Crazy v. Silly

You’ll get a kick out of this Guardian post by Charles Pierce. Just a snip:

Within the struggling Republican party, there is the Angry party and the Crazy party. Sometimes – in fact, often – those two overlap. This year, those two elements between them have produced in the current Republican field the single biggest public fruitcake in the history of electoral government. At the start, it looked like Romney might accede to the leadership of that wing of the modern GOP that occasionally can be referred to as “not insane”. (In 2000, John McCain was the unquestioned leader of this faction, and he’s spent the last seven years denying it, which is how the post became vacant.)

Romney had the money and he had the record to disenthrall his party from the influence of the extremists that have taken it over the cliff and onto the rocks below. In this, he was powerfully equipped to do his party and his country a great service. Instead, against all odds, he’s spent two years carving out yet another political subset. To borrow a famous bit from the Monty Python crew, Mitt Romney seems bound and determined to fashion himself into the leader of the Silly party. …

… Romney was a decent Republican governor for Massachusetts in that he largely let things happen and stayed out of the way. He signed on to a healthcare reform bill that was driven by the Democratic state legislature and, for all his bloviating about it elsewhere, Romney pretty much let gay marriage slide safely into the mainstream. In fact, he largely gave up on the job a full two years before leaving it.

This person is almost unrecognisable on the presidential campaign stage. He has adopted weird, angry positions completely dissonant with his personality as a smooth handler of other people’s money. One minute, he’s Torquemada, babbling about doubling Guantánamo and lecturing McCain, of all people, about the efficacy of torture. The next, he’s running a television spot about immigration in which he makes Tom Tancredo sound like Emma Lazarus. (Subsequently, on that same matter, Romney has accomplished the not-inconsiderable feat of making Rudy Giuliani look reasonable on an issue of public policy.) At some point, Romney should be forced to make a speech while his consultants stand next to him, drinking glasses of water.

I do believe that what’s left of the Old Guard pre-Goldwater/Reagan GOP look to Romney to stop the insanity. However, to get the nomination Romney has to prove his angry/crazy creds to the base.

Frank Rich calls Romney “a glib salesman who seems a dead ringer for Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man of no known core convictions who works on the Nixon campaign in the TV series, ‘Mad Men.'” Pretty much my impression. The Old Guard may look to Romney to bring on the Return of Normalcy. But I don’t see much in the way of passion for Romney among the grassroots.

And then there’s Huckabee. Rich thinks Huckabee may be the Republican Barack Obama.

Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.

Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology. An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960. …

… The real reason for Mr. Huckabee’s ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting — and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian — than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia favored by the entire G.O.P. field with the sometime exception of John McCain.

Before we get all soft and gooey about what a swell guy Huckabee is, note that as recently as 1992 he was calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined and said that hollywood celebrities fund aids research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.

Seems to me that over the past year or so Republican voters have fallen in and out of love with a succession of candidates — first Giuliani, then Thompson, now Huckabee. But the War and Profits factions in the GOP hate Huckabee and will do their best to undermine him, which makes the odds he will be the nominee very long, indeed.

8 thoughts on “Crazy v. Silly

  1. At some point, Romney should be forced to make a speech while his consultants stand next to him, drinking glasses of water.

    Quote of the day, definitely. And not just because I tend to discount sentences, and even whole paragraphs, that contain the word “zeitgeist.”

  2. Oh, I don’t know. That’s a good line, but I thought “a television spot about immigration in which he makes Tom Tancredo sound like Emma Lazarus” was laugh-out loud funny. But he did soften me up with the shout-out to Monty Python – I’ve thought of that sketch often during this campaign.

    Huckabee has been worrying me for months, after I saw him on Jon Stewart. He comes across as a friendly, not angry, witty guy, and a bunch of folks could be attracted to that without realizing his politics are dreadful and his ignorance frightening. I can only hope that now that he’s a front-runner, the Dumond story will get more coverage, and Huck’s many failings will become news.

    The real quandary is, sooner or later the GOP will have to nominate someone. Who? Will we see a deadlocked convention? A schism between the Angry, Crazy, Silly and the Very Silly wings of the party? It’ll be something to watch while waiting for the writers strike to end!

  3. “But the War and Profits factions in the GOP hate Huckabee and will do their best to undermine him.”

    The W&P factions in the GOP have officially entered full panic mode. While waiting for my first cup of coffee to kick in this morning, I spent ten minutes channel surfing (the Weather Channel, Meet the Press, and This Week with George). The Weather Channel played it straight and stuck to reporting the weather. Those appearing on the other two programs were shocked, SHOCKED!, that the Republican base is infested with theocratic fundamentalists who just might nominate Huckabee. Don’t these fundies know that their job is to stuff envelopes for Republican candidates, vote Republican, then keep their mouths shut and stay out of the way of the plutocrats. The nerve of those people!

    I agree that the W&P factions will do their best to prevent Huckabee’s nomination. I think the back up plan is to make sure Hillary is the Democratic nominee. She may be a registered Democrat, but at least she understands that Republican lobbyists and war profiteers are people too, who deserve our understanding and respect.

  4. Hey Maha,
    If this is the best and brightest of the Repugs and the Dems STILL loose I’m movin’ to some obscure third world hell hole and running for emperor. The Dems have some really good people, Biden, Richardson, and Dodd are my favored over the “first tier”.
    I’ll be on the campaign trail in outer Mongolia all this week, so I won’t be in contact ’till Thursday eve………
    Cao for now.

  5. One of my favorite goofball ideas that Huckabee is proposing is what he calls the “fair” tax. He wants to abolish income tax and the IRS and substitute a 23% sales tax. So a low income family who spend all their income and possibly more, if they have a negative savings rate, would be paying 23% on virtually all of their income. Someone earning beyond their needs would pay tax on only part of their income. The more they earn the smaller percentage of their income would be subject to tax.

    I also think that sooner or later it will be impossible to ignore the fact that Huckabee is lying about his actions in the Dumond affair

    Too bad Gomer Pyle is only a fictional character, I think he would be leading the GOP pack.

  6. Mitt’s efforts in Indiana need CPR…campaign staff have had problems collecting enough signatures for the 2008 primary….

    Romney Campaign Staff have traveled to the 8th & 6th congressional districts to collect enough signatures…

    Mitt may be feeling a backlash from Indiana’s typically conservative voters and their reluctance to support a candidate who continues to morph on his values.

  7. goatherd,

    Nah, Gomer never could have made it in today’s GOP. He’s a nice guy who a) actually served in the marines and b) cared about other people and helped them.

    I see the modern GOP more as the Eddie Haskell party…..

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