Sam Tanenhaus: The Tangled Relations Between The Republican Party And The Conservative Movement
The conservative movement has never been in poorer shape than it is today, but who among us is confident that it is going away? By all estimates, the Republicans are confronting the worst prospects for a governing party since 1976 (post-Watergate) or even 1932 (post-Crash), and yet the presidential race grows tighter by the day. All this has some thinking back fearfully to elections past, when the Democratic Party seemed to hold the advantage, only to see its high-minded good-government candidates dismembered by the Republican "attack machine." Already some now worry that Barack Obama may simply be next in the line of sacrificial saints, joining Adlai Stevenson and Al Gore, George McGovern and Michael Dukakis. And conservatism's moving parts are still intact. Rush Limbaugh and his fourteen million listeners are very much with us. So, too, is the brain trust that gave us the Iraq war; some of its best minds (Robert Kagan, for one) are now nestled in the McCain campaign. Karl Rove, the tarnished "boy genius" who presided over the midterm debacle of the 2006 elections, is back in the game-- in fact playing several games at once (Fox News, Newsweek, informal McCain adviser). Even George Bush, stuck with the lowest approval ratings in modern history, remains a champion fund-raiser.
The right thrives elsewhere, too--as an example to liberals who have studied its strategies and its tactics. The inflamed young netroots organizers who propelled Howard Dean to national prominence in 2004 and damaged Joseph Lieberman's campaign in 2006 consciously modeled their styles of protest politics on the insurgent campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. And in the last, desperate phase of her primary struggle, Hillary Clinton nakedly deployed the racially charged idiom perfected by "white backlash" candidates from George Wallace to Jesse Helms.
And there is the curious case of liberal academics who have fashioned themselves into authorities on Republican tradecraft, particularly in the realm of button-pushing rhetoric. Foremost among them is the Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who for some time has been tutoring Democrats in the uses of emotionally charged language so that they, like Republicans, can tap the "irrational" impulses of voters. The appeal of this recomm end ation of demagoguery is its "science." Lakoff's recent book The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain explores Republicans' ingenuity at "preparing the seedbed of our brains with their high-level general principles so that when 'tax relief' was planted, their framing could take root and sprout." He detests the ideology, but he admires the method.
Another important installment in the Democrats' new training in Republican-style ruthlessness is The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, who outlines methods by which Democrats might copy the verbal roundhouses thrown by Republican candidates. According to Westen, Gore's mistake during the 2000 debates was to deflect Bush's personal attacks when he might have roared back in kind. Here, according to Westen, is what Gore should have said: "If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings." On the strength of his theories, Westen became a fleeting sensation a year ago. His fans included Bill Clinton, who told The New York Times: "To say I think it's a very important book is an understatement." Clinton added that he was underlining passages for his wife as she was preparing to begin her campaign....
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The right thrives elsewhere, too--as an example to liberals who have studied its strategies and its tactics. The inflamed young netroots organizers who propelled Howard Dean to national prominence in 2004 and damaged Joseph Lieberman's campaign in 2006 consciously modeled their styles of protest politics on the insurgent campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. And in the last, desperate phase of her primary struggle, Hillary Clinton nakedly deployed the racially charged idiom perfected by "white backlash" candidates from George Wallace to Jesse Helms.
And there is the curious case of liberal academics who have fashioned themselves into authorities on Republican tradecraft, particularly in the realm of button-pushing rhetoric. Foremost among them is the Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who for some time has been tutoring Democrats in the uses of emotionally charged language so that they, like Republicans, can tap the "irrational" impulses of voters. The appeal of this recomm end ation of demagoguery is its "science." Lakoff's recent book The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain explores Republicans' ingenuity at "preparing the seedbed of our brains with their high-level general principles so that when 'tax relief' was planted, their framing could take root and sprout." He detests the ideology, but he admires the method.
Another important installment in the Democrats' new training in Republican-style ruthlessness is The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, who outlines methods by which Democrats might copy the verbal roundhouses thrown by Republican candidates. According to Westen, Gore's mistake during the 2000 debates was to deflect Bush's personal attacks when he might have roared back in kind. Here, according to Westen, is what Gore should have said: "If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings." On the strength of his theories, Westen became a fleeting sensation a year ago. His fans included Bill Clinton, who told The New York Times: "To say I think it's a very important book is an understatement." Clinton added that he was underlining passages for his wife as she was preparing to begin her campaign....