The Republican Addiction to Attack Politics Has Backfired

Serious Republicans have become concerned. By Serious Republicans, I mean the people who would like to forget how much their party has profited politically over the past 50 years by allying itself with Bible-thumpers, sexual bigots, the sad detritus of American apartheid, the black-helicopter crowd, and people who would like the federal income tax to be as flat as they believe the earth is. By Serious Republicans, I mean the likes of Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, David Frum, John Podhoretz, and Karl Rove.

(Yes, for the purposes of argument, Karl Rove is a Serious Republican, and not just an unusually successful ratfker who, at one point or another, has used all the above-listed constituencies to win elections. Just play along, okay?)

The Serious Republicans have become concerned over the 2012 Republican presidential field in general, and over Rick Perry in the specific. The other day, Podhoretz, showing the true loyalty to self of the career Legacy Hire, took to the pages of that deeply serious newspaper, The New York Post, which will publish anything written by a conservative that is not written in bodily humours, to moan about the quality of the help his party is being asked to hire. Quoth The Pod:

Stop proposing nonsense tax plans that won't work. Stop making ridiculous attention-getting ads that might be minimally acceptable if you were running for county supervisor in Oklahoma. Stop saying you're going to build a US-Mexico border fence you know perfectly well you're not going to build. Give the GOP electorate and the American people some credit. This country is in terrible shape. They know it. You know it. They want solutions. You're providing comedy. This is a serious time. It requires serious leaders. Where's the gravity?

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The intellectual burning and chafing among the Serious Republicans grew most acute when Perry, staring both a colossal failure and Donald Trump — but we repeat ourselves — in the face, seemed to flirt with reviving the "issue" of President Obama's citizenship and to suggest that he might reopen the "issue" of the president's birth certificate. Oh, the swooning and the vapors that ensued.

Quoth Jebby:

"Republican candidates should categorically reject the notion that President Obama was not born in the United States. It is a complete distraction from the failed economic policies of the President."

Quoth Haley:

"Any other issue that gets injected to the campaign is not good for the Republicans. Republicans should want this election to be what American presidential elections have always been: a referendum on the incumbent's record."

Quoth Turdblossom:

"You associate yourself with a nutty view like that, and you damage yourself," Rove said. "And I know he went and he's trying to cultivate — as all of them are — Donald Trump, in order to get his endorsement, but this is not the way to go about doing it, because it starts to marginalize you in the minds of some of the people whom you need in order to get the election.... There's a simple answer. Yes, he was born in the United States, yes, he is eligible to serve, and don't associate yourself with sort of this nutty fringe group."

We will note for the record that every single one of these comments concerns the deleterious effects of birtherism on the GOP's chances in the next election. In other words, birtherism's main problem is not that it's a truthless pack of lies, but that it's a truthless pack of lies that is a political loser. It is a political loser because Trump is a clown, and for another reason we will get to in a minute. This is awfully good of you, fellas, but I have a few questions:

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1) Where were you in '04?

In 2004, as part of the general campaign to re-elect George W. Bush, there was an organized campaign to cast doubt upon — and, ultimately, to smear recklessly — the undeniable heroism shown by Democratic candidate John Kerry during his time as a Naval officer in Vietnam. Entire books were written promoting this slander. Prominent pundits — most notably, the execrable Michelle Malkin's visit to Hardball — went on television to mainstream vicious nonsense. At the Republican National Convention, delegates wore cute little Purple Heart band-aids to mock Kerry's wounds. The whole thing was despicable, and that's being enormously kind.

Make no mistake. Swift Boatism is different from birtherism only in two ways. First, the target is obviously different. But, second, and most important, there was serious money behind Swift Boatism and there is little behind birtherism. (In Republican campaigns, the difference between an "issue" and a "distraction" is whether the Koch Brothers have busted out the checkbook yet.) And those are the only two differences between the two. They are equally nasty. They are equally truthless calumnies. They are equally the product of the fevered hive mind of the conservative Republican base.

2) Where were you, Jeb, when the Swifties were helping re-elect your brother?

Oh, wait,here you are, in a letter to a Swiftie from 2005, after the damage was done.

"As someone who truly understands the risk of standing up for something, I simply cannot express in words how much I value their willingness to stand up against John Kerry."

3) Where were you, Haley, when the party in which you were a substantial bagma... er... power broker, helped them do it?

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4) Where were you, Karl, when the campaign of which you were the putative brains employed this "nutty view" to devastating effect?

You tried — and failed — to distance yourself from the stench, but not from the money behind it, which may be the epitaph of your entire public career one day, now that I think about it.

5) Come to think of it, where were all of you when the conservative CPAC establishment celebrated Bush's re-election by honoring the paid liars who had helped make it possible with its "Courage Under Fire" award?

Roy Hoffmann, the retired Navy rear admiral who founded the Swift Boat group, said he didn't know much about Miller but was pleased with the honor. The real goal, he said, was to ensure that Kerry didn't become commander in chief. "We achieved our goal. That was our primary concern, and we are pleased someone recognized the effort — or at least the impact — we had on the election."

Not as pleased as Jebby, and Haley, and Turdblossom were, Admiral, I assure you. Where was their concern for important issues then? Why were they all not dropping heavily onto their fainting couches the way they are today?

I could go on. I could mention all the well-remunerated wild-ass notions — Mena Airport! Dead kids on the railroad tracks! Vince Foster! — hurled at Bill Clinton for exactly the same reasons that birtherism was first thrown at Barack Obama, to toss as much sand in the gears of a Democratic administration as possible.

I could mention that, if it weren't for the political utility of nutty, fringe ideas, Karl Rove wouldn't even have a career, as ably limned by Joshua Green of The Atlantic a few years back. Green talked to Mark Kennedy, a judge in Alabama who, in 1994, became one of Rove's first targets:

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile.

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That Mark Kennedy was a pedophile is a "nutty idea." It was a "fringe" kind of thing. Rove had no more compunction about trotting it out than he did about whether or not the Swifties were truthless yobs. So he can spare us now his deep concerns about the quality of the candidates his party has produced, having done so much to create the party that could produce them.

To be fair, Rove was only building on what came before. There were the refuse-barge campaigns run by the National Conservative Political Action Committee in the late 1970's and early 1980's. NCPAC, run by a vicious closet case named Terry Dolan, ran a single negative radio spot against Senator Frank Church in Idaho 150 times in one day. Once, speaking, he later claimed, only "hypothetically," Dolan gave away the game:

Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process. We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn't have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.

For 30 years, that's worked very, very well. The campaigns have become noisier. The money's gotten bigger. The techniques pioneered by Terry Dolan and NCPAC have become amplified by a new media universe, especially talk-radio, the potential for which Dolan's ideological heirs shrewdly saw long before their hapless Democratic opponents did. But the basic principles have stayed the same — through Whitewater, and the Swifties, and birtherism, for the brief moment in which the latter was an effective technique. The Republican party became addicted to this sort of thing, and it should come as a surprise to approximately nobody that the addiction has produced a field of candidates you'd have to be stoned to admire. The Serious Republicans built the politics that now so embarrass them, so it's a little late to be overcome by the vapors at the unseemliness of it all.