Elephant

This Week in Republican In-Fighting

- At a Tea Party rally in Phoenix, Arizona, organized by an anti-illegal-immigrant group called American Citizens United, a scuffle broke out between organizers and two members of the National Socialist Movement. Apparently, one of the organizers became enraged when the Neo-Nazis unfurled an Adolf Hitler flag after being told that displays of racism weren’t welcome. But, Nazis will be Nazis, and so the man with the flag, JT Ready, responded to the protester’s concerns by shoving him to the ground.

- The conservative Club for Growth announced their endorsement of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio over Gov. Charlie Crist in next year’s Florida Senate race. Crist, once considered by many to be the future of the Republican party (not to mention a potential running mate for John McCain in 2008) has come under fire by conservative groups for his support of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan and his recent backpedaling of that support. Rubio, who hates taxes, Castro, and socialized medicine, is now considered by many on the far right to be the future of the Republican Party.

- Venerable three-term Utah senator and conservative Robert F. Bennett announced that, despite his staunch opposition to higher taxes, bigger government, and financial regulations, and despite the fact that he has supported precisely none of President Obama’s initiatives, he has already had to spend $500,000 and air TV ads (after airing none in 2004) to fend off primary challenges from hard-line conservatives. The Club for Growth has come out against Bennett, criticizing him for his support of the 2008 Wall Street bailout and for daring to communicate with Democrats about health care reform. The also don’t like that he has criticized their use of the word “socialism” as a “buzzword” and a distraction.

- South Carolina Republican Representative Bob Inglis told the Greenville News that the old-school Reagan coalition (of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and moderate Democrats) is now “running on fumes” and faces extinction in the face of anti-incumbent pressure from hard-liners and Tea Party agitators. Claiming that these hard-liners are indifferent to abortion and other social issues and would let people without health insurance “die on the steps of the hospital” to make a point about the dangers of socialized medicine, Inglis called on the man from Galilee to draw the distinction between this new breed of conservative ideologues and the breed of conservative ideologues he favors: “I’m thinking there was a guy named Jesus who had some things to say about these kinds of concepts,” he said. “And I don’t want to live in a society that lets a few test cases die on the steps of the hospital.” Inglis is facing a primary challenge from no fewer than three members of his party.

- Finally, Sarah Palin’s biography, Going Rogue: An American Life, was released today and has already being touted as little more than a settling of scores with John McCain’s campaign team, primarily chief strategist Steve Schmidt. She characterizes the campaign as defeatist and poorly managed and Schmidt as an vindictive bully. In response, members of the McCain team have called the book a “fiction” and have reiterated claims that Palin was woefully unqualified for the nomination and refused to prepare for her interview with Katie Couric. Jumping into the fray, conservative columnist David Brooks called Palin “a joke” and said, “I mean, I just can’t take her seriously. We have got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama is trying to handle a war. We just had a guy elected Virginia governor who is probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell: Pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination … believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are just not going to elect a talk show host.”

Tune in next week.

Photo by Mr. Frego

What is to be done with Joe Lieberman?

By coming out last week against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care plan, and saying he would join a Republican filibuster to keep the bill from coming to a vote, the Independent senator from Connecticut finally dropped all pretense of Democratic loyalty. Which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is familiar with Lieberman’s hypocritical, sanctimonious Lewinsky-era attacks on Bill Clinton (and “the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations”); his hawkish approach to national security and the war in Iraq; his indifference to the wishes of Democratic voters in his state in 2006 after they chose Ned Lamont in the primary; and his support last fall of John McCain in the presidential election.

So what should the Democrats do with him?

Well, if Democrats were like Republicans, Lieberman would be hanging in the public square already. If Democrats were like Republicans, he would be riding the back bench of the Senate Chambers Janitorial-Services Subcommittee. If Democrats were like Republicans, Joe Lieberman would be Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Upstate New York Republican House candidate who, late last week, was outed as being ideologically impure by the mob of right-wing scaremongers (including Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and Malkin) and promptly thrown under the bus. After which the bus was set on fire.

