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President Obama, speaking in Washington at the national prayer breakfast, said we as a nation need to return to the idea that we can have strong debate without questioning the motives of others. He said that critics could surely attack his programs without attacking whether he is actually Christian and actually born in America. (Fringe and not so fringe critics of Obama have for months harped on the vaguest possibility that he was not born in the US and that he is Muslim, neither of which is true.)
Okay, good start. Where do we go from here?
The era of open hyper-hostile politics in American began with two figures: Newt Gingrich and Lee Atwater. They came along in the early and mid-1980s and formulated a critique of the Republican party which, in essence, said, Look, you tried old guys have become a permanent minority on Capitol Hill and you are fairly fat and happy being in the minority. The new idea was to disagree and be disagreeable. . Make noise, make trouble, win elections.
Gingrich decided he would stop at nothing to gain power in Congress, and he got it, first, by openly bringing down the Speaker of the House with charges of ethics violations and then continued that path by trying to openly destroy the presidency of Bill Clinton. The impeachment take down failed, but the tactic worked, because the Republicans got back the presidency in 2000. The Republicans found that civility did not pay off, but being angry and vindictive worked remarkably well.
Lee Atwater created the model of “take no prisoners” campaigns for office in which, at the end of a campaign, the candidate’s own spouse or children might feel they’d have to hold their noses to vote in his favor. The idea was to go out hard, fast and early and attack the candidate so strongly on all sides that he’d be left stumbling trying to catch up or, heaven forbid, explain himself. Once you start explaining, you’ve lost.
Perhaps the Dems were just too successful for too long in the 20th century and the Republican frustration boiled over into nastiness and then presented figures who could ride and massage that mood to power. The newer political operatives capture power not in the name of big corporations and the wealthy, which send politicians on their way, but in their own names, for their own purposes, just as modern corporations have been taken over by a professional management class which has managed to turn once boring CEO jobs into sums of wealth that kings would have envied.
Karl Rove, the string puller for Bush II, has described himself as a student of Atwater and he took that sort of politics to a new level with the Bush campaigns. His tactics were so sleazy in the 2000 primary season that they threatened a real, permanent rift in their ranks as Sen. John McCain recoiled from his defeat. Rove ran scorched earth campaigns and he didn’t care if nothing or no one, besides his candidate, was left standing.
At its base, this sort of politics would. in theory, allow a Republican to win election against a certified saint on the grounds that the person was not compassionate enough. It defeated Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a disabled veteran of the Vietnam war, claiming that he was not strong enough in defense against terrorism, in effect, making his patriotism a question in voter’s mind. How in the world do you make that work? For one thing, you plant seeds in the minds of voters so early that nothing else can grow in that space. For another, you sense and then ride the basic beliefs, and prejudices, of the voters. In the south, defense, and the military, always win. To many southern voters, you can never spend too much on military power.
THE REPUBLICANS HAVE NO PATENT ON DIRTY CAMPAIGNS
Dirt bag politics have been part of the American scene from the beginning. The Democrats are widely acknowledged to have stolen the presidency in 1960 with phony ballot counts in Chicago (Daley) and far south Texas (LBJ). The working assumption among hard nosed politicians of the era is that each party had to at least match the dirty, and down right illegal, tactics of the other to have a chance of winning office.
What has changed in the last two decades is that disrespect, down and dirty tactics of the back alley and hidden maneuvering are now out in the open. The Republicans staged a small riot (the famous Brooks Brother’s Riot) in Florida to steamroll the recount process in 2000. The political parties have enough highly trained lawyers and people who know how to twist logic into the desired shape that they make their arguments openly, without shame, even though there might not be any base logic to what is being said. By the time the public figures it out, it will be too late. It is all done under the banner of morality and, remember, we are the true patriots, they are a threat. The Republicans have managed to equate the Democrats with evil and they aren’t going to give up that advantage when given smooth talk and politeness.
THE BIGGEST ATTACK OF ALL
The tactics of the 60 year long cold war worked very well for Republicans and they applied some of it to all Democrats. Back in the bad old days in the middle of the last century, J. Edgar Hoover was at the FBI, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was on Capitol Hill and the hunt for reds, commies, was everywhere. There are traitors in our midst!, was the cry. It kept the right and far right close enough to power to pull some of t
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GINGRICH SPEAKS AT CPAC MEETING IN DC (see below)
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he important levers and it worked very well for a long time.
