Getting ready for the storm
One effect of the unusualy close Democratic primary race on political coverage in the national media has been that discussion of the big prize, who will be the next President, has been put off. When we pick a candidate and get back to business, the discussion will focus on a number of things. Key factors include the vote turnout for certain ethno or demographic groups, candidate personality, and the merits of the substantive policy agendas of the two candidates, and of their parties in general.
The fact that both Democrats present fairly similar policy goals, and even where they differ, basically agree with one another, has meant they have had to focus mainly on attacking one another, and not on why one’s policy is better than the other, or better than John McCain’s. Likewise, it’s hard for McCain to come out and campaign against either Democratic, because he doesn’t know who his opponent is, and nobody likes a two-front war. All the Republicans can do is build up their candidate, not make any arguments against substantive Dem. policies (other than the usual nonsense, some of which I’ll try to disspell in future bloggings). The net effect is that watching CNN and MSNBC several hours a day, you would get the impression from that substantive policy is irrelevant in this election.
But it isn’t. One place that made me realize is this is conservative talk radio. Since my boys in blue moved over to an AM radio dominated by conservative squawkers, I have been getting a higher dose of it than usual. One argument I heard the other day went something like this, “yes, it’s true that the GOP has had control of all three branches of the Federal Government for 6 of the last 7 years, and yes, they’ve been totally incompetent, but the Democrats gave you a choice of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, candidates worse than, and to the left of, even John Kerry.”
Now, of course the conservative commentators aren’t quite as up-front as my paraphrase about the full extent of their control of our government, or the incompetence with which they’ve exercised that control, but a lot of conservative are coming around to the position that they have to concede a little bit on that. It’s just hard for any honest man to look at the Bush years as though they’d been any kind of success. Actually, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. But that, they tell us, is no reason to change anything. In their view, we should stay the course and give then another chance. And we certainly shouldn’t choose a Democratic, because they’er “too far to the left.”
Basically, they’d like to make it sound like it’s the DNC’s fault that the GOP has been destroying our country, because we didn’t offer good enough alternatives. That’s a pretty clever red-herring, isn’t it? They can concede a little bit about the Bush disaster to sound credible, while urging you to vote Republican, without really expressly defending any of the political values of the Republican party, or addressing any of the reasons given by Democrats as to why those values are wrong.
There are several flaws with this approach, but I’ll focus on the biggest flaw. The Republicans want to focus on distancing themselves from Bush, while preserving power. The argument we’re dealing with here is just another tactical implementation of that strategy. The strategy ignores the bigger problem that the disaster of the Bush years was not of Bush’s creation alone. As Paul Krugman and others have argued, Bush isn’t solely responsible for the destruction of America; he’s just a man of his party, implementing the same bad ideas that they’ve been pushing quite successfully, for years.
To that end, Krugman was correct when he implicated McCain as having subscribed to the exact same out-of-touch party mentality. It’s not just Bush. Bush has indeed been particularly reckless. However, Bush has consistently pursued the agenda set by the dominant wing of his party. McCain is a more intelligent and better-spoken leader, and a more mature man (perhaps too much so?), but it’s hard to see how that is going to make a difference. It’s not just Bush’s recklessness that his caused this mess, it has been the implementation of bad social policy, the same bad social policy the Republicans have been affirming since the days of Nixon.
Back in 1999 and 2000, I had neither the knowledge of the world nor the political convictions I have today. But I did recognize that if we were bound to have a Republican president, it should be the one who spoke English, and could round off an argument with something other than scripture. That guy was clearly McCain, not Bush. Nevertheless, Republicans chose a president who was literate only in scripture (if anything), and as their puppet, he has run our country just about into the ground.
Now they want to use Bush - that clown of a President - as a scapegoat, and get the benefit of the doubt that it was just his mistakes, and not their mistakes. Over the coming weeks and months up until November, I pledge to, as often as I can, write as much as I can to disspell the Republican myths that have been the cause of the last 6 years of dreadfully bad governance.
No matter how much I may agree with certain aspects of the GOP agenda, or disagree with other aspects of the DNC agenda, I just cannot trust a party that would wilfully choose incompetent leadership, nor do I think our current problems are exclusively attributable to Bush. The Republicans have had their chance - nearly uninterrupted control of the bulk of the Federal government since 1969, and they have squandered it. They had their chance to elect McCain. Now, they want to make up for that mistake by offering us McCain again. I think it’s too late. By nominating Bush, they lost a great deal of my trust. By offering McCain as part of a strategy to distance themselves from Bush while changing nothing of substance, they’ve lost what was left.
I urge you not to be swayed by the argument that there is something wrong with the choice of Clinton or Obama. There’s something wrong with the choice of McCain though. That problem is that our country needs change, not more of the same.
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