Here in Raleigh-Durham we are very fortunate to have Hal Crowther (Bio) writing for our weekly independent newspaper, erm, The Independent. It’s hard to say which part of his latest gem The Elephants in the Room; How the GOP Lost its Way I like best so I’ve just snipped out a few for your enjoyment. Man, I love this guy. Go read it.
He’s talking about the GOP’s Southern Strategy and how it’s coming back to haunt them now in a big way.
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”?
And this:
I’ve always railed against self-righteous, ignorant Yankees who attack the South armed with nothing but outdated stereotypes. If we produced the most terrifying bigots who violated civil rights, we also produced more than our share of the heroes who risked everything to defend them. But race is the dark at the top of the national staircase, now and always. And the South is the place, cursed by its history, where racism became an enduring, politically formidable institution. There are no moral paragons, no pure hearts in politics
Are the diehard Rebels softening, even now? I asked my brother, who teaches in a part of the Deep South where
liberals are hunted like squirrels and raccoons, if the ruinous war in Iraq and the administration’s amazing series of scandals and smoking guns–as well as its vandalism of conservative principles–might change the way his neighbors voted. “Not really,” he said. “They’re down on Bush but they’ll jump on any excuse to forgive him. To them it’s just two teams, and Democrats are the other team. It’s like being born to root for Alabama or Auburn, Georgia or Georgia Tech.”In 2004, I think I observed that 25 percent of the electorate would vote for Bush if he were convicted of killing JonBenet Ramsey, or photographed raping a goat. That untouchable base must include my brother’s neighbors. Southerners are a stubborn people, slow to trust, even slower to change established loyalties. For conservatives under 50, the GOP is the South’s home team and family tradition. They’re holding up their end of the devil’s bargain, and the latest candidates show no sign of welshing on theirs. Still genuflecting to the ghost of Strom Thurmond, Giuliani, Romney, McCain and Fred Thompson were all conspicuous no-shows–pleading “scheduling conflicts”–at the PBS forum on minority issues held at Morgan State University in September. Even Newt Gingrich said he was disgusted.
And my favorite:
The Republicans needed us and they got us. They used us and now they’ll go down choking on us. It was the marriage made in hell, a fatal alliance that may be the South’s final revenge on the Republican Party for Lincoln, Grant and the War Between the States. As cultural heterogeneity and relaxing racial attitudes continue to marginalize the old Dixie worldview, Republicans will feel that Bible Belt pinching tighter and tighter. By and by they’ll hang themselves with it. They’ll scramble and cheat: In black precincts they’ll try to inhibit voter turnout, in California they’re already trying to steal electoral votes with a shady referendum. But new friends will be hard to find, when they’ve defined their party by what they hate, discourage and oppress: minorities, unions, poor people, immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, scientists and scholars, small farmers and businessmen, journalists, pacifists, non-Christians, uppity women with their reproductive rights. You can run a modern political party on Wall Street’s money, but you can’t get by on its votes. Just as Wall Street cares nothing about abortion or gay marriage, Main Street cares nothing about tax cuts or inheritance taxes–it never expected to inherit anything but the kingdom of heaven.
If you think I’m being optimistic, you’re mistaken. The devil gets his due and the Frankenstein thing, the knight of the living dead, falls apart at the seams in 2008. Trust me. But what does it leave in its wake? The GOP’s fragmented identity, along with his own lack of candor, commitment or visible achievement, allowed George W. Bush to ascend to the presidency (by fair means or foul, it doesn’t matter now) as a virtual mystery. Texas cowboy or Connecticut preppy, Southern fundamentalist or country-club moderate, Wall Street or Main Street, underdog or dauphin, who knew George? He turned out to be the most dishonest, incompetent, imperious and radically secretive chief executive we’ve ever suffered, with the most dangerously foreshortened view of history and the most frightening array of scoundrels to do his bidding. He’s twisted and crumpled the Constitution like a cocktail napkin. If the cringing Democrats in Congress had the courage and were sure they had the votes, his impeachment would be sealed in 20 minutes. The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan–which has real WMDs–exposes the unbearable fact that we wasted irreplaceable resources on the wrong war. It also exposes the deadly risk, for even the richest and most powerful countries, when they place their critical resources in the hands of liars and fools.
emphasis mine