Decisions

I've commented on these remarks by Fred Barnes before, but Pam Spaulding has a post with more detail that leads me to look at this in a new light. It might seem like this should be an FGB post, but . . . well, no. She quotes from Chuck Wolfe of teh Victory Fund:

If McCain decides to take Barnes' advice, his campaign will no doubt be forceful in its effort to convince fair-minded Republicans and independents that ending marriage rights in California and barring gays from serving openly in the military are not anti-gay positions. McCain will say with a straight face that these are merely policy differences, and that he does not condone discrimination against anyone.

...The targets of that twisted message, both inside and outside the campaign, will have to make a choice. Will they let themselves imagine McCain is cringing through such a speech, regretting what he knows he is doing to his friends and staff, and that later, in private, they'll get a wink and a nod and whispered assurances that he's only doing what he has to do to win?

This goes far beyond gay issues, into a fundamental crisis in American politics, and, indeed, the whole cast of public discourse in this country. We've seen Obama move from what we thought were position statements embodying the ideals of change to more "moderate" statements designed to appeal to the middle -- whatever that is these days. My own thought is that the pundit class has moved discourse so far to the right in this country that the "middle" equals what used to be known as "moderate Republican," give or take the Neanderthal positions on social issues (and I might point out that the tactics here reveal a distinct distrust of the American system, but that's only to be expected of an authoritarian philosophy; we won't even address the hypocrisy involved in decrying government involvement in just about every aspect of our society while attempting to use that same government to impose ideologically acceptable policies -- but see more on that below). Given the results of public opinion polls on a range of issues over the past few years, it's obvious that the pundit class -- and their joined-at-the-hip twins, the political establishment -- are seriously out of touch. (I think I noted that Barnes is full of it regarding DADT and same-sex marriage, but it seems to be a scientifically confirmed fact that if you repeat something often enough, even if people know it's not true, they believe it.)

I think one reason I'm so fed up with the political process in this country is that I was really hoping that Obama, at least, would take a position and pull the country to him, not take a position and then abandon it (or appear to abandon it) to chase after what the pundit class says the country thinks. (There's no hope for McCain -- he's proven himself a vote whore time and time again over the past eight years.)

And let's not forget ideology: someone like Andrew Sullivan and, one assumes, the Log Cabin Republicans, find themselves in the position of espousing a philosophy that has become somewhat more than tarnished. Sullivan's response is to try to distance himself from the reality while maintaining the identity -- his periodic attacks on the Christianists and neocons while maintaining that he is a "true conservative" amount to no more than that, when the reality is that the name is most of the identity. I think America has been, historically, pretty much a non-ideological experiment. We are, when all is said and done, pragmatists -- we're interested in what works, and the philosophy can fall by the wayside -- or be developed after the fact. (Which to me says there is an upside to our deeply held anti-intellectualism.) And I think we're right: what we're seeing now is how ideology can cripple us.

So I guess we just go through the motions again this year while we're waiting for someone with the balls to stand up and say "Wait a minute! What the hell are you doing here?"

I'm not holding my breath.