P.M. Carpenter

I am still experiencing computer problems. After several weeks of consultation with technical "experts," I believe the root issue has finally been identified and I'm now just one (more) expense away from resolving it.

The only other thing I've learned from this episode is that computer techs, by and large, are complete idiots.

 

Journalism gets an incomplete

Ah, the old stiff upper lip, screwed into place by outright terror and another paycheck: "The more voters have gotten to know House Republicans’ fatally flawed candidates, including those with ties to organized crime, a Nazi enthusiast, and another being sued for attempted rape and sexual assault, the less there is to like," said DCCC's Ryan Rudominer to Politico. "So for all the Republicans’ popping the champagne and the countless millions spent in secret funds from shady right wing groups, they haven’t been able to close the deal in their targeted races, and that’s why Democrats will win."

Although Rudominer's premise was exceptionally gentle -- the less there is to like? -- his conclusion was ruggedly delusional, which is, however, what he gets paid for generating. The midterms may not be as apocalyptic for Dems as many observers were calculating just days ago, but the Cook Political Report remains pessimistic: "This year is shaping up to be something of a repeat of the 52-seat House and eight-seat Senate rout of Democrats in 1994." The Rothenberg Report essentially concurs, predicting a "likely Republican gain of 40-50 seats."

Politico gravely speculates on the causations of such vast voter dissatisfaction with the Congressional majority, citing the usual suspects of "unpopular legislative votes" (such as health-care reform, demanded by huge pluralities for decades), "the quality of opposition" (you know, rehabilitated witches, inarticulate Asian women who look remarkably WASPish, arresting First Amenders, those "with ties to organized crime, a Nazi enthusiast," etc.), "the partisan breakdown of the districts" (think unevolved knuckles, think dragging), "or the huge sums of money dedicated to Democratic defeat" (think Gilded Age, think William McKinley, think Mark Hanna).

A nice, respectably comprehensive list, no? Politico covered all the bases, yes? 

Not quite, for the list omits possibly the most worrisome causation of all, the one the Founders feared most and seems destined to further retard America's (remaining) potential greatness: voter ignorance, resulting in a gross susceptibility to demagogically pain-free cures.

The empirical particulars of the American electorate's growing remoteness from enlightened democracy are far too numerous to even survey in a mere post; but that's OK, because you're already familiar with the disquieting evidence of our politically out-of-touch populace. From all too widespread beliefs in government "death panels" to intractable doubts about, say, the president's true faith, we've an electorate, in large part, that's either irredeemably ineducable or just downright stupid.

It's crowning achievement in transcendent dunderheadedness, though, will be to put those who screwed us of late right back in power -- after the screwers have made no misrepresentations whatsoever to the screwees about how they're going to screw us again in precisely the same position: brace yourself, they promise, for the repeat debaucheries of unregulated markets and supply-sided inequality.

So come on, Politico, and you other journalistic organs of political objectivity. Be complete when composing at least your postmortem list behind our midterm folly: to it, add popular stupidity. 

The other tale of "Tales of the Tea Party"

Like a cat with an embarrassment of rodentlike riches, the Times' Ross Douthat this morning paws liberals' discombobulation over the Tea Party movement's success. 

"[T]he liberal mind is desperate for a narrative, a storyline, something to ease the pain of losing to a ragtag band of right-wing populists," writes Douthat, who then relates and topples a few floated narratives, from racism's prevalence to what Douthat sees as "the most persuasive liberal storyline" -- that of Tea Partiers as entitlement hypocrites (i.e., the "Don't touch my Medicare" thing). 

Parenthetically, my favorite from Douthat's list: "that the Tea Parties are nothing new.... [H]istorian Sean Wilentz ... link[s] Glenn Beck’s daffier ideas (and the Tea Partiers who love them) to the cold war-era paranoias of the John Birch Society. These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never found a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits." 

It's my favorite not because it's true that Tea Partyism is indeed "nothing new," but because Douthat has his subsequent crackpotisms backward. One could rather easily make an intellectual case for repealing the 17th Amendment -- one more Madisonian buffer between lawmaking and the great unwashed is at least theoretically plausible -- whereas Tea Partiers' "responsible-seeming message" about deficit-busting merged with more and more tax cuts is just more immensely falsifiable drivel. 

