Short Stories, Long Odds

I am a professional, after all, so I can admit that what Kuttner lays
out isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. I have a hard
time following the theory all the way down into the Red State base,
which is why I don’t entirely buy it.

If this were all part of a grand plan, Senate Republicans and Frist
would have had to appear sabotaged by people other than Democrats.
Instead, Frist looks ineffectual, Dobson’s calling him out in the
press, and the internet is ablaze with the usually rank-and-file
NeoCons losing their damn minds, renouncing the party, and even
better, swearing that the GOP gets no more money from them.

If the base and the grass roots were quiet, or pledging faith in their
leaders, or brazenly claiming that this is all a grand plan on behalf
of their boys, I would be more inclined to side with Kuttner and his
disaffected ilk. But it doesn’t make any kind of political sense to
alienate that huge slice of the electorate they worked for 30 years to
lure in and that is now totally enraged.

The problem a lot of Democrats are having with the deal is that they
want absolutes, just like the other guys get. The big secret is that
while elections are very much a zero-sum game, there are no
categorical absolutes in American politics, even though it seems like
there are for the Republicans.

Notice how many moral issues are championed during the election years
and then quickly abandoned in favor of the requisite pro-business,
pro-power, pro-supply-side, Straussian agenda usually embraced by
Republicans since 1994. These are presented as absolute binaries and
then quickly abandoned in favor of the the real workings of politics -
the deal-making, the compromises, and the hard fact that you only ever
get 25% of what you start out demanding.

I think that the Republicans are probably less comfortable with the
new religious-right agenda that’s been foisted upon them by the people
who enabled their majority than anyone is admitting. Because they
played to this crowd so hard for so long, now they are beholden to
them as a party, and someone should have had the political smarts to
sit up and notice how impossible things would get when their newly
energized base started painting them into a corner.

So we didn’t get an absolute, and neither did the Republicans, and the
immediate pending doom for somebody was averted. When McCain said that
it was a victory for the Senate, he wasn’t kidding. Politically, it
was a victory for everyone but the people without the sense to realize
what a big mistake the whole idea had been in the first place.