Frank Rich: In Praise of Extremism

In a best-case scenario for him, the GOP will spurn Perry for Romney. It’s a given in Washington, of course, that Romney is the tougher opponent for Obama because he appeals to “moderate” and “independent” voters. The Beltway hands making this case are usually the same suspects who caution Obama to stick to the “vital center.” As Michael Gerson, the Bush 43 speechwriter turned columnist, put it last week, Romney is the GOP’s “safe choice” because he represents the “reassuring center.”

Gerson argues that Romney’s “prospects are better than his current polling” and likens him to Thomas Dewey without a hint of irony. A more accurate assessment comes from another conservative writer, Jonah Goldberg, who compares the inauthentic Romney to an alligator or a shark, animals “that just seem fake when you see them in real life.” Obama should only be so lucky as to run against a robotic leveraged-buyout tycoon whose Massachusetts health-care reforms resemble his own and whose religion vexes orthodox Christians in the GOP base.

Somebody slap me. It should be a cold day in Hell when I agree with the likes of Frank Rich, but in this case I do, although I draw a conclusion diametrically opposite to his. Yes, there is a widespread, perhaps conclusive, disaffection toward the sort of centrism that is expressed by Washington insiders. This sort of "bipartisanship" is nothing more than a middle ground between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who have, over the course of some years, managed to position themselves as the opposite poles of a vanishingly narrow political continuum. That is, however, how the game is played inside the Beltway, as a wet-behind-the-ears neophyte such as Barack Hussein 0bama has come to learn, precisely as many of us predicted from the beginning.

Rich is correct - there, I've said it - in that there is, in present-day politics, a widespread disdain for that ridiculous, self-important gaggle of political castrati that is typified by one David Brooks, whom Rich rightfully ridicules, his predecessor the late David Broder, about whom de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, and a weird cadre of media sycophants who appear to have concluded that their moving leaves somehow make the political winds blow. They are about to be disabused of that self-absorbed notion.

Where I depart from Mr. Rich is his apparent conviction that were 0bama to return to some radical progressive stance the political tide would once again surge his direction. That simply isn't going to happen. There is a wave of "extremism" if one is willing to endure the misapplication of that idiot label, but not in the progressive direction. It is against the Beltway Powers That Be, yes; it is against "bipartisanship" as that label has been equally misapplied toward "agree with the Democrats", it is against big government, big waste, big ideas that produce nothing but misery, big aspirations that end up in the crushing return to reality that is the very summation of the 0bama Presidency, big talk, big spending, and big bags of political gas that dwarf the Hindenburg and are likely to lead us to a similar end. Rich has identified the problem, all right: it is himself.

0bama will not salvage this mess in the name of fervent progressives everywhere; if he does manage to do so it will be as a pathetic, bouncing puppet of precisely those political factions who Rich appears to disdain as much as his mirror-image adherents of the Tea Party do. It is not a time of "extremism", it is a time of a long overdue correction to that inflated boil on the body politic that is modern government. It needs to be lanced, not nurtured, and no one on Rich's side of the house has a stake in anything but further inflammation.

He's stuck, truth be told. They're all stuck, the ones who thought that a two-bit Chicago pol would be their ticket to a wonderful new progressive utopia. He isn't, he won't be, and the hope that if only he were to double the dose of poison it would turn into a cure is a progressive fantasy that Rich still hasn't given up and probably never will. The rest of us don't care what is called "extremism" anymore. We want out of this idiocy and we aren't going to run to the comfortable Beltway crowd as a better alternative to themselves. That illusion really is gone.

Bump for a good post.

Actually, that is the subject of some troubling reflection on yesterday's Newshour, when Judy Woodruff interviewed two authors of a new book on the Millenial Generation (Gen Y), which is the generation born basically 1982-2001/2/3 (they chose 2003, I suspect just to make it bigger than the Baby Boom Generation, and so make their megaphone louder).

Young people of this generation, they tell us, are the triumphant, soon-to-be-all-conquering Fruit of the Long Marchers, the New Soviet Man of Fabian Communism. They're this, they're that, they're liberal ...... skulls full of mush, I think Rush said ...... but these heralds announce that it is now time for all the useless old hatey people like us to just get out of the way.

Ever notice how liberals are always ready to box us up and bury us? I was listening to some old Peter, Paul, and Mary numbers being (also) bruited on PBS -- same message, get lost, go away and ..... oh, I don't know, eat rat poison or something. "Eat Starch, Mom" was Grace Slick's take on it 40 years ago. Bet Mom didn't.

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