There is one other storyline, however, that Douthat omits from liberals' explanatory grab bag, and which I find most compelling. I should add that Douthat committed no intentional oversight here, since most liberals -- and virtually every movement progressive -- reject the thesis, which is this:

Because America is a center-right nation, the Tea Party is more closely aligned with the majority thrust of political sentiment; which is to say, what looks extraordinarily crazy to the center-left appears but mildly and even acceptably pixilated, perhaps, to the center-right. Put another way, the Tea Party is the majority's affably touched uncle; to the numerically narrower and more distant left, it's a dangerous, raving madman. 

This major premise of a center-right nation is commonly embraced by political theorists (though, again, it is roundly rejected by movement progressives of the hallucinatory "We the People" chant), but it helps to explain as well, I think, why the seemingly sudden rise of anti-Obama fervor after what so many of us mistook for a universal desire for organic "change." In brief, or so goes the minor premise, voters in 2008 voted less for Obama than they did against the accumulated nightmares of BushWorld, in which willingly resided the profoundly foolish John McCain.

The presently disaffected majority, therefore, wasn't so much pumped by the Tea Party as it was primed by its own preexisting ideology. Nevertheless the Tea Party, financed with jesuitical genius by offstage deep pockets, has exploited what already was. 

Cut the ridicule

The inviolability of the law of unintended consequences has been demonstrated again. Says The Hill 2010 Midterm Election poll, as paraphrased by "Opinionator": "Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP ... 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists."

True, the results are marginally skewed, since "likely voters" in this election cycle trend to the center-right, which would then skew temperamentally with the above plurality. Yet The Law holds: Notwithstanding months of ribald ridicule of the Tea Party/GOP's roster of nakedly unbalanced candidates for high office, vast swaths of the electorate are not only unrepelled by them, they appear more aligned than ever.

The right is having a proverbial field day with this phenomenon. What doesn't kill them only makes them stronger; assault them sarcastically and they only grow in numbers. In the Times' "Opinionator," conservative blogger JammieWearingFool happily captures the depressing reality: "Despite 18 months of the media calling tea partiers frothing rabble and angry extremists, a new poll shows precisely the opposite.... [C]lear-thinking people have tuned out the lamestream media and their mantra about how crazy tea partiers are. They think they can constantly harp on Angle and O’Donnell yet they overlook the surge nationwide from independents toward the GOP."

Putting aside what the blogger exotically regards as "clear thinking," he does in fact comprehend the right's growing numbers as a jujitsu-maneuver outcome.   

And that, gentle reader, returns me to what is by now my rather tiresome complaints about MSNBC's programming, especially its evening lineup of Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. 

Yesterday I bemoaned their "untrammeled hysteria" over what promises to be an imaginary wholesale collapse of responsible government at the hands of maybe -- maybe -- 33 + 8 Tea Partiers, out of 535; and, as a subtext, their pound-pound-pound programming of "Be Afraid! We're Doomed!" almost certainly depresses greater turnout.  

Yet, you'll be unsurprised to learn, I've another complaint: The Schultz-Olbermann-Maddow fire brigade is contributing to the backlash -- and it's not hard to see how.

Imagine you're an informed, unabashed liberal and you're discussing politics with an independent fence-sitter who happens to let slip some mild sympathy for your ideological opponents' ideas. Naturally you promptly correct his errant thinking but in the process you also imply -- nay, pointedly note -- that he's a wretched idiot for even thinking such a thing. Now I ask you, as a student of human emotions, What will his reaction likely be? You got it: He'll entrench, he'll dig in his offended heels and now insist that he's right, rather than just wonder.   

And that -- the precipitating former -- is what Schultz-Olbermann-Maddow have been accomplishing for months. They giggle, they scoff, they ridicule and belittle the right, and throughout, they merely inflame and augment the center-right's creeping certainty. 

The prescription: Stick to journalism, stop offending and state the facts with some dignified solemnity. Let Reason -- not ridicule -- prevail. 

