David Drucker of Vanity Fair has been talking to Republican political consultants about how they are advising their clients to talk about the president.
“Your heart tells you that he’s bad for the country. Your head looks at polling data among Republican primary voters and sees how popular he is,” said one Republican strategist who, like most of the nearly two dozen I interviewed for this story, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly and protect their clients. “It would be malpractice not to advise clients to attach themselves to that popularity.”
Never mind the president’s low national approval ratings; his temper tantrums and chaos at the White House. If you want to win nomination in your Republican primary and, in the hardening red state-blue state divide, the general election that follows, embrace Trump and hold on tight. “To break the dam, you have to put cracks in it, and here we are plugging up the cracks,” this strategist added. “It’s really cynical, but so is politics.”
Once a mercenary picks a side and accepts the check, it’s best not to think too hard about who ought to win the war. Are you fighting for the wrong side? If your army wins, will it be bad for the country and the world? Is your leader even a German patriot or he is some Austrian interloper with dangerous ideas that will bring ruin to your people? However bad he is, he surely can’t be as bad as the Bolsheviks.
Oh, look, I came to the fork in the road and took the Godwin Path. Silly me.
Upton Sinclair once astutely observed that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” We could say the same thing about getting a man to do something. These consultants are in a genuine quandary, I admit, but they already too much resemble defense attorneys who know that their clients are guilty. It says a lot that they’re in the same ethical limbo but without the high-minded principle to back them up that everyone deserves an adequate legal defense.
After all, their clients’ freedom is not on the line. They aren’t serving a useful purpose, like assuring that the police and prosecutors respect people’s civil rights. It’s not the case that it’s better that nine undeserving politicians win their elections than that one deserving one lose his. From an ethical point of view, this is cynicism in the service of appeasement and collusion, all done for simple career preservation and money.
No one is really forcing them to continue in their line of work, and if the only honest advice they can give is that their clients do the wrong thing (as they see it), they can’t fall back on the idea that they have a responsibility to render their best counsel to paying customers. They only need consider what an ethical or spiritual consultant would say, and that’s pretty obvious: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
That’s a pretty comical read, wherein a reporter goes to talk ethics with a class of people who have none.
Even the on-record gay consultant who says he has worked with anti-gay candidates: “Hey, no candidate is perfect!. You have to make choices”. What a choice to make; the dignity and civil rights of a whole class of citizens, including yourself, traded for some tax cuts and the supremacy of your whiteness.
But since when is it new that Repub elites are handmaidening policies and ideas (racism/xenophobia, theocracy, imperialism) that they maybe probably don’t actually wish to see come to be, but which appeal to the right-wing voter who gives them their power and paycheck.
I guess none of this is news, but it doesn’t stop sucking.
As always, you can (probably) find one or two out of the mass that do not fit the description, but for the most part these people have no souls. No empathy, no heart, no honor and certainly no concept of America as a better place.
I’d like to think that the D consultants are better, but I’m afraid that they just have more human candidates. But then, maybe that in and of itself makes them better.
How much clarity can you get of the root than this: “To break the dam, you have to put cracks in it, and here we are plugging up the cracks. It’s really cynical, but so is politics.”
The Washington village goes out to convince the rubes that they will do something about the cynicism of the Washington village. The grift of running against grifters.
Yes, it’s a con, and it seems to touch anyone who comes close to “politics” in the sense the consultant means as inevitable cynicism. The strategery becomes beguiling; the income tempting; the job prostituting. The political class that has so inflated the cost of elections is pure cost that is stripping politics of all value and values.
The only difference between Republican and Democratic consultants at this point is that the Republicans have zero positive to say in their defense. The Democratic consultants story is that they are about defeating the Republican grip on the country. Are they really? If they are, why should all of them not be fired for incompetence?
Democrats wanted the swamp to be drained too. They just understood that Trump was the last person to send to do that. Trump voters thought that the fact that everyone thought he was the last person to send to drain the swamp meant that he knew enough about the swamp to successfully drain it.
Now do you understand the reluctance of most people to contribute to political campaigns in an era of high-rolling political coampaigns? How many billions did the political professionals blow in 2016?
Is there some way to restrict these hangers-on to the minimum wage? And even $7.25 is much more lavish than the value these parasites deliver.
It would be lovely if ethical principles drove human behavior. For many it does. But politics is a sewer and politicians and their underlings, especially on the Republican sides, are swamp rats. So none of this is at all surprising. It’s like saying water’s wet.
Cry for them? Of course not. Vomit in my mouth at the very mention of them, sure.
This is just another variation of driftglass’s “Republican Detachment Disorder”. These consultants, their clients and the rest of the water carriers for the modern GOP have no problem with the Popular Vote Loser’s agenda, they just don’t like the fact he says things so baldly. That and the obvious white supremacist stuff–they’d prefer that to remain in dog whistles.
Ethics seems to be a difficult concept for many people to grasp. Instead they prefer ‘legal’.
As in,
‘If it’s not illegal it must not be an impeachable offense’ or some such similar premise.
