Rather than get pro-family policy concessions along the lines of those advocated by Rick Santorum — things like tax credits for children — Republicans have simply stood athwart history, yelling no, and losing ground bit by bit. The same can be said of the GOP’s response to Obamacare, financial reform, Lilly Ledbetter and dozens of other Obama initiatives.

Republican obstinance hit its tragicomic peak-nadir, of course, during the summer of 2011, when the GOP said no to a Grand Bargain well to the right of anything remotely acceptable to any Democrat not experiencing abject terror over the prospect of losing reelection. I shudder to think of the consequences if that “deal” had been struck. But thankfully Republican intransigence has been liberals’ best friend as much as conservatives’ worst enemy. And if these Gallup results are to be believed, none have internalized that fact more than Republicans themselves:

Gallup

{ 0 comments }

Pin It

Ed Conard And Crackpot Economics

by Elias Isquith on May 5, 2012

David Frum asks Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon as well as other successful tech enterprises, what he thinks of Ed Conard’s theory that the investors among the .01% are the indispensable risk-takers that fuel the American economy. As it turns out, not much:

Risk-taking? These guys aren’t risk-takers. Think of the founders of Google. They came from middle-class families and went to Stanford. Short of inheriting the crown of England, there’s nobody in this life less exposed to risk than a Stanford Ph.D. in computer science. They had a business idea. They didn’t put up their own money. They used other people’s money—venture capital. And the venture capital company wasn’t using its own money either. They were investing other people’s money too—and taking fees of 2% on principal and 20% of profits for their trouble.

Hanauer goes on to share who he thinks is really at-risk when it comes to start-ups of the kind that made him so wealthy; it’s probably not who you’d think.

What’s striking about the debate over Conard’s fairy tale capitalism — which is more or less the official doctrine of the Republican Party and is little removed from presumptive nominee Mitt Romney’s economic platform — is the way it shows the bankruptcy of what passes for intellectual debate in our politics. From what I’ve read of Conard’s theory, both in Adam Davidson’s New York Times Magazine piece and through the previews he has made available on his website, it’s self-evident crackpot nonsense, gussied up with copious econojargon and delivered with the unbending, serene confidence of the religious zealot. From the Davidson profile:

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

Yes — and it’s actually an act of mercy  to burn a heretic at the stake; that way, they’ll have the opportunity to recant and save their souls from an eternity in Hellfire. It’s simple logic! Yves Smith rightly points out that a smooth, perfectly calibrated, and miraculously simple All Encompassing Worldview is not something worthy of reverence or at worst self-consciously measured criticism. On many other issues in our society, that kind of intellectual authoritarianism is rightly greeted with great skepticism. And history has provided more than a few examples of why that’s for the best:

Just because someone has an internally consistent world view does not make it accurate. Fans of slavery, alchemy, the Inquisition, trial by combat, and Ptolemaic astronomy all had logical looking arguments supporting their now discredited views. Conard at first seems to yet another evangelist of a hopelessly flawed and dangerous orthodoxy, and the more he speaks, the more he seems to be deeply imbalanced, so intensely invested in his distorted personal mythology that he is driven to make the world at large reflect it back. It would be far better for Davidson and the New York Times to treat people like Conard as epitomes of deep-seated cultural pathologies, rather than promote them.

Remember: Conard is ostensibly an aspiring public intellectual. His book is an economic Ten Commandments, a catalog of the supreme knowledge he’s delivered to us from the Mount Sinai of his enormous wealth. Yet if you’re not already an adherent to the church of the free market — and even if you are; Glenn Hubbard, an otherwise stalwart defender of high finance and the Republican dogma, criticizes Conard for ignoring the problem of rent-seeking — Conard’s philosophy is rather immediately recognizable as a distorted product of  desperate rationalization and base self-interest. Why, then, is this economic creationism granted such unwarranted publicity and respect? I think Krugman’s got the answer:

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine. …

And why is the G.O.P. so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence? It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests. Indeed, support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business.

It’s not exclusively “charlatans and cranks” profiting from telling money what it wants to hear; or, if you prefer, the charlatans and cranks have climbed their way up to vantages previously thought of as remote from the depredations and avarice of the outside world. Professor Conard: Coming soon to a business school near you.

{ 62 comments }

Pin It

The Last Of The Republicans

by Elias Isquith on February 28, 2012

Tpow

Jonathan Chait’s latest piece for New York stands as not only his best effort thus far under their masthead but, more importantly, as my new go-to link to give to those who genuinely want to know what’s really going on in American politics but have neither the time nor inclination to wade knee-deep into the wonky minutiae (sorry, Messrs Sides and Silver). It’s a bit like a Malcolm Gladwell piece in a way, with Chait skillfully translating and synthesizing recent, influential, and Big Picture-y ideas from the polisci world. But instead of explaining just why it is that rich people are so awesome*, Chait’s attempting to provide answers to that most-vexing question — WTF has happened to the Republican Party?