Don't panic

Either cable-chat hysteria has infected the Times' resident Tea Party analyst, Kate Zernike, or she was momentarily seized by sensationalist urges. But one thing is certain. "Carry out" has no journalistic business in the following passage:

With a little more than two weeks till Election Day, 33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats.

While the numbers are relatively small, they could exert outsize influence, putting pressure on Republican leaders to carry out promises to significantly cut spending and taxes, to repeal health care legislation and financial regulations passed this year, and to phase out Social Security and Medicare in favor of personal savings accounts.

What Ms. Zernike meant to say in all seriousness, I'm sure, is that Republican leaders will be under pressure to make flashy attempts at carrying out cuts in spending, the repeal of health care legislation, and so on, but all such attempts would unquestionably die short of President Obama's veto pen. That is, they wouldn't even survive the morbidly dysfunctional Senate, where, even assuming an unlikely GOP-recapture, Democrats would -- and here we'd have a happy turning of the tables -- filibuster them to an early expiration.

Which is to suggest or warn that cable-news hallucinations are endangering clear thought, even at the normally clear-thinking Times.

My worry is not a matter of underestimating the Tea Party's diseased influence on the GOP Establishment, the latter of which was already well on its way to depraved indifference to rationality, but rather of overestimating its realistic influence on long-term policy. Simply and reasonably put, it won't have any -- short of House-floor tantrums, legislative bomb-throwing, non-appropriation of funds, and brief spells of government shutdown. I know, that sounds like a lot. But its duration would be for, maybe, two years, which is decidedly short-term, after which an appalled electorate would redeem themselves.

Meanwhile, however, cable-news chatter in the form of MSNBC's evening lineup has proclaimed, through oppressive implication and rather contemptible generalizations, the Tea Party's unrivaled ascendancy and thus the nation's certain doom. On "The Ed Show" last night, for instance, the host had located one Tea Party candidate whose medieval hankering is to abolish public education; hence, according to Ed, such is now one unshakable part of the GOP's official platform. Good grief.

On MSNBC we witness untrammeled hysteria virtually all hour, whichever hour, excluding the now-sane! Chris Matthews' and sober Lawrence O'Donnell's. Even though Bozo himself would have a better chance through a last-minute write-in campaign of winning Delaware's open Senate seat, Keith Olbermann devotes endless airtime to the demented vagaries and spooky ruminations of Christine O'Donnell as a potential U.S. senator. Rachel Maddow then sarcastically cries "Boo!" at everything that sidewinds rightward, as though the barbarians are not only at the gate but well through it.

I suppose these ceaseless hysterics keep the ratings and ad revenue up, but they also most assuredly keep the audience's progressive spirits down; they present a gross and even hopeless distortion of the political playing field. And depression kills turnout.

Reread, please, the fact-checked portion of Zernike: "33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats." Out of 535.

That may be 33 + 8 too many, but that's hardly an invasion of the mind-snatchers. And they, too, shall pass.

We saw it coming

As I speculated nearly four months ago, the day following CIA Director Leon Panetta's portentous June 27th appearance on "This Week," President Obama's long-range sights have always been set (or so I desperately hoped) on Afghan reconciliation, since as a keen student of history he has no intention of being "LBJ-ed." Hence the current U.S.-encouraged talks between Taliban leaders and the Afghan government should have come as no surprise.

From June 28:

I disagree with the press assessments, following Mr. Panetta's appearance on "This Week," that have thundered unanimously that a political solution, in the form of a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, runs from the highly unlikely to the absolutely impossible.

On the face of it, those assessments are hard to argue with. "We have seen no evidence that they [the Taliban & Friends] are truly interested in reconciliation where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society," said Panetta. "I think it is very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that is going to be meaningful," he added.

I detected, however, an unreported touch of squirming and a trifle hesitation in Panetta's delivery [a mere 50 to 100 Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, maybe less, he offered] which suggested ... that he was only delivering the hardball "official" line as cover to back-channeling overtures.

That was the explosive kicker: Panetta's emphatic and unsolicited "maybe less."

There sat the CIA director nakedly telling the nation that our official reason for fighting in Afghanistan had been essentially voided. That, combined with Panetta's vivid -- and rather beseeching -- outline of pointed demands for "meaningful" talks, seemed to give it away. 

