If the Mitt Fitts
This entry was posted on 12/2/2011 1:00 PM and is filed under Added Articles.
If the Mitt Fitts you Must Acquit
(yourself better than this)
Truly these reactionary times make it treacherous to be a republican. For as the dregs and detritus of the Reagan Revolution devour its own old and young, it is placing an increasingly strenuous summons on what it means to be republican. The ground is continuously shifting under the political footwork to leave only a narrower and narrower plot on which any candidate may safely stand.
In this regard, like the farmer in the old joke, the republican presidential candidates are certainly out standing in their own fields. For they are not outstanding in anyone else's. In debate, after debate, after debate, after debate in an endless profusion, a winnowing process is underway. Unfortunately they don't seem to be finding the best and brightest in these debates but identifying the dimmest and the least. The debates don't seem to be elevating anyone only settling and driving some down as this process seeks the lowest common denominator of acceptability in a candidate among potential primary voters. One by one all the tail enders rise to the top and then fall back down again. And it was not a very illustrious group to begin with. Outside of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry they are mostly all out of work actors, professional outsiders, and in some instances, like Paul, Gingrich and Romney, semi-professional candidates.
Of course, it's not the French Revolution, it's not death by guillotine that awaits those too slow of foot to change with the times, just political obscurity and obloquy awaits. Even the winners will surely be damned with illusory praise as, to appeal to a smaller and smaller base in order to beat an undistinguished field, they may be disqualifying themselves from participation in the larger political presidential lottery to come. For as time unwinds they are being forced to embrace increasingly bizarre and intellectually insupportable positions.
Still there are only two parties working here, and even the slow dog can occasionally find an old bone to gnaw. Not long ago the republicans in the House engineered a show vote in favor of the venerable slogan: "In God We Trust" that was not exactly a principle in hot dispute. But everyone really knew what they meant and in what sort of deity they truly trusted - not GOD but the almighty GOP. God in this equation being merely a political sideshow to their smaller aims. Because betray them as it might the base has stayed notoriously loyal and true to its party. So theoretically each side in our political sweepstakes is never far from a fifty-fifty shot at winning. And in truth, politically, because neither side is able to come across very convincingly, we seem to be in a period of leapfrog democracy, first one party is given a shot then the other. Kiss these warty candidates as promiscuously as you want, we still can't seem to locate a prince or princess among 'em. But this may be about to change, for at this junction let's say that it seems the democrats are in the stronger position to capture the future.
Here's why. Republican loyalists in particular have overlooked a lot, often with little to show for what they've got. Even now they are rabidly behind their party's umbrage over the current debt problems though the vast majority of the debt was clearly accumulated on their watch. Wasn't it just yesterday they were the ones printing money like it was going out of style and resisting all reasonable attempts to compromise and rein themselves in? Now that a democrat is in charge, suddenly they are budget balancing warriors. This, even though they haven't even bothered amending all their revenue shrinking/deregulating/government gutting policies which are responsible for creating all the debt in the first place.
Go a little farther back and you see them exercising considerable high dudgeon as they supported a bunch of pols who were cheating on their spouses as they tried to impeach a democratic president for cheating on his wife. Later they preferred the military patriotism of a Vietnam era draft dodger over someone who'd enlisted in Vietnam for dangerous duty, seen serious combat and received medals in the process of serving his country. Then they praised the same candidate as down to earth and the other as a dirty elitist intellectual though they'd both attended Yale at the same time and only one of them had also gone to Harvard - and that had not been the elitist.
In other words, in politics facts don't necessarily get in the way of a more visceral ideology. This holds true to democrats as well, of course, from time to time, but seldom to such a large and blatant degree as current republican theology demands. And so republican candidates expound their governing philosophies to a crowd that by this time more resembles a lynch mob, one that cheers at the mere mention of multiple executions, boos service members who have a lifestyle of which they don't approve, believe young children of illegal immigrants should be kept ignorant, barred from schools and denied citizenship even when born here and still have anger left over to profess delight at the thought of some young American dying unnecessarily due to a lack of affordable health care. Tough crowd.
They also believe the logistically impossible feat of dreaming of millions of illegal immigrants rounded up somehow, uprooted from their homes and then deported wholesale in cattle cars. Moreover, they are quite certain that Hawaii is a little Muslim country somewhere between Kenya and Indonesia, that global warming doesn't exist (the fact that the polar icecaps are melting is just a pure, once in six millennia, coincidence), they adore torture pretty much under any circumstances and consider it an article of faith that new revenues would somehow prove detrimental to balancing a budget severely in the red. And this is the set of principles the republican candidates are gamely managing to try to display their fealty to. To their shame and discredit most are succeeding.
