K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so
excited you'd have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to
slap around a welfare deadbeat.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich
Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond
the incessant repetition of Reagan's name. A battle over race-and-
gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent
from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As
long as the G.O.P.'s own identity politics, over religion, don't flare
up.)
Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating
Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl.
Then Republicans in Michigan reconstituted their party's election-year
chaos by temporarily revivifying yet another candidate, Mitt Romney,
who had been left for dead.
The playing of the race card by Hillary Clinton's surrogates to
diminish Barack Obama was sinister. But the Clintons are hardly
bigots, and the Democratic candidates all have a history of fighting
strenuously for inclusiveness. By contrast, the Romney victory in
Michigan is another reminder of how Republicans aren't even playing in
the same multiracial American sandbox.
The conservatives who hyperventilated about the Democrats' explosion
of identity politics seemed to forget that Mr. Romney also dragged
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into this campaign -- claiming that he
"saw" his father, a civil-rights minded governor of Michigan, march
with King in the 1960s. The point of Mitt Romney's invocation of the
race card was to inoculate himself against legitimate charges of
racial insensitivity; he had never spoken out about his own church's
discrimination against blacks, which didn't end until 1978. Instead,
the tactic ended up backfiring. Late last month The Boston Phoenix
exposed this touching anecdote as a fraud. George Romney and King
never marched together.
I don't mean to pick on Mitt Romney -- though heaven knows it's a
thriving national pastime -- but his retro persona exemplifies much of
the present Republican dilemma. It's not just that the old Reagan
coalition of social, economic and foreign-policy conservatives has
fractured. A more indelible problem for the Republicans in 2008 is
that their candidates are utterly segregated from reality as it is
lived by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Americans. The
G.O.P. presidential field's lack of demographic diversity by age,
gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the
leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.
Mr. Romney's victory in Michigan was most of all powered by a lie far
more egregious than his bogus appropriation of King. In a state
decimated by unemployment, he posed before auto plants like an
incongruously well-groomed Michael Moore, vowing to fight to bring
back every last lost job. His plan? He'd scrap the modest new fuel-
efficiency standard passed with rare bipartisan unity in Washington
last month and give Detroit a $20 billion fund for energy
"research" (not to be confused, he claimed, with a bailout).
It's a poignant measure of Michigan's despair that some voters willed
themselves to believe in Mr. Romney's preposterous antidote to the
decades-long erosion of the American auto industry. It's a farcical
measure of how little the other Republicans have to say about the
nation's economic crunch that Mr. Romney's con job could pass for
substance.
Whatever the merits of the Democratic candidates' takes on our fiscal
crisis, at least they saw the crisis coming. Though Mr. Romney
officially kicked off his presidential candidacy in Michigan, he
started grandstanding about the misery in that state only after all
his other campaign strategies had failed and he needed a Hail Mary
marketing gimmick. In his announcement speech in Dearborn last
February, the lone economy he mentioned was the fuel economy of the
Ramblers his father manufactured at American Motors in a distant
past.
Among Mr. Romney's rivals, Mike Huckabee alone made affinity for
economically struggling Americans his calling card. Unfortunately,
Huckanomics is more snake oil. All federal taxes would be replaced by
a national sales tax that despite its Orwellian name (the Fair Tax)
would shift more of the burden to middle- and low-income Americans.
For the other Republicans, the downturn has been an occasion to
recycle the mindless what-me-worry optimism of the pre-1929 G.O.P.
presidents and Wall Street potentates since relegated to history's
dustbin. When Maria Bartiromo, moderating a CNBC Republican debate in
October, asked the candidates if the nation was heading into a
recession, Fred Thompson found "no reason" to think so and pronounced
both the near and longer-term economic future "rosy." Rudy Giuliani
extolled the glories of freedom and the market before promising that
"the sky's the limit."