Judging by today’s left-wing editorials, that’s exactly what many want to happen to Lieberman as well.

But here’s the problem: The thing that makes the Democratic Party so well-equipped to deal with rapidly changing national demographics and place itself in a position to profit off of them electorally – that being its big-tent, ideologically wishy-washy, take-all-comers, ad hoc approach to governance – is the very thing that makes it unable to handle heresy when it threatens to derail party priorities, like health care. Sure, Lieberman is a traitor. Sure, he’s a hypocrite who once tried to pass a bill that would have gotten rid of the filibuster and who is now threatening to use the filibuster to subvert the will of his constituents. And sure, he is the senator from Connecticut, which is the insurance capital of the world, and therefore any philosophical arguments he can make against a government-run insurance option are tainted to the point of absurdity. But Democrats just aren’t cut out for cutting out the hearts of those who defy them. For months, the Democrats have been held hostage by members of their own party who 20 years ago would have been called Republicans but who were hand-picked by the Democratic leadership to help them retake Congress in 2006. The Faustian bargain Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer made back then was simple: We will once again be in power … but there will be no “we.” The Democrats have no heresy because they have no ideology. Which is exactly the reason they’re in control of Congress.

So what should Democrats do with Mr. Lieberman? Probably nothing. As much as left-wingers would love to see him dropped down a well by Obama and Emanuel and other party leaders, deep down every Democrat knows that it’s not going to happen. That it’s not in their party’s nature. That it’s best to just take Lieberman aside and quietly give him what he wants in order to get health care passed. That the best way to keep their party in power is to continue making its platform as big and malleable as possible and to continue driving Republicans to make theirs even smaller and firmer.

Ideology is a cold bedfellow. Especially on election day.

New-media maven

Three years out from an election is a perfectly reasonable time to start polling, right?

After all, if sports writers can argue about which NBA stars should be representing team USA in the 2012 summer Olympics (Brian Scalabrine?) and commentators can claim the 2010 World Cup as a valid topic of conversation while broadcasting from the 2006 World Cup and climatologists can bicker about the lifespans of glaciers and the endangered species that live on them, then surely political pundits and pollsters can have their fun speculating about which Republican is going to take on Barack Obama in the next presidential bout.

Just as I wrote a few weeks ago about the love of the sports fan waiting until the off-season to truly blossom, so too does the life of the political junkie find its greatest joy in the speculative irrelevance of the electoral off-year. When polls have no consequences and editorials have no weight and theorizing is so much crystal-ball gazing, the punditocracy, both professional and kitchen-table-based, can really feel free to let their minds and their mouths run wild, free from the philosophical tethers of, you know, reality.

Take, for example, a poll released this past Friday by Rasmussen: It’s not about health care or the war in Afghanistan or the economy or job performance on Capitol Hill. No. This poll looks at who the favorite is, as of October 2009, to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (which comes with a tiara, the keys to a brand-new Toyota Tacoma, and the thrill of taking on the Barack Obama political machine in the next general election).

According to the poll, as of Friday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the preferred candidate of 29% of Republicans nationwide, followed by Mitt Romney (24%), Sarah Palin (18%), Newt Gingrich (14%), and Tim Pawlenty (4%).

It goes on: “Romney leads all prospects among voters who attend church once a month or less. Huckabee leads among more frequent churchgoers. Huckabee holds a huge lead among Evangelical Christians with Palin in second and Romney a distant third. Huckabee and Romney are essentially even among other Protestants while Romney has the edge among Catholics.

“Romney leads among Republicans earning more than $75,000 a year while Huckabee leads among those who earn less.”

Now, as much as I love this kind of ultra-specific poll-modeling – “While Palin has a slight edge over Huckabee in the all-important Jewish Moderate-Conservatives Who Don’t Eat Cake on Wednesdays demographic, Gingrich is doing surprisingly well with Anorexics Below the Poverty Line Who Think Organized Religion Is the Cause of All the World’s Problems But Who Feel a Deep Spiritual Connection to the Universe and All Living Things in It” – it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the results, printed more than two years out from the first primary, are the very definition of an institutional absurdity.

