Political Irony

Jon Stewart on Fox News defending Romney’s video comments calling 47% of Americans “freeloaders”:

I know they believe that the best defense is a (good?) offense, but um, seriously? “This is factually accurate, what Romney is saying.” ??? “I don’t understand what the controversy is. I think Mr. Romney should campaign on this point.” ??? “If I’m governor Romney, I run with this all day long!” ??? “It was the truth!” ??? “He’s a boss who says the truth, but the truth often hurts.” ??? “I think this will be seen as a win for Romney.”

It appears that Romney has the decency to not actually believe his own bullshit. But Fox News?

© Mario Piperni

I keep thinking about something David Brooks said about Romney — “Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater.” I think part of the reason Romney is turning out to be such a inept politician is because — even though he is clearly willing to say whatever people want him to say — the level of scrutiny that is applied to presidential candidates has made it painfully obvious to everyone that he doesn’t really believe most of the stuff he is saying, and he can’t hide that. He could get away with not believing what he was saying as a businessman, and even most of the time as a governor. Not just because the level of scrutiny was lower, but the demands required of him by today’s Republican party to toe the crazy party line is so much higher.

A key is the way Romney phrased it in the video: “My job is is not to worry about those people.” He justifies it as a job. It is a role he is playing, like an actor in a TV show. It’s not about what he himself believes. It is just a job and his boss is the Republican party. And if they believe that “All Democrats are moochers, and all moochers are Democrats” he’ll say his lines and tell them what they want to hear.

Michael Tomasky put it this way in a really interesting article:

In a way, it’s not even mostly Romney’s fault. It’s the fault of the party and movement that introduced and spread this toxic propaganda in the first place. When Romney is licking his wounds on Nov. 7, that party and movement will fire all its arrows at him. He’ll deserve a lot of them. But they will have buried him with the ignorance and rage they demanded he adopt. His chief crime will have been his weakness in failing to confront them.

Of course, Etch-a-sketch Romney would never have confronted them, which is why the right finally gave in and nominated Romney even though they definitely do not like him. Because they thought he was their tool — they could pull his strings and he would say whatever they wanted him to say. They did the same thing with Dubya.

And that’s what’s really sad. The movement conservatives are already trying to convince themselves that the reason Romney is losing is because he isn’t conservative enough. The National Review even applauded Romney’s comments in the video as the most expressly conservative thing he has said since entering the race. It is unclear if they will ever figure out that being hard-line hateful ideologues is not the solution, it is the problem.

© Kevin Siers

Or is everyone starting to tune out of the upcoming election? Yes, I’ll almost certainly watch the first debate, and if it is worthwhile, I might even watch the rest of them too. And I will definitely vote. I always do.

Not only is this the most costly presidential election in our history (total spending will be greater than a billion dollars, and that doesn’t count all the time and money spent by other people, like the media, bloggers like me, and even normal people), but it is also the most comprehensively covered, discussed, argued, and lied about election in history. It’s too much.

There has got to be a better way.

I like how in many parliamentary systems there is no fixed election date. From the time when the government decides there is going to be an election to when the election actually happens is typically just two or three months. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our campaign season were that short?

UPDATE: A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling that could have forced the secret money groups to disclose their donors. This is more bad news for our elections. About the only thing I’m sure of about campaign finance reform is that the names of people who pay for political activities must be disclosed. Otherwise, there is no way to tell if your elections are being bought by foreign governments, multinational corporations, or even by terrorist organizations.

In New York magazine, liberal Frank Rich reports on his experiment of immersing himself, “listening to, watching, reading, surfing, and otherwise gorging on conservative media” during the week of the Republican national convention. His conclusions do not paint a pretty picture for the future of the Republican party. My favorite quote:

What did I learn in my week imbibing the current installment of the Reagan revolution? I came away with empathy for those in the right’s base, who are often sold out by the GOP Establishment, and admiration for a number of writers, particularly the youngish conservative commentators at sites like the American Conservative and National Review Online whose writing is as sharp as any on the left (and sometimes as unforgiving of Republican follies) but who are mostly unknown beyond their own ideological circles. What many of the right’s foot soldiers and pundits have in common is their keen awareness that they got a bum deal in Tampa, a convention that didn’t much represent either their fiercely held ideology or their contempt for the incumbent. They know, too, that their presidential candidate is the Republican counterpart to Al Gore—not only in robotic personality but in his cautious hesitance to give full voice to the message of his troops. Even Paul Ryan, the right’s No. 1 living hero, let many of his fans down with his convention speech—not because he fudged facts but because he soft-pedaled his “big ideas” about small government once in the national spotlight. Ryan left some conservatives wondering if the only thing they gained from having him on the ticket was his name on a lousy T-shirt.

The Republican establishment tightly controlled the convention, leaving the Tea party and other small government true believers out in the cold. And while the mainstream media mainly showed that version of the convention, the new Republicans had their say on the other media to which Rich spent the week listening. It is an interesting war between the old and new guards.

Personally, I think both sides have lost their way and are in danger of becoming irrelevant in this world of changing times and demographics. Both Republican factions are clinging to a world that, if it ever actually existed, certainly doesn’t exist now — the mythical world of Saint Ronnie where you never raise taxes on the rich and the enemy are labor unions and the welfare-sucking poor.

Rich reaches this conclusion:

Since Eastwood’s turn was perhaps the most replayed video of the entire convention, it may have done damage to the convention’s “more in sorrow than anger” political strategy—assuming that strategy was sound. On November 6, we’ll learn if the party Establishment and Romney campaign knew what they were doing by striking that pacifist tone, or whether the angry voices on the right who opposed them can say, “I told you so.” We’ll learn as well whether the Republican Party is on a path to revive the Reagan revolution or, as the blogger Doug Mataconis has it at Outside the Beltway, in a self-destructive tailspin mirroring that of “the Democratic Party in the wake of the Vietnam War.” Either way, I finished the week with sympathy for true believers on the right who are far more divorced from their own political party and the nation’s culture than even those on the left who are perennially disillusioned by Obama, the Democratic hierarchy, and their own journalistic Establishment. That anger is certain to rage long past Election Day, and if I learned anything in my week strolling around the conservative mind, it was that anyone who sticks to an exclusive diet of lamestream media is missing the news.

© Kevin Kallaugher