And it did.

Egads Egan!

The Times' Timothy Egan presents a fascinating look at Idaho's improbable Democrat, Congressman Walt Minnick, and what's keeping him politically alive in one of the nation's reddest districts. Egan concludes with something of an epiphany.  

This living oxymoron — an elected Idaho Democrat — is banking on what seems like an absurdly quaint notion in the Obama midterms. “Most people in this country are pragmatic and moderate,” Minnick said. “If you don’t govern from the middle you probably will lose your majority.”

It’s true in 2010, and will be true in 2012, after the Republicans are thrown out for overreaching and Minnick, for all his characteristics that make Democrats wince, will look like he was on to something.

But, posted a commenter:

I put more value in a Russ Feingold, who is going to go down while standing up for what's right. In the long run, that's worth more than one seat in Congress.

And so it goes, likely forever. 

The myth endures

If the Howard Beales of the right devoted as much attention to denouncing the ignorance, as well as hypocrisies, of our times, their networks of rage would cancel each other out.

By way of example, first this, from this morning's Post:

If the midterms are in part a referendum on the size, scope and effectiveness of the federal government, older voters [according to a new WaPo/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard U. poll] appear poised to deliver a rebuke to the Obama administration.

Then this, from this morning's NY Times:

Banks spent billions of dollars in the good times to build vast mortgage machines that made new loans, bundled them into securities and sold those investments worldwide. Lowly servicing became an afterthought. Even after the housing bubble began to burst, many of these operations languished with inadequate staffing and outmoded technology, despite warnings from regulators.... Now banks are ill-equipped to deal the foreclosure process.

Yet the myth -- capitalism = efficiency/effectiveness, government = inefficiency/ineffectiveness; you know, such as private healthcare's 20-30 percent overhead costs versus Medicare's 2 percent -- endures.

Sullivan on Obama

Last night, as I watched "The Daily Dish"'s Andrew Sullivan on "Charlie Rose," I was intrigued, amused, and even comforted by the vast intersection of philosophical agreement between me, what you might call an old-school New Dealer, and this self-described "English conservative." That "English" was an indispensable, self-aware and, I'm sure, self-distinguishing modifier, for oh how contemporary American conservatives have checked out of authentic conservatism -- that of the Burkean hue.

"Conservative" Sullivan said nothing with which this modern "progressive" -- if I may -- commentator would intensely disagree, while the principal point of profound agreement came in Sullivan's observation that President Obama, whom the conservative still supports, is Washington D.C.'s "only adult." By now, that seems to me one of those self-evident propositions whose nearly universal denial by Washington's rowdy children is both breathtaking and endlessly depressing.

Yet I assume that Conservative Sullivan is able to philosophically embrace Obama because deep within the latter's progressive heart there pumps the blood of an old-school conservative. And that, in my opinion, is an admirable and dynamic mixture.

The same held true for FDR, a 19th-century conservative-by-sentiment, but one who understood that 20th-century exigencies required liberal action. Roosevelt could play the fiery, leftist populist when the political environment demanded it, but he much preferred to wheel, deal and accommodate. He loved consensus, chiefly because he realized that only consensus could cement real change. (Hello, Edmund Burke.) Sound like any other modern president?

Sullivan's two areas of disagreement with Obama were also the same as mine -- well, 1.5 in my case.

Afghanistan. Going deeper there is a miserable, misfortunate blunder on Obama's part, mused Sullivan. We simply cannot win, he ventured, and I simply cannot think of any good counterargument. It's that bleak, that hopeless.

Sullivan also took Obama to task for inaction on prosecuting the Bush war crimes and all the little Bushies who committed them. I both agree and disagree: the proper prosecuting entity, as I wrote at the time, was majority Congressional Democrats -- at the time these crimes were coming to light. The founders never expected any chief executive to rein in executive power or correct past executive abuses. That's not in the executive's nature, or even best interest, and that's why the founders empowered Congress to check the executive, through impeachment and removal if necessary.

In addition, Obama envisioned his dream of health-care reform becoming a nightmarish and unaccomplishable sideshow if subjected to the circus-like atmosphere of "war-crimes trials" -- a virtually guaranteed scenario from the right. Was the trade-off worth it? Reasonable people can disagree, but roughly 50 million presently uninsured Americans would likely lean one way more than the other.