The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams… the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

A key thing to understand is that we’re not talking about the end of the GOP in and of itself. There won’t be a “TBA” on the other side of the ballot, across from “Scarlett Johansson (D)” in 2028. America’s two-party duopoly — already the longest-serving in the democratic world — will continue to reign supreme. As it has before and as the Democrats have, too, the Republican Party will eventually change enough, ideologically and demographically, to ensure its continued existence**. But the GOP that we know, “the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes,” that’ll die the same way that the Democratic Party of Thurmond, Byrd, and Long — or the Republican Party of Dewey, Eisenhower, and Chaffee — died.

It’s not the economy but rather the demographics, stupid:

Campaign reporters cast the [2008] election as a triumph of Obama’s inspirational message and cutting-edge organization, but above all his sweeping win reflected simple demography. Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country. One measure of how thoroughly the electorate had changed by the time of Obama’s election was that, if college-­educated whites, working-class whites, and minorities had cast the same proportion of the votes in 1988 as they did in 2008, Michael Dukakis would have, just barely, won. By 2020—just eight years away—nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third. In 30 years, nonwhites will outnumber whites.

And as Chait persuasively argues, the Tea Party-type GOPers know this, either literally or somewhere in their bones. Hence the controversial “anti-illegal immigration” laws in Arizona, South Carolina, George, and elsewhere; hence the many attempts nationwide to make voting more difficult for the poor, the young, the uneducated (and, incidentally, the non-white); hence the constant talk amongst the more roused of the Republican rabble — or those interested in doing the most rousing — of a kind of final confrontation, a battle to forestall 1,000 years of darkness.

A reasonable person could learn the above and conclude 2012 to be so much Sturm und Drang over what is in some ways an irrelevant election. Demographics are destiny. Whether Obama wins or loses in 2012, we’ll never see another Newt Gingrich come so close to the White House. It’s rather hard to win elections, after all, when your primary supporters are crashing that big town hall meeting in the sky. But I’d recommend wariness against this kind of complacency. The United States may be Barack Country in the long run, but remember what Keynes said: in the long run, we are all dead.

I’d take Washington Monthly‘s Paul Glastris seriously when he argues that this time really is different:

[I]t’s natural for veterans of Washington to be a little dismissive of the idea that any big changes will happen if the Republicans win big this November. The presumption is that the desire to get reelected, the resistance of K Street, the power of the minority party to create gridlock, or the sense of responsibility that comes with governing will rein in the extremism we’re hearing from GOP candidates in the primaries….

I think this is a profound misreading of where the Republican Party is right now. The failure of the GOP to shrink government the last three times it had power is precisely what motivates the anger of the Tea Party base—a force that still exhibits an amazing ability to lead the Republican Party by the nose….

The attitude of official Washington is that politicians will behave like politicians and avoid extreme actions that will lose them the next election—and if they do overreach, the other party will win and take corrective action. But what the Beltway elite doesn’t understand is that the Tea Party only needs two years in power to make the changes they have in mind—changes that would be destructive, far reaching, and in many ways tamper-proof. Even if they then lose, their antigovernment agenda will live on.

Remember: nothing fights quite as fiercely and desperately as an animal cornered.

[click to continue…]

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Pin It

Is The Republican Primary George McGovern’s Fault?

by Elias Isquith on February 22, 2012

Gop2012

Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost is bemoaning the dissolution of the old, pre-McGovern system of Party organization, when both Parties, were run by a hierarchical network of wise men and power brokers. Ever since the McGovern-Fraser Commission that brought about the modern nomination process, Cost argues, Americans have been saddled with an unwieldy, inefficient, and self-defeating system.

Instead of there being a centralized Party leadership to keep in mind what’s best for the entire institution, power is divvied-up among the candidates. And while the candidates may mean well, the fact is that it’s rarely in their own self-interest to do what’s in the greater self-interest of the Party. Some of them end up behaving like the contemptuous little sovereigns of the Holy Roman Empire, refusing to sacrifice an ounce of their own power for the greater good.

Supposedly, this is the reason why this cycle’s Presidential nomination process for the GOP has been such an unmitigated disaster; an endless and self-destructive carnival of mediocre candidates becoming that even weaker through in-fighting and desperate attempts to prove themselves most faithful to the wingnut code. It’s, in a word, the system, man, that’s bringing Mitt Romney — and a chance of winning in 2012, with him — to the brink of defeat.

