(Credit)
With every passing day, it looks increasingly certain that The One™ has got this election nailed down. America’s about to get all the “hope” and “change” it can stomach.
Meanwhile, the London Telegraph reports that senior GOP leadership expect a landslide victory for Obama which could ignite a civil war within the ranks for the future of the party:
Aides to George W.Bush, former Reagan White House staff and friends of John McCain have all told The Sunday Telegraph that they not only expect to lose on November 4, but also believe that Mr Obama is poised to win a crushing mandate.
They believe he will be powerful enough to remake the American political landscape with even more ease than Ronald Reagan did in 1980.
The prospect of an electoral rout has unleashed a bitter bout of recriminations both within the McCain campaign and the wider conservative movement, over who is to blame and what should be done to salvage the party’s future.
[snip]
David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, told The Sunday Telegraph that Republicans should now concentrate all their fire on “the need for balanced government”.
“It’s hard to see a turnaround in the White House race,” he said. “This could look like an ideological as well as a party victory if we’re not careful. It could be 1980 in reverse.
“With this huge new role for federal government in the economy, the possibility for mischief making is very, very great. One man should not have a monopoly of political and financial power. That’s very dangerous.”
In North Carolina, where Senator Elizabeth Dole seems set to loose, Republicans are running adverts that appear to take an Obama victory for granted, warning that the Democrat will have a “blank cheque” if her rival Kay Hagen wins. “These liberals want complete control of government in a time of crisis,” the narrator says. “All branches of Government. No checks and balances.”
Democrats lead in eight of the 12 competitive Senate races and need just nine gains to reach their target of 60. Even Mitch McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans, is at risk in Kentucky, normally a rock solid red state.
A private memo on the likely result of the congressional elections, leaked to Politico, has the Republicans losing 37 seats.
Ed Rollins, who masterminded Ronald Reagan’s second victory in 1984, said the election is already over and predicted: “This is going to turn into a landslide.”
A former White House official who still advises President Bush told The Sunday Telegraph: “McCain hasn’t won independents, nor has he inspired the base. It’s the worst of all worlds. He is dragging everyone else down with him. He needs to deploy people and money to salvage what we can in Congress.”
It goes on, if you can bear to read it. For me, if Obama weren’t sitting on the other side of this horrific breech, I’d be downright gleeful for a fight to restructure the Republican Party. We need it desperately, and the fact that Sarah Palin was thrown out there as an appeal to the base means that they know what we want - sort of.
It’s hard to tell if this is the beginning of Palin’s career or the unceremonious and abrupt end. If Obama wins overwhelmingly - something the polls don’t entirely point to but other factors (like his insanely large rallies) seem to indicate - Palin may be tied irrevocably to McCain’s trainwreck of a campaign. Further, she’s endorsed too many of his non-conservative policies to be free of ideological baggage, meaning that her best bet in 2012 would be to play up the fact that she was inexperienced back in ‘08 and has spent a lot of time learning and developing policy platforms of her own. My guess is that Palin is, on the whole, too neo-con for what seems to be an emerging core of paleonconservative/classical liberals at the root of the conservative resurgence. Guys like Michael Brendan Dougherty, Justin Raimondo, Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Larison, and even the never-serious John Zmirak are exerting pull that’s either getting more play, or I’m just becoming more aware of it. Pat Buchanan is in style again (even on Rachel Maddow’s show), the Paulites cannot be underestimated, Von Mises has stewards in gentlemen like Jeffrey Tucker and Tom Woods, and Catholic bloggers like Mark Shea and, if anyone is listening, myself - are trying to help pull people out of the neocon tailspin.
The convergence of social and traditional media that’s happening right now, real time, is helping to blur lines and make this possible - the influence of the little guy, if he’s cogent enough and has good things to say - can be equally important to the stuff getting bandied about at The Corner or in The Kingdom Of Kristol, and certainly vies for attention with old-guard rags like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I give far more political creedence to bloggers and writers who make their case well and consistently (linking, in turn, to others who do the same) than I do to big-name journalists or old-skool party hacks and pundits. I want fresh perspectives, people who were never in bed with an administration, writers whose views haven’t calcified over the course as one (or several) campaign strategies panned out. People who still have to work for a living, connect with real people, and have to hustle for their martinis and only attend gala dinners in rented tuxes.
I digress.
For those who continue to hold the reins of power, the dividing line can be neatly drawn between those in love with the Governor-lady with the funny accent from Alaska, and those who are less besotted:
…The real bile has been saved for those conservatives who have balked at the selection of Sarah Palin.
In addition to Mr Frum, who thinks her not ready to be president, Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned Mr McCain’s running mate as a “symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics.” Conservative columnist David Brooks called her a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”.
The backlash that ensued last week revealed the fault lines of the coming civil war.
Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of right wing talk radio hosts, denounced Noonan, Brooks and Frum. Neconservative writer Charles Krauthammer condemned “the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama”, while fellow columnist Tony Blankley said that instead of collaborating in heralding Mr Obama’s arrival they should be fighting “in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country”.
During the primaries the Democratic Party was bitterly divided between Barack Obama’s “latte liberals” and Hillary Clinton’s heartland supporters, but now the same cultural division threatens to tear the Republican Party apart.
Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin’s critics as “cocktail party conservatives” who “give aid and comfort to the enemy”.
He told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?”
This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. Palin is no Reagan. Her strength lies in her relatability to average Americans and her strong pro-life, pro-family appeal. But what is populism when the country is so schizophrenic? 2012 will see Palin in the running, no doubt, but will she rise to the fore or be forever tied to afore-mentioned policies and failed bid of Crazy Uncle John? Who will emerge to lead the factions to a unified conservatism by then? Could a dark horse candidate come to save us? Will we see the Palins and Jindals vying for legitimacy, instead of the Romneys, Julianis and McCains?