As a result of all of these Norqistian Loyalty Oaths and many other odd and inflexible positions on which a republican candidate is judged in these troubled times how is it that the winner may be the most flexible politician working today? Mitt Romney is the essence and greatest living practioner of political malleability. He is the ultimate political striver. In a crowded field of Washington pragmatists and intellectual corner cutters he stands out. It seems that this ambidextrous Mitt, well, fits this party of ideological Puritans like a glove. He has something for everyone and nothing for all. Who can pin him down? Shamelessly opportunistic as he was four years ago in the last presidential go-round when he was beaten by the grouchy but principled (at least prior to the nomination) old man McCain, and his dingy, unprincipled and unqualified sidekick, Palin. Last time their candidate was a "Maverick" (which he often loudly proclaimed during the election then later disavowed) - Bret and Bart's younger brother John.
Chastened by that defeat, Romney has really done nothing since that time but prepare for this time, tirelessly honing the craft of canny electioneering as if that's all there was to being president; learning to be more smooth and fluent, to not blink at obvious untruths, to sense the onset of trouble to deftly segue away from embarrassing topics and learning, like a child tracing over a line drawing with a crayon, to cover up and hide all his old positions beneath glib and untraceable versions of his new positions. But with limited success. All those earlier positions are indelibly inked and bound to show through even the most persistent subterfuge and come back to haunt him.
Still, it turns out that, in this season of sheer absolutes, he is the perfect man because standing for so little his feet barely any longer even touch the ground. And as each new wave of scrutiny comes, instead of being swept off his feet and thrust aside and washed far out to sea like all the others he simply, anchorless, bobs back to a position at or near the top again. Like the once wild horse broken and tamed to the saddle Mitt now seems fit for the ride, as he brags that he is the only one in the field who has taken the infamous no new taxes pledge. I don't know but I suppose there is a ceremony attendant to this, like joining the masons or enlisting in some other not so secret society. It is not hard to visualize Mitt, one hand over his heart and the other over his eyes, surrounded by mysterious, hooded and black robed men who refuse to give their names; after having been first sworn to secrecy, and being forced to drink the blood of a dead chicken solemnly swearing, "I Mitt", he forcefully intoned
"pledge allegiance to Grover Norquist and to the inanity for which he stands, two nations, under GOP, eternally divided with inequality and injustice for all. Amen".
This is the new Pledge of Allegiance that many republicans have signed. Remarkably Romney is the only one among the presidential candidates to sign it. Apparently it is a sign of his craven determination to win this thing at all costs that he is willing to cut off one of the two principle options - and the only viable one - of solving our debt crisis for the next four years if he wins. This is so completely irresponsible that not even Gingrich or Bachmann or Perry or Cain or Santorum or Paul would be mad enough to do such a thing. Unless, like George H.W. Bush, he is just fibbing to get elected; read his slippery lips: no new taxes - ever!
Otherwise he is simply proving that he is much more interested in getting the job than he is in doing the job if he should ever get it. How else to explain putting in hock the sovereignty of the office he is seeking in advance to a low grade lobbyist and opportunist and charlatan like Grover Norquist? And to put it in writing!
It is certainly saying something that polls show that republicans think that from such an inimitable field, that he is their most electable candidate. But it's a rare triple play that Romney, "the Mitt", a la Brooks Robinson, will have to pull off if he is to be a successful presidential candidate. First his policies when he was Governor of Massachusetts are quite different than the policies he is professing now and the policies he will have to have as the republican nominee for president will have to be of a different ilk in the general election than they were in the primary if he hopes to prevail. That's a lot of juggling of positions for one man to handle - a triple flip, if you will - which could easily lead to a flop in the general election if he isn't careful. It seems that even a guy named Mitt might occasionally drop the ball trying to keep all these positions straight.
Meanwhile all the best things he's done over the years he now disavows which leaves him nothing positive on which to run. The worse ones he's never dreampt of doing he now assures his party he will embrace avidly - at least until the general election when he'll have to unimply what he just implied. Furthermore he will run as a job creater and builder of things, when his entire career has been built as a downsizer, a corporate raider who dismantled companies and eliminated jobs for fun and profit. He will run as a suppliant populist though extremely rich man of the people whose main economic plank will consist of maintaining unjustifiable tax breaks to millionaires like him and give aways to multinational corporations which (along with the Supreme Court) he caringly refers to as "people" - just folks, don't you know, just like us. Except these corporate giant amoral superhumans are just plain folks like atoms are planets or a Bengal Tiger is your child's pretty new pet kitty.
At this point the only plan of governance Romney will emerge from the primaries armed with is already set: the way to make government work better is to continue to undercut the ability of government to function (proud and effective republican policy since 1980). To reduce the debt they plan on cutting taxes further - exactly the unconscionable practice which created our endemic budgetary shortfall in the first place. And third, to alleviate pressure on the middle class he will reduce taxes only on the wealthiest 1% of the population. Simple.
It's not my fault this plan reads more like a parody than a policy. I can't help it. But their theory is, in short, that as water shouldn't be used to douse fires, more revenues should never be used to reduce debt. Each of these statements seems to be a denial of the element in question's proper function. In other words, to elect Romney and other republicans to fix our problems in Washington will be the moral equivalent of ensuring that only active, known arsonists be hired to lead our fire departments. These political firebugs have a multi-pronged plan to fight the fiscal wild fires that in a previous incarnation, a short four years ago, they were still in the process of setting. To wit: First start more fires. If the water of revenue can't be used to reduce debt then only incendiary cost cutting can. Second, mothball all the fire trucks, cut up the water hoses and lay off all those superfluous firefighters we can no longer afford. This should raise more than enough money to balance the budget - the fires will surely disappear of themselves in acknowledgement of the genius of the policy.
