Whether Republicans want to admit it or not, their problem with “clown candidates” began when Grumpy McUnderpants chose Sarah Palin as his running mate and let The Stupid genie out of the bottle:
Longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy was struck by the metaphorical symbolism the instant NBC cut from Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” to what he called “the real world.”
“Trump never felt more over to me than at that moment,” said Murphy. “Maybe the market for clown candidates will now diminish.”
Palin was just an extreme example of a trend. What was it about Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle than made anyone think they were qualified to be president? Why didn’t they get the Harriet Miers-treatment from the base? Obviously, it was because they were the kind of vapid reactionary buffoons that the base identifies with.
With Palin, they took this pandering to eleven. They opened up Pandora’s box; they let the cat out of the bag; they crossed the Rubicon of Stupid. Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall.
Now “Establishment Republicans” are hoping that the killing of Usama Bin-Laden will focus the collective hive-mind of their base and they’ll be able to start putting the pieces of their party back together again.
I’m sorry, but it isn’t going to happen in this cycle. And the reason in simple. The Republicans’ legislative agenda isn’t serious and is designed to encourage their stupid ill-informed supporters in their fever-mad delusions and prejudices.
I called their legislative calendar for this week the Chandra Levy agenda because the disappearance of Chandra Levy was all anyone in Washington could talk about in the month leading up to 9/11. The killing of bin-Laden will have the same effect of making the Republicans’ stupid obsessions seem small, petty, inconsequential, and fundamentally unserious.
For the Republican base to get serious, they would first have to be led into seriousness. And their leadership is still marching under the banner of The Stupid.
Stupid and proud of it.
A D-list celebrity winking in the direction of the Birthers and rocketing to the top of the GOP polls cannot bode well for the Republican Party.
STILL waiting for Country Last to apologize for Caribou Barbie.
“They crossed the Rubicon of stupid”…heh heh, I like that.
You’re right…the Republicans won’t retreat from Stoopid until they get whupped for it and learn their lesson…didn’t happen in 2010…let’s hope it happens in 2012.
The stupid will come back loud and clear in a week or two, if not days. A closed media environment will do that.
On the other hand, I suspect the Money Men have already decided it’s not in the cards for 2012 so they’re not going to bother recruiting and financing a legitimate Republican candidate. They’re mostly ok with Obama, plus governing is hard. They’ll wait till 2016 to dial up another “compassionate conservative”.
i hope you’re right, but my doubts about the sensibility and the attention span of Americans is pretty high.
Serious is not fun. The Republican base has been led to value a rhetorically potent but more or less juvenile style of argumentation by their entertainer-philosopher shock jocks, both on radio and on TV. There is a certain glee that comes out when one of these people come out with an argument that is wrong but is hard to argue against because it has demagogic pop appeal. This is likely because so many of their desired outcomes fly in the face of consensus reality. It is the response of a five year old who doesn’t want to do what his or her parents want. In any case, seriousness is anathema to the Republican platform at the moment. Seriousness is where people actually try to solve problems, and the solutions always sound a lot like eating vegetables and sharing your toys with the kids they don’t know.
This reminds me of a priceless riff from Leonard Pitts, when Dubya made some comment to the effect that God talked to him. Pitts, paraphrased: “Now, I’ve met plenty of people who’ve said, and seriously believed, that God talked to them. Thing is, in every single case God told them things they didn’t want to hear.”
I still think Chris Mooney & Jonathan Kay “Among the Truthers” are right that it’s about the emotion. We keep throwing reality at them and they still choose the emotion buffet: fear, hate, Boehner’s tears.
The smart Reps like Cheney & Rove let the eye candy Palin speak for them simply because of the vote count. But then pretty stupid started mixing with the angry loudmouths and all Rove’s logic and Cheney’s monied strategies can’t bring back a brain.
Nope, if it ain’t emotional, it ain’t a GOP.