Yet the thrust of Sullivan's take on modern American politics, as I stated above, was that Obama is rather shockingly singular in his political maturity. One may object to him here and there, on this or on that, but it appears that Barack Obama is pretty much our only hope to a more rational future. And, it seems, (real) conservatives and progressives alike agree.

Amateur hour

Nationalizing the midterms in 2006 won Democrats majorities in both houses of Congress. Extending their anti-Bush message enlarged their majorities in 2008. So naturally in 2010, as Republicans promise en masse to return to destructive Bushian economics, Congressional Democrats have localized their races.

Amateur hour. Which has sent the White House's political operation into desperation and despair; it had wanted, duh, to nationalize the Democratic campaign -- for weeks, Obama labored to alert and alarm voters about returning to GOP "policies that got us in this mess" -- and to pool advertising resources accordingly.

The Democratic House and Senate campaign committees, however, preferred to disperse funds to individual races, to be used in their own individualized way. The result? Those party organs are now defending even once-upon-a-time safe seats. Why? Because voters indeed perceive this as a national election, just as Republicans have insisted it is.

Now the White House is scrambling. It had a message -- the message -- but its potency has been diluted and contaminated by dozens upon dozens of individually tailored messages. So Obama is forced to bob, weave and shift; his political voice has been "in flux during the final stretch," as the NY Times puts it, as he "searches for a way to frame the message that will connect with voters and get news coverage...."

Obama's latest shift: "He called the flow of undisclosed money from corporations and big business a 'threat to our democracy.' " Which of course it is. But let's face it: voters' interest in that topic couldn't be located with an electron microscope.

"Senior White House officials say the shifts are a conscious effort," continues the Times, "to find new ways to make the president’s basic argument so it stays fresh and stays in the news."

And that, as we all know, is unmitigated tommyrot.

For starters, Obama's "flow of undisclosed money" argument has little to do with his earlier "basic argument" of alert and alarm over GOP policies; second, not many a sober politico ever wishes to introduce "new way" themes into a campaign with only three weeks to go. Monotonous jackhammering on the opposition's greatest weakness (in this case the GOP's past performance) -- that's always the preferred ticket.

As I said, amateur hour. But the White House's "told you so" will be of no comfort.

The quick and the dead

In the title as political metaphor, lifted shamelessly from Peter’s first epistle, there’s no question as to who’s who.

During the Obama administration’s genesis, Republicans wasted no time in erecting a wall of separation between their interests and the nation’s; the discipline was brutal -- there would be hell to pay if apostates were to break ranks and opt for the secular Good over the Hereafter ideological. Democrats solemnly gathered and indeed achieved a few remarkable victories in the nation’s interests; but now, saith Gallup, they wander with Dante’s Virgil in Limbo.

Enter the hermeneutic practitioners, who now assign the original sin of all this apocalyptic silliness to both Republicans and ... who else? ... President Obama. I quote from my most recent encounter, experienced just minutes ago, with the left’s St. Paul of Krugman:

“[T]here has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn’t offered an effective reply.”

Not now, not yesterday, not since the Beginning. An “effective reply” still awaits its presidential unveiling -- although given an electorate that tells pollsters that Republicans are responsible for current economic conditions and they trust Republicans more than Democrats to improve these conditions, the waiting may endure. That’s Obama’s cross to bare, misspelling intended.

At any rate, Krugman is incontrovertibly correct. Only with the midterms upon us has Obama gone in public search of an effective reply to Republicans’ “fact-free” skulduggery. Such is advocacy journalism’s first draft and it’s doubtful that political historians will much improve on it. I have no argument with the left’s critical assessment of what is rather straightforward chronology.

Yet I profoundly differ with the left’s counterfactual conclusion, which has, by now, ascended to the level of progressive Scripture: Obama should have publicly clashed with the right from the get-go. Had he acted the fire-and-brimstone FDR (of 1936, rather than the more accommodating FDR of ‘33, two vastly different and transitional presidential personalities which idolatrous progressives stubbornly confuse and conflate), he and his fellow Dems wouldn’t be suffering as underdogs now.      