All of these policies (to glorify them with a name) would seem designed to achieve the opposite of what they promise. How to explain any of this? First of all, the tea party types that demand intellectural purity, when push comes to shove - the primaries being the push, the general the shove - really don't account for much. Like the social conservative wing, the "religious right" et al, before them; they are just the tail of the dog, the red-headed step child of the republican party. They will never get what they want and in fact generally get just the opposite which fuels their misdirected anger which, in the end, may be exactly what they deserve, for they never deserved to get what they wanted to begin with. There are consequences for hypocrisy.
Therefore only in the primary, like the bouncer/doorman at the popular, highly exclusive club, do they wield exclusionary power. But like the bouncer, notice they are never actually invited in to the party. They aren't affluent or well connected or even well dressed enough to attend. So they receive for their loyalty the worst of all possible worlds, less efficient, less well respected, debt ridden government with diminishing economic opportunity for them, declining government services, devolving social justice systems and crumbling infrastructure; all without even the satisfaction of joining in on the spoils as equals with the ruling class at the bar of prosperity. No they are the drones, the worker bees at the low end of the party which enable the high living queens at the other end to enjoy their super plush lives of wealth and power.
Why is this? Because the republican party is the money party. The democrats are a money party too, but despite their best (or worst) efforts and skin deep allegiance, they are no where near as deeply submerged in the money mire as the republicans. Look how quickly the corporate world coopted the tea party carpet baggers, and how quickly they let themselves be bought. Almost overnight they went from feigning outrage over Wall Street excesses and corporate bailouts and big money bankers to being rabidly pro-corporation, pro Wall Street and anti-regulation all at the same time. Seriously, the early tea party statements sounded like Occupy Wall Street. How quickly their tongues got governed when the leashes were applied and the money spread around. These are the most quickly tamed revolutionaries in history. Not exactly like the originals, after all.
These pretenders, after boarding the ship in Boston Harbor, would have quickly decided to join the British captain for afternoon crumpets and tea drunk while daintily raising their pinkies in the air. Hope they enjoyed it because it's all the benefit they're ever likely to get as recompense from Wall Street. By now their ire has been directed into safer channels for corporate America, railing against those who would keep their masters from exorcizing their moral and financial superiority over anyone who they think may be weaker than they are - which, not just coincidentally, is exactly the overriding ethic that corporate America lives by today.
But here is the republicans' visceral problem. People hold on more ferociously to that which they feel is starting to slip away from them. This explains the republican party's increasing fanaticism. They harbor a deep fear and entertain an even darker sense of foreboding that despite all their machinations and intellectual and moral compromises over the years the country is beginning to turn back to the left away from them. This is the pendulum factor in a working democracy. Once you go too far in one direction you must go back in the other. There is no exception to this rule. In this case, the more they try to chisel it, rig it, continue to say God is on their side and discredit with extreme vilification anyone who dares to disagree with them; as much as they keep trying to move the political center farther and farther to the right, the more the backlash against them will build. Some of them must know this but, like a gambler in a losing streak, they can no longer help themselves from engaging in behavior which can only hasten their own demise.
The terrible rumbling shift they felt when Obama was elected, a black democrat, is still building below ground. Though they retrenched slightly last election the wiser among them know that the tide is still turning inexorably against them, demographically, politically, socially and morally. It is of this they are terrified. That's why they are overreaching now. In state after state, they're grabbing all they can get while the grabbing is good, lining their pockets and telling their fibs. And they can do us a great deal of harm still. It is because of this they are willing to shut the government down, to ruin its credit, to filibuster it to death, to do anything to hold on to that which they feel in their bones they are losing control of.
For my money they most resemble the democratic party of Andrew Jackson at the end of its own anti-government run, just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War - the ultimate break down of political civility, if you will. They were the original anti-government, states-rights fanatics. And their fanaticism of trying to hold on to what they had never ever deserved, led to the war. The difference is that the dirty little secret of the democrats in those days, the thing they were really trying to protect with their small government cant, was slavery. The Reaganite heirs of today are anti-government states-rights fanatics who are devoted to protect and abet the accumulation of large amounts of capital into fewer and fewer hands. Otherwise the intellectual banality of their posture is inconceivable. They have blatantly tilted all their policies to massage the bank accounts and egos of the wealthiest 1/2% of Americans. Everything else is negotiable but not that. That's their dirty little secret.
But it's starting to come out of the closet. If Romney is nominated, it will mark the second presidential election in a row that the party is not wholly united behind its candidate. This is truly a disastrous split. You can't win like this. Money is separating from ideology like cream from milk or oil from water. The nominee of the old guard wealth-hoarders is different from the nominee the ideologues in the party would have chosen. It is very unlikely that such a bifurcating political party can succeed even behind an opportunist like Mitt. They just haven't grasped it yet.
