The Fish Rots From the Head*

Mario Cuomo

I recommend today's column by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. Milbank outlines how far right the Republican Party has moved and why readers have challenged him for his defense of the "conservatism" of Bob Bennett and Lisa Murkowski. As Milbank pointed out none of the Republican leaders in recent memory would qualify anymore to be member of the party. The American Conservative Union average rating of House members is an astonishing 95%. We've seen moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chaffee and Arlen Specter leave the party. Now, only Olympia Snowe and Mary Collins would be considered a moderate in the Senate. Milbank expects a challenge to Olympia Snowe in 2012. This is an astonishing and dangerous development for one of the largest political parties in the industrialized world.

As Joe Biden said, this isn't your father's Republican Party, let alone your Republican Party. The Canaries in the mineshaft for me were the dissents against the Bush administration uttered by former Reagan people. Contrary to pubic myth, it was Reagan appointees still in government who leaked all the information about Abu Ghraib, torture and the fiasco at Gitmo and the coup at the Department of Justice by advocates of the unitary theory of the executive. On the economic side, people like Bruce Barlett called out the Administration early and before Democrats about the tax policies which would plunge America into almost insurmountable debt. Finally, Bruce Fein came forward at the House to argue for the impeachment of George W. Bush, a rather dramatic break in the old guard. And now Bush looks like a moderate compared to the current cast of characters.

If you think something smells about this election, you're right. Last night's Rachel Maddow show took us to Delaware where teabagger Christine O'Donnell is running against Chris Coons. While Rachel got all the news from her being shut out of O'Donnell headquarters, several items jumped out at me during the whole show. This was one of the first television shows to examine a state where a teabagger is really running for a major office. First, Christine O'Donnell had $20,000 left in her account at the end of the primary, which was last month. Now she has $2.7 million. Second, Chris Coons was shown doing retail campaigning in the state. But no one has seen Christine O'Donnell locally. Third,while Democrats seemed less than enthusiastic, despite Rachel's spin, the Republicans have virtually no GOTV efforts planned. And, lastly, the local reporter and political columnist on the Show have had no direct interchange with O'Donnell despite several attempts.

What is going on here? When the teabaggers broke on the scene with the sponsorship of Fox News, I commented that I thought Fox was turning America into reality television. By creating this phenomenon with the Koch brothers and Freedomworks, they pushed the story so much that all media had to cover and then accept teabaggers as some authentic American movement. But even a recent study published yesterday tagged the teabaggers at about 13-15% of the electorate and over half of them are from the religious Right. Yet, they have taken over the Republican party. With the flood of private corporate money,the sans culottes stand a chance of winning office for high elected office without any experience in any known political endeavor. If you follow their ads,like Rand Paul in Kentucky, he defends social security and Medicare even though his whole life and his father's whole life was spent arguing against it. On every extreme position these candidates have ever advocated they have simply said what is convenient now. And this is not the usual moderating one's position for the general election. That's what's really strange.

If you were running conventionally,you would adjust your message as you talked to voters. But the evidence is coming in that none of these people are engaging in any retail campaigning or even appearing on local television. They are only appearing on Fox News, which they admit is a strategy for fund-raising. But Fox News doesn't have enough market share to ensure victory. In Colorado, Ken Buck doesn't even campaign or appear on television except through ads and he only adjusts his positions half-heartedly and not very convincingly. This is the Sarah Palin approach, which she thought did her well after the lethal Katie Couric interview. Just appear to the faithful at orchestrated rallies and on Fox News.

There is a totalitarian strain beneath this. Barack Obama appears weak because he's challenged at Iowa backyard meetings and at townhalls. Personally, I'm relieved that Americans feel free enough to ask the President critical questions. When this happened during George W., the person was ushered out of the hall and sometimes even to jail. But the new strategy is not to reveal any chinks in the armor. The candidate now appears only in sanitized settings and on a friendly television station. You can imagine what any of these people would do in public office. As the corporations know, they will be more than eager to meet them in private and accept legislation written on K Street. After all, there have virtually no knowledge or experience with policy issues.

It reminds me of the 1930s when the German conservative parties were ideologically bankrupt and thought they could ride the new energy provided by the Nazis in parliament. Remember the early allies of the Nazis were the conservatives and big business. The conservative parties were elitist, and well-educated and thought they could tame these ruffians. They didn't and could not and the world paid dearly. And the role of the religious Right in this should not surprise. Adolf Hitler said at the beginning there was nothing incompatible between Christianity and Nazism. And Pope Benedict seems to have agreed. But soon the Nazis created their own protestant churches and allowed the Mormons to engage in missionary work in Germany. The great Dietrich Bonhoffer was a great exception to the rule that the churches followed the new line. The difference here is that the religious Right is setting the agenda and has already embraced a theocratic fascism.

