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Can you believe these GOP
candidates for president?
By CHUCK McFADDEN
of TheColumnists.com
If you watched the recent CNN “debate” among the Republican presidential hopefuls, you may be forgiven if you thought you were watching candidates for CEO of the National Rifle Association. Or the Border Patrol. Or National Evangelical-in-Chief.
Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani each tried to one-up the other guy on how much they opposed illegal immigrants and how tough they were on terrorism. Romney talked about how many “sanctuary cities” Giuliani had carelessly allowed to exist in the State of New York while he, Giuliani, was mayor of the City of New York. Giuliani came right back with how Romney had allowed a company to work on his mansion grounds when the company, it was discovered later, had hired illegal immigrants.
John McCain said he’d been to Iraq for Thanksgiving, and the soldiers there told him they wanted to be allowed to win. No mention of how we would win, or what “winning” would consist of, but it came across as no-nonsense patriotism.
Torture is good, if done against the right people. Romney said he’d like to double the size of Guantanamo, so there.
“Are we electing a president or a sheriff?” asked New York Times columnist Bob Herbert.
It’s hard to tell sometimes, but don’t be fooled. The eight men running for the Republican presidential nomination are all intelligent. Their advisors are intelligent. The candidates are sounding like belligerent idiots because before they can really run for president they have to secure the Republican Party nomination. And the only way to do that is to sound tough and stupid.
Why? Because there is a considerable chunk of the Republican Party that is, to put it most kindly, made up of modern-day Know-Nothings. They don’t know much about the world, and don’t want to. Send those dusky brown people back to where they belong. Give me my AK-47 because I’m a “sportsman.” The Bible is the inerrant word of God, no matter that it contains copious amounts of drivel. Somebody somewhere giving us trouble? Bomb them. That’ll show ‘em.
The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, contains many different types of people, including worldly sophisticates who snicker at the imbecilities of the “base.” But the problem for the candidates contorting themselves up there on the stage the other night was that there are sufficient numbers of simplistic, ignorant voters in the ranks of the Republican electorate so that you can’t ignore them. Not if you think “Hail to the Chief” is a nice tune.
So Mitt, and Rudy, and all the rest have to stand up there in debate after debate and sound like simpletons.
We have more than 40 million people without health insurance in this country, and the number is growing; it appears we are headed for a recession, if not an out-and-out depression; Iraq is the worst foreign policy debacle in the history of the republic; it is a war we cannot “win,” no matter how badly our soldiers want to; the federal government has thrown roadblocks in the way of stem-cell research for theological reasons; the degree of hatred for the United States around the world has risen markedly in the past seven years, making it a more comfortable place for people who want to do us harm.
These are real problems that affect people’s lives. They demand solutions--or at least serious attempts at solutions--from the people we elect to office. But none of those issues are addressed in any real way by the Republican candidates. Nope, with them, it’s guns and Bibles and crackdowns on foreigners, all expressed in bumper-sticker terms.
A nice illustration of the difference between the Democratic candidates and the tortured Republican Eight came on PBS’s “Washington Week” program recently. The reporters around the table spent some time talking about the Republican race, then turned to the Democrats. There, they talked about the “horse race” aspect of the contest, as they did with the Republicans, but they also spent some time discussing the nuances and differences between the health care plans advocated by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That type of analysis is almost never prompted by Republican policy proposals, because there haven’t been any, beyond “I’m tough!” and “I’m tougher!”
Newspaper opinion columnists have been doing it for months now, but if you are sensitive to it, and you can read between the lines, you can sense that the reporters writing the “straight” news stories about the Republican candidates, no matter how hard they try not to, are beginning to giggle a little.
And if you look ahead, you realize that whoever wins the Republican nomination is going to have to do some real tap-dancing to win the general election. How do you get the vastly more sensible entire electorate to go for you when for the past nine months you’ve been sounding like a Bible-thumping gun nut who hasn’t a clue?
What you do is, you pray that people have short memories.
©2007 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Dec. 10, 2007.
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