So, I finally received my hurricane-delayed MacBook Air today. Thank you all very much for your contributions. You’ve made me very happy and CabinGirl very jealous. She even waged a Facebook campaign to have this computer turned over to her for her enjoyment. It’s a really nice piece of equipment. I particularly like the backlit keyboard and faster internet loading time. It’s super lightweight and slick looking. And you can run Apps on it, which might or might not turn out to be a timesink for me. They actually gave me $100 worth of free Apps just to try to get me hooked. What’s the difference between Apple and a crack dealer?
There’s only one problem. I can’t really find anything I want to write about at the moment. Do I really want to grab at Politico’s bait and explain to them that Rick Perry doesn’t inspire panic on the left? He’s extremely radical. That’s precisely why he isn’t too awe-inspiring. The Republicans haven’t produced a plausible president. If this were 2004, it would be like Joe Lieberman was the great hope of the Washington Establishment but that he was struggling to match Maxine Waters’s level of support and trailing Dennis Kucinich badly. I don’t think the Bush/Cheney campaign would have been very worried, even with 9% unemployment.
Is it fair to compare Rick Perry to Dennis Kucinich? On one level it’s not. Perry’s experience as the chief executive of Texas probably trumps Kucinich’s experience as the Mayor of Cleveland. But if you want a candidate who holds positions that are considered out of the mainstream and on the far side of their party’s wing, Perry and Kucinich match up quite nicely. On most issues, I happen to agree with Kucinich, but I also recognize that the country isn’t very liberal and if I wanted to govern America, I’d have to moderate my platform. Rick Perry doesn’t realize that the country isn’t all that conservative and that they won’t elect some bum who thinks their Social Security check is evidence of a crime against the Constitution.
They call Social Security the Third Rail of American politics for a reason. Anyone who touches it is immediately burned to a crisp. That’s why Bush got nowhere when he tried to privatize the program in 2005. He’d destroyed any mandate he had for a second term before Hurricane Katrina put the nails in his coffin. But Rick Perry isn’t just saying he wants to change how the program is designed. He’s saying that the program should be destroyed because it is against the law. He says the same for Medicare. Serious candidates who expect to win don’t espouse views that the American people will reject out of hand and with extreme prejudice. If George McGovern was the candidate of Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid, then Perry is going to be the candidate of Abortion, Austerity, and Automatic Weapons.
A vanishingly small percentage of the public agrees with his extreme positions on religion, entitlements, or federalism. On religion, for example, a study by Profs. David Campbell and Robert Putnam recently found that the country is increasingly uneasy with the Christian Right.
So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.
More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.
This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.
Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.
Add to this the the obvious way in which Rick Perry’s speech, style, and swagger call to mind the utterly clueless and disastrous presidency of Bush, and you have the perfect candidate for Obama.
Perry’s positions and persona do unite the left in opposition, but that’s only icing on the cake.
Did I say I didn’t want to write about this? Well, with the sweet new machine, I had to write about something.
