You don’t have to look very far to see the Village Idiocy of the Week as the Serious Ones pause to reflect between primaries.
The theme coming from the Village is simple: despite the fact that there’s two contested national primary contests and that the Democrats have a three way race and are regularly outpolling the Republicans (split among six candidates with widely different views) at these contests, the Democrats are hopelessly split and broken, while the GOP is vigorously engaging in the democracy of competing ideas.
Got that? Here we go round the bend…but at the end of that bend we come back to the heart of the Village wankery: John Fucking McCain.
First stop, Noemie Emery reducing the Democratic contest down to a playground scuffle between two politically correct wimps.
Sometime back in the 1990s, when the culture wars were the only ones we thought we had going, a cartoon showed three coworkers viewing each other with narrowed and questioning eyes. “Those whites don’t know how to deal with a competent black man,” the black man is thinking. “Those guys don’t know how to deal with a powerful woman,” the woman is thinking. And what could the only white male have been thinking? “They don’t like me. They know that I’m gay.”
So far as we know, there are no gays in the mixture today, but the cartoon nicely captures what the Democrats face as they try to wage a political war in the age of correctness, which is, they are finding, an impossibility. The Democrats are the party of self-conscious inclusion, of identity politics, of sensitivity training, of hate crimes, hate speech, and of rules to control them. A presidential campaign, on the other hand, is nothing but “hate speech,” as opponents dive deep into opposition research, fling charges true, half-true, and simply made up against one another in an attempt to present their rivals as slimy, dishonest, disreputable, dangerous, and possibly the worst human beings who ever drew breath.
It’s amusing to see her sneer at the Dems for basically having no real idea on how to fight dirty. She relegates it to a pansy slap-fight, rather than the Rebublicans, masters of real political contests. It’s the same tropes trotted out against Kerry and Gore, Hillary and Obama are too wussy to be President because they fight like pussies, not like those manly Republicans.
In retrospect, this was an inferno waiting to happen, the moral debris of more than three decades into which mischievous fate tossed a match. For years, the Democrats’ most effective candidates have been men from flyover country, who positioned themselves as not-overly-liberal, and for a time it appeared they might have come up with two. But Evan Bayh and Mark Warner took themselves out of contention, leaving the field to John Edwards, a “person of pallor” (as James Taranto has it) of the male persuasion and southern nativity, who is still in the contest. But he is also, alas, a white southern pretty boy, a high-maintenance dude who gets haircuts for what constitutes monthly rent for his favorite voters, lives in a compound the size of a village, and was famously caught on tape fluffing his hair up for four minutes, which defeats the whole purpose of being a white southern male.
Meanwhile, the comic relief (Dodd, Biden, and Richardson) washed out fairly quickly, and the two left standing were Obama and Clinton, each one a possible First. For a year or so in which Hillary seemed to be cruising, things were civil, until she hit a speed bump in Iowa. And then, as she put it, “the fun part” began. In short order, surrogates for her campaign were describing Obama in colorful terms, calling attention to his self-confessed cocaine use when younger, his Muslim relations, and his middle name Hussein, which (though given him in 1961) is the same as that of a notorious dictator and murderous sadist deposed by American forces in 2003.
The Closet Dyke versus the Closet Raghead. Sensitivity? We don’t need a sensitive President. We need a clueless, blockheaded fucker who crashes through history and decorum like a red bull on Red Bull! Behold our President destroy everything he touches like a manly, manly, man. BARBARIC YAWP BEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM!
SO how do you follow up that pile of smoking crap? Why, we turn to El Pantaloade de Barilla on the stupidity front. Democrats are broken wimps when THEY fight. GOP folks…they’re AMERICAN. (Warning: stupidity and mild peril.)
I LIKE Barack Obama. The Clintons, not so much. But the Clintons are right and Obama is wrong.
