GOP Demoralization

Jim Geraghty at the wingnutty National Review discusses the political atmosphere post-tipping point.

We’re in an election year. Heading into these, each party wants issues that energize their side and depress the other guys. As someone on the GOP side recently lamented, right now the voters who can’t wait for November are the Bush-hating Democratic base. They can’t wait to vote for their guys. They went through PEST (Post Election Stress Disorder) in 2004, and now they feel they have a chance to really stick it to Bush, and even dream of retaking the House and Senate.

Right now, Republicans are pretty p.o.ed, but mostly at their own party leaders. The good news is Bush has delivered two really good Supreme Court justices. But they’re appalled at Congress’ spending habits and pork barrel like the “Bridge to Nowhere,” embarrassed by the Abramoff scandal, frustrated at the slow progress in Iraq, can’t understand why nothing is being done about illegal immigration, see the size of government getting bigger and bigger, and so on.

The cantankerous and insightful anti-Pajamas media blogger Dennis the Peasant has been ripping some deal critics on the right for what he sees as blatant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim baiting. But today he observed that few bloggers on the left are willing to stand up for the deal or criticize the fearmongering. No, like the disingenuous lawmakers I referred to a few days earlier, these folks see a winning political issue and are jumping on the bandwagon.

I basically agree with Dennis the Peasant that the left-wing blogs are not calling bullshit on the hysteria over the ports. There is too much schadenfreude in seeing poll numbers like this and this.

After five years of telling Americans that we need to kill Muslims over there so that they won’t kill us here, allowing Dubai to manage our ports is like FDR handing the keys to San Francisco over to Hirohito. It just ain’t popular.

And the Republicans have another problem. If the right-wing blogosphere is any judge, the GOP base is getting bored with fighting Muslims and they would vastly prefer to go back to fighting Mexicans. But Bush is nowhere to be found on Mexican immigration.

The Democrats can have a very good year if they just stand united and refuse to give Bush anything. With 65% of the public now opposed to Bush’s handling of Iraq and the Democratic Party now polling better on national security, there is no upside to appeasing the President. The other side is demoralized: do you think they really want to be engaging in a semantic rearguard argument over the difference between ‘breach’ and ‘overtop’?

Take a look at Geraghty’s analysis (these guys really do live in an alternate universe):

And more and more, I think Glenn Reynolds had it right; the entire Tipping Point phenomenon can be summed up as action and reaction. The Bush Administration’s reaction to the cartoon riots was comparably milquetoast. The violence and threats committed over the cartoons shocked, frightened and really, really angered Americans. They want somebody to smack the Muslim world back onto its heels and set them straight: “It doesn’t matter how offensive a cartoon is, you’re not allowed to riot, burn down embassies and kill people over it.”

They’re ashamed that Denmark is leading the fight over this.

When the Bush administration’s reaction was mostly equivocating statements and a failure to confront the Muslim world over its insistence of the worldwide applicability of its blasphemy laws, I suspect a lot of folks whose top issue is the war on terror concluded that Bush was going wobbly.

We’ve already seen endless negotiations with Iran, when most Americans who follow the issue are ready to declare Ahmedinijad as a millennial fruitcake aiming to bring about the apocalypse. Most who follow the Iraq war closely suspect Tehran is stirring things up there.

The interesting thing is the post-Tipping Point view on the Muslim world is alien to Bush; I suspect he would find it abhorrent. Unfortunately, that puts him out of step with a large chunk of the public — a vocal, angry chunk that is likely to have plenty of politicians courting it.

Courting these voters will mean supporting proposals that are supported by wide swaths of the American people, but are largely considered nonstarters in Washington circles: much tougher immigration restrictions, including patrolling the Mexican border; racial profiling of airline passengers instead of confiscating grandma’s tweezers; drastically reducing or eliminating entry visas to residents of Muslim or Arab countries; and taking a much tougher line with Saudi Arabia and coping with the consequences of that stance. Since 9/11, the Bush administration, and most leaders on Capitol Hill in both parties have dismissed those ideas as unrealistic, counterproductive, or not in accordance to American values.

Could the Democrats court this chunk? Peter Beinart offers his thoughts. They’ve got to be sorely tempted, even though it would mean abandoning their kumbayah multicultural we’re-all-the-same-at-heart worldview.

Could the Republicans court this chunk? Bush never will, but other Republicans will certainly be interested.

Or the third option… suppose both the Democrats and the Republicans reject these options as just too unthinkable, racist, Islamophobic, nativist, xenophobic, etc. Think some sort of tough-talking Perot-type could use them for a third party bid in 2008?

It would be ugly. Picture Ann Coulter’s “ragheads” commentary, Michael Savage’s trademark hyperbole, Lou Dobbs’ “the corporate fatcats are selling us all out in the name of profits!” table-pounding rhetoric rolled into one campaign aimed at playing to those worst instincts – “we’re tired of sorting out the good Muslims from the bad Muslims and the good Arabs from the bad. From now on, we’re treating ‘em all as potential threats.”

If Geraghty is correct about the mood of the right, I would welcome a third party challenge. Let someone take on all the nativist, racist, blindly isolationist bile that Bush has built up within the Republican Party and take it independent. Maybe Pat Buchanan is ready for another run. The GOP is sick and it needs an excision of this type of rhetoric. For too long the Rove machine has seen an advantage in nurturing these feelings without committing to the savagery that might satisfy them. Let someone come along and kick this leg out from under them. It will only expose the bankruptcy of hate to solve our problems.

Meanwhile, the left is finding the temptation to pander to this nativism almost irresistable. You won’t hear it from me. Nationalize the ports or shut the fuck up.