But in America 2009, absurdity in the defense of relevance is no vice. In our rapidly evolving media environment, ridiculousness is expected and accepted. But what cannot be accepted — what can not be tolerated, what can not be justified — is the sense that a company that bases its reputation on up-to-the-minute analysis is out of touch with the proper tools needed to cull information for that analysis. These days, the only sin in America is not being tuned in. And something about the old-school Rasmussen polling model – “You sir, who will you be voting for?” – smacks of rotting antiquity.

Take Chris Cillizza’s piece in The Washington Post today about the status of the Sarah Palin political identity on Facebook. It may seem like so much new-media fluff to stodgy old guys still married to old-school notions of political relevance, but it also might just prove to be more telling of the status of the Republican political landscape than any 10 Rasmussen polls could ever hope to be. There, Cillizza writes, “As of press time, Palin’s Facebook site had nearly 930,000 supporters … By way of comparison, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) has 82,000 Facebook supporters while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) has 121,000.”

That paragraph right there should be enough to have Huckabee and Romney shaking with fear. If Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign proved anything (as if this point really needed to be proven), it’s that you can’t view new media, especially social-networking, as some sort of cute adjunct to an otherwise traditionally managed campaign. A candidate’s approach to the Internet says everything about that candidate’s understanding of the times we’re living in and the voters who are living in them.

For all her faults, Palin is smart enough to know that having a million friends/fans on Facebook is like having a marketing/information-dissemination army on your side, ready with the click of a mouse to do your bidding. Facebook may have proven to us once and for all that the insignificant particulars of human lives are sources of fascination — both as writers and readers, both as exhibitionists and voyeurs — but perhaps more fascinating (and more important for politicians looking to get out the vote) is that it has shown people to be happy pro bono public-relations advocates for whatever cause, event, band, person, puppy video they deem worthwhile. People love being in the know, Facebook has shown us, and they love letting other people know they’re in the know. And the best way to let other people you’re in the know, and that you knew before they did, is to be the one sending that person what it is they don’t know about but you do.

Cillizza talks about Palin using Facebook to do an “end-run” around the mainstream media and talk directly to her supporters, both actual and potential. Which is true. But it’s more than that: Facebook allows Palin (just like Obama, who knew a little something about being written off by mainstream-media folks and needing to find new unfiltered ways of gaining momentum) to do an end-run around the mainstream PR/marketing/political advertising bureaucracy, putting aside traditional notions of pay-for-play access and huge media blitzes. Instead, all she has to do is throw up the occasional post about her support of Glen Beck, her distaste for Washington insiders, or (most famously) her belief that Obamacare will sentence the elderly to death, and – bang! – she’s got a million people ready, willing, even desirous to spread that message around the world.

In other words, Facebook has not only exposed us as advertisers for ourselves; it’s turned us all into volunteer sandwich-board wearers for others.

So if I were Mike Huckabee, I’d take cold comfort in that 28 when comparing it to Palin’s 930,000. One is just a number on a piece of paper taken three years — and a million media cycles — out from the next presidential election. The other represents virtual bodies on the virtual ground, ready to go to war for their favorite former governor from Alaska.

Especially when going to war means never having to leave your house or even change out of your pajamas.

Photo of Meghan McCain by Tobyotter via Flickr

Yesterday, Atlantic reporter Mara Gay offered her readers a handful of takes on the state of women in the Republican party. “Pundits are predictably split lines on whether to love or fear Liz Cheney’s new red-blooded, anti-Obama, neoconservative foreign policy group, Keep America Safe,” she wrote. “But they agree that she is part of a vanguard of conservative women who are rising to lead the GOP.” And, from the looks of it, they certainly do. Still, following the Meghan McCain Twitter incident — where the daughter of the former presidential candidate was called, among other things, a slut for her tank-topped, sweatpantsed TwitPic appearance — one has to wonder whether this isn’t something of a mixed blessing: Sure, having its very own roster of nationally recognizable female icons might, at first glance, be a positive, but the length of the leash that’s been afforded to them seems to undermine any would-be positive gains here.

