Kill It While It’s Down
September 2008
s I write, at the start of the second week of September, John McCain has just pulled ahead of Barack Obama in the popular polls for the first time in the presidential race. The media are claiming a post-convention “bounce” for the Republicans. There is speculation that the Democrats have perversely set themselves up once again for defeat in a presidential election, and that the Republican Party is launched on a comeback campaign Bill Clinton would envy. Obama, the Democrats fear, may not be able to win over the white voters and independents he needs to prevail, and among whom McCain has made significant inroads since the Twin Cities rendezvous. The bounce that has been of such help to him is widely supposed to have been provided by his choice of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his hard-Right running mate. The Republican Party, we are told, is back in play again, despite its devastating defeat in the midterm elections two years ago when it lost the House and Senate, George W. Bush’s 30-percent-and-under popularity ratings, and the president’s demonstrably failed presidency on every front during the past eight years. How was this apparently miraculous turnaround--Sarah Barracuda apart—accomplished by the Party of Lincoln?
Probably, it hasn’t been accomplished. The GOP candidate is Republican in name only, a Democrat at heart who came close to crossing the aisles a couple of years ago--which explains why his first preference for VP was Senator Joe Lieberman, the nominal Democrat and neoliberal whose interest in the Republican Party is owing solely to Bush’s and McCain’s foreign policies abetting Israeli aggression in the Middle East. The GOP of 2008 is actually at three removes from its original self: the zombie in possession of the original zombie that galvanized the corpse of Robert Taft’s GOP after World War Two.
Thus, if McCain and his inner party are victorious in November, the power and the spoils will go elsewhere than to what is somehow still commonly thought of as Republicanism. Because the Grand Old Party, as the opposition party to the Democrats, is dead. It was moribund well before 2000, but Dubya finished it off by his embrace of a liberal foreign policy offered in the spirit of America First (Wilsonian idealism and Johnsonian powerlust), and liberal profligacy at home (deficit spending, home mortgages for the poor, the socialization of prescription medicine, etc.) presented as “compassionate conservatism”.
In the seemingly endless course of a presidential campaign that has lasted nearly two years already, a campaign crowded with so many strutting narcisistic nincompoops, so many appalling incidents and spectacles as to make one despair of modern mass democracy as a credible and effective form of government, the most outrageous affront is John McCain’s claim to being an agent of “change.” A McCain presidency would represent the triumph of the worst ascendent elements of both parties combined. It would, in fact, signal the creation, long in the making, of what would effectively amount to a single national party, the Democratic-Republican Party: the engine of single-party rule in America, as the conservative Republican grassroots were crushed at last and the McCain Republicans--the so-called moderate Republicans of the post World War II era--merged with the Democrats to form an irresistible Democratic-Republican majority.
As for Sarah Palin as Vice President of the United States: First, she is Number Two on the ticket. Second: I do not know much about Alaskan politics but I am familiar with the politics of the state of Wyoming, which has been home to me now for 30 years. The two states are similar in many ways. First, they have by far the fewest inhabitants of all the 50 states in the Union. In 2005, Alaska’s population was about 660,000 people, Wyoming’s some 509,000. Both are represented in Washington, D.C. by a single U.S. Representative. Both rely overwhelmingly on mineral extraction to support their economies, and on severance taxes as a source of state revenue. Both retain a marked frontier character, owing to their small populations and millions of acres of wilderness and undeveloped land. And both are Republican states, whose brand of Republicanism is fundamentally libertarian.
One might suppose Wyoming to be a conservative Republican’s dream. But it is not so. The most “conservative” (also the most effective) Wyoming politician in the years of my residency in the state was Gov. Ed Herschler, a Democrat. Herschler was a rancher and a lawyer from Kemmerer where I lived for 20 years (I was somewhat acquainted with the family) who performed the heroic feat of selling Wyoming’s resources to the multinational energy companies at a fair price, while seeing to it that they did not rape the state by destroying its remaining resources in the process. By comparison with Herschler, the Republican bigwigs in Wyoming have been mostly busts or disasters. Senator Alan Simpson helped give the country the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill of 1986, Congress’s first attempt at “solving” the immigration crisis by amnestying illegal aliens. Senator Malcom Wallop, elected to his first term on a responsibly environmentalist platform, ended by selling out his initial constituency and is today a full-time resident of the Beltway, where he apparently has forgotten that such a place as Wyoming exists. Republican governors since Herschler’s time have been blank cartridges; while a friend of mine, elected to the state legislature two years ago, decribed for me last summer how the Republicans in Cheyenne, who vastly outnumber the Democrats there, are doing their best to prove they are More Democratic Than Thou by squandering the state’s mineral tax bonanza on socialistic schemes that Ed Herschler would have vetoed over bourbon and cigarettes at the Hitching Post saloon, across town from the capital building. Lastly, of course, there is Vice-President Dick Cheney, architect and master ventriloquist of the Bush administration, for whose worst excesses in the areas of foreign policy and constitutional rights he is largely responsible. (In my experience, the best of the Wyoming Republican bunch has been Rep. Barbara Cubin, a Republican who has done heroic work on several fronts, the immigration fight especially. Unluckily, having served eight terms she is now unwell, her husband is unweller still, and Mrs. Cubin has declined to run again for office this fall.) It is possible that I am being unfair to Gov. Palin, but I cannot help recognizing in her the exact same form and type of Republican politician that has prevailed in Wyoming for three decades, to our disadvantage and that of the rest of the country as well.
The GOP has overstayed its welcome by 148 years, and it is past time now for it to go. Springfield delenda est--and the sooner that happens, the better. A victory this fall by the Party of McCain will save the Democratic Party by reinforcing and legitimizing it, but a Democratic win could end by sinking both parties four years from now, when President Obama’s postracial and post-political administration will be known chiefly for its black patronage machine and a particularly vicious type of politics calculated to cover over the naïve incompetency of government by ideologues that will have demonstrably led the country farther away than ever from the Promised Land, while bringing it a few steps closer to Kenya.
At that point, with the two national parties discredited and in shambles, the American people may find themselves in a position to discern where real political change actually lies. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.