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The best evidence last week’s Democratic convention succeeded in accomplishing what Team Kerry set out to do is the Republican reaction, which is to insist the Boston infomercial was a false representation of both the party and the nominee.
To a certain extent, that’s true - although as a progressive, I would argue it’s not nearly as true as the conservative chattering class would have it. No matter how left-wing the delegates on the floor were on the hot-button issues (this was almost an hourly talking point on Fox and CNN) the face of the party establishment was pretty much the face we saw on the stage - culturally liberal on social issues, Clintonian centrists on economics, but most of all, completely pragmatic about elections and what it takes to win them.
This last quality, of course, is one the Mayberry Machiavellis also share. Which is why the criticism now coming from the right is so amusing: It mirrors almost exactly the Democratic complaints about the last Republican convention, in 2000. That, too, was derided as a false front. At times it seemed as if Rove and Co. had rounded up every non-white Republican official in the country and planted them on permanently on stage, while banishing the likes of Tom DeLay and Pat Robertson to the outer edges of prime time.
The most ridiculous example of this role reversal I’ve seen yet comes from Michael Barone, the effete conservative columnist turned Fox News talking head. In his convention week column, Barone railed against the Democrats for having the gall to complain about the divisive politics of the Rovian era:
Now Obama on Tuesday night, like Clinton on Monday night, said that the way to get rid of partisan division is to install the party that has vociferously promoted partisan division - that insists on the "Bush lied" theme ... It is like the man who murdered his mother and father and threw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he was an orphan. The Democrats, having stirred up partisan turmoil and political division, now seek power on the grounds that they will eliminate them.
What’s amazing about Barone’s diatribe is the complete absence of any awareness of how ironic it is for Republicans to complain about Democrats indulging in the politics of personal destruction on one hand, while promising to heal partisan wounds on the other.
This, of course, was precisely the political strategy pursued by the Rovians in 2000. If anything, they ran even further from the Clinton haters in their own party than the Democrats did from the Bush haters in Boston this year. And with good reason: Bush and Co. had the complete fiasco of the Clinton impeachment (and the congressional losses suffered by the GOP in 1998) to remind them how much swing voters hated the anti-Clinton moral hysteria.
Barone’s bitching, in other words, sounds more like a claim of copyright infringement than a legimate gripe about Democratic hypocrisy. Imitation, after all, isn’t just the most sincere form of flattery; it’s also the heart and soul of competition.
It would seem, in other words, that both sides have learned the utility of the good cop/bad cop routine in an age when the left and the right both want red meat while the voters in the middle generally prefer their politics with a side order of Valium.
As the party out of power, the Democrats are naturally better positioned to put the technique to good use now. And, since the swing voters are a hell of lot more disturbed by the fiasco in Iraq and the partisan hype that got us into it than they ever were about Clinton’s blow jobs, the Dems also don’t need to as careful about keeping the Bush bashers out of sight and out of mind until November. If I were Barone, I’d be pissed, too.
The Kerry crew’s happy willingness to adopt and adapt a winning play from the GOP’s 2000 playbook may also support Mickey Kaus’s theory for why the two parties are locked at rough parity. In an intensively competitive arena, in which the tools of modern mass marketing are far more important than ideology or even patronage, neither party can gain a lasting edge without seeing its best sales ideas stolen by the other. Do the voters seem to like moderate Southern governors with a folksy charm? Hey, our guy is like that! (or at least, can be repackaged that way.) Does unleashing the attack dogs and then waiving the olive branch work? Well, we can do that, too!
This raises the prospect of an even deeper deadlock, in which presidents are first weakened by relentless partisan attacks from the other party’s base, then defeated by false promises of bipartisan unity from the other’s side marketing maestros. And every four or eight years the two sides wil change places and repeat the cycle.
This is not, to say the least, a healthy political model for a troubled superpower with enormous foreign policy problems and some equally enormous economic and financial problems waiting just down the road. However, it seems to be the kind of politics we are going to get.
I should add, at this point, that I don’t see the two parties as equally to blame for this. The Bush family mafia basically invented the red meat style of presidential campaigning in the 1988 election ("Our race for national sheriff," as George Will called it.) The Clintonites, on the other hand, ran a relatively substantive, decent campaign in ’92, and again - although to a lesser degree - in ’96. They also, within Washington’s natural limits of partisanship, tried to deal with the Republicans as opponents, not blood enemies, when they took office. In response they got the political equivalent of a dirty war.
Since then, we’ve seen a Latin American style election in Florida, a deliberate attempt to use the post-9/11 solidarity to push through a radical right agenda in Congress, a coldly calculated effort to smear Democrats as terrorist sympathizers in the 2002 off-year elections, and the political corruption and patronage of the Iraq "reconstruction" effort. None of this was exactly designed to foster a spirit of partisan reconciliation.
So now we’ve come full circle - with the Bush campaign on the defensive, desperate to throw a full-scale negative assault at Kerry, but worried about how well it will go over in the wake of the Democratic unity fest. Kerry, meanwhile, has put himself on the high ground, where he can self-righteously label all of Bush’s attacks (even the valid ones) as "the hateful politics of the past."
It’s all so unfair, wail the Michael Barones of the world. The Democrats are using bipartisanship as a partisan weapon!
Well, boo fucking hoo. There are no patents on wily political strategies. No copyrights on insincere rhetoric. The Kerryites have simply learned what the Rovians taught them and turned it around. And that, as we all know, is always fair play.