Understandably, Cost yearns for the good old days:

Because there is no such governing body, we have this mess that possibly might stretch on for months, leave lingering bad blood between the factions, and ultimately give Barack Obama a boost in the general election. That’s the difference between having somebody in charge and having nobody in charge….

The sad truth is that Americans who lived and died 150 years ago – who didn’t have modern medicine, personal computers, cars, airplanes, easy access to higher education, “sophisticated” manners and all the rest – had a much better party system than we do today.

And the Republican party is paying the price for this right now.

Hey, guess what; I’m not buying this for a second. (Big surprise, right?) And neither should you.

The far more logical explanation for the Republican Party’s current nomination woes? The Party faithful have gone off the deep end. At this point, that’s kind of a boring analysis, I know. We’ve been saying this for at least three years. But it’s still true!

For Cost’s argument to make any sense, we’d have to discount the 2008 Democratic nomination process, which produced not one but two top-tier, highly-electable candidates. And though their campaign was inarguably hard-fought, they not only were able to make nice for the kids, but have forged a rather improbable but doubtlessly effective partnership. In fact, Obama and Clinton have worked so well together, it’s become something of a cliché for bored DC journos to pitch a story: What if Clinton and Biden switch seats for 2012?

During the dog days of the Clinton-Obama contest, of course, there were plenty of Democrats who worried, as Cost is today, that the intra-party squabble would — like Lisa did Johnny — tear the Dems apart. But these anxieties were proven premature. Why? Because the Democratic nomination contest of 2007-2008 was waged along personal, not ideological, lines.

On the substance, the distance between Obama and Clinton was minuscule. Indeed, the distance between the two of them and the median voter was similarly proportioned. And that’s where the big contrast with today’s GOP lies.

Clinton and Obama weren’t marching around Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, and other primary states going back-and-forth over who was more indebted to Lyndon Johnson’s legacy; or who would nationalize more industries and subsidize more forms of birth control. It got ugly between the two of them, sure, but it was ugly in a petty, personal way. No one was showing swing-voter Jane Doe those planks of the Democratic base best left under the rug.

Today’s GOP, on the other hand, has not only had the ad hominem brawling that so turns voters off, but it’s had more than the normal share of extremist one-upsmanship. Honestly, as little as you may think of today’s Republican Party, did you honestly imagine that at this juncture, in late February, we’d be talking about Rick Santorum? Or Rick Santorum and Satan? That support for Paul Ryan’s dismantling of Medicare would be the moderate position? The list goes on.

That, and not the post-McGovern reforms, is the real reason the GOP seems poised to spectacularly blow what could have been a Heaven-sent opportunity. Not because the people have too much control, but because these people have too much control. At this point, not even Da Mare or Boss Tweed could save Republicans from themselves.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Pin It

Ronald Reagan Ain’t Walking Through That Door

by Elias Isquith on January 18, 2012

 

 

Reagan
Nancy Pelosi nabbed herself some headlines the other day as she offered her totally unbiased, off-the-cuff, and ulterior motive-free analysis of the Republican Party’s list of primary candidates:

The top House Democrat dismissed the Republican presidential contenders Tuesday, saying they represent the “third tier” of the GOP and have no chance of unseating President Obama in November.

“This crowd that they have there, it’s not exactly what you would call the first string of the Republican Party,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said during an interview hosted by Politico. “I think that they can do better than that.”

Asked which Republicans would make better contenders, Pelosi demurred. “I would never say,” she quipped.

Bernard Finel’s not buying this line which, in some form or another has been repeated quite frequently over the past two years. He insists that when it comes to today’s GOP, this is as good as it gets:

[T]he notion that the current GOP field is weak somehow, or that there are better people in the GOP sitting on the sidelines, is just, simply wrong.  You have the popular governor of a major state, you have the man who came in second last time, you have the man who essentially defined the Republican brand in the 1990s, and you have the woman who defines the potent Tea Party caucus today. This is the cream of crop.

And that’s what people need to understand. This is not your father’s GOP, where yes, there were always a bunch of yahoos lurking off in a corner. Look, all parties have a lunatic fringe. But the current GOP presidential field is not the lunatic fringe. It is the absolute mainstream of the party. People don’t like to admit that. They want, desperately, to hold to the illusion that there is some sort of reasonable or even sane core in the party that is just currently at a low ebb. But that isn’t the case.

