So what are we up to now, in reaction to these twin debacles of precambrian policymaking? Following even crazier still uber-extremist right-wing monster freakazoid criminals dressed up as ordinary angry citizens, of course. Natch, babe. In for a penny, in for a pound. In for a pound, in for a planet.
It is the stuff of fiction, really - almost unimaginable to remotely sentient beings operating in the real world. Something that requires a master novelist to do it proper justice. But Orwell's long dead, so even that possibility is off the table.
Not everybody quite gets how perilous is the moment, however. Democratic pundits who are rejoicing over the tea party primary victories, thinking that they are good for the Democratic Party, are stupid slugs who ought to have the living sh*t kicked out of them, just for brainlessly taking up space on the planet. First of all, who could possibly care in the slightest about the fate of the Democratic Party? Am I really supposed to be so filled with motivating joy about the prospects of electing slightly less regressive agents of the American oligarchy to Congress that I will run down to party headquarters and start phone banking for my local Democrat? Are we really supposed get electrified and rally around our president and the inspirational likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, simply because they are marginally less obnoxious than the alternative? Golly, I just don't think so.
But more importantly, Democrats are the very reason for the tea party, this latest episode of American idiocy. Had the party done something with the grand historic opportunity handed to them two years ago, none of this would be happening. Had they not booted so badly a rare alignment of the stars that gave them crises allowing real, serious solutions, along with a despised opposition allowing the final crushing of the conservative disease for a generation or more, we wouldn't be sitting here today laughing at serious candidates for the United States Senate who have staked out firm positions on the societal perils of onanism.
If Barack Obama had channeled Harry Truman instead of Neville Chamberlain, this show would have been over a long time ago. But the president instead decided to make nice with vicious thugs, even though he never needed to, and even though they were publicly excoriating him in the ugliest and most deceitful terms, just as he was negotiating with them. And negotiating. And negotiating some more. The Fool Down The Hill spent a year cutting deals with Republicans in Congress on his health care debacle, giving in to them at every turn, and stiff-arming the progressives who had made him president, only to achieve exactly what anyone who has been remotely conscious since Joe McCarthy's day knew would be the outcome: no Republican votes for a bill they themselves had helped water down to near insignificance. Add to that Republican obstruction on every other issue, the almost complete absence of GOP votes on anything - even legislation they had previously sponsored - the Democrats favored, along with the right's continuous assault on every real or (mostly) imagined personal characteristic of the president, and now you see a huge part of the explanation for the tragicomedy that is American politics at this moment.
What's worse, Obama's stupidity is a gift that will keep on giving
for a long time. By means of his actions in the White House so far, he
has nearly guaranteed that he cannot recover in the coming years, no
matter what. He has done one of the few things that more or less
assures his presidency of being finished. The right will never let up
on him, even if he were to adopt their agenda wholesale. And let's be
clear about this - he more or less already has.
If you lay out the
positions of the Obama administration on everything from civil liberties
to gay rights to economic policy to national 'defense' and more,
there's hardly a damn shred of difference between his positions and
George W. Bush's. It's a ludicrous lie to call this milquetoast
regressive in a Democratic suit a liberal, let alone a socialist. And
we've only just begun with Bad Barry, folks. After he gets his ass
royally kicked in November, Obama will lurch even further to the right.
But that will engender even greater scorn from the sickos living over
there under their slime-infested rocks, as well as endless congressional
investigations of bogus administration scandals, likely including an
impeachment. Or did you miss the 1990s entirely, Barack?
But that's only the start of it. Because Obama was too dumb to
recognize that everything hinged on reviving the economy (did you miss
the last century, too, Bro?), and because he was too cowardly to move
boldly on anything whatsoever that he did, he has also lost ordinary,
centrist, independent voters who think both parties are generally
worthless but will vote for anyone who can actually produce solutions.
It's possible that you can bring those people back, but it ain't likely.
The first rule of politics is that people vote their pocketbooks.
Thus, any prayer at winning again would require an economic recovery.
But that isn't gonna happen, in part because Half O'Bama half-assed the
stimulus bill, partly because he was seeking bipartisan support which -
wait for it now - never came, despite the compromises which reduced the
size of the stimulus and turned one-third of it into ineffective tax
cuts that the one-tune-jukebox Neanderthals demanded. It's also not
gonna happen because this downturn is less a one-off event than it is
the culmination (we grimly hope - it could get worse yet) of a thirty
year grand national downsizing project, and because it is less an
economic recession than it is a wholesale and permanent restructuring.