The Obama camp has been trying to suggest, insinuate, whisper or wink that the Clintons are somehow racist. Obama’s staff sent out a memo compiling some quotes that allegedly demonstrate the “racial insensitivity” of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The Obama folks are fanning the overreaction to her suggestion that President Lyndon Johnson was a more substantive agent of change on civil rights than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Obama is also fueling the flatly erroneous view that Bill Clinton called Obama’s historic run as the first credible black presidential candidate a “fairy tale.” (Clinton used that phrase in reference to Obama’s claim to have been consistently antiwar.)
However poorly the Clintons or their subalterns may have chosen their words, does anyone seriously believe the Clintons are racists? Anyone? Anyone? Of course not.
And this points to the real reason Obama’s candidacy is a fairy tale, and it has nothing to do with being black or opposing the war. It’s because he’s selling a dream, not reality.
Obama’s whole campaign is based on some of the most noble and inspiring sentiments in political life: hope, togetherness, bipartisanship.
See, Democrats are overreacting wussies (unlike Jonah Of The Whale here.) Sensitivity again is lambasted. We don’t need Presidential candidates who are sensitive. WE NEED MANLY MEN! (Warning: Hyper-stupidity, appreciable peril.)
Obama’s fairy tale is the idea that we can get beyond disagreement. But Democracy is about disagreement, not agreement. We have real arguments in this country, and the political arena exists for us to hash them out peacefully. Obama’s – and Mayor Bloomberg’s and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s – “post-partisan” snake-oil promises to take the disagreement out of democracy. You can’t do that.
What if you disagree with Obama’s ideas? Are you suddenly against hope? Given recent events, it seems that if you’re not with the Obama program, you’re fair game for tarring as a crypto-racist. And that’s what Obama supporters are willing to say about the Clintons! (Of course, I can barely scrape together two molecules of sympathy for the Clintons. They’ve been playing games with race for years, using the same tactics against their enemies that the Obamans are now using on them.) If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, imagine what hairballs will be coughed up at the Republicans.
Unity around an issue – war, health care, education – is a legitimate appeal. But you can’t defend America with hope; you can’t heal people with unity. Further, it is morally antithetical to democratic values to demand unity for unity’s sake. And it is quite literally impossible to govern that way.
Democrats disagree on stupid things that make them wimps. There is no room for unity and hope in 2008, screw that. In our hyper-partisan state, trying to bring America together to get work done is silly and makes Jonah Smash Puny Thoughty Thing. Republicans on the other hand disagree on things that make them surprisingly kick-ass, like ninjas that shoot bees from their eyes, and the bees have tiny lasers. Oh, and bees are also ninjas. Yeah.
But enough of the stupidity overload. We need to have some sort of messages of seriousness to appeal to the serious village folks remarking on how the Democrats lack ninjas with bee shooting laser ninja eye powers, and this week it’s Eleanor Clift.
This is America under a microscope. The two biggest unresolved social problems–gender and race–are playing themselves out at the ballot box. Exit polls in Michigan revealed that nearly 70 percent of African-Americans who participated in Tuesday’s Democratic primary voted uncommitted, an early warning of discontent in the black community. Hillary Clinton was the only leading candidate whose name was on the ballot because of a dispute with party officials; still, African-American voters withheld their support. The Democratic Party establishment has been so busy congratulating itself for diversity it failed to sort out how two wings of the party would engage each other, leaving it to Clinton and Obama to figure it out for themselves. She needs a share of the African-American vote to win the nomination, and he doesn’t want to inflame white suburban America by presenting a narrow race-based appeal. Hillary is impatient, but she won’t get to the White House if she doesn’t find a way to capture the energy and enthusiasm Obama produces. This election is about hurrying history, not holding it back.
Divided! The Democrats are divided, coming apart at the seams! Nobody believes they have a leader or even a front-runner, they are TERRIBLY UNSERIOUS!!one!1!
Got that? Never mind that complete lack of energy, focus, or leadership in the Republican party makes the disagreements on the Dem side look pale by comparison. It doesn’t matter, because the GOP is apparently united on stuff like being racist jackasses, misogynistic twits and bigoted homophobes.
But it’s okay, folks. Because there’s somebody who can rescue us from the unserious Democrats and their petty, slap-fighting tussles.
