CSotD: Crazies: Can’t win with’em, can’t win without ’em
Skip to comments
I've mentioned that there have been way, way, way too many political cartoons showing a hurricane with some label on it bearing down on Florida, but Jim Morin uses the actual hurricane to make a political point.
That's diffo!
Not only are we going to see a large amount of taxpayer money dished out by the nanny state over the next few weeks, but we're going to see a lot of Republican governors requesting help. In fact, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindhal stayed home from the convention so he could preside over the disaster in person, skipping his chance to make a speech and further burnish his prospects.
Anyone with a lick of sense and an ounce of social consciousness recognizes that this is a perfectly proper response to disaster. You don't have to get very far into the Constitution before you hit the part where the Founding Fathers (Peace be upon them!) declare that the very purpose of the document includes promoting the general welfare of the people of the United States.
But when you are campaigning against the social contract and the concept of any government assisting in the general welfare of its people, it does muddy the waters to be simultaneously asking for a handout.
And it's hard to mouth the nonsensical but well-accepted party line that government can't create jobs while you are using government funding to hire carpenters, roofers, plumbers, electricians, road workers, bridge builders and a host of other people. Even people who think McDonnell Douglas donates its fighter jets to the Defense Department, and that the US Marines are unpaid volunteers can understand that rebuilding after a hurricane includes creating a few jobs.
Fact is, after Katrina struck, there were plenty of conservative voices saying they should let New Orleans go, don't rebuild, and that its destruction was inevitable given its location.
The problem with that is that there is Theory and there is Practice, and the pure ideological pieties of the anti-tax, anti-government crowd faded in the face of the actual, in-your-face aftermath, though not perhaps fast enough to prevent George W from appearing heartless and inept.
But he wasn't in the middle of a campaign at the moment.
Whatever Isaac has in store for the Gulf Coast, he's going to force the extreme wing of the Republican party into sharp focus, at which point the question becomes, will the rest of the party cut them loose, try to shut them up or ride out the storm, so to speak?
They've already begun to tamp down Paul Ryan, who is dutifully making his own positions and beliefs subordinate to those of the actual candidate, what's-his-name.
Unlike Sarah Palin four years ago, he's more discreet, more polished and seemingly more focused on the reason he is there. In other words, he seems more intent on winning the contest than on becoming a star, and he's willing to let pragmatism outshine ideological purity, which makes perfect sense.
The vice-president is not supposed to represent an ideology. He's supposed to smile and carry the president's spittoon. In fact, the reason Theodore Roosevelt was tapped to be McKinley's VP was because New York's Republicans wanted the firebrand reformer put in a position where his strong positions would have no chance of spoiling their game. (Good plan. Didn't work out.)
Still, even if Ryan plays the game as he should (probable), and even if the Republicans manage to stifle the crazies who got them this far (we'll see), there are already enough sound bites and quotes about self-reliance and the nanny state in existence to make the upcoming combination of hurricane recovery and presidential campaign interesting.
It may boil down to how big a factor the crazy vote is. If I were a Republican strategist, my plan would have been to stop feeding the crazies after the convention and let them kind of go on autopilot while working on the surface to make the candidates more palatable to a sane electorate.
And I think that process has been in play since the Ryan pick: "Okay, here's your poster boy. Now back off a little and let us make him into a viable mainstreamer."
Isaac may well have knocked that plan into a cocked hat. I guess we'll see.
Fasten your seat belts. We are likely to encounter some turbulence up ahead.
Comments 6
Comments are closed.