The Republican route to ruin

It's pretty clear now that barring some really strange event, Barack Obama is going to win the election for President come November 4th. This year started out as a severely anti-incumbent year, and the recent financial collapse of Wall Street and banks world wide have greatly exaggerated that trend.

The fact that the Republican Party could not field a candidate for President who unified the various factions of the Reagan coalition was easily recognizable early on. There was no Bush-recommended candidate, and every major candidate who could collect enough money to enter the primary peaked out with 40% or fewer of the votes needed to win, so that finally everyone dropped out except the zombie candidate, John McCain, the Non-Republican Republican whose campaign had gone broke in the Summer of 2007 and had to be resurrected. Contrast this with the Democrats who fielded a superb group of candidates which winnowed down to Hillary Clinton and the upstart Barack Obama who were each rolling in money and who fought the primary out over half a year in all 50 states. The final decision of Democrats to choose Obama as the better of the two remaining candidates (by a small factor) was in stark contrast to the Republican choice of John McCain as the only Republican candidate not disqualified by the Primary process.

Throughout the year this was going on the American economic situation continued to get worse, while the economic pundits in the mostly brain-dead and propagandistic media kept trumpeting the "news" that the economy was going to be improving by the end of Summer by the end of 2008 by early 2009 maybe in late 2009. The fact is that no one really knew how bad things were, what was causing the economic problems, or what the future held. It was still possible for individuals trying to sell complicated bank products or elect Republican candidates like Phil Gramm to claim that the economic decline was merely a "mental recession" as late as late Summer 2009. The media was filled with economic "happy talk" even after Bear Stearns investment bank collapsed in March and right up until the other four major Wall Street investment banks disappeared and the largest insurance company in the world, AIG had to be taken over by the U.S. Government in September 2008. Suddenly the media replaced the economic happy talk with gloom and doom to match their ignorance.

The McCain for President campaign then tried to shift the political discussion to how scary Barack Obama's character was, while offering a series of improbable programs that have titles that sound like solutions to the economic problems. Each such program has lasted through about half a week of scrutiny before being relegated to the trash heap and quickly replaced by another faux program.

The outcome of the election is already quite clear. It's just a question of how big Obama is going to win - and considering that the alternative is the aged John McCain with the totally unqualified Sarah Palin as his Vice president, we may all thank God for the likelihood that Obama is going to win the Presidential election.

The Presidential campaign is currently running hot and heavy, and the media is thoroughly invested with trying to sell it as a competition between two equally capable candidates. They have to. Without a solid horse race to sell, the media will suffer a bad loss of advertising revenue. But the media revenue is the main reason they are selling the horse race. Without an unlikely surprise event, the real race for President has been decided.

So what happens after November 4th? At this point we get a sermon [*] from David Frum.

American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.

We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.

Republicans used negative campaigning successfully against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, it’s true. But 1988 and 2004 were both years of economic expansion, pro-incumbent years. 2008 is like 1992, only worse. If we couldn’t beat Clinton in 1992 by pointing to his own personal draft-dodging and his own personal womanizing, how do we expect to defeat Obama in a much more anti-incumbent year by attacking the misconduct of people with whom he once kept company (but doesn’t any more)?

Here’s another thing to keep in mind:

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

Normally I don't bother with anything from NRO, including David Frum who occasionally makes sense. But this time he points to the very possible future that the Republican Party is whipping its supporters into an orgy of anger that is not going to die down after the Presidential campaign is over. For a well-known Republican writer like Frum to publish such a warning in the National Review Online [a principle conservative journal] just before the election is a strong indication that he is very concerned that the anger the McCain campaign is building up is a really dangerous trend.

It really is a danger. The Senate Republicans have done everything they could to sabotage any accomplishments by Congress since they lost control of the Senate in January 2007. The major effort by very right-wing House Republicans to kill off the first effort to pass the Paulson Proposal is another example. They reversed themselves only with they found the public was going to blame them for the financial crisis if they continued to act to block action.

It appears that Frum's warning is coming much too late. The anger is already built up. Once the results of the election are known, the conservative Republican anger is not going to be tamped down. The conservatives have already run all the effective Republican moderate leaders out of Congress. There are no remaining "wise old men" to turn to.

The result is going to be that in addition to severe economic crisis facing America in 2009 and two on-going wars, there is going to be an angry conservative Republican Party who would rather blow up the entire American government than work with their opponents to solve America's problems.

I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am. I see no real hope for good sense and positive efforts to put America first likely to come from the Republican Party in 2009 and 2010. It's going to instead be all anger all the time until the anger burns itself out and the politicians who are fomenting it are mostly removed from office.

Will there be any vestige of the Republican party remaining when that anger is removed from government? Will the brand name survive? That's probably as much a question as what the new structure of banking in the American economy is going to be in the future.

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[*] "sermon" is Frum's own description of what he wrote.

[ h/t to Laura Rozen at War & Piece. ]