Who can this person be? Why, just ask Wynton Hall over at NRO, it’s gotta be Saint McCain with his slightly crooked halo.
John McCain’s contrarian credentials are precisely the reason why he may be the GOP’s strongest candidate to defeat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
Consider the following: Even as Mitt Romney claimed his home state of Michigan this week, John McCain finished a competitive second in a state where 68 percent of primary voters were “mainstream Republicans” rather than the independent and moderate voters who typically form McCain’s base of support. Of the Democrats who voted in the Republican primary, 41 percent supported McCain. To some observers, McCain’s attractiveness to independents and Democrats is evidence of his weak conservative credentials. This is curious logic. Few of them would concede that Ronald Reagan’s support from “Reagan Democrats” in his 1980 and 1984 landslide victories made the Gipper less of a conservative.
In New Hampshire, as expected, McCain did well among independent voters — but he did much better than expected among mainstream Republicans. And that suggests that Republicans know instinctually what is likely true: that John McCain’s maverick pose as the GOP’s ideological eye-gouger will make him all but impervious to charges by Democrats of representing a de facto third term for the unpopular President Bush.
More than that, McCain’s war-hero status and role as legislative champion of the hugely successful “surge” in Iraq will contrast sharply with Senators Clinton and Obama’s slender and dovish foreign-policy resumes. And in presidential campaign communication, candidate “contrast” reigns supreme.
The Serious Village message is that it’s okay for McCain to unite the GOP and America because he’s been an unapologetic hawk that despite a populace where 60-70% of us are regularly against the Iraq War, he’s been for it every step of the way. I’m sure that will of course “unite” the country in not voting for him.
Uniting the country under Clinton or Obama would lead to Unseriousness (said with the same thunderously monolithic pronouncement that toothpaste commercials reserve for The Dreaded Gum Disease Gingivitis or skin care commercials do for The Heartbreak Of Psoriasis) and of course we can’t have that. We must continue hyper-partisan attacks and the mass politicization of every aspect of American life so that the Villagers gain more power and wisdom. Fools!
McCain’s most powerful political weapon may be his “authenticity,” a trait highly valued in today’s YouTube political culture. Among those in New Hampshire who valued a candidate who “says what he believes,” 53 percent supported McCain. The next closest candidate? Mitt Romney at 13 percent. And of course, it’s not just Republicans who should be worried that Americans respond well to straight talk: Democratic strategist Tad Devine told the leftist Huffington Post this week that “it is just a simple fact that should John McCain emerge as the consensus GOP nominee, he will be very formidable.”
Whether McCain has the time (and the inclination) to bind conservatives’ wounds and win them over remains to be seen. But if anyone knows how to hold out hope for a “homecoming,” surely it is the former POW-turned Arizona senator.
For all his ideological purity, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 pummeling at the polls was one of the weakest showings by a Republican presidential candidate in modern political history. Arizona senator John McCain — not a perfect conservative, but an electable one — may yet be the 2008 campaign’s Barry Goldwater, in reverse.
Anti-Goldwater. The Chosen One. Savior. McCain. It always comes back to him.
See, to the Village Idiots, the Dems are broken beyond repair. None of their candidates are leaders because they are only fighting over the race and gender cards, it’s only the black folks versus the white women, and they’ll NEVER get it together for the constituency that matters in the Village: White Men.
But the GOP needs to desperately unite behind McCain to save it from drowning in the yellow-tinted flop sweat of AuH2O. Luckily, there’s Really Old White War Hero Guy John McCain to save us from this darkie-powered and estrogen-infused Unseriousness!
PS, I hear John Edwards is running too but the Village is ignoring him, because it doesn’t fit into their whole “Dems are nothing but the race card versus the gender card” thing. Or maybe it would remind the Dems that they have another choice or something silly like that. Or maybe it would remind the GOP that Mike Huckabee is running on a lot of the same fiscal issues.
But enough, it’s Clin-bama versus Saint McCain, and the Trash Heap has spoken, bitch.