Take a look at Sarah Palin. When unveiled, as part of this past fall’s main political event, she brought to the national Republican party stout dedication to … the sort of ever-smiling, folksy character that most television audiences from the 1950s and ’60s would remember as being the perfect second-tier female figure — it was June Cleaver at the Republican National Convention (complete with a horribly cliched storyline about an over-zealousness for shopping). Whether or not the portrayal was fiction, it was hardly the portrait of a political powerbroker. And it was a window into just how far Republican women have come.

Now comes the nonsense with Meghan McCain. McCain, who, with her Tweeting and her cursing and her MTVing, was doing her level-best to help her party shake its (to co-opt her phrasing) pantsuit-y properisms, was put in her place for it. After posting the image, and receiving a whole bunch of flack, McCain reported that she’d been called a slut. She then wrote, in what seems like a rather measured response to such misogyny, that she was “going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in.” Shortly thereafter she tweeted that she “want[ed] to apologize to anyone that was offended by [her] twitpic,” further declaring that she had “clearly made a huge mistake” and is “sorry 2 those that are offended.” This last statement was, no doubt, the result of a public-reaction calculation, made to minimize any damage that the photo might have caused. But this isn’t the gross part. Nope. The gross part would be the fact that some of her Twitter followers were so threatened by the (very minor, it seems) appearance of sexuality in one of their (assuming here, that most of her Tweeting readership is sympathetic to her political views) emerging leaders, that they all ganged up to shut it down. Chalk up another win for the in-the-kitchen-character-building set.

Whether the likes of Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Liz Cheney will have to face — if they should ever climb into the true national spotlight — such a character reduction remains to be seen. But, with the GOP trending toward allowing for a larger role for women, it would serve them well to refrain from taking away their freedom to be anything but mid-20th-century homemakers.

Kristol the Ever-Devoted

Bill Kristol’s Love for Sarah Palin Knows No Bounds

Since Friday, when Sarah Palin declared in a rambling, incoherent, borderline Dadaist speech that she would be stepping down as governor of Alaska only a year and a half into her first term, politicians and pundits of all political stripes have been trapped in a state of extended head-scratching. From Mike Huckabee to Maureen Dowd, from Keith Olbermann to Karl Rove, from Pat Buchanan to Andrew Sullivan, they’re all falling over one another to make sense of the completely nonsensical.

Was this a shrewd move, they wonder, one that would free Palin to spend the next few years traveling the country, earning money, meeting Republican party leaders, shaking hands in waffle houses, and generally prepping herself for a run at the presidency? Or was it an act of political suicide, damning her to a spot in the great book of political curiosities, someone we’ll all vaguely remember 30 years from now as being the woman who thought the best way to prove her bona fides as a resilient hard-working defender of freedom was to quit her elected office and leave her state high and dry?

What, in short, was she thinking?

The answer is: Who the hell knows? Not the pundits, not the Republican establishment, not even her own father-in-law. In fact, only two things were certain by the end of this weekend. The first is that Sarah Palin is a complete genius at speaking incomprehensibly (whoever can make sense of the following sentences will win two free tickets to the first annual Unfit Times Summer Sleep-Over Party: “So I choose for my state and for my family more freedom to progress all the way around.” “We know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities.” “And that is what I’m doing keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities – remember, they include energy independence smaller government, national security, freedom! And I know when it’s time to pass the ball – for victory.”)

The second is that there is nothing Sarah Palin could ever do to make Bill Kristol not love her.

Since even before the Republican Convention and the rollout of the governor as John McCain’s running mate, conservative columnist and Weekly Standard founder Kristol has been singing the praises of Palin to anyone who would listen, calling her an “inspirational figure and a powerful symbol” and lobbying for her to be McCain’s choice. “There she is,” he wrote in his most gob-smacked prose in September, as if he were Bert Parks singing to the newly crowned Miss America, “a working woman who’s a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who’s broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who’s a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.”