Now, the Democrats are, generally, portrayed as traitors. To what? Everything. American values, family values, saving the unborn, limiting the power of government. You name it. The Democrats don’t just have mistaken policies and ideas, they would let terrorists come in and bomb your kid’s school!
Here is the basic problem: it all works very well for the Republicans and they can smell the distant possibility of returning to power, real soon. If they can make major gains in the elections this year, even win one house of Congress and some governor’s races, they have a shot at winning the presidency in 2012. If that happens, the whole national experiment in trying something new, a path away from where Bush took the nation, is over.
In a real sense, the Republicans have been running against the youth vision of the 1960s and ‘70s ever since then. They are running against the modern world, against change that makes people uncomfortable and changes they don’t understand. That is partly the reason that the health care debate spiraled into near disaster: it represented more change, too much change, for ordinary people to grasp and accept. In the middle of a near total collapse of the American financial system, Obama and the Obamaettes wanted us to be serious, sober and reasonable about a volatile issue that health care. Sure.
Behind this curtain of “hold back the future”, the Republicans can take office and send billions in tax cuts to the wealthy and take all restraint off business. Problem is, they already did that and it didn’t work out too well, did it?
WE CAN’T REALLY GET CIVILITY BACK BY ASKING POLITELY
Negative television campaign commercials work, even while the public expresses disgust every election time. Just plant the seeds of doubt in voter’s minds and you are on your way toward victory, most of the time. Pretending that Democrats would intentionally take actions to harm their nation works, too.
Questioning Obama’s citizenship is a good tactic for the Republicans, because it plays to the fears of many voters that this new guy, who seemed to come out of nowhere, might somehow be a strange creature with a secret agenda. Many white people have been taught their whole lives that blacks are inferior, now they are told to accept a person with African heritage as superior and worthy of the highest American office. There is almost nothing to dislodge these sorts of fears in the minds of some, so the Republicans and the far right go to town.
In truth, lets admit it: both Democrats and Republicans try to play to the fears and ignorance of a large segment of voters. Politics is a big game and the rewards of victory are fantastic. If need be they will lie or exaggerate the truth until it is the equivalent of a lie. The difference in recent decades is that the Republicans have lied better, more consistently and with stronger effect. And, they don’t give a damn if the whole process is damaged.
Most people grew up and simply accepted the views of their families and parents as a “frame work” for their politics. Most people, even college educated, which is less than 30% of the public, have never taken the time to examine their political views and consider whether they should change, dramatically or incrementally, in the way they view the world. A major segment of the voters is, at base, largely ignorant of government and politics generally, but their vote counts just as much as anyone else and it is all but impossible to free this segment from determined viewpoints.
If the Republicans would devise a more coherent pathway to power, one that actually reflects an intention to govern, rather than just forming reactive statements to the modern world, then they might not have to rely quite so much on fear, rumor and slander to win office. Their stated aim during the Bush years was to “limit government”, but, in fact, the underlying goal was expressed by (their term) starve the beast, meaning denying funding to the federal government. With massive tax cuts, two wars thousands of miles away and billions of ear marked funds flowing from Congress, they have put the country on a pathway to financial collapse. The banking/home mortgage disaster, and the federal spending that followed by both Bush and Obama, was a nice bit of frosting on the cake.
CIVILITY AND DECENCY WILL NOT RETURN ANYTIME SOON.
Perhaps the Republicans, in this interim period can devise a plan for governing that relies less on fakery and hidden motives. If they do, we would have a chance to return to a more civil dialog. It will take that plus a generational change to improve our national politics. The generation that learned the lessons Gingrich taught will have to move on and out and be replaced by one that values civility and has a sense of that the core values of American citizens extend to how our nation’s business is conducted as well as to the lives of the unborn. The screaming segment of the Republican party that sees Dems as traitors and morally corrupt will have to be vanquished by political power or by time itself, more likely the latter.
Doug Terry, 2.4.10
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