I was thinking along these lines a few weeks ago, not long after it became clear that Gov. Christie was not going to seek the nomination. I had internalized the narrative of the field being weak. But when I stopped and doubled-back for a second, it became clear to me that the whole idea rests on a bit of a myth.

When we talk about supposedly top-tier GOP pols who chose to abstain from running, what are the names that come up? Usually: Gov. Barbour, Gov. Daniels, Gov. Bush, Gov. Christie, and maybe Rep. Ryan. Now, acknowledging that I’m pretty left-wing and am likely constrained from ever truly understanding why someone would find any of these gentlemen particularly appealing, I’ve got to say: this, my friends, is slim picking.

Besides Bush — who I think is actually a much better prospective candidate than his brother ever was and, if not for the toxic nature of his surname, would almost certainly not only be running but front-running — the only one of those men that I can honestly picture behind a podium at a hypothetical GOP convention is Christie. Indeed, I think Christie made a mistake not striking while the iron was hot and (barring an unlikely swerve by the Party to the middle) will find himself saddled in 2016 by his four years as the Executive of one of the country’s most liberal states.

But the rest? Daniels reminds me of George H.W. Bush without the pedigree or the resumé. He could never be a convincing culture warrior and is not exactly a man who jumps off the screen. He would thus would stake his claim on a supposed record of technocracy and competence. Simply put: what benefit — besides his conventional faith — does he bring that’s not already found in the otherwise superior Romney?

As to Barbour and Ryan? As the immortal Gob Bluth would say, C’mon!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Pin It

Peter King and Politicians’ Tough Talk

by Elias Isquith on December 5, 2011

Pking

Steve Benen seems to think he and Media Matters’ Jamison Foser have unveiled Republican malfeasance:

Jamison Foser flags this quote from New York’s Peter King.

Some Republicans worried about the political fallout for their party if the public holds them responsible for holding up middle-class tax relief.

“If we don’t extend the payroll tax (cut), we’re giving the Democrats an issue,” said Rep. Peter King, R-New York. “There is no need to give it to them. They’re the ones who mismanaged the economy. They are the ones who put us in this situation. We shouldn’t allow them to get out from under that.”

It’s tempting to explain to King that the recession began in 2007 — making it silly to blame Dems for “putting us in this situation” — but let’s put that aside for a moment.

The more interesting realization here is that the New York Republican didn’t say he’s concerned about the economy, and he didn’t say he wants to put more money in middle-class consumers’ pockets. King instead said he wants to go along with a payroll-break extension to deny Democrats a campaign issue.

And ultimately, that’s apparently all that really matters.

As Foser concluded, “That’s the modern Republican Party: Occasionally willing to do the right thing, but only if they think it will hurt Democrats.”

I think this line of analysis is, for liberals, seductive, self-serving, and suspect. Maybe Foser’s guess is true and Republicans today are willfully, near-cartoonishly, villainous in their political calculations. Maybe it is indeed a winning strategy for a Republican to champion to prospective GOP voters his willingness to tie helpless young women to train tracks and steal candy from babies; maybe Peter King, who knows the far-right mind in GOP politics about as well as anyone today, is indeed playing to that most sadistic, mean-spirited side of this chunk of the electorate’s consciousness. People sometimes do rationalize themselves into embracing the conventionally despicable, after all.

But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think what’s more likely is that Peter King, being the seasoned pol that he is, knows that you won’t win an argument with hardened partisans — especially hardened partisans who have, for the time being, gone “all-in” on a specific strategy which you’re arguing against — by making some dramatic pollyanna speech about Right and Wrong and Goodness. Rather than make that argument — which would tacitly admit that the Democrats are and have always been on the “right” side of this issue, while Republicans have always been on the “wrong” side, after all — King makes a clean and bloodless utilitarian argument that Republicans are going against their best interests. It’s not inspiring stuff, sure; but it’s the kind of rhetoric that all pols, on both sides of the aisle, employ when talking to their base.

I’d imagine there are a few reasons why pols use this kind of talk: one, it’s most effective when attempting to sway actual players in the contest through the media, as King seems to be here. Two, it flatters its audience with implied deference to their savviness as political observers and actors. Three, it protects its author from claims of having gone “soft” or somehow acting sentimentally rather than intelligently. Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, what I don’t think is the case is that King and his ilk see themselves as arguing for the “right thing” but “only if…it will hurt Democrats.” By that logic, Nancy Pelosi was only opposed to raising the Medicare retirement age as part of a debt-ceiling deal because, though she knew it was the “right” thing to do, she also knew it would harm her Party’s chances of using Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” as a cudgel in the upcoming election.

As I said, that might be the case. But I’m just not ready to get that cynical — not just yet.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }