House of Eratosthenes

This isn’t some hardcore tighty-righty Republican choosing that headline. It’s a middle-of-the-road, waitin’-to-be-run-over, moderate liberal sissy. I see him as a Meghan McCain without the cuteness factor, which is to say I see him as a MoveOnDotOrgster. With great reason, I think…

For Republicans, the big immediate problem of the past few years has been how to distance themselves from George W. Bush and all the disasters for which he stands. How do you put some daylight between yourself and this guy?

Unfortunately, they have been able to come up with only one way: Impostor theory. The movement’s instinct, developed during better times, is to dismiss all failings as authenticity problems. The true faith wasn’t discredited, they say, Dubya simply failed to live up to it. We didn’t change Washington, they moan, Washington changed us.

Sorry, chaps. Conservatives did change government, and their long experiment with that institution discredited central elements of their faith. That is obvious today, even if it remains a forbidden thought for the movement itself.

Instead of moderating their message, though, conservatives have resolved to be done with moderation forever, to throw down primary challenges to the GOP’s remaining centrists, to dig the hole ever deeper in a frantic search for purity.

Recognize the talking points? Everything George W. Bush did was a disaster — NO EXCEPTIONS — and everything he did was emblematic of what the conservative movement stands for — NO EXCEPTIONS. That’s the kind of thing you can only spew out in pen-and-ink form, since there is difficulty involved in accessing any rebuttal in that forum, and therefore there is difficulty involved in posting a rebuttal where someone will see it. You can’t go on talk radio and say stuff like that. Someone will call in and say “Now let me get this straight…part of the conservative movement is to let Congress spend just as much money as it wants to spend, on anything at all?” And there you are. High and dry. “Er, ah, um, time for a commercial break…”

So this isn’t the party faithful begging people to come back. It’s a liberal twit, with his liberal twit half-truths, trying to sell the pig-in-a-poke that the bailout mess was caused by “greed.” People got greedy because they weren’t being taxed heavily enough. It’s so cute how he pretends the stuff he’s saying is simple logic and common sense, when what he’s really arguing is that people tend to become more ethically pure if & when they live under more restrictive rules. If you stop believing that, engage in the antithetical belief even for an instant that people determine as individuals how morally upstanding they’ll be regardless of the rules that apply to them…his argument melts down. Completely.

So he’s actually being a pessimist when he says Republicans have a decent shot in 2012.

Consider the various bailouts of the financial system, which are deeply unpopular and which many of the Republicans in Congress can truthfully say they opposed from the get-go. Right now, it would be difficult to blame the bailouts on either party, since they started in the Bush days. But three years down the road from now, they will be Mr. Obama’s to defend.

In that situation, Republicans may well decide to press their offensive against the elite by depicting the Democrats as the party of Wall Street. I know this sounds counterintuitive, possibly even hypocritical. And yet, if they choose to take that route, Republicans will have a lot to go on. Mr. Obama’s great success in reaping campaign money from Wall Street, to begin with. Or his mystifying tendency to give important economic oversight jobs to former hedge fund managers and investment bankers — rather than, say, regulators or experts in corporate crime.

The episode of the AIG bonuses, when the administration showed such solicitude for the sanctity of contract, will make a fine companion piece to the administration’s failure to lift a finger for the mortgage cramdown bill, hated as it was by the financial industry. The administration’s watered-down stress tests will come up, as will its perplexing failure to deal firmly with the so-called zombie banks. Useful comparison will be made with Republican administrations of the past, which put insolvent institutions into receivership.

True, taking this tack would mean overcoming a number of fairly large contradictions, but the potential rewards are great and resourceful conservatives will no doubt find a way. Indeed, some are doing it already, describing Democrats as the bought-and-paid-for puppets of Wall Street. For example, during the AIG outrage, Ann Coulter wrote a column titled “Gordon Gekko is a Democrat,” in which she tallied up the enormous contributions that Mr. Obama collected from investment bankers over the years and concluded: “Wall Street gets what it pays for.”

As for Obama administration officials, I suspect they will find it difficult to get back to “Yes We Can” after having spent so much time chanting, “Because We Say So.”

But suppose we get through the current economic slump with no further great disasters, what happens then? For one thing, the culture wars, which have thankfully been doused by the economic crisis, will come roaring back in some yet-to-be-determined but certain-to-be-awful form.

For another, the administration itself will probably move back to the Clintonian sweet spot that Washington Democrats find so comfortable and correct and desirable. The jitters will be over, the killjoy liberals will be marginalized, the warm old consensus will envelop our leaders once more, and they will resume their old habits, adored by the press for their post-partisan high mindedness, celebrating free trade and the magic of the market, triangulating just like in the merry days of old.

Then the Republicans will eat them for lunch.

If you haven’t already, you should read all the way through Ann Coulter’s column. She does a very decent job of supporting her thesis that the democrat party is the party of the “greedy” Wall Street types. Certainly, she does a far better job than taking the Thomas Frank route of saying “I know this sounds counterintuitive, possibly even hypocritical” and just leaving it at that. Ann Coulter did something that is decidedly out of style now: She inspected the facts, and used those facts to form reasoned, independent opinions. Conclusion: Yup. The democrat party has a decided advantage in luring in the Wall Street bucks. Do your homework.

But the central problem on which this moderate-lib is sounding the alarm, is a genuine one. The bailouts. President Obama is rapidly becoming Mister Bailout. Yes, they did start under George W. Bush’s watch…that much is true. And this is why, when conservatives claim George Bush wasn’t really a conservative, there’s a great deal of truth to that. Did you notice how Frank blithely sidestepped that one as he dismissed the claim?

The O-Plan Herein lies the biggest problem in any attempt to get Barack Obama re-elected to a second term: To defend Obama’s less effective, and arguably harmful, policies — you have to claim that what George Bush was doing, was no different. There is some truth in that. But then you defeat your other argument, that Obama was and is an effective paladin in a revolution of C-H-A-N-G-E. You’re defending this supposed Agent of Change, by saying what He is doing isn’t that much different from what came before. You’re counting on people being easily distracted as they digest these arguments, and possessing no medium-or-long-term memory whatsoever, or not applying it. For if they do apply a long-term memory to all these vital talking points, what you get back is —

George Bush was a conservative. What Obama is doing is no different from what George Bush was doing. Obama, therefore, is a conservative. Obama is bringing about change.

Doesn’t compute. Sorry, it just doesn’t.

But there are going to be quite a few challenges ahead, in 2012, for Mister Bailout to run for re-election. Obama is as popular as all get-out. His policies aren’t. The dichotomy can survive for a little while…two years…three years maybe…at the end of which, it’ll be in sad, sad shape. You can’t have some popular guy doing unpopular things, and then staying popular that long.

Or maybe you can. We’ll see. But the depression one encounters when one sees a new problem crop up, and knows immediately that The One is just going to use the usual two-step process on whatever it is — give a great speech and then spend a shitload of borrowed money — is a soul-sucking, palpable sense of futility. You don’t stay all hopey and hopeful while experiencing this depression. And those who are opposed to President Obama, do not have a monopoly on it. Something costs too much…He’ll give a wonderful speech and spend lots of money. Something doesn’t cost enough…He’ll give a wonderful speech and spend lots of money. People are sad, angry, fighting, suicidal, depressed, restless, they forgot to bring home milk, their butts itch — He’ll give a wonderful speech and spend lots of money. After awhile, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, to just pretend He’s doing something that is likely to fix whatever the problem is. Dangle a politician in front of people for all those years, and it isn’t too long before they can see Him for what He truly is.

Liberals are simply more interested in assigning blame than dealing with any problems. When someone says that “Bush did it”, the proper response is “I’m against this policy no matter who supports it”.

Liberals hate that. It destroys their goal of being known for having good intentions.
- JohnJ | 06/05/2009 @ 13:25
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The GOP Ain’t Dead Yet
Friday, June 5th, 2009