10
Aug
And the vast right-wing conspiracy casts its vote for…Hillary!
Conservatives are already giving up the good fight. They’re going to have to do what liberals have been doing for decades now: vote for the least of the evils. A column in today’s Los Angeles Times lays it all out:
Sen. Clinton is rapidly becoming not merely acceptable to many right-wingers but possibly even their candidate of choice.
Holy mackerel! That’s none other than Bruce Bartlett talking there. Now Bruce has got some seriously impeccable credentials of the conservative kind: supply-sider (he even wrote a book called Reaganomics:Supply-Side Economics in Action, currently ranked #1,101,268 on Amazon), adviser to St. Ronald, Poppa Bush treasury guy, once employed by now-Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Bruce is feeling out of sorts these days. He must be, if he’s touting Hillary. But then, like her husband, she is a Republican Lite product of the DLC, which is priming itself to move back into the White House. See, Barlett doesn’t like GW. He wrote about that, too: Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy ( whoa! it’s #95,421!). For Bartlett, it’s all about economics, a discipline for which Bush’s Harvard MBA seems to have left him singularly unprepared. (But then economics isn’t called the dismal science for nothing, and the only people who react precisely as predicted by game theory – economists love game theory – are economists and psychopaths).
I haven’t read either book (please!), so I don’t know the particulars, but on the face of it I don’t see what Bartlett is so upset about. Reagan never balanced a budget; he was the first president to preside over a $200-billion deficit. Bush is just imitating the master, seems to me. Sure, his deficits are huger, but so is the economy. (Of course, somehow Bush is getting away with not counting his war expenses in the deficit.) But just like St. Ron, George cut taxes for rich people – in fact, he did him one better, because Reagan’s tax cuts weren’t really tax cuts at all; Reagan introduced “bracket creep,” which put people in higher tax brackets, and he raised Social Security taxes. Bush, meanwhile, seriously slashed taxes so much that the gap between the rich and the rest is the greatest since about 1929. Bush has been deregulating like everybody thinks Reagan did but actually didn’t. And the way he’s been decimating government programs and protections seems a lot like Reagan’s mantra of “getting government off our backs.”
But my god! Look who else likes her. Well, sort of, considering the alternatives: William Kristol, the neo-con leader of Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard and the Project for the New American Century, a think tank for a kind of modern-day, more subtle Ghengis Khan. Bartlett quotes the Washington Post as quoting Kristol as saying, “”Obama is becoming the antiwar candidate, and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world.”
Well, Kristol would say that. He wants that war to continue and expand. HC has already talked about leaving thousands of American troops there for the indefinite future. Now that’s not nearly on the scale that Kristol advocated before and during the war, but is he now seeing it as better than nothing? Maybe our constant presence there can still salvage his dreams of American dominance in the Middle East?
Bartlett already wrote that Clinton is the most conservative of the Big Three. Edwards is clearly to her left, and Obama? Well, Obama’s still feeling things out and talking too much. Here’s Bartlett on his reasoning:
… a Republican can’t win the presidency next year; none of the party’s candidates look strong enough to overcome the handicaps that President Bush has imposed on them. Therefore, I had no choice but to size up the Democrats from a conservative point of view. Which one is least bad?
Well, better least bad than I’m-never-gonna-vote-for-no-stinking-Demo-Rat! Any politician wants all the votes s/he can get, and why not? Doesn’t mean you have to do what your supporters want, no matter how much money you’ve taken from them. As far as Bartlett’s concerned, Hillary’s got economic street cred – pragmatism, balanced budgets, above all free markets. He says nothing about the war, though he does quote another conservative journalist as saying Clinton, during the AFL-CIO debate, sounded “reasonable” on the war.
“I’m starting to see the makings of a rapprochement between Clinton and the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’” Bartlett says. Maybe the death knell of the DLC has been rung too soon. After all, Clinton’s campaign committe chair is none other than former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe, a member of the DLC, just like Clinton and a whole bunch of Blue Dog Democrats, the ones who’ve given us, oh, all kinds of Bush-backed legislation.
Who woulda thunk it? When things look bad for the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy, Hillary starts looking good to them.
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You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. The republicans don’t support Hillary. The liberal “neo-cons” do. All top-tier candidates in both parties are paid for by the same people.
Don’t believe me? Look at the FEC donations. This is sickening and if the American people vote these sociopaths into office, they deserve the facism, slavery, and tribulation they will endure.
I have a lot more confidence in the American people, though. But, I am not beyond asking for some divine intervention here.
