The most uplifting piece of political commentary I have read in years - and I mean that literally - has come from the pen of none other than right-winger Robert Novak. His column last week filled me with hope. I coulda kissed the guy.
Novak had attended an Aspen, Colorado political forum staged annually by Republican financial angel Theodore J. Forstmann of the prominent New York buyout firm, Forstmann Little & Co. Gathered were more than 200 “mostly prestigious” types, and guess what? “For two full days,” reported Novak, “George W. Bush was bashed. He was taken to task on his handling of stem cell research, population control, the Iraq war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina.”
What made that synopsis especially uplifting was this: “The critics were no left-wing bloggers. They were rich, mainly Republican and presumably Bush voters in the last two presidential elections.” For two full days these movers and shakers of supply-side splendor confabbed over such diverse issues as world poverty, human rights and the international economy - and “the connecting link,” Novak noted with as much surprise as lament, “was hostility to President Bush.”
Oh happy days. Even the economic royalists are restless. Even the sole beneficiaries of Bush’s plutocratic quagmire are sinking into the realization that although wealth may not trickle down, incompetence does - and that is no way to run a railroad. Ultimately the entire social infrastructure will crash and derail even their own, self-satisfied agenda. That, at least, is the kind of overdue foresight one assumes has occurred to this crowd.
The joyous turnabout that Novak observed and grudgingly reported did not stop there, either. The fat-cat dissatisfaction with Bush, he wrote, is of historic proportions. “Longtime participants in Forstmann Little conferences … told me they had not experienced such hostility against a Republican president at previous events.” Face it, Junior. When you no longer look better than your one-term pappy, you’ve got big, big problems.
Over the weekend the New York Times took just enough time off from screwing its readers with extortionist subscription demands to make this broad and rather insightful analogy with respect to the president’s nose-diving popularity: “While Mr. Bush has been worrying about low expectations in schools, he's been ratcheting the bar downward himself on almost everything else…. The American public has much higher expectations than he does for the president and his government.”
Based on what Novak heard and saw in Aspen, the NYT’s emperor-with-no-clothes assessment, it seems, has finally trickled its way up and into the brains of fat-catdom. It’s unfortunate that it took the perfect storm of Katrina to fully expose Bush’s running aground of the world’s only superpower ship of state. Those who have been worrying less about corporate profits for the last five years and more about the gathering clouds of Bush’s dark incompetence are only surprised that it took the disastrously obvious to enlighten.
In sketching the contour of American political cycles, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once noted that its chief characteristic is that once the left positions the country into proper working order, the resulting prosperity leads the electorate to start thinking like Republicans. So the right finds itself swept into power, only, of course, to foul things up. This prompts a return to leftward national thinking, which once again improves matters, which once again leads to Republican complacence, and so it goes, on and on.
If Schlesinger was correct, then the right’s forecast of a permanent Republican majority was doomed from the beginning. But there can be no doubt that George W. Bush has sped the inevitable - and the embarrassing cold-shouldering delivered unto him at Aspen by a critical base might have indicated just how soon this cycle’s end may come.
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