Room to regroup
by digby
Rick Perlstein has a fantastic piece up today about Newtie, Perot and the Contract With America. It’s really helpful to have a historian of the modern conservative movement weigh in on recent history. The press is simply dismal in this regard. The whole article is great, but this is the gist:
Gingrich and Co. were able to get away with it because the plain facts of what the Contract actually was (a strategic erasure of Republican conservatism) almost entirely escaped the political press – at the time, and ever since. A 1996 New York magazine article by Jacob Weisberg, for instance, about how “Ross Perot is back, in all his self-aggrandizing, wacky splendor,” observed as evidence of said wackiness, “One minute Perot is making an important point about the unwillingness of the major parties to deal with the Social Security time bomb. The next he is off on a jag about how the Contract with America was actually his idea.” (Imagine!)
A 2004 history of conservatism stated baldly that the Contract “epitomized antigovernment conservatism.” The narrative was set: the Contract, and its consequence – the new Republican congressional majority – proved America was indisputably (to take the title of that 2004 history) a “right nation.” This supposed truism underwrites the defensive rhetoric of, say, Barack Obama, who felt compelled to say in his State of the Union this week, quoting Abraham Lincoln, that “government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”
(Yeah. I just wilted like a dead petunia when I heard that one.)
The point he’s making about the GOP “co-option” of the Perot movement is truly important. When you look back at the context you will see that a big part of it was repudiation of failure (Daddy Bush) and the opportunistic ascendance of the conservative movement. It’s a similar dynamic to the ascendance of the Tea Party after Junior Bush’s failure. There’s a reaction among a certain subset of the American public to GOP failure that leads them to an “independent” reform movement concentrated on political corruption, low taxes and deficit education. (With a good dose of flag waving and military fetishism thrown in for flavor.)All of which fits very nicely back into the GOP fold once they make clear just how committed they are to all those things. It’s a nice scam — it gives both the party and voters a place to go after failure to regroup and then come back together to fight the liberals.
Just as Newtie led the Perotistas back into the fold in 1994, they all went back in 2010. Works like a charm. And just like clockwork, Even old Ross himself came around and endorsed George W. Bush in 2000. (If you see some crazy, take a look at that transcript.It’s really going to be hard to beat the 90s for sheer political lunacy.But they’ll keep trying.)
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