August 10th, 2007 at 5:53 pmWell, there’s no doubt you’re right about the money – I showed Hillary’s bankers as an illustration (ain’t the Internet great? I’ve come to the conclusion that it was invented to make people even madder than they already were because now they know, not just suspect). I agree with your despair, too. The Internet has done away with any excuse for ignorant voting. Just about everything you need to know is a click or two away. And I’m not talking about the TV remote. In this way the people who vote for Bush or Clinton do indeed deserve what they get. But I don’t, and neither does the country. It got to the point in 2004 that I was reading seriously about secession – that is, I would kick Bush Country out of the country, let’em have their own country, I’ll keep America.
I don’t know what you mean by “liberal ‘neo-cons’” though. You mean those Blue Dog-type Democrats who vote for the war and thereby ally themselves with Republican neo-cons?
I realize Bartlett and the others mentioned speak from inside the Beltway, not the best place to know what’s really going on in the country. They only listen and talk to each other.
But some ordinary Republicans almost certainly will vote for Hillary. Plenty of them voted for Bill over Dole once they found out about him and weren’t scared anymore. He went out in 2000 with a 66-percent approval rating, and you don’t get that from just Democrats and independents.
Many Republicans are disgusted with Bush and with the party and the war; I’m thinking that many – not most – Republican voters are not as far right as the party leadership. They can see where that leadership has taken the country. I can’t see them getting enthused by the choices they’ll have in GOP primaries, and I think Hillary is astute enough a politician to know how to talk to them in a way that can soothe their fragile egos and overcome their kneejerk hatred. A minority of them, to be sure, but enough to win.
I don’t share your confidence in the American people, though I do think many of them – in both parties – are out in front of the people who are supposed to be leading them.
Who would you like to see elected?
August 10th, 2007 at 6:55 pmP.S. Don’t know if you read this post; if not, it’s on point here.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:04 pmWell, HERE’s a Republican who’s going a different route. Sounds like a [better late than never] perceptive woman to me. And look at what a fog she’d been in for at least six years…
Enough to give a person hope.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:50 pm[...] Clark Contact the Webmaster Link to Article ron paul And the vast right-wing conspiracy casts its vote for…Hillary! » Posted [...]
August 11th, 2007 at 1:54 amOne sometimes forgets that Bill has views akin to a moderate Republican, back when that didn’t go the way of the dodo. When your own candidates are losers, you take what you can get. Rs can be rather pragmatic that way.
The link by z. was interesting. I wonder if Elizabeth Edwards’ military family background and the Edwards’ Southern upbringing in particular inspired the choice. Electoral choices are often cultural, which allows Rs to win even if their ideas are opposed by the population at large.
HC has a of negative baggage in that dept., fair or not, and it scares me. Not that her politics totally appeals to me either, but positions alone don’t win elections. Anyway, the wife’s arguments make sense … good brief for EE.
August 11th, 2007 at 7:20 amHi Joe,
I have a slightly different (probably wishful) interpretation of the linked wife’s decision. While not true of Bush’s hardest core base, I think even perhaps the majority of Bush voters convinced themselves they were voting for “compassion” — and wanted to see themselves as such. The ‘artful’ (and unscrupulously exploitive, disingenuous) co-optation of “compassionate” to adjoin “conservatism” was once-upon-a-time a brilliant stroke of Roveian propaganda. But now, six-plus years later, how many Bush voters feel they got robbed by a bait-and-switch? The cognitive dissonance is too exposed for cover anymore.
And yet I think what such voters may have retained is that they consciously or unconsciously realize they really did want to vote for compassion. And so now as they look elsewhere in their post-betrayal enlightenment, the degree to which they feel betrayed may focus precisely on the degree to which compassion wound up never being more than rhetoric to George Bush (and so far below the pockets of CEOs and the hymnals of born-agains in his priorities that compassion didn’t even get table scraps).
This woman’s analysis of why she supports Edwards says to me that she has had a lightbulb moment far beyond just the betrayals of one dim bulb-in-chief: she’s now actively looking for the sounds of compassion with follow-through, something, someone, with a track record (and shame on the media for never really investigating and showing the nation in 1999-2000 that Bush as Gov. of Texas had no such track record). While John Edwards was skillfully representing the victims of corporate negligence, George Bush was skillfully getting the state of Texas to pay for his baseball team’s new stadium, the sale of which bloated his bank account. There’s the kind of contrastive analysis I hope this woman represents which many many Republicans and swing voters are making.
August 11th, 2007 at 9:07 am