The Base Likes It Bloody. The Candidates Dish It Up. Do the Rest of Us Have to Swallow It?
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Ron Paul often looks aghast, as though cartoon steam is about to whistle from his ears. He has the startled look of someone who has discovered, once again, that he is the only sane person in the room. Paul had the full, wide-eyed, everyone's-gone-loony look last Tuesday night in the "spin room" after the latest Republican presidential debate, as he criticized candidates who seemed willing to nuke Iran.
"I was shocked! I was shocked!" said the libertarian congressman from Texas. His rivals for the GOP nomination, he believes, are espousing an immoral position that is actually a form of pandering.
"They're worried about the immediate next election, which is the Republican primary, and anything they can do to pander, they'll do it, and they'll forget about what they believe in, they'll forget about the Constitution, they'll forget about building coalitions."
Coalitions? Not a word you hear often on the campaign trail these days. We're already deep into Red Meat Season. This is the season of the marginal candidate whose voice rises higher and higher until it threatens to reach a pitch that only a dog could hear. It's the time when candidates try on entirely new political ideologies the way teenage girls try on skirts at Abercrombie. (If you're Mitt Romney, Reaganesque conservatism is the new black.)
What's different this election cycle is the brutally long primary season -- a full year of posturing, base baiting, sniping and heel nipping that only a political junkie could love. We'll be on this red-meat diet for so long it may kill us.
It's no secret that candidates play to the base during the primary season, and that nominees drift toward the center for the general election. But the center has become a killing ground. The 2008 campaign has backed up through the pipes so far into 2007 that it may have become impossible for lawmakers to get anything major accomplished. Consider the abrupt demise in the Senate of the compromise immigration bill. Compromise? That's collaboration with the enemy! (Meanwhile, we wonder why those dang Iraqis can't get along with one another.)
John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and others have discovered how hard it is to be both a lawmaker and a presidential candidate. All have been targeted for straying from ideological purity. Joe Biden, a Democratic senator from Delaware, said the other day, "Folks, being commander in chief requires you to occasionally be practical." What? Doesn't he realize it's Red Meat Season?
The presidential race has been in fifth gear since late last year. Something is wrong with an election process that oozes across time and space to envelop our entire political culture. The campaigning has become unmoored from the crucial event of voting -- those clarifying moments when citizens go into a school cafeteria or church basement and cast ballots. The first caucuses and primaries are still seven months away, and the general election won't take place for 17 months. We're all going to need a survival strategy. Like: Hide under the covers.
Candidates have been campaigning up a storm, yet the national polls have hardly budged. No second-tier hopeful has made a dramatic move. Most normal, non-politics-obsessed people still aren't paying attention. There aren't five people in America who can identify Mike Gravel on sight, and no one knows Duncan Hunter from Duncan Hines. And who's Ron Paul? Why doesn't he have a last name? Does he know George Ringo?
Only partisans are paying attention, and partisans aren't political vegans. So anyone seeking the party's nomination must know how to serve up the big slabs of flesh. For Democratic candidates, that means proving that you abhor and abominate George W. Bush more than anyone else on Earth; for Republicans, that's starting to mean pretty much the same thing. Democrats say Bush is a monster; Republicans say he's something worse -- a liberal.
The classic red-meat Republican issues are God, guns and gays, but this year immigration has rapidly become the juiciest one, even more so than the Iraq war. Someone like McCain may say on the stump, again and again, that there's no way to round up 12 million illegal immigrants and send them back home, but some of his rivals advocate precisely that. I asked Duncan Hunter, the GOP congressman from California whose immigration policy is built around the idea of a really big fence, what he'd do with the illegal immigrants here. His answer: Shoo 'em out.
"You realize we deport thousands of people every month," he told me. "We tell folks, 'You have to go home. Make your country a good country. Put pressure on your government if you don't like things. Get after those congressmen in Mexico and those congressmen in other countries.' "
Go home and start a petition drive. Pass out fliers.
