Posted on 09/07/2012 6:53:33 PM PDT by neverdem
Going by the conventional rules of American politics, the Democratic convention this week was an unmitigated disaster. And, going by the same rules, the GOP convention was a disaster, too. So, either the rules of American politics have fundamentally changed, or at least one of the parties is taking an enormous gamble.
Since the Nixon years, the GOP has enjoyed a marked advantage over the Democrats at the presidential level. Cultural issues — race, religion, abortion, patriotism — have worked to the Republicans’ advantage. Until Barack Obama’s election in 2008, no Democrat has won the presidency without aggressively adapting to that fact.
Jimmy Carter, a southern Evangelical, defeated a very moderate Vice President Gerald Ford at a moment when the GOP was still reeling from the Watergate scandal and Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Still, it’s easy to forget that Carter was the choice of what would come to be known as the “Christian Right” (historian Steven Hayward reminds me that Carter got a lavishly generous reception on the fledgling “700 Club”).
At the beginning of the general-election campaign, Ford was behind 33 points and by the end had very nearly caught up with Carter. Had Carter not cast himself as a pious southern veteran, small-business owner, and conservative-leaning Democrat (opposed to busing, muddled on abortion), or if the GOP had not nominated such a liberal candidate so closely tied to the Nixon presidency, it’s quite possible the Republicans would have won in 1976.
Since then, any Democrat who tried to run as an unapologetic liberal, particularly on cultural issues, lost. In 1992, the Democrats seemed to have figured that out. They nominated Bill Clinton, a pro-death-penalty Southerner who wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” and who campaigned against the “something for nothing” welfare-state politics of his own party. He picked fights — often symbolic, occasionally substantive — with the Left to prove he was a centrist.
Thanks to a host of complex reasons, many of them having to do with George W. Bush’s mixed political legacy, the Democrats no longer feel the need to play Clintonian games. They yanked the “rare” language out of the abortion plank of the platform, supporting instead abortion on demand. Indeed, a layman watching the speeches from abortion activists, and more importantly the reactions of the delegates, would conclude that the ancestral party of the Free Silver movement had morphed into the free abortion movement. It’s a remarkable shift given that the electorate is more pro-life today than it was when Bill Clinton ran in 1992.
On the symbolism front, in what even leading Democrats admit was a spectacular display of self-inflicted stupidity, they managed to scrub any mention of God from the Democratic platform. They also removed support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. When they realized how grievously idiotic these unforced errors were, they tried to fix them by amending the document. The result was an ugly moment where the delegates voted three times against, in effect, God and Jerusalem, until the chairman of the convention, L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa simply steamrolled his own party like some Politburo bully.
It’s an unspoken rule of politics that you’re in a bad place when you’re renouncing God on TV — three times! Even Peter stayed away from the cameras when he renounced Jesus.
Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have become Dukakified. It was Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that the election should be entirely about “competence, not ideology.” Romney has avoided saying that in so many words, but it’s certainly how he’s campaigning. After running to the right in the primaries and boldly picking Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney bizarrely seems to have retreated to an ideological and even intellectual crouch.
Though he doesn’t say it explicitly, the tone and tenor of Romney’s convention speech suggested that Obama failed because didn’t have the right resume, not because he has the wrong ideas. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s top strategist, has dismayed many on the right by operating according to the theory that Romney mustn’t do anything to offend the delicate sensibilities of some statistical abstraction of a female voter in the Ohio suburbs. Listening to the Romney speech, you’d have no idea he picked a principled, fearless, and brilliant conservative lightning rod as a running mate.
If Stevens’s theory of the election is right, then the GOP convention was brilliantly executed. But that is a huge gamble — as huge as Obama’s bet that Americans have moved left. Right now, however, it looks too much like a contest between people with the wrong ideas against people without any.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc
already posted
” Listening to the Romney speech, you’d have no idea he picked a principled, fearless, and brilliant conservative lightning rod as a running mate.”
That’s because he didn’t. Ryan was begging congress to vote for TARP even when it was a big no-no. His budget is also a gimmick that relies on assumptions of 2 percent unemployment and 5 percent growth every year (something we have not seen for 30 years) to “grow” (not cut) us out of debt by 2040.
Ryan is just the gimmicky Robin to Romney’s Camp version of Batman. The GOP hope to propel that loser as the new “Sarah Palin,” that way the real Sarah Palin won’t be able to threaten their interests.
Vote for Sarah Palin next time. Palin chose NOT TO RUN this time.
I was going to vote for her. Now I’ll vote for Mitt Romney, and Ryan.
Above all vote.
Vote.
Your assessment of Ryan’s budget is not correct, as itneither assumes 2 percent unemployment or 5 percent growth It is not gimmicky and is quite the opposite. It reforms the two largest entitlements and dramatically changes the spending track that is going to bankrupt and collapse our economy. It also has evolved to get enough support from the opposition to get through a slight republican senate majority.
I guess when your candidate is like Obama and has no ideas or solutions the only think you are left with is trash talking the opposition.
It's a Leftist clown pretending to be "uber conservatives" to "infiltrate Conservative websites and spread distention" like it's Progressive Fascist Democrat masters tell it to. >[? Don't waste your time reasoning with it, it will simply keep screaming it's pre-programed lies.
RC IS GETTING A REST ..A MUCH NEEDED REST.
Truly an idiotic piece.
This may be Romney’s best strategy. You have to consider the electorate. Fer cryin’ out loud! He has to appeal to people who were actually stupid enough to vote for Zippy in 2008. So regardless of his ideology, regardless of his ideas or lack of them, maybe laying low when it looks like he’s leading is a good strategy.
That’s what I would do.
If you’re heading for victory, don’t make any sudden moves that could send you off course.
You could argue that O-bummer has the wrong ideas because he has the wrong resume. I ran into people like him in academia, they have never had a "real job" where they were expected to have ideas and make them work in the real world.
Yes O-Bummer is out to destroy America but he is not, (Thankfully!) very good at it. Mostly because he has a head full of theory but has never actually done any of the actual work.
He’s using Ryan as his attack dog ever so gently riding the fence and getting the true message across, good tactic.
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