Republicans are fond of billing themselves as the party of "personal responsibility." But what they seem to mean by that is that everybody else should take personal responsibility for Republicans' failures--because Lord knows they're not likely to do it themselves.
Here's a case in point. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com quotes "Ace of Spades" (link is in the linked post; damned if I'll send 'em any more traffic) on a recent interview given by Republican darling Sarah Palin:
I don't like this interview. I was trying to figure out why. I think I know. Even though it's interesting to know about Palin's reaction to her mistreatment by the media, I think we are now getting well oversaturated on such personal stuff. It's too much the Heroine's Tale, which is nice and all, but we're ultimately looking for a leader, not someone with a tale of hardship. (Emphasis added)
To which Nate comments, "I think we can acknowledge that Palin had a rough go of things with the media."
OK, fair point. But I will argue that the main reason Sarah Palin had a "rough go of things with the media" was not mistreatment by the media, but rather the fact that she's dumber than the proverbial box of rocks and utterly unprepared for political office--and no amount of winking and expensive clothing could cover that salient fact up.
The Republicans would crucify any reporter who dared ask Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama, or any Democratic politician) the kind of idiotic softball questions that were routinely handed to Sarah Palin--who still managed to come off looking galactically clueless. Consequently, she was kept under wraps for most of the rest of the campaign cycle, appearing only at closed events with tightly controlled audiences who could be guaranteed to applaud at all the "right" lines and also not to notice that the woman can't string two coherent sentences together on a regular basis or that she has a distressingly casual relationship with the truth.
As Nate points out, that was also largely a failure of the McCain campaign in having no coherent media strategy, other than to complain about it all the time. Indeed, there was so much carping and griping and pissing and moaning from the Republican camp about the media coverage of the campaign that it would have served them right if the media had treated them more severely than it did the Democrats. As I was just remarking to one of my colleagues this afternoon, there's an old saying in America: "The toes you step on today may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow." That's a lesson that John McCain and the Republican Party appear not to have learned too well.
Same thing with the Republicans' analysis (if that's the right word to use for what they've been doing) of why they lost the election. It's not that their ideas are decades out of date, bear no rational relationship to reality, have been tried and routinely failed, or that they picked the worst possible candidate to represent them, and then let him pick the worst possible running mate. No, it's that they weren't sufficiently slavishly devoted to their tired, worn-out, ineffective, and out-of-touch ideas. Oh, and voter fraud (at least according to Norm Coleman).
I see the same theme running through the comments made by Republican members of Congress when they were discussing the bailouts of Wall Street investment firms and the Big Three automakers. When they were talking about their best buddies on Wall Street, the people who pushed to deregulate the financial sector and manipulated the markets in a Ponzi scheme that makes even Bernie Madoff's gargantuan house of cards look puny by comparison, the Republican message was something like "ZOMG! If we don't give them absolutely everything they want, no strings attached, no oversight, no transparency, and rightfuckingnow!, the world will come to an end!" Fast forward a few weeks to when the automakers came back to town for the second try, and asked for a loan package a minuscule fraction of what the Republicans had insisted we hand over to their fund-raising friends, and suddenly we were being told that time was not of the essence, that all manner of concessions would have to be made, and a government overseer would have to be appointed, and that the companies' bad management should not be rewarded. I guess the take-home message there was, yet again, IOKIYAR.
I could go on and on. (Larry Craig, Mark Foley, the Katrina débâcle, Enron, yada, yada, yada...) But if the Republicans really want to resuscitate their brand, I would respectfully suggest that they start acting like the party of personal responsibility, instead of being the party that just always talks about it.
Comments