Even the White House halfheartedly acknowledged the home-mortgage
fiasco ahead of this crew. Instead, the Republican candidates have
largely clung to illegal immigration as Domestic Crisis No. 1, to no
particular point beyond alienating Hispanic voters.
The election is more than nine months away, and already this obsession
is blowing up in the G.O.P.'s face with non-Hispanic voters, too. Far
from proving the killer app of 2008, illegal immigration is
evaporating as a national cause. In the nearly identical findings of
The New York Times/CBS News and ABC News/Washington Post polls this
month, it ranks near the bottom, the top issue for a mere 4 to 5
percent of voters. The economy (at 20 to 29 percent) leads in both
surveys, closely followed by the total of those picking some variant
of "war" and "Iraq."
As if it weren't crazy enough for Republicans to lash themselves to
the listing mast of immigration, they are nonplayers on the issues
that do matter most to voters. The more the economy tanks and steals
Americans' attention from a relatively less violent Iraq, the more
voters learn that the Republicans have little to offer beyond their
one-size-fits-all panacea of extending the Bush tax cuts.
To voters who do remember Iraq, the supposed military success of the
"surge" does not accrue to the Republicans' favor either. Quite the
contrary. As every poll shows, most Americans still want the troops
home ASAP. Republican declarations that we are "winning" merely leads
many voters to a logical conclusion: Why not let the Iraqis take over
the remaining triage so we can retrieve the $10 billion a month in
taxpayers' money that might benefit us at home? This is why even the
poll-driven Mrs. Clinton, who has been the most cautious and ambiguous
of the Democratic candidates about a withdrawal timetable,
dramatically changed course to expedite her Iraq exit strategy in
Tuesday night's debate.
Thanks in part to the Giuliani campaign's one triumph -- turning 9/11
fearmongering into a running late-night talk-show gag -- the usual
national-security card is no longer so easy for Republicans to play.
Conservatives not in denial see the crackup ahead. "All the usual
indicators are dismal for Republicans," wrote George Will last week,
concluding that "Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since
Nov. 3, 1964," when Barry Goldwater lost 44 states.
But might some Republican still win, especially if the Democrats are
ultimately divided by race, or by the Clintons, or by their own inane
new debate about Reagan? Conceivably, but only if someone besides Ron
Paul is brave enough to break out of the monochromatic pack.
That contender would seem to be John McCain. For all the often
irrational anger directed at this conservative by his long-time
antagonists in his own party, he is the sole G.O.P. candidate who
resisted the immigrant vigilantes. He might have done better in
Michigan, where he spoke honestly about the grim prospects for the
auto industry, had he backed up his prognosis with remedies less glib
than a vague pledge to retrain workers at community colleges.
Education policy of any kind is M.I.A. on the McCain campaign Web
site.
His ardor for the war, however, has not done him in. He handily won
the growing Republican antiwar vote in both Michigan and New
Hampshire. Apparently many still remember that Mr. McCain was bitterly
against President Bush before he was for him.
Exit polls find that among voters in Republican primaries, as many as
half have turned against the president. David Frum, the onetime Bush
speechwriter, laments in his provocative new book "Comeback" that by
2008 his former boss "had led his party to the brink of disaster" and
cost it "a generation of young Americans."
At the last Republican debate, the candidates invoked Reagan nearly
three dozen times and Mr. Bush just once. "I take my inspiration from
Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush," said Mr. Romney on his
Michigan victory night, in a typical example of the candidates'
circumlocutions about the incumbent president.
This, too, is laughably out of touch with reality as practiced in most
American living rooms. Imagine if Mr. McCain's Straight Talk Express
stopped taking detours around the one figure who unites 60-plus
percent of the populace in ire. Imagine if he started talking straight
about how he'd clean up the White House mess. That might at least
break the ice with the vast majority of voters who look at the G.O.P.
presidential field and don't see Ronald Reagan so much as also-rans
for "The Bucket List."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/opinion/20rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
excited you'd have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to
slap around a welfare deadbeat.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich
Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond
the incessant repetition of Reagan's name. A battle over race-and-
gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent
from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As
long as the G.O.P.'s own identity politics, over religion, don't flare
up.)
Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating
Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl.
Then Republicans in Michigan reconstituted their party's election-year
chaos by temporarily revivifying yet another candidate, Mitt Romney,
who had been left for dead.
The playing of the race card by Hillary Clinton's surrogates to
diminish Barack Obama was sinister. But the Clintons are hardly
bigots, and the Democratic candidates all have a history of fighting
strenuously for inclusiveness. By contrast, the Romney victory in
Michigan is another reminder of how Republicans aren't even playing in
the same multiracial American sandbox.
The conservatives who hyperventilated about the Democrats' explosion
of identity politics seemed to forget that Mr. Romney also dragged
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into this campaign -- claiming that he
"saw" his father, a civil-rights minded governor of Michigan, march
with King in the 1960s. The point of Mitt Romney's invocation of the
race card was to inoculate himself against legitimate charges of
racial insensitivity; he had never spoken out about his own church's
discrimination against blacks, which didn't end until 1978. Instead,
the tactic ended up backfiring. Late last month The Boston Phoenix
exposed this touching anecdote as a fraud. George Romney and King
never marched together.
I don't mean to pick on Mitt Romney -- though heaven knows it's a
thriving national pastime -- but his retro persona exemplifies much of
the present Republican dilemma. It's not just that the old Reagan
coalition of social, economic and foreign-policy conservatives has
fractured. A more indelible problem for the Republicans in 2008 is
that their candidates are utterly segregated from reality as it is
lived by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Americans. The
G.O.P. presidential field's lack of demographic diversity by age,
gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the
leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.
Mr. Romney's victory in Michigan was most of all powered by a lie far
more egregious than his bogus appropriation of King. In a state
decimated by unemployment, he posed before auto plants like an
incongruously well-groomed Michael Moore, vowing to fight to bring
back every last lost job. His plan? He'd scrap the modest new fuel-
efficiency standard passed with rare bipartisan unity in Washington
last month and give Detroit a $20 billion fund for energy
"research" (not to be confused, he claimed, with a bailout).
It's a poignant measure of Michigan's despair that some voters willed
themselves to believe in Mr. Romney's preposterous antidote to the
decades-long erosion of the American auto industry. It's a farcical
measure of how little the other Republicans have to say about the
nation's economic crunch that Mr. Romney's con job could pass for
substance.
Whatever the merits of the Democratic candidates' takes on our fiscal
crisis, at least they saw the crisis coming. Though Mr. Romney
officially kicked off his presidential candidacy in Michigan, he
started grandstanding about the misery in that state only after all
his other campaign strategies had failed and he needed a Hail Mary
marketing gimmick. In his announcement speech in Dearborn last
February, the lone economy he mentioned was the fuel economy of the
Ramblers his father manufactured at American Motors in a distant
past.
Among Mr. Romney's rivals, Mike Huckabee alone made affinity for
economically struggling Americans his calling card. Unfortunately,
Huckanomics is more snake oil. All federal taxes would be replaced by
a national sales tax that despite its Orwellian name (the Fair Tax)
would shift more of the burden to middle- and low-income Americans.
For the other Republicans, the downturn has been an occasion to
recycle the mindless what-me-worry optimism of the pre-1929 G.O.P.
presidents and Wall Street potentates since relegated to history's
dustbin. When Maria Bartiromo, moderating a CNBC Republican debate in
October, asked the candidates if the nation was heading into a
recession, Fred Thompson found "no reason" to think so and pronounced
both the near and longer-term economic future "rosy." Rudy Giuliani
extolled the glories of freedom and the market before promising that
"the sky's the limit."
