The Only Good Republican

A few days after the election, regular commenter Angryclown (an old friend of mine, by the way) left this bit in a post-mortem about the election:

 Palin, Quayle, Shrub: stupid.

Bush 41, Dole, Kemp, McCain: smart enough.

A cacaphony of comic routines from the eighties and nineties rattled through my head as I pondered the response; when George HW Bush was in office, his verbal tics, bumbles and occasional attack of food poisoning certainly got their press; Kemp was only obliquely a factor in presidential politics, but he was usually portrayed as someone who’d taken a few too many concussions during his years as an NFL quarterback, especially when he got on the radar during his years as Reagan’s HUD secretary; Dole’s campaign was pretty much DOA in ’96, so his portrayals were a milder form of ridicule.  As to Mac – well, we’ll come back to that.

I responded:

Any Republican can be “smart enough”, when he/she is not a contender or a threat.

Bush41, Mac, Kemp and Dole are all “smart enough” now that they’re retired. When they were contenders, they were all “stupid” or worse.

Sorta like McCain; “Maverick” was every Democrat and media outlet’s favorite Republican, until he actually got endorsed. Then he was a crazy old man – until his career ended. Now he’s “smart enough”.

If Palin retired from politics tomorrow, all the “Palin be dum” stuff would disappear overnight.

It’s true, of course; to the Democrats and the media, the only good Republican is an irrelevant one.  Whether that irrelevancy comes from expired shelf-life (Dole, Kemp, George HW Bush) or being indistinguishable from Democrats (Arne Carlson, Dave Durenberger, and the media’s official “Good Republican”, Chuck Hagel – in Minnesota terms, any Republican that Lori Sturdevant endorses), the idea is the same; the media and the left will tolerate Republicans who are no threat whatsoever to Democrats.

Take the example of John McCain.  He has for the past decade been every liberal’s favorite conservative.  I can’t count the number of Democrat friends who, between 2001 and 2007 or so solemnly intoned “McCain is the only Republican I’d ever think about supporting”.  And conservatives were duly lukewarm on him; he earned an American Conservative Union rating of 87, only a point or two better than notorious moderate (and fellow “Democrat’s Favorite!”) Jim Ramstad, the departing Congressman from Minnesota’s Third District.

And yet the moment he got through the endorsement process, what did his years of accomodation, his “maverick” appelation, his “goodwill” and “reaching across the aisle” get him?

Along with being labelled an “extremist” Republican by a media that managed to shunt Mac’s moderate past down the public memory hole with record speed, I mean? 

Bupkes.

In the wake of the Republican Governors’ Conference, the MSM’s talking heads are prescribing…running to the center. 

Patterico looks back at his own predictions on the subject:

One post that I think has held up pretty well is one that I wrote on February 4, 2008, while the Republican primary was still going hot and heavy. My post was titled John McCain: The Myth of an Electable Candidate. Responding to a Wall Street Journal piece by Steven G. Calabresi and John O. McGinnis calling John McCain the most electable Republican, I said this:

It’s my view that McCain only seems electable because of his media image, which will collapse once the country actually gets to know him in the general election.

. . . .

Many voters will eventually learn that McCain’s image is nothing like the reality. People who know nothing of McCain except his image are finally going to sit down and watch a debate. At that point, a lot of them are going to say: “Holy crap! That’s the guy I thought I liked?!” The antiwar crowd will finally realize he makes George Bush look like Neville Chamberlain. And everyone will see McCain’s smug condescension, born of a background of elitism and privilege. It will manifest itself in that self-satisfied mockingly contemptuous grin that he can’t hide.

As one should beware of Greeks bearing gifts (unless it’s Michael Dukakis trying to look martial astride an M-1), conservatives should beware of the approval of the agenda media.

So what should  we do? 

More later.  Like, over the course of the next year.