Honestly, reading through Kristol’s writings from the last two months of the campaign is like reading the diary of a man in love. It’s like reading the libretto to an Italian opera. It’s like reading Dante on Beatrice.

And the love was clearly unconditional. Even as it started to become clear that Palin was wildly unprepared to be vice-president (see the Katie Couric interview or her debate with Joe Biden), even after the country had turned on her and the party faithful had become skeptical of her and she had become a drag on the ticket, still Kristol stood by her, like a lovesick puppy or a knight errant – loyal til the end.

Which is admirable in its way, I guess.

But here’s the problem with loyalty: Once you’re in, once you’ve declared that someone is your girl or guy, you can’t turn around and say you’ve made a mistake. Well you can, but not if you’re Bill Kristol, king of the East Coast Conservative Intelligentsia, who didn’t just throw his support behind a proudly uneducated, unrefined nitwit but actively advocated her being made the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Not when you stuck around like a fool when everyone else around you was rightly jumping ship.

No, Kristol is in with Palin all the way and until the end.

And he proved it again this weekend. Responding to Palin’s announcement on Fox News Sunday, he conceded briefly that the move was “strange” and “unconventional” (a not-so-subtle allusion to Palin’s own contention that the speech was more proof that she doesn’t go in for “politics as usual”) but then quickly moved back to more adulatory territory. First he said hopefully, “You know, maybe she’s crazy like a fox.” He then went on, “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think it’s a pretty shrewd gamble” before finishing off with this masterpiece of sycophantic self-delusion: “I don’t rule out that it’s a stroke of genius.”

Genius. When even die-hard Palin supporters and family members are tempering their language, dodging reporters, and pleading ignorance, what can you say about a man so in the tank for Palin, so lost in love for Palin, and – most significantly – so unable to admit he may have actually been wrong in his original assessment of her, that he is able to force the word “genius ” out of his mouth while speaking about a charismatic mediocrity abandoning her responsibilities as governor?

I don’t know. All I can say is that the whole thing reminds me of Martin Scorsese.

Do you remember during the promotional run-up to the release of Gangs of New York, when Scorsese was comparing Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance to that of Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver? And we all thought he was talking crazy, and then we saw the movie and we knew he was talking crazy, that not only was DiCaprio not as good as De Niro in Taxi Driver; he wasn’t as good as the rest of the cast of Gangs of New York. But rather than admit he was wrong, that he was just talking up DiCaprio’s performance to sell tickets, Scorsese decided to stick by his claim in the hopes that even if we never thought that DiCaprio was as good as De Niro, at least we’d be convinced that he was convinced that DiCaprio was as good as De Niro. That way, instead of our thinking him foolish we would have to assume Scorsese – the great genius of the cinema – was seeing something we – decidedly not great geniuses of the cinema – were incapable of seeing. He had to keep up the appearance of continued conviction. So what did he do? He started to stick DiCaprio in every movie he could: The Aviator, The Departed, this fall’s Shutter Island, 2011’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and on and on and on, til death do they part. Anything to spare himself the shame of saying he was wrong.

Mark my words, Martin Scorsese will make 30 movies with Leonardo DiCaprio before he admits he overstated things once at a press junket in a fit of enthusiasm. Movies that should star women, movies that should star kids, movies that should star animated chimpanzees – they will all star DiCaprio. And Scorsese will sing his praises as an actor who can play anything.

And so it is with Bill Kristol, who will go to his grave never having admitted that, consumed by his desire to see a Republican win the presidency in 2008, he forgot himself and backed a completely unprepared, unengaged, unworthy, unreasonable, possibly unhinged horse and then stuck with that horse long after it became clear she had no business being anywhere near a racetrack of any significance.

In this regard, I kind of respect Kristol. I’ve never felt that kind of devotion to anything in my life. I’ll throw someone under the bus if the mood strikes me or there’s money in it. It’’s not easy being principled. But Kristol is a different kind of man: a man of loyalty and of stubbornness, who refuses to take the easy way out, to go along with everyone else, or to go with the flow. Because, as we know now (thanks to the wise woman of Wasilla, Alaska), only dead fish do that.