Steve Benen has been pointing this out for a while:
This year is supposed to be a cycle ripe for the Republicans’ picking, but they’re stuck with a candidate they don’t really like, an agenda they can’t tout because the American mainstream would disapprove, and an opponent they consider awful, but unable to attack with legitimate attacks.
I think they could go after him with legitimate attacks, but for some reason they don’t really emphasize them. Instead, they make up crap about welfare and Medicare, and treat a centrist health care plan inspired by their own nominee as the second coming of the Bolshevist Revolution.
The GOP is really just high on their bullshit. That’s problem number one. Remember this from January 2010?
Mr. Obama told members of the House GOP at a Baltimore retreat that their decision to tell their constituents he is “going to destroy America” had made it virtually impossible for them to vote with Democrats on even moderate policies, at least if they didn’t want to jeopardize their reelection prospects.
Perhaps the most striking moment in the president’s appearance – which was reminiscent of a Prime Minister appearing before the British Parliament, though far more polite – was when the president complained that some Republicans had suggested his policies, which he cast as relatively moderate, were in service of a “Bolshevik plot.”
There was some applause following that comment – apparently not an endorsement of the president’s point, but rather the notion that he was, indeed, a Bolshevik. The moment seemed to point to the futility of the president’s message – the GOP is not suddenly going to start portraying Mr. Obama and the Democrats as moderate realists, especially when Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts suggests the current strategy has been working just fine.
It did work fine for a while, particularly during the 2010 midterm elections. It worked for the extremely narrow purpose of winning elections, although plenty of Republican officeholders lost their careers in the resulting chaos, in spite of doing little to nothing to help the president. They lost to people who were high on the bullshit.
And that gets to problem number two. There really isn’t anything the GOP base agrees that the federal government should do aside from garrisoning the Middle East and Central Asia, and building a moat on the Mexican border. And, because Romney is so cautious and deferential to the base, he has no positive message. He has no message on education. He has no message on climate change. He has no alternate vision on foreign policy. He isn’t talking about veterans. He isn’t talking about Native American policy. He has nothing to say about prison reform. And he opposes all progressive change on social issues.
He can’t say what he wants the government to do. Close to 100% of his rhetoric is about what he wants the government to stop doing. They’ve delegitimized the federal government to such a degree that they can’t actually run it. They can’t even articulate a theory of how they’d run it.
That’s why we’re seeing a convention completely devoid of content. It’s also why they’re more comfortable telling lies than offering alternatives and honest criticism.
Maybe the real problem is that they’ve already won all the politically and legislatively easy stuff in rolling back the New Deal, Great Society and socio-cultural changes of the period from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s. What’s left is the stuff people like, and with Democrats asserting that “we” have to make some tough decisions to keep them, Republicans are left with nothing to argue for except austerity for the 99% now. That won’t sell. So, sell they lie that FDR is in the WH.
Well put, except that as I hear it, Josef Stalin is in the White House. Of course, I heard that from a person who believes that the only differences between FDR and Stalin were a wheelchair and a mustache.
Oops– did I ever misspeak. Yes, they’re selling that it’s the socialist-fascist-communist-anti-imperilist Kenyan-castro-chavez-muslim in the WH. (They would use Stalin and Mao but Luntz’s poll demonstrated that not enough people remember either for those names to have any resonance.) It’s Democrats that are sort of selling the notion that FDR is back in the WH, but mostly they liken him to IKE-JFK-Reagan.
your link just brings us back to the homepage.
If so, I see the upcoming debates as the BB on steroids.
As I noted before his hand hit the bible — there’s plenty they’d be able to legitimately attack him on, but sadly most of them have to do with things associated with the phony WOT/foreign policy they fully supported as well.
They are comfortable telling lies because their minions gave them a license to lie free of any political or financial reprisal long ago. Their lies are the primary ingredient in their universal cure for everything, known as denial. There’s a hefty compilation of failures past and present that must be buried before the idea that they can succeed can be believed. They can’t run on their collective record, and need to be amnesiacs and hope America joins them at it, or otherwise Bush would be there in person, as opposed to on video. Hopefully he’ll be seen right under that debt clock, no?
The mythical BHO they are running against is really no different from say, the mythical “liberal media” or “welfare queen”. It’s the end product of “otherization” and enemy creation that magically transforms them and their minions into the undeserving victims of those “not like them”, who hold the moral highground and the most and best mensa credentials as evidenced by their many and varied successes they can’t cite.
As I recall, they won the 2010 election primarily because the allegedly gullible and impressionable youth stayed home in large numbers due to discontent, while the wise gray people bought into the “the dems are gonna steal your SS/Medicare” lies. There were also many other lies too, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/671.php but I think that one had the most impact in their getting the half-win.
Them criticizing BHO in terms of his failures, would be analogous to Rush Limbaugh claiming that Fluke is vulgar and uncooth.
fixed now?
Appears to still be a problem. The link in question is the “Remember this from January 2010?” bit, not the link to Benen’s article.
Ah, okay. Should be fixed now.
Yeah. Sorted.
Does the GOP leadership actually understand their base? What they perceived as easy targets to megaphone their campaign of hate, has performed. But now they won’t go back into their box and whether it’s the Akin remarks, the 2 Rep throwing nuts at the CNN camerawoman on the floor of the Convention this morning or the USA USA USA chants tossed at the very wealthy Puerto Rican woman speaker; the GOP can’t step away from the truth of the party that is happening. This is the base taking over leadership.
I’d venture to say that the GOP doesn’t even have a single coherent base anymore. It’s more like they have a school of piranhas, each of which with its own agenda and a set of deadly sharp teeth.
I dunno. I can do analogies up to a point, but it feels dumb after a while.
I guess we’ve finally got a pure experiment that will show whether content matters at all in national American politics. Can a few hours of fake and shameful excuses for debates bring more than a snowflake’s worth of substance to the blizzard of ads and other lies that will overwhelm the media? And would the Dems do better to work with the snowflake or try to make a bigger and/or better blizzard? I guess we’ll find out.
It’s surprisingly hard to fight someone whose entire strategy is predicated on lies. Thanks Money.
True, although I think all the work on the Left over the past few years hammering away on what James Fallows calls the “false equivalence” watch is beginning to pay off. (E.g., today’s NY Times editorial about Republican lies, the LA Times story about Ryan’s false statements.)
I think Democrats have a couple of advantages going forward:
1 – The Democrats’ convention is next week. It can both step on the Republican “bounce” and generate its own “bounce”, as well as counterattack the blizzard of lies emanating from Tampa this week.
2 – The debates, where Dems have the best political counterpuncher of the current generation going up against a debate opponent whose one big weakness is reacting to the unexpected.
True to form, I have more pessimistic takes on these but let me say I hope you’re right.
Maybe last fall at some event Romney was at a retired man, shorter than Romney, asked a question re: budget and the retirement pay the man was getting.
Don’t know if the retired man was federal or state. Romney’s response was to the effect that maybe we’ll cut it by 50% and you didn’t earn it anyway.
If you can recall & post a link, I’d sure appreciate it.
Thanks
Romney, Ryan, and Darryl Issa, the Unholy Trinity.