Or, if the Obamessiah is annointed, will there be a 2012 election at all? (I can see his inauguration bearing shades of Caesar returning from Gaul. I wonder if future generations will equate “Crossing the Potomac” with “Crossing the Rubicon”?)
If anyone has booze and wants to stop by to talk about it, you should be able to locate my house if you drive through town and listen for the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I think the issue really is populism, but Republicans don’t understand populism. The GOP needs a populist this go-round, a Teddy Roosevelt or an Andrew Jackson. The whole “Give our corporate rulers what they want and maybe you can get some too!” pitch is stale and nobody believes it, least of all the politicos. The “Let us run things and we won’t let them ruin the country any more” pitch is less and less effective as well. People notice when you don’t follow through on your promises. “Sometimes the cards ain’t worth a damn if you don’t lay ‘em down.”
The real divide in the GOP is between the populists, who want an end to the liberal project of turning us into France, and the corporates, who want the government to get out of the way of unlimited access to the public bank account.
The populace wants an end to abortion, gay marriage, and liberal domination of the institutions. They mostly either don’t care about the economic issues or are more or less persuaded by the small-government/low tax arguments the GOP has made in the past. Frankly though, most wouldn’t really be that upset by a government-run health care system, or more bank regulation.
The corporates want less regulation and more corporate welfare. They want continual low-level warfare to enforce the status-quo of free-market worship around the world. War also helps to keep up the demand for munitions. They love the false prosperity that the borrow-and-spend policies of the last 2 GOP administrations have bought. They are willing to go along with the social conservatism of the base to get what they want, but by and large they are not bothered by abortion, and gay marriage wouldn’t make them cry either.
And Palin has become the lightning rod. She appeals to the people, the vulgar, base, evangelical, pro-life, small businessman GOP voter, but she doesn’t appeal to people who (like you and Larison) take issues seriously. The base loves her because she is one of them, the identify with her personally</b. She’s not a rich guy who found God (Bush), a rich guy who suddenly discovered the social conservative position (Romney), a rich guy who wants to kill people in other countries (McCain and Giuliani), a rich actor/lawyer (Thomson) or a rich pastor (Huckabee). She’s a recently middle-class mom who actually believes in the socially conservative planks in the GOP platform.
The reason the populists mistrust the elites is because they mistrust and despise the corporates, the Rockefellers and Bushes. They see them as the people who have betrayed them at every turn, who “ruined” the Republican party. And they associate the elites with the corporates they’ve enabled. When somebody like David Brooks, who helped get the GOP into it’s current position, tells the populists that someone they identify personally with (Palin) is a fatal cancer in the party, they are going to take it personally. When somebody like Noonan, who has enabled and cheerled and apologized for 35 years of GOP disasters, from Nixon to Bush II, wrought by the corporates, calls Palin vulgar and stupid, they take that personally too.
The point to this rather rambling and overlong response is that if the GOP was able to put together a set of economic policy proposals that were actually good economically for the working and middle classes in this country, rather than the corporations who line their pockets, and found an genuinely socially conservative middle-class person to front for them, they could remain the party in power. But since the corporates don’t want that, and the corporations always get what they want from the GOP, this election, and likely the next are doomed.
“failed bid of Crazy Uncle John”
I think this characterization is beneath you.
Mary,
You’re entitled to your opinion. I think that even if many of us feel that we must vote for him to stop a greater evil, John McCain is still not trustworthy. I have serious doubts about his emotional stability and intellectual honesty, as well as his capacity to lead. The man has frequently contradicted himself or changed positions on issues, is known by his colleagues to lack self-discipline and the ability to control his temper, and has well-documented character problems which should cause anyone serious concern.
As a number of commentators have noted, being tortured in a Vietnamese prison may contribute to his heroism, but is not the sort of thing that bodes well for long-term psychological health.
I know you don’t like what I have to say about this election or the candidates who are supposedly on “our side”. Don’t feel like you need to keep reading if it’s only going to upset you.
“If anyone has booze and wants to stop by to talk about it, you should be able to locate my house if you drive through town and listen for the wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
Man, I’d love to take you up on that offer…
I believe it was Mencken who first said that “Democracy is based on the idea that the people know what kind of government they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” This, in a nutshell, is the problem with populism in a democratic republic. We are now living with results of our country’s historic faith in the wisdom of the people.
In a secular mass democracy like ours there are no true populist leaders, only cynics who exploit the narrow sectional and factional interests of competing portions of the population who wrongly view themselves as somehow representative of “The People.” “The People” are nothing more than an abstraction in mass democracy, which is, the adage goes, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner.
While I agree with the idea that the current political elite has no interest in the common good, neither do “The People.” We are becoming (if we are not already) a nation with no citizens. A citizen values the common good and has some degree of influence over affairs of state. We are becoming a country of slaves, not because corporate and intellectual elites have subdued us beneath a jackbooted foot, but because the vast majority of our fellow citizens have willingly surrendered themselves to their appetites and their ignorance.
We are becoming a country of slaves, not because corporate and intellectual elites have subdued us beneath a jackbooted foot, but because the vast majority of our fellow citizens have willingly surrendered themselves to their appetites and their ignorance.
I absolutely agree.
If anyone is interested (which I do not assume), I have expanded my remarks here: http://controversies.thecontrariansreview.com/2008/10/28/conservatism-populism-and-whats-next.aspx