How the GOP lost its way
13 FEB 2008 • by Hal Crowther
Four months ago, as the general public was getting its first taste of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, we beheld a rare congruence where the most liberal and least liberal New York Times columnists offered essentially the same impression, during the same 24-hour news cycle:
"To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy," wrote the liberal economist Paul Krugman, "and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the GOP base, however, you have to say some very stupid things, like Mr. Romney's declaration that we should 'double Guantanamo ... .'"
The next morning, at the bottom of the same op-ed page, after boasting that Romney graduated in the top 5 percent of his class at Harvard Business School, the conservative David Brooks asked us, "Why do the Democratic candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the Republicans pretend to be dumber?"
To answer Brooks as if he didn't know is condescending, so we assume his question is rhetorical. But "the media" have become a bubble where the people inside don't always grasp what is obvious to everyone outside. What Brooks probably knows, he will never write—that Democrats pretend to be as smart as they can because they think many of their target voters are intelligent and discriminating, while Republicans pretend to be as dumb as they can because they think most of their base is even dumber. (The smart ones, they think, understand that the candidates are just whoring themselves to snare the slack-jaws.) This humorously sorry state of the party, the wages of four decades of cynical success, was pulled into focus by a Times headline from the Republican primary camps in New Hampshire: "Candidates Spar Over Who Is a Real Republican."
They can spar until Jesse Helms endorses Barack Obama, but the Real Republican will never emerge from this pack or any other. In its pursuit of power, the Republican Party has dismembered and reassembled itself so that a thousand livid sutures are showing. It's not a party but a Frankenstein monster, patched together from dead and discontinued materials, organ transplants that may yet be rejected, rough pieces that look familiar but never match. Since the party's symbol is the elephant, the parable of the blind men and the elephant is relevant: Touch the thing here and it's a briefcase, over there a cross, down there a bomb, a gasoline pump, a pistol, a golf club, a fetus—a noose? Republicans are no longer a party but a loose coalition of Americans who hate things—different things—praying that fear and aversion can win them another four years of power and excess. Ed Rollins, the old Ronald Reagan operative now working for Mike Huckabee, recently acknowledged the party's unnatural composition and the fact that hasty old stitch work is coming undone. "It's gone," said Rollins. "The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition—social conservatives, defense conservatives, anti-tax conservatives—it doesn't mean a whole lot to people anymore."
What is this quilted, decomposing thing, lurching across the cornfields, scaring crows in Iowa and moose in New Hampshire, terrifying the lowly possum in the South Carolina pinewoods? It used to be my daddy's party, his beloved GOP. Without a coherent identity, without appealing or plausible candidates who can even simulate sincerity, the patchwork party's primary season has been a ghoulish cabaret, scary-funny, more Mel Brooks than Mary Shelley. Every morning's newswire yielded comic treasure. Did Giuliani really say "I took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large extent"? Is it possible that his panicked opponents have tried to hamstring the surging fundamentalist Huckabee, who repudiates evolution, by calling him a liberal? And Huckabee, pressed to defend a son who killed a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp—god love our working press—did he say "It was mangy—it looked like it was going to attack"?
John McCain, now the presumptive GOP nominee, earned his idiot stripes by declaring that "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation"—an embarrassment he could have avoided by reading our absolutely God-and-Christ-free Constitution on page 498 of the new World Almanac. Romney and Giuliani would reverse themselves up to 180 degrees on guns and abortions; Romney styled himself a secret hunter, a closet Nimrod, though there's not as much as a shotgun pellet to prove it. The candidates were divided on the issue of—torture? In their clumsy passion to whore their way into the hearts of Republican conservatives, these mangy candidates have the look of dogs that won't hunt anywhere. And they seemed to have no handlers, no writers or researchers, no scouts to steer them through the minefields created by their own lies and evasions. Primary season has never been kind to the truth; but in an age when any voter can check any lie online, pandering to the base as if it has no mind, no memory and no investment in reality has become a distinctly Republican perversion. In their desperation to connect, Republican candidates could scarcely be distinguished from cloacal right-wing propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who say absolutely anything that comes into their heads and expect their audience to believe it because they want to.
Logic dictates that presidential candidates of the patchwork party, staggering under the weight of the Iraq war and their own mendacity, will soon be as dead as the poor beast at the Scout camp, and that by the time their burlesque is concluded the survivor will be begging his Democratic opponent for a chance to die with dignity. But logic dictated that George W. Bush was too inconsequential to be elected governor of Texas. It dictates that a corrupt two-party system most Americans despise will soon be replaced by something more democratic and manageable, perhaps even less expensive. It dictates that a party made of four or five belligerent constituencies with nothing in common would lose every election—yet up till the eve of the 2006 midterms, the Republican Frankenstein was enjoying one of the longest winning streaks in its checkered history.
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