“June Is GOP Throwback Month”: Republicans Are Not Trying Very Hard To Escape Their Past
The right has long seemed stuck in the 1980s, ever basking in Ronald Reagan’s warm glow and policy solutions. This month it seems conservatives have decided to switch things up and temporally relocate themselves to the 2000s, if just for a little while.
So a giant squirrel is following former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton around the country on her book tour. Seriously. The Republican National Committee has dispatched someone in a bright orange squirrel costume to appear at her book events. The costume, Mother Jones reported this week, is left over from a similar 2008 publicity stunt in which the party used the squirrel to illustrate its concerns about ACORN, the now-defunct voter mobilization group. There was a logic to it then – squirrels and acorns – but now it’s as if someone at the RNC was cleaning out a closet, came across the squirrel suit and thought to themselves: Well, we can’t let this beauty go to waste. So the squirrel now wears a T-shirt which reads, “Another Clinton in the White House is Nuts.”
That sentiment neatly channels one of the early, sanctimonious premises of the George W. Bush presidency – the idea of Clinton fatigue, that the country didn’t want any more of the 42nd president, that “America wants somebody to restore honor and dignity to the White House,” as Bush put it while campaigning for the office. That somebody at the RNC thinks describing a return to Clintonism as “nuts” indicates that that particular delusion hasn’t been dislodged in the intervening 14 years. Remember that when he left office Bill Clinton enjoyed a 66 percent approval rating, according to Gallup. And just this week a Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Annenberg poll found that he is easily the most admired president of the last quarter century, with 42 percent of respondents naming him the most admired chief executive in that time. That’s light-years ahead of President Barack Obama (18 percent), the Bush who succeeded Clinton (17) and the one who preceded him (16). Peace and prosperity will do that for you.
Of course the Bush presidency reoriented itself after 9/11, and we’re getting a flashback of those years as well, thanks to the collapse of the Iraqi armed forces in the face of the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (an al-Qaida splinter group) and the civil war in Syria. So the whole neocon cast that devised the original Iraq fiasco have crawled out of the GOP memory hole apparently intent on proving the old Karl Marx-ism that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. “This is about preventing another 9/11,” former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on MSNBC this week, having updated his talking points not a wit from the first time he advocated sending armed forces into Iraq. Writing on The Weekly Standard’s website, Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol argue for air strikes and ground troops as “the only chance we have to persuade Iraq’s Sunni Arabs that they have an alternative to joining up with” al-Qaida or facing government death squads. Truly nothing persuades people of our benevolent intentions like bombing and invading their country. We’ll be greeted as liberators – just like we were the first time, right?
But the award for abject lack of self-awareness goes to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who wrote with his daughter in The Wall Street Journal this week: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Meanwhile back in the original Bush country – Texas – the 43d president’s gubernatorial successor this month channeled one of the uglier aspects of the 2004 presidential campaign, shameless gay-bashing. Recall the role played in the Bush re-election campaign of riling up the social right with state level campaigns against gay marriage. Speaking in San Francisco last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry compared homosexuality with alcoholism, saying that both afflictions can be resisted with a sufficient amount of will power. This sort of noxious comparison might have been unremarkable a decade ago, but times have changed and rapidly, with polls now showing majorities of Americans favoring marriage equality, for example. In 2014 it draws rebukes like this one, from CNBC host Joe Kernen: “I don’t think gay marriage leads to cirrhosis of the liver or domestic violence or DWIs.” Yeah, there is that.
Perry seems to have gotten the message, telling reporters at a press lunch on Thursday that he – and the GOP in general – shouldn’t get “deflected” onto social issues like the nature of homosexuality. “I stepped right in it,” he said.
Adjusting to rapid change can be hard, doubly so for conservatives whose ideology inherently resists it. Perhaps the best recent example of that emerged this week from North Carolina. State House Speaker Thom Tillis, the GOP Senate nominee, told “Carolina Business Review” in 2012 (the interview was ferreted out this week by Talking Points Memo) that “the traditional population of North Carolina and the United States is more or less stable. It’s not growing. The African-American population is roughly growing but the Hispanic population and the other immigrant populations are growing in significant numbers. We’ve got to resonate with those voters.” When asked whether Tillis was characterizing whites as the state’s and the country’s “traditional population,” his spokesman said no, that he was merely referring to “people who have been in North Carolina for a long time.” This is transparent nonsense. He contrasted the “traditional” population with, among others, the African-American population, which I’m fairly certain has been in the Tar Heel State for some time now.
But take a step back and look past the offensive content: Tillis was answering a question about his party’s inability to appeal to minorities, so when he talked about non-“traditional” voters he was doing so in the context of wanting to “resonate” with them. If this is the right’s idea of reaching out, it’s going to be a long decade for them – no wonder they’re trying to C.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 23, 2014
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