When it comes to ethics, it’s best to remember this quote,
‘Either how can you say to your brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in your eye, when you yourself behold not the beam that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of your own eye, and then shall you see clearly to pull out the mote that is in your brother’s eye.’
.
Oh, these Repub mercenary leeches made their Faustian bargain more than a decade ago, and happily counseled their clients to erect a nationwide Party of Lies, which spectacularly succeeded. Of course, the lies had to become bigger and bigger as time and failure(s) went on, until one achieved the current state of Trumpism, but this is merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. Our deranged Trumper seemingly cannot utter an objectively accurate statement. This is an environment these people know intimately.
Anyway, these are deeply damaged people by definition, and their prized creation is our incompetent white electorate. But their professed concern for the country is very touching, haha.
An ominous point to remember is that as the war turned irrevocably against the Austrian Adventurer, he turned against the German people, who had proven too “weak” and obviously inferior to the victor nations. He therefore determined that since the Germans had failed him and his perceived “destiny” for them, they had to be utterly destroyed. This will be the mindset of our poor-man’s Fuhrer as well…..
Also, too, the defense attorney does not have a client with a national security concern unlike that potential for a political consultant.
They are not interesting. What is more interesting is the question: “Do they really believe they are helping their cause?” They are desperately trying to hold onto power – but they are simply sharpening the contrast between what people expect, and what the GOP is providing.
The election was swung by voters who decided at the last minute that Trump was the lesser evil. (Stupid, but that’s what it amounts to).
So, to keep those voters they have to DO something: build the wall, eliminate immigration, bring back the 50’s, whatever. Only, the GOP was not ready for power.
They can only BLOCK things, not govern. They have ZERO agenda outside angering everyone the base hates – liberals, Muslims, “coastal elites”, uppity women, immigrants, brown and black people, etc.
Giving the constant middle finger to everybody might please the base, but it does nothing to help govern the country, and they are constantly losing approval as a result of their obvious inability to get anything done.
Oh, but they do. Their job isn’t done until they’ve destroyed every shred of progressive — people centered — government. IOW, that world the peaked in the 1890s. And half their electoral base is too ignorant not to recognize that those like them fared poorly in that time; so, a large chunk of that electorate seek regression back to the 1850s. Once the first faction nears completing their job, they’ll rediscover their eugenics roots and that will satisfy the second faction that will drop their anti-abortion schtick in a NYC minute.
They have no positive agenda. They have huge, historic majorities in Congress, not matched since the 1920s, and rarely equalled in US history, and they can’t pass a bill. None. Not one. Nada!
No Obamacare repeal. No tax bill. No budget. Hopefully they can pass the debt ceiling increase, but we’ll have to hold our breath on that one. No funding for Trump’s wall, although he will stamp his little feet! It’s so very vexing. Except that “vexing” is not a word Trump knows.
Nothing that they wanted has been accomplished. They have done negative things like dropping Obama’s last minute environmental regulations & Packing the courts with mutant clones from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
None of those things is good, but they have not given billionaires their tax cut yet. They have not built their wall and they have not changed anything at all. Trump has not succeeded in Making America White Again. They love him for trying, but does anybody think it will have any lasting effect other than pissing off a very large number of people.
No wonder they are becoming openly fascist. They feel that this is their last stand, that they are losing, that they will soon be gone. And they will be gone from power. The majority is not forever going to tolerate being held out of power by the most bigoted, uneducated and ignorant minority of the population. Calling them “Deplorables” is too soft really.
Apropos what you call the “Godwin Path”, Booman, I wish you wouldn’t take it.
Trump is an authoritarian-minded freak, no doubt, and we lower our guard at our own risk. But drawing an analogy between the GOP and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is ridiculous. Drawing an analogy between what the GOP Congress has done since January and the 1934 German parliament voting itself out of existence and handing dictatorial power to Hitler is beyond ridiculous. (You haven’t drawn those analogies but others have.)
Some crackpot GOP state legislators have proposed that plowing a car into a crowd of protesters ought not be called a crime. In Charlottesville, some deranged fool actually used his car as a weapon. The difference in number between alt-right-caused casualties using cars and Nazi casualties using gas chambers and “traditional” massacres is about 6 million.
It’s a strange time.
It’s agony for decent people who thought their time had come with Obama and then Scalia dying and Hillary poised to win. Only the MSM, Jim Comey, and the Russians stole the rightful future.
And it’s bewildering for ‘respectable’ Republicans who have to pretend to be something they’re not (responsible) because of Trump and the House Freedom morans.
The consultants are being cynical when they pretend Trump is not representative of the party, its base, or it’s values. He is and they know it. The whole ‘I’m doing this while holding my nose, because I’m better than this’ is not the act. The act is the ‘I’m just going to help good people get elected and hope the country doesn’t go to hell.’
They never did give a shit about the country or its values, they are only pretending now because it’s expected. While they go about doing their real job, which is to dismantle the government, loot the treasury, and rig the courts for corporations.
They’re laughing all the way to the bank.!