Even the White House halfheartedly acknowledged the home-mortgage
fiasco ahead of this crew. Instead, the Republican candidates have
largely clung to illegal immigration as Domestic Crisis No. 1, to no
particular point beyond alienating Hispanic voters.
The election is more than nine months away, and already this obsession
is blowing up in the G.O.P.'s face with non-Hispanic voters, too. Far
from proving the killer app of 2008, illegal immigration is
evaporating as a national cause. In the nearly identical findings of
The New York Times/CBS News and ABC News/Washington Post polls this
month, it ranks near the bottom, the top issue for a mere 4 to 5
percent of voters. The economy (at 20 to 29 percent) leads in both
surveys, closely followed by the total of those picking some variant
of "war" and "Iraq."
As if it weren't crazy enough for Republicans to lash themselves to
the listing mast of immigration, they are nonplayers on the issues
that do matter most to voters. The more the economy tanks and steals
Americans' attention from a relatively less violent Iraq, the more
voters learn that the Republicans have little to offer beyond their
one-size-fits-all panacea of extending the Bush tax cuts.
To voters who do remember Iraq, the supposed military success of the
"surge" does not accrue to the Republicans' favor either. Quite the
contrary. As every poll shows, most Americans still want the troops
home ASAP. Republican declarations that we are "winning" merely leads
many voters to a logical conclusion: Why not let the Iraqis take over
the remaining triage so we can retrieve the $10 billion a month in
taxpayers' money that might benefit us at home? This is why even the
poll-driven Mrs. Clinton, who has been the most cautious and ambiguous
of the Democratic candidates about a withdrawal timetable,
dramatically changed course to expedite her Iraq exit strategy in
Tuesday night's debate.
Thanks in part to the Giuliani campaign's one triumph -- turning 9/11
fearmongering into a running late-night talk-show gag -- the usual
national-security card is no longer so easy for Republicans to play.
Conservatives not in denial see the crackup ahead. "All the usual
indicators are dismal for Republicans," wrote George Will last week,
concluding that "Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since
Nov. 3, 1964," when Barry Goldwater lost 44 states.
But might some Republican still win, especially if the Democrats are
ultimately divided by race, or by the Clintons, or by their own inane
new debate about Reagan? Conceivably, but only if someone besides Ron
Paul is brave enough to break out of the monochromatic pack.
That contender would seem to be John McCain. For all the often
irrational anger directed at this conservative by his long-time
antagonists in his own party, he is the sole G.O.P. candidate who
resisted the immigrant vigilantes. He might have done better in
Michigan, where he spoke honestly about the grim prospects for the
auto industry, had he backed up his prognosis with remedies less glib
than a vague pledge to retrain workers at community colleges.
Education policy of any kind is M.I.A. on the McCain campaign Web
site.
His ardor for the war, however, has not done him in. He handily won
the growing Republican antiwar vote in both Michigan and New
Hampshire. Apparently many still remember that Mr. McCain was bitterly
against President Bush before he was for him.
Exit polls find that among voters in Republican primaries, as many as
half have turned against the president. David Frum, the onetime Bush
speechwriter, laments in his provocative new book "Comeback" that by
2008 his former boss "had led his party to the brink of disaster" and
cost it "a generation of young Americans."
At the last Republican debate, the candidates invoked Reagan nearly
three dozen times and Mr. Bush just once. "I take my inspiration from
Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush," said Mr. Romney on his
Michigan victory night, in a typical example of the candidates'
circumlocutions about the incumbent president.
This, too, is laughably out of touch with reality as practiced in most
American living rooms. Imagine if Mr. McCain's Straight Talk Express
stopped taking detours around the one figure who unites 60-plus
percent of the populace in ire. Imagine if he started talking straight
about how he'd clean up the White House mess. That might at least
break the ice with the vast majority of voters who look at the G.O.P.
presidential field and don't see Ronald Reagan so much as also-rans
for "The Bucket List."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/opinion/20rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin