Unity of Thought, Unity of Purpose

McCain is backing down from some of his fear-mongering. As my mother tells me, the use of Barack Obama’s full name has backfired on the Republicans, shifting more Hispanic voters to him. Some people would have loved McCain to keep going on the attacks, keep rousing the rabble, but the trouble is, the rousing’s going in the wrong direction! What lesson can we draw from this?

The lesson should be plain: America is beginning to take a rather dim view on certain excesses, and the candidate who can best navigate those waters is the person who doesn’t have to pretend (or pretend hard) that they’re in tune with America’s mainstream values.

The trouble with McCain is that he’s judging those values according to Pre-Bush politics. Politics really have changed in America. Obama is the winning Democrat nominee and the leading presidential candidate because he tapped, ultimately, into that emerging politics. It wasn’t a gimmick, it was his central strategy: tap the compelling reaction against Republican policies to stir up opposition and move the battle lines back.

Obama doesn’t need to tack back and forth with his finger in the wind. He knows the prevailing wind. Because he can create a fairly stable persona, and because that persona matches the mood of the nation, Obama can manuever without creating too much cognitive dissonance. McCain can’t, and it’s not entirely his fault.

The Republican Party is doing this to itself. The party believed that it had captured the center of the country, and it did, but just barely. This weak connection, this toleration for the sake of expedience is what gave the Republicans their power, but always with Democrats checking that power one way or another, either as Congress during the Reagan/Bush Years, or the President during the first half of the Republican Majority in Congress.

Bush never strayed further than two or three points from the halfway mark. If we look at Bush 43’s first term, we can imagine a parabola of Republican power, with the post-9/11 period as the height of recent Republican power. The historical accident of that terrible attack temporarily reversed the decline of the Republican’s hold on power.

Unfortunately for them, the Republicans both took this for granted and believed that their dominance was to become permanent. What they were doing instead was building a backlash against Republican politics that might keep them in the wilderness for the next generation.

That backlash is underway, and it’s what’s making for treacherous sailing for the Republican candidate. The old tactics have worn thin. The old character attacks are having a tough time competing with Obama’s strong, powerful call for a focus on the issues, which with the free-falling markets, the obscene absurdity of the regulations, or lack of regulations, help make that an appealing message.

The Republicans might have been able to steer things towards the center, but the internal politics of the party, long set against compromise on most levels, long set on playing off of deep-seated cultural resentments, have made it difficult for Republicans to reach out to the center, and maintain the base at the same time. The very extremity of Rovian Politics, of Cheney-style politics, of appealing deliberately to the politically incorrect (racism and other flavors of malign demagoguery), has guaranteed that moves towards moderation, towards shared consensus against certain prejudices will risk them their base.

The Republicans have been throwing obstacles in their own way; is it any wonder why Obama simply sits there, cool like Fonzie?

The Republicans like to think of the choices being made as daring, but those choices committed McCain in awyas that reduced his options. The choosing of Palin as Vice President is one of them. A bipartisan commission in Alaska has ruled That she unlawfully abused her power. Surprise? No. They knew going in that this was hanging over her head. They simply did not care. That, or they thought they could spin this towards harmlessness.

The national GOP has done this before. Remember Tom DeLay? The man was indicted and he didn’t step aside for quite some time. The Republicans have gotten so competitive about winning elections that they will not even let a little thing like criminal charges get in the way of re-election. It could work, but at the end of the day, the reason that folks once were a bit more willing to leave the office behind was that people knew in the parties that the circumstances begin working against you when things like criminal charges start coming your way.

The Republicans have wanted to believe that they could put up ramparts of spin, defensive walls of BS, and defeat any such threat to their power. It’s all the liberal media! It’s all partisan politics! The trouble is, in the long run, that the people who aren’t so heatedly political are going to see a pattern developing, regarding actions where the poltics have little to do with what makes things look bad.

The Republicans have put themselves in a position where they can’t be more moderate, where they’re forced to defend corrupt and incompetent behavior, and where they are increasingly dependent on unsympathetic, even dangerous fear-mongering and prejudice.

But it’s inevitable, that as one demonizes the other side, makes it seem like the other side is set to destroy the country, like its sympathetic to our enemies in a time of war, that the spectre of this decidedly anti-democratic behavior, of a political candidate being brought down by violence rather than countervailing political persuasion, become more likely. When the survival of the country is portrayed as consequent to one candidate winning rather than another, then some may take that absurdity of overheated politics to its ultimate conclusion. Whether that’s violence against one man, or violence against many people, the danger of that this rhetoric might incite is present.

The Right Wing has brought up Ayer’s repeatedly, but in qualitative terms, are the people who shout “kill him” are no different, people who trust the political system so little that violence against those they disagree with is a plausible alternative. How far will the Republicans push things for the sake of political power? How much damage will they do to the peace and political stability of this country on the way down. When will they start considering their interests and that of the greater public’s interest together, and when will they start easing up on their rhetoric for the good of the rest of the country? When will the Republicans prove to the rest of us that they care about more than just their own party’s power?