TMCP To The Rescue

by digby

Todd Gitlin muses on the current state of GOP lunacy and points out that their main hope is for Bush levels of Obama failure. But he sounds a cautionary alarm, noting that in spite of all the hoohah about progressive realignment, the margins remain frighteningly small:

Read this fine piece of 2008 campaign analysis by Andrew Gelman and John Sides; and also the various comments, and Gelman’s and Sides’ responses. Gelman and Sides on 2008:

[V]oting behavior did not change that much. Obama did win states that Democrats had not won in a while, and demographic trends suggest that Democrats have a chance to win those states in the future. But there were only small shifts in state-level vote margins. Two thousand-eight looked a lot like 2004 and did not signal any wholesale change in partisan loyalties or party coalitions. Moreover, it does not appear that Obama “realigned” specific groups of voters. The widespread fixation on carving the electorate into its constituent groups misses the crucial fact that Obama did better than Kerry in nearly every possible demographic: rich, poor, white, black, Protestant, Catholic, men, women….Voters of all stripes were displeased with the economy and President Bush and so voted for the opposing party’s nominee.

Then the Republican strategy is nothing more or less than this: to make sure that Obama fails. For the GOP to become a national party, Obama’s record must be littered with Waterloo moments. The years of the bloating financial bubble must be forgotten, and the jobless recovery pinned on Obama. The only health reform that passes must be one that seems to hurt more people than it helps. The under-30 voters who went for Obama by 2-1 must be scared witless.

This sounds right to me. It’s hard to know if the political zeitgeist will be that bad, but what’s most frightening about the possibility is that public opinion tends to lag quite a bit behind the reality. So even if things turn around pretty quickly now, and health care reform is actually beginning to work, it may not be in time for people to notice before they vote.

Gitlin goes on to note the one thing for which we can be grateful: the utter dearth of decent Republican candidates. Thank goodness for that, right? Well, I’m not so sure about that. In response to my post this morning on Afghanistan, reader Sleon writes in with an op-ed by The Man Called Petraeus. He adds this:

Were Obama to summon the courage and good sense to reply to the generals, “Bullshit, there is no winning Afghanistan” and order a withdrawal, the Right will make the flap over the Missile Defense cancellation seem like a storm in a teacup and we’ll be hearing a lot about abandoning Western Civilization. If he doesn’t, we’ll spend billions for years, and a lot more people will die. Either way look for a “Draft Petraeus” movement to surface within the Republican party for 2012 and this man is smarter than MacArthur and not so principled as Eisenhower.

Yup. Both dday and I have been tracking that possibility for a while and I would guess it’s getting more likely. (If he retires soon, I’m going to take out a bet.) The scenario is that a nation battered by long term economic woes and an expensive but low level war, blames both parties for their inability to fix their plight (all the while screaming about government interference!) and gratefully turns to a straight shooting military man who “knows how to get things done.” (In another era, it might have been a businessman, but they are out of fashion these days.) TMCP is the obvious guy. He’s very, very good.

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