{"id":3651,"date":"2008-11-18T08:00:33","date_gmt":"2008-11-18T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3651"},"modified":"2008-11-16T13:43:54","modified_gmt":"2008-11-16T18:43:54","slug":"the-only-good-republican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3651","title":{"rendered":"The Only Good Republican"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few\u00a0days after the election, regular commenter Angryclown (an old friend of mine, by the way) left this bit<\/a> in a post-mortem about the election<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Palin, Quayle, Shrub: stupid.<\/p>\n

Bush 41, Dole, Kemp, McCain: smart enough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 As to Mac – well, we’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n

I responded:<\/p>\n

Any Republican can be \u201csmart enough\u201d, when he\/she is not a contender or a threat.<\/p>\n

Bush41, Mac, Kemp and Dole are all \u201csmart enough\u201d now that they\u2019re retired. When they were contenders, they were all \u201cstupid\u201d or worse.<\/p>\n

Sorta like McCain; \u201cMaverick\u201d was every Democrat and media outlet\u2019s\u00a0favorite Republican, until he actually got endorsed. Then he was a crazy old man – until his career ended. Now he\u2019s \u201csmart enough\u201d.<\/p>\n

If Palin retired from politics tomorrow, all the \u201cPalin be dum\u201d stuff would disappear overnight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s true, of course; to the Democrats and the media, the only good Republican is an irrelevant one.\u00a0 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 <\/em>to Democrats.<\/p>\n

Take the example of John McCain.\u00a0 He has for the past decade been every liberal’s favorite conservative.\u00a0 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 <\/em>about supporting”.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Along with being labelled an “extremist<\/a>” Republican by a media that managed to shunt Mac’s moderate past down the public memory hole with record speed, I mean?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bupkes.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the Republican Governors’ Conference<\/a>, the MSM’s talking heads are prescribing…running to the center.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Patterico<\/a>\u00a0looks back at his own predictions on the subject:<\/p>\n

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<\/font><\/strong><\/a>. Responding to a Wall Street Journal<\/em> piece by Steven G. Calabresi and John O. McGinnis calling John McCain the most electable Republican, I said this:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s my view that McCain only seems<\/em> electable because of his media image, which will collapse once the country actually gets to know him in the general election<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

. . . .<\/p>\n

Many voters will eventually learn that McCain\u2019s 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: \u201cHoly crap! That\u2019s<\/em> the guy I thought I liked?!\u201d The antiwar crowd will finally realize he makes George Bush look like Neville Chamberlain. And everyone<\/em> will see McCain\u2019s smug condescension, born of a background of elitism and privilege. It will manifest itself in that self-satisfied mockingly contemptuous grin that he can\u2019t hide.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So what should<\/em>\u00a0 we do?\u00a0<\/p>\n

More later.\u00a0 Like, over the course of the next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few\u00a0days after the election, regular commenter Angryclown (an old friend of mine, by the way) left this bit in a post-mortem about the election: \u00a0Palin, 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; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}