I differ, because the left’s counterfactual history is as damnable as the right’s regular offerings of unverifiable fairy tales -- “If only Obama had done this, done that, our way, we’d be much better off.”

With illegitimate ease, counterfactual history becomes perfect history. All imperfections are instantly vaporized by the power of faith and pure imagination. If only Obama had drawn an early line, say, with a larger stimulus, if only he had entrenched then and there and given Republicans what for, if only he had “effectively” tutored the ineducable electorate as to why it would be his way or the highway, well, Obama then and thereafter would have ruled supreme.

A nice, pleasant story, but also utter nonsense. Even worse complications could and probably would have erupted; for instance Obama would have instantly put the lie to his campaign promise of a kinder and kind of postpartisan Washington. Republicans would have been giddy. The electorate would have been outraged -- hoodwinked again, voters would have cried, and much sooner than they did, thus likely dooming both health-care and financial reform.

I’m not entirely sold on Tolstoyan fatalism as a universal axiom of history, but at least in Obama’s case I’d argue that events have played out in something of a destined, and even judicious, order.

 

Maddow's waste

Last night, what an embarrassment. But far more than that, what a waste.

Rachel Maddow could have asked Congressman Peter DeFazio’s Republican challenger, Art Robinson, how a demand-less economy can rapidly recoup without massive infusions of government cash, thus substituting much-needed demand; she could have asked how he otherwise intends to health-insure 50 million uninsured Americans; she could have asked how familiar he is with the wretched consequences of unregulated capitalism; she could have asked about the (lack of) wisdom of our military involvement in Afghanistan.

Maddow could have asked many a relevant question, but instead she played a transparent game of “gotcha,” mostly about ancient and, to be sure, scientifically crackpot quotes. Well, Ms. Maddow, Isaac Newton went to his grave believing he could unlock the alchemistic secret of “creating” gold. So what? Such was the thrust of Robinson’s studied response lying in wait -- and frankly, Ms. Maddow, it visibly unnerved you and probably generated a touch of sympathy for him.

All those relevant questions left dangling, left unasked, to which Robinson likely would have looked the absolute fool. But you, Ms. Maddow, asked about “hormesis.”

If Rep. DeFazio were to appear on Sean Hannity’s fraud of an interview show, and were he then to be asked by Mr. Hannity nothing but questions about 15-year-old oddball quotes or writings, movement progressives would, quite rightly, be up in indignant arms. Typical, that’s just typical, they’d say, of the malign Sean Hannity and his far-right tactics of distraction.

So what was movement progressivism’s rarely granted preemptive strike in response? To act like Sean Hannity, thus demonstrating that impeccable wastes of valuable interview time aren’t the sole property of the malicious right.

What a waste. Robinson could have been nailed, but good. But you, Ms. Maddow, blew it.

 

The party of upchuck

Newt Gingrich’s most recent trollery -- his preposterous swill about a “party of paychecks” being engaged in patriotic struggle against an ignominious “party of food stamps” -- was nevertheless meritorious in one way: it revealed the philosophical and spiritual chasm between yesterday’s conservatives and today’s pseudoconservatives.

To wit, from Politico’s “Arena,” there was this from former GOP congressman Mickey Edwards:

Newt is utterly unconcerned with the welfare of the country or the people in it; he cares about (a) Newt, and (b) power for Newt. There may well be some Republican candidates who will follow his lead, but if they do they'll drive away both independents and intelligent conservatives.

Mr. Edwards’ placement of the adjective “intelligent” was, I thought, telling. He assumed an intelligence among independents but culled that attribute from the mass of GOP voters.

If there are enough Mickey Edwardses out there, their partisan association with today’s decidedly unintelligent conservatism will come to a thundering end. Whether that leads to a third and likely insignificant party or their assimilation into the conservative side of Democracy remains, naturally, to be seen. But something inexorable is stirring.

