Thursday, October 23, 2008

Wet Dream, III: I'm Melting!

Why the silly, disgusting (yet heretofore successful) tactics that have worked for the Republicans for 40 years suddenly don't work anymore.

Glenn Greenwald attempts to suss it out:
What is happening to GOP electoral tactics?
There's clearly something interesting -- and different -- happening here. It's not that right-wing politicians are accusing liberals and Democrats of being unpatriotic, anti-American subversives. There's nothing new about that. To the contrary, that McCarthyite accusation has virtually been a central plank -- one could say the defining plank -- in the GOP platform for the last three decades, at least.

What's different -- markedly so -- is that once they do it, they feel compelled to backtrack, deny they said it or meant it, rescind it, and -- in the case of Palin -- actually "apologize" for it.…Apologies in general are viewed as marks of weakness on the Right and are extremely rare; but in particular, the idea that any of them would apologize for insulting liberals or impugning their patriotism is simply unfathomable.

Yet in a period of one week, that's what all three of these right-wing candidates have done -- quite abjectly. Clearly, the standard right-wing electoral tactics simply aren't working this year.

Perhaps most significantly of all, the views typically attributed to Democrats and liberals to justify the "unpatriotic" and "radical" labels -- particularly those in national security -- are now views shared by the majority of Americans. I thought one of the most illustrative moments of the campaign was when Sarah Palin, in her debate with Joe Biden, snidely accused Obama of wanting to wave the "white flag of surrender in Iraq." That taunt -- an old, reliable favorite GOP trope -- fell flat on its face. How do you convince Americans that Democrats are weak, America-hating radicals by virtue of views which a majority of Americans themselves embrace?
We're gradually seeing not only the demise of the right-wing faction that has dominated the Republican Party for decades, but also the death of their ugliest and most toxic tactics. When numerous right-wing figures crawl across one's television set desperately denying and abjectly apologizing for attacks on the patriotism of Democrats and liberals, that is potent evidence that, at least as a matter of political rhetoric, a genuine sea-change is taking place.
The New Yorker's George Packer sums it up like this:
End of an Era
The Republican Party’s immediate post-election future will be a bloody struggle over Palinism. It’s already started at National Review online, where the growing hysteria of the posts signals that the roof is falling in on conservatism. Everything that worked for forty years has suddenly not just stopped working, it has become self-defeating. Republican candidates, strategists, and pundits are like witchdoctors who keep repeating the old incantations over and over, their voices rising in furious shock, to no effect. That’s the sound of an era ending.

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