Last week in Miami, McCain suggested, prefiguring Ron Paul's comment, that his rivals are just "pandering for votes":
"To want the office so badly that you would intentionally make our country's problems worse might prove you can read a poll or take a cheap shot, but it hardly demonstrates presidential leadership."
He's gambling that there are votes to be gained by appearing statesmanlike. Professional driver: Do not attempt.
But even the maverick McCain knows where the lines are drawn during Red Meat Season. At last week's debate, he mentioned alternative energy, and started to say something that began with "s." Could he possibly have been about to utter the word "solar"? There's a liberal Democrat word if there ever was one. Verbal tofu! A Republican can't speak that word, any more than he can announce that, if elected, his inauguration suit will be made of hemp. Luckily, McCain caught himself and talked about ethanol instead.
At one point, talking about immigration, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani used the word "compromises" four times in about 15 seconds -- and he wasn't holding it out as a virtue.
But the classic pejorative for Republicans is "Ted Kennedy." Hunter, for example, would like to convince the party base that top-tier candidates Romney, Giuliani and McCain all emanate the malodorous and mephitic stench of Kennedy liberalism. Romney, he said, supported a 1994 gun control law advocated by the Massachusetts senator and President Bill Clinton. "I saw John McCain join with Ted Kennedy on the border control bill," he told me. "I think we need to abandon the Kennedy wing of the Republican Party."
On the Democratic side, the sneaking suspicion is that front-runner Hillary Clinton may be a neocon, as opposed to what the Republicans believe she is (Madame Mao reincarnate). John Edwards, who four years ago positioned himself as the "positive, upbeat" candidate, has transmogrified into a red-meat partisan, firmly camped to the left of the Bush-collaborating Clinton and Obama. And then there's Mike Gravel, a former senator from Alaska, who last week had some USDA Choice words for anyone who voted to give Bush authorization to go to war:
"We have killed more Americans than was done on the 11th of September," he said. "More Americans died because of their decision. That disqualifies them for president. It doesn't mean they're bad people. It just means that they don't have moral judgment."
For Democrats, sanctimony is the other red meat.
Of course, the media are complicit in nurturing the rancor of Red Meat Season. It's not just that we compulsively cover every medium-sized political squabble as though it's the Battle of Antietam, or that we cover partisan politics more fervently than we cover government (there were several hundred journalists at the GOP debate in New Hampshire, probably more than have cumulatively covered the Justice Department in the past 200 years). We also prod candidates to disagree in the most visceral manner, ideally involving vulgarity, scratching, biting, gnawing on ankles, etc.
From the mainstream newspapers to the cable TV shoutfests to the shrieking political blogs, there's an infrastructure that distributes red meat wholesale. We operate the same way that cat-food companies fill up all those little cans in the factory: We use pumpable meat. We give abundant coverage to the cranks, curmudgeons and wing nuts of American politics. Tom Tancredo, come on down! Tancredo, a Republican congressman from Colorado, revealed in the debate that he's so extreme and difficult a character that even the evil-genius Bush adviser Karl Rove can't stand him. He said Bush has governed as a liberal and opined that McCain's immigration bill raised the question of "whether or not we will actually survive as a nation." On Planet Tancredo, we're just one bilingual classroom away from total destruction.
In the last Democratic debate, Obama -- he who would change the nature of our politics -- complained about a question on whether English should become the official language of the United States: "This is the kind of question that is designed precisely to divide us." Quite right. That's the game. And after the GOP debate, former senator Jim Talent, now an unpaid adviser to Romney, pointed out that it took an ordinary citizen in the audience to ask the first question about health care.
The media prefer the red meat. Please toss us huge slabs.
But candidates should beware: Red meat during primary season can get rancid during the general election. What sounds good today may turn out later to have been a rotten thing to say.
Joel Achenbach is a staff writer
for the Washington Post and blogs
at washingtonpost.com/
achenblog.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.