We know what the GOP will do in 2012. Haley Barbour already has outlined his belief that Republicans will capture 30 state houses this year and will control the redistricting of Congress. Most of the gains in House seats are states that currently vote Republican. A glitch in this is that these states also have growing and active Hispanic populations and the laws have changed so that fewer governors can mandate re-districting themselves. But the intent is clear to sew up the House for the foreseeable future.

Several citizens groups are asking the IRS and the courts to investigate the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove's groups for violating campaign laws. The Rove case is one that actually may bear fruit. Rove set up his organization with aid from the Chamber of Commerce but no one seemed to tell him that he can not run ads that explicitly attack political candidates or risk losing his legal status. And he's doing this. As are the various front groups like Concerned Taxpayers, etc. While this will have no effect on this year's election, the legal and popular backlash against this will hinder them in 2012.

The strange cognitive dissonance some of these candidates engage in is truly bizarre if you are a practitioner of rational politics. For example, Rick Miller in Alaska is against federal subsidies to business, even though he received them when he lived in Kansas, is against unemployment even though his wife received it after being laid off; and is against social security even though his father is on it. The Republican candidate for Senator in West Virginia, who brags he is right of the teabaggers, boasts he earned his money the hard way he inherited it. Well, not really, he received large federal subsidies for the past ten years. And like many of these candidates, he doesn't even live in the state where he's running. Almost all the super-wealthy candidates the Republicans are running for office have received large federal mandates for their private businesses. I raised this with a conservative Republican yesterday and his response was "All politicians are like that." This is a variation of Family Values campaigning by the likes of Newt Gingrich. Caught by his wife in affair, she asked him how can you give that family values talk. He said that's what people expect of me. Hey, no problem.

Whether the Democrats keep both Houses in Congress, which they will do if there is a God, the political situation in the country is ominous. If Rick Scott, a virtual criminal, has a shot against Alex Sink in the Florida's gubernatorial race, we are in real trouble in this country. There are no more filters for candidates. A candidate who actually protects pedophile priests can beat Richard Feingold in Wisconsin. A member of the John Birch Society and a Christianist is tied with Harry Reid. Democrats may ultimately triumph in these races but the fact these races are even competitive should serve as a warning sign.

The Nazis had a couple of elections before they finally pulled it off. There is no way back now for the Republicans. They have jumped the shark. All the conservative pundits arguing about policy are going to be swamped by the very irrational tide that is being launched. There is no more policy like Frank Fukuyama convinced them that history ended. The emotional content of the Republican message is brutish,encouraging a coercive society and punishing the poor and people down on their luck. It is strange to see the low information voter being fed an ideology of Going Gault by people who have been supported by government programs and probably who would not have made it if these programs ceased to exist.

How strange is it? Consider the fact that many Republican candidates are campaigning against the minimum wage? That's not strange but the fact that none of them, including the RNC chair, knows what it is would have been the George H.W. Bush scanner flap of yesteryear. Or the year when all candidates were asked what a gallon of milk cost. Just to show they had some idea about real life. Not anymore. Reality no longer matters.

A psychiatrist from Georgia posted a entry on the DailyKos this past week that captured some of this madness. His clients tended to be lower-to middle class white Southerners, who didn't want the tax cuts for the rich to expire. He said that his clients believed that if all these government support programs were removed then they themselves would have a chance to be rich. It was all these other people who were weighing them down and taking their chance away from them. Thomas Franks captured this in his book What's Wrong With Kansas? It's not enough that I succeed, others must fail and be punished.

Eric Cantor had a Freudian slip yesterday. Asked why the vast majority of Jews voted Democratic, he said,"That's because most Jews want to help the underdog." Or maybe they know Nazis when they see them.

Oh, remember how ACORN got Obama elected? Republicans and teabaggers think they are taking a leaf from Obama's playbook--they're hiring former ACORN employees for their Get Out The Vote campaigns. I guess they remembered ACORN's 2008 Man of the Year was John McCain.

After the election before the conventional wisdom wraps us into its fog, we must do a post-mortem on this strange new strategy by the Republicans of only conducting an air war on television and radio and laundering massive amount of money from foreign entities and American corporations. Someone needs to locate the brains behind this and it isn't Karl Rove. And even though the Reichchancellor of the teaparty is Senator Jim DeMint, he doesn't possess the acumen for this type of nation-wide campaign. And it's not Haley Barbour because his M.O. is very different and recognizable to real practitioners of politics. It's someone else and some others. Maybe it's the CIA shrinks who re-engineering North Korean torture techniques for our "enhanced interrogation" program.

The Arnuld Governator told Der Speigel that Obama would win re-election in 2012 because the Republicans will win the House. He said that the Republicans would find it difficult to select a real candidate against Obama. But two years will cost America about 10 in getting the changes we need.