And it’s stirring against what can only be called the monstrous likes of tea partiers and Gingrichites such as Michele Combs, director of communications for the Christian Coalition. I repeat, the Christian Coalition, whose pseudoconservatism doubles as pseudotheology. Again, from the “Arena”:

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich has always had a talent for getting to the nub of the matter. And when he implies that this election is a choice between "paychecks vs. food stamps," that just about sums it up. Except for less than a handful of the nearly 250 congressional Democrats running for reelection, not one Democrat running is using advertisements trumpeting his or her vote for Obamacare; or for Obama's stimulus bill, or for any other legislation the president forced through Congress.

Since every single Republican in Congress voted against Obamacare, they were the ones who voted for paychecks for the American people. On the other hand, the vast majority of Democrats in Congress voted for all of these Big Government programs and as a result, we have a record number of Americans on food stamps.

Now it may be that Ms. Combs’ paycheck-conservatism is constrained by a profound, congenital stupidity for which she should bear no personal responsibility; it may be she actually believes that “Obamacare” brought about today’s mass unemployment. But I doubt it.

I suspect, rather, that Ms. Combs is simply engaging in her party’s classic, tactical flapdoodle of saying whatever might appeal to the Social Darwinian apes among us who, given the proper motivation, will drag their pseudoconservative knuckles to the polling booth early next month.

Whichever way the 2010 midterm elections materialize, there’s a philosophical bloodbath coming for the GOP. Its Combses can’t tolerate its Edwardses and its Edwardses can no longer stomach its Combses. It seems, at long last, that the conservative-pseudoconservative coalition is doomed.

 

Less Meek

Just a short take this morning.

 

It now seems a) irreversible that Democratic senatorial candidate Kendrick Meek will finish last and thus b) advisable that he should quit the race assuming c) Independent candidate Charlie Crist promises to caucus with Democrats, all of which d) would stop GOP candidate Marco Rubio in his tea partying tracks.

 

I was prone to suggest this weeks ago but wanted to see how October proceeded. It ain’t good: the lastest CNN Opinion Research poll has Meek at 21, Crist at 30, and Rubio at an unbeatable 42 -- unbeatable, given his divided opposition.

 

If Meek were at 30 and Crist 21 I’d suggest Crist’s self-removal. The transcendent goal here, though, is to stop one of the tea party’s golden boys.  



Getting what’s been gotten

It’s a real stretch but still tempting to say that in 2008 Candidate Obama acted the slick Madison Adman in overselling the idea of change, the idea of progress, while minimizing or altogether dismissing the unpleasant realities of working for both. Indeed, it’s more than just tempting for some among the utopian left; they pointedly accuse Obama of playing this very shell game, hence they’ll play no more because they’ll countenance the con artist no more.

Others among the disaffected progressive base acknowledge that the above accusation is wildly misguided. Both Candidate Obama and President Obama, they concede, have always balanced the spiritual rhetoric of progress with the realistic rhetoric of pushback. Obama, they admit, conned no one about the difficulties ahead; he both forecast and emphasized a prolonged and arduous struggle.

So why their persistent disaffection -- one virtually indistinguishable in degree from the utopians’ disaffection?

Answer: A fundamental misunderstanding of the vast difference between campaigning and governing, as beautifully reexpressed in the NY Times this morning by the uncomprehending and suddenly ubiquitous Adam Green, of BoldProgressives.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee:

“It’s great that President Obama is showing a fighting spirit in the weeks before an election, but what his former voters need to see is that same fighting spirit when he’s governing.”

Thus Green & Co.’s central complaint, one so cluelessly removed from the actual battlefields of governance and lawmaking as to leave one nearly in awe. 

It can be dispatched with ease, as President Obama did recently with respect to Mr. Green’s particularly pathological idée fixe, the public option:

“I could have had a knock-down, drag-out fight on the public option that might have energized [Rolling Stone] and The Huffington Post, and we would not have health care legislation now.”

The same held true for financial reform, and will – someday -- hold true for energy reform and immigration reform and tax reform and every other broken sector of U.S. policy. And by the way, the same held true for FDR and LBJ, for the New Deal and the Great Society; once legislation moved from concept to committee, the “fighting spirit” behind it mostly morphed into quiet negotiation and disagreeable compromise.

That’s the way it goes, and that, for better or worse, is the way it was designed to go, and that’s what some progressives just don’t seem to “get.”