Politics, Nov 2012

I don't usually write about politics.  What's the point?  There are few things as tedious as someone else's political opinions.  But once every couple years I do like to write things down, to document where my head is, if for no other reason than to provide entertainment value for the future me.  In January 2007 I documented the carnage of the first six years of Bush, whose worst offenses had then just been put to a halt by the Nov 2006 election.  In October 2008 I noted my thoughts on the eve of the election four years ago.

And so here we are on the eve of the 2012 presidential election.

I'm not a Democrat.  It's just that I find nearly everything the GOP has done in the past 30+ years to be repugnant.  Their social policies are non-starters of course.  But while I might agree with the rhetoric of their fiscal policies, when they get into office they don't actually do what they say.  They spend lavishly on the military and on unnecessary wars, say they'll balance the budget but instead balloon the deficit and debt with supply side voodoo economics, and then have the balls to blame all the resulting troubles on the Democrats.

Follow the data.  That is my political party.  Listen to what they say, and then see if they do it.  The Democrats are far more honest legislators then the Republicans.

But the GOP is better at campaigning.

The GOP is simply better than the Democratic party at "leveraging stupid".  They can exploit what people don't know in ways that lead them to vote against their own interests.  Lubricate the whole process with massive amounts of money and it's no contest.

The GOP is increasingly able to leverage our fickle and forgetful populace.  Recent GOP administrations have been astonishing disasters by nearly every measure, but the electorate still thinks we should swing back to them and "give them a chance".  Do you not remember even four years ago?

The GOP is much more homogeneous then the Dems and can provide a unified opposition, even when the GOP has only a slim lead in a given congressional chamber.  This is why we frequently see compromises coming out of Washington when the GOP is in the White House and the Dems hold Congress, because it's much easier to splinter off some Democrats.  With Obama in the White House and a GOP-held House, the right simply circles their wagons and waits it out.  Heck, with Obama in the White House and both chambers under Dem control, they could barely get legislation passed, because the Democratic party is a big tent and there are lots of competing and conflicting interests -- not to mention that the legislature is typically fighting an uphill battle against lavish lobbyist spending on the other side.  And so we get more center-right legislation passed.

The country has been sliding to the right for decades now.  Obama winning in 2008 was an astonishing and wonderful aberration, and one we're not going to see again in a generation, if ever.  Whether it resumes in 2013 or 2017, it is inevitable that we will soon return to a dominant GOP and their Treasury-liquidating machinations.  All Obama did was put the brakes on the looting for a few years.

When the history of this campaign is written, I think it will show that the crucial factor was the ability of the Obama machine to watch for the tiniest gaffes and amplify them into national news stories. Todd Akin, London Olympic readiness, 47 percent, etc. Actual issues and policies don't really matter; what you need to do is capitalize on the gaffes. And with Obama being such a master of self control and careful rhetoric, the GOP is not going to be able to compete on this playing field (unless they cheat, a la "you didn't build that" and creative editing).

But also keep in mind that while some see the GOP making blunder after blunder, a sizable chunk of the population is subsisting on a steady diet of *precisely* the opposite "news" that the rest of us are: a steady right-wing drip feed of gaffe shockers from Obama / Dems / left wingers, playing into the right wing's own persecution fantasies. They've made their own reality, and now they live in it.

In fact, will conservatives accept the results of the election if Obama wins?  Even if the final tally isn't close, I think August 2009 demonstrated how unhinged the right wing can get.  Here come the pitchforks.

In the dark days of 2011 and the runup to the GOP primaries, I said that Obama was going to CRUSH his opponent, and until October it looked like it was going to be as easy as I thought. Thanks to Romney gaffes and GOP wingnut comments on social issues, the campaign was all about how extreme the GOP had become, and not so much about Obama's failings.

Conventional wisdom was that Romney would kowtow to the rabid right during the primary season and then pivot to the center for the general election. In due course he did jettison all of his previous moderate beliefs during the primaries, even abandoning the one major legislative achievement that he HAD managed to eke out while governing Massachusetts -- his healthcare plan. But has the primaries wrapped up, he didn't pivot to center as we expected. The convention came and went, and he didn't pivot -- he was still way out there on the right. September came and went, no pivot.

Finally, during the first debate in early October (only a month before the election) he finally made the pivot, momentarily (and famously) stunning Obama with his new detachment from the previous 7 years of campaigning. Now Romney suddenly was for all sorts of centrist policies, and in plenty of cases nakedly adopting Obama's own positions.

Even if you believe that we are now seeing the "real" Romney, and the right-baiting Romney from the last 7 years was the aberration, you have to worry about who else comes in the door with a Romney administration.  If you put Romney in the White House, that lets the GOP thugs back into the entire executive branch.  Remember Doug Feith?  AG Alberto Gonzales?  How about all those book-selling candidates that Romney beat on his way to the nomination?  He would likely have to appoint some of them to senior positions, if not the cabinet outright, in order to mollify the right wing.  How does Secretary of State Michelle Bachmann sound to you?

Sadly, a parallel between 2012 and 2004 is how deeply the opposition dislikes the president. Where the center-left fell into a depressed funk after Bush's re-election, I'm quite afraid of the rightwing wingnut reaction following an Obama win. The more rabid conservatives don't take failure very well.   Remember the August 2009 town hall meetings? That was some full-on (and orchestrated) batshit crazy there, with concealed carry permits.

As Matt Taibbi said in his September piece, "This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close".  Even if Obama wins, he won't win by a landslide, and this election cycle won't serve to repudiate the GOP's behavior of the last four years.

And so, either come 2013, or come 2017, our short break from inanity in the White House is likely over. Enjoy it while you can.

In the end, this election comes down to this:

Is the USA even governable anymore?  I think the last 4 years have shown that it is not.  The GOP made a cynical calculation in Jan 2013 that they could simple stand on "no" and wait out the clock, and they were able to manipulate enough of the populace to believe their lies.  The data could not be more clear that GOP leadership is ruinous to our country, and yet they still were able to survive and scuttle any actual progress.

We got a break from the looting; will it be a 4 year break or an 8 year break?