CT Blue

Could it be that the Republican party is having trouble keeping young and up with the times? This is the party that for the last 40 years has beaten the Democrats so well at messaging that they manage to win their fair share of elections even though they (including the sainted Reagan) pretty much destroy the country every time they get near power.

But I detect some cracks; indications that they are resting on their laurels. It seems, in fact, for Republicans, it’s always 1980.

I read today that Romney called Obama “the most feckless president since Carter”.

Before I get to my main point, let me detour a bit. Apparently, Romney thinks Obama is not as feckless as Carter, or he’d have gone back to some other feckless president, like Coolidge, or said that Obama was more feckless than Carter. Since I assume all Republican presidents are, by definition, full of feck, this leaves Obama trailing only Clinton in feck among the Democrats since Carter. But the Republicans are positively embracing Clinton, so he too, is full of feck. Nowadays, the Republicans just can’t get enough of the guy they tried to impeach, and who my must-be-faulty memory still insists they thought was a criminal incompetent at the time. So, Obama has less feck than all those feckfull guys, meaning he may still have plenty of feck. All I can say is, that whatever point Romney was trying to make, he was pretty feckless in the way he went about making it.

But, I definitely digress; back to my main point. What’s with the Carter references? It’s been 32 years since he was president. Even the Democrats had stopped running against Herbert Hoover by 1964, and they had far more cause to do so. Besides, Hoover had pretty much slipped into a sullen retirement after his presidency. Not so with Carter. Voters that were 18 when he last ran are now 50, and a large share of the idiots that voted for his replacement are now dead. The man is just not perceived the way Republicans delude themselves into believing he is perceived. For most people, Carter is the nice man who builds houses, supervises elections, and says sensible things about the Arab-Israeli situation. The Carter gibe is more likely to be met by blank stares then anything else. Just one more sign that the Republican message operation needs an operating system upgrade.

Besides, “feckless” means incompetent, and everyone knows that Bush was the most feckless president in American history. He was so feckless that despite Romney’s fecklessness of the last few days and weeks, I still think Romney would have marginally more feck than Bush, though he’d do more harm than Bush since he’d be a slave to a Congress dominated by sociopaths and loonies. I really think Romney should stay away from the word, because people might look it up, and remind themselves that Romney’s incompetent campaign has gotten him where he is only because he ran against a field of fecklessness unprecedented in all of American history. Remember: Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman, Hermann Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. It’s hard to tell at this point whether Romney was the least incompetent or the shit floated to the top. Either way, Romney, a guy who couldn’t even go to England without pissing off the natives, really ought to avoid the topic.

Apparently Romney is being rightly condemned by almost everyone for trying to make political hay out of the killings in Libya, but I can’t agree with the argument made by Kos, (which may be tongue in cheek) that Romney had no choice but to attack. If you’re losing, you don’t intentionally go out and do something that will make your chances of losing even greater, and indeed, this may be the final straw for Romney, much like McCain was toast after pronouncing the economy’s fundamentals sound, and then proposing cancelling the campaign when it turned out he was just a tad wrong.

My own take is that Romney in particular, and the Republicans in general, have lost any sense that there are limits to how vicious and mean spirited you can be, particularly when the object of your venom is Obama. They have internalized the fringe attitude toward him, and believe that  attitude is shared by a broad cross section of their fellow citizens. None of us are immune from the belief that most other people feel the way we do, but things get dangerous when you start to believe that the minority to whom you are pandering (or to whom you were pandering until you began to half believe your own lies) hold broadly acceptable views.

Since their venom has been tolerated and even excused by the media, there has been no effective check on its verbalization, but that doesn’t mean what’s being verbalized has become any more widely believed. Now their weird world view has to actually produce votes, and they are coming up against the fact that most people don’t view Obama as anything other than what he is: a likable man trying to do his best in a bad situation he inherited from the people who despise him the most. Other than Republicans, few view him as an America hating closet Muslim. People like him even if they disagree with the policy choices he’s mde, so they don’t recognize the guy the right despises in the president they know. Because he’s known, all the money in the world is unlikely to shake their perceptions. Romney, on the other hand, is, as Kos says, a dick, and all the money in the world is having a hard time hiding that fact from the American people.

But the incident still illustrates the double standard that the media allows in this country. One could not criticize Bush in the days after 9/11, or for months after, on any subject, lest one be perceived as helping the terrorist. That extended to anyone asking for an investigation of the events leading up to the incident. Imagine, if you can, the reaction we would have heard if the titular head of the Democratic Party had blamed Bush for 9/11 the day it happened. The reaction to Romney is encouraging, but it pales in comparison to what would have happened had, for instance, John Kerry done something similar.