No economist I've heard of sees any shred of economic recovery anywhere
on the horizon throughout all of 2011, and neither do I. In fact, there
are good reasons to think it gets worse from here. And that means
Obama and his party are toast, not just in this election cycle, but the
next one as well.
Having thus irrevocably alienated aliens on the right in addition to the just-gimme-some-results voters in the middle, Obama is producing some of the same effect on progressives as well. It was a very bad idea to speak in bold, Lincolnesque strokes as a candidate if you intended to govern like a small town city manager, and a feeble one at that. Lots of young folks, especially, who flocked to the banner of hope and change are now feeling burned, and well they should. For many others - including the dude I see in my bathroom mirror every morning - this is more like the last straw, the final frontier. Having spent decades holding our noses and voting for Democrats just because the Republicans were so goddam destructive, many of us are now done, possibly forever. Not only is it unimaginable to me that I would vote for Obama in 2012 - no matter who is his Republican opponent - I refuse, with rare possible exception, to vote for any Democrat ever again, until the party can at least get back in the ballpark of progressive politics.
And so it is Obama and his co-conspirators in Congress have lost the right and the center, and at least the enthusiasm if not the votes of the left. But, more importantly, they have done so in ways that are mostly permanent, ways that mostly preclude any possible recovery of these voters' support. This is precisely the reason that Democratic pundits and functionaries are even more self-destructively stupid now than they have been for thirty years, rejoicing in tea party primary victories, thinking that those represent good news for their party.
Consider the appropriately-named Bob Shrum as one example, he whose
great wisdom has produced an astonishing zero-for-eight record as a top
presidential campaign staffer over the decades (in a hissy fit after
nine days on board, he actually quit the Jimmy Carter campaign, the only
successful one he was ever involved with).
Looking ahead to the
presidential prospects of 2012 given the surge of the tea party, he
surveys the Republican field, noting that, "The GOP's 1964 tragedy of
Goldwater, who was at least a serious figure, could be repeated in the
farce of Palin. ... Newt Gingrich is positioning himself as Palin with a
brain. Gingrich has now become a font of smears and off-the-rail ideas
- from privatizing Social Security to the transparently racist charge
that Obama channels the Kenyan anti-colonialism of the father he barely
knew.
With his pandering to both prejudice and extremism, Gingrich
could be the 2012 nominee. He would be unelectable. ... So would Mike
Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who's proposed scrapping the
progressive income tax, the sinister idea championed by that great
socialist Republican Theodore Roosevelt. ... In desperation, Republican
strategists are thinking of Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour,
who would also compete with an appeal to the birthers, the resentful,
and the backlash base. But Barbour was a legendary D.C. lobbyist for
the most powerful vested interests, from tobacco to oil. Perhaps he
could run on the slogan: "Remove the Middleman." For Republicans,
payback could come as early as November, with Democrats keeping the
Senate - maybe even the House. But 2012, I believe, will provide the
ultimate irony: The people who most revile President Obama - and the
Republican leaders who enlisted them only to see their party hijacked by
them - may assure an Obama re-election."
To say that this analysis displays astonishing naivete would be an unfair and unkind cut on simpletons the world over. This is pure lunacy, and it shows both the self-interested narrowness and the analytical imbecility of Democratic strategists (to abuse a term) and pundits. Maybe these folks haven't noticed lately, but in American politics "pandering to both prejudice and extremism" is not exactly a losing strategy. Maybe these people (and there's a lot more of them than just Shrum) aren't paying real close attention, but most American voters don't even have a clue who Teddy Roosevelt was or what he did. And they don't exactly shrink from the idea of slashing taxes just because some dude had a different approach a hundred years ago. Or was it a thousand?
Most importantly, Shrum's assumption of rationality amongst voters leads him to conclude that the nomination of Palin in 2012 would result in the "ironic" "farce" of her Goldwater-like crushing defeat at the polls. It is no surprise this guy keeps booting presidential campaigns. The twin wonders are why anyone continues to hire him, and why anyone publishes his analysis of politics. For all I know, he could be a world-class expert at philately or the intricacies nineteenth century cricket, but, meanwhile, opinion journal publishers might want to take note of the increasingly inconvenient fact that the guy clearly knows nothing about politics.
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