News at Home

Column: So You Were Surprised by the Approach the Republicans Took Last Week?

by P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter is a writer and historian and HNN columnist.

All last week editorialists across the country fumed over the Republican Party’s orchestrated hypocrisy in New York. It was a crying shame, they wrote, that the Grand Old Party would wallow in such political Tartuffery – hiding from television viewers its regnant princes of darkness while parading a few moderate warlocks onto the convention stage.

There at the prime-time podium, for example, stood liberal California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, bulging with conservative compassion; and there, captured at the podium, was temperate and frequently off-the-reservation John McCain, the only living Republican pol known to ever wear a military uniform. But where were the bulwarks of authentic Republicanism? You know, the fiscal crackpots and tree killers and kids’ candy stealers?

It seems, decried the commentariat, as though the party of Karl Rove is trying to … drumroll … deceive us. Not only did the party spotlight its least ideological members to avert attention from the fire-eaters behind the curtain (indeed, the most disgraceful hatchet job was assigned to zany Zell Miller, D-GA), it went a step further in suppressing nearly all inklings of policy. Economic doldrums, deepening debt, the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan – it was all a forgotten blur. In lieu of a policy map we got a cardboard caricature of W. the tough guy, W. the determined, W. the world’s resolute warrior, whether the namby-pamby world likes it or not.

As a tutorial in defiant public relations, the Republican convention was great stuff. The key is a big American flag. You can cover any blemish with it and dress any red herring in it.

All this brazen humbuggery unsettled the print punditry, yet, oddly enough for many of us in agreement, the weeklong clatter of editorial dismay was also dismaying to read. Dismaying, after a while, because in reading column after identical column denouncing such trickery one gained a clear sense that the politically aware population of editorial writers grasped just how utterly gullible is the unaware population, otherwise known as the American electorate. The obvious – that Republicans were staging a cynical hoax – needed to be hammered away at, lest millions not notice.

We’ve suffered four years of one boneheaded policy after another from the Bushies, policies that further deprive the needy, further enrich the wealthy, stagnate (at best) the middle class, encumber our children and children’s children, alienate our friends abroad and strengthen our enemies. This isn’t merely an anti-Bush take on things: It was the official Republican take all last week. Had the Bush administration a favorable record to crow about, it would have done just that rather than mask its record with diversionary chest-pounding and deceptive image-packaging. This, political commentators had to point out with repetitive, sermonic emphasis. The editorial catechism was a tribute to the electorate’s infamous lack of civic attentiveness.

Granted, the GOP was playing its only cards. When a party’s inventory of success is so bare, the party must distract attention by prattling on about überpatriotism or cultural values or plucky leadership or the promise of tomorrow. Forget what it’s done lately. If the party’s ethical coffers are equally bare, it intensifies distraction by smearing the opposition with a disregard for facts that would embarrass Baghdad Bob. That is hardly – or, rather, it shouldn’t be – news, and it sure isn’t policy and it sure isn’t anything to cast a vote for. It’s just hollow, fast-shuffle politics, a brand Republican strategists happen to be particularly adept at manufacturing.

The fast shuffle wouldn’t be a brand of winning politics, however, if the electorate’s brain were as engaged as its emotions. It would be strategic history, long since recognized and rejected for the fraud it is. And editorialists would be relieved from their present burden of harping on the obvious.

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.