the hunger games for real

            There is general agreement that the 2012 presidential election is enormously significant.  In the view of many, it is in fact more significant than any election in recent memory.

           

            The reason most frequently advanced in support of that proposition is that the election presents America with a stark choice between diametrically opposite visions of what government should be.  Romney, this argument goes, would give us a lean, minimalist federal government focused on reducing taxes, reducing or eliminating federal government regulation, demanding individual responsibility in lieu of collective care-giving, closing America’s borders—in effect, creating a government that, in Grover Norquist’s famous sobriquet, could be “drowned in a bathtub.”

            Obama, on the other hand, would give us a government that requires the wealthy to pay more in taxes, regulates business activities that might impinge the public welfare, strengthens the social safety net, fosters inclusiveness—in effect, a social democratic government or, as the GOP prefers to regard it, a “nanny” state.

            There is hyperbole in both those visions, and in fact, they aren’t mutually exclusive.  There is no question however that a Republican victory in November would put this country on a distinctly different course than would a Democratic victory.

            The John Galt-ian nature of the direction Republicans would take the country scares me, but that isn’t the biggest fear factor apropos a Republican win in my view.  Political winds shift and blow in different directions over periods of time, and if this turns out to be a good year for conservative winds, sunspots or a new el nino will over time turn those winds around and usher in a progressive spring.  Remember that the election of 2010 followed 2008 by only two years.

            What scares me about the possibility of a Republican victory in November is what it might portend for the future of politics in this country.  Here are a few reasons why.

NUMBER ONE

            Obama’s swearing in was barely complete when Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate and announced that making Obama a “one-term president” was his party’s “number one goal.”  This at a time when we were fighting two wars that his party had literally put on the country’s credit card, the financial system was on the verge of collapse, we were at least several months into a very deep recession, unemployment had been rising steeply since the previous September, the housing bubble was about to fully burst and the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse.  In the face of all that, the number one Republican goal was to get rid of Obama.

            Only a few days after McConnell made that announcement, all the Republican leadership of the House and Senate convened at a retreat (I believe it was at a resort hotel in Maryland) at which Eric Cantor demanded of them a new set of marching orders—essentially that the party would attack and obstruct.  If Obama proposed anything, the party would attack it, and then simply say no.  The leadership left that meeting unanimously in support of that policy, and for the first time in the 50-odd years that I’ve been watching politics, we saw one of our two parties quite simply ignore, on a continuous basis, its responsibility to govern and pursue instead its self-aggrandizing goal—get rid of the President.

            So firmly behind that policy were the Republicans that they consistently found themselves now opposing policies and ideas they had previously supported.  Perhaps the most egregious example, an individual mandate to pay for universal health insurance was a policy idea originally floated by the Heritage Foundation and supported strongly by the Republican party.

NUMBER TWO

            I will be the first to admit that distortions, misrepresentations, judicious omissions and occasionally outright lies have come from both sides of the aisle during the presidential campaign.  I will further stipulate that because the Republican party had a primary campaign season to get through, it has had more opportunities to obfuscate and thus could be expected to have a higher total number of lies than Democrats.

            Here’s what concerns me.  With no exceptions I can think of, when a Democrat (like Joe Biden) has misrepresented something—or when the party has released an ad containing factually dubious content—at a minimum the Dems have stopped making the dubious statement or stopped running the misleading ad.  They’ve even occasionally issued a mea culpa.

            On the Republican side, not only have there been more lies and distortions, they have been aired absolutely unapologetically.  The most recent examples would include the ad charging that Obama took 716 billion medicare dollars from seniors to pay for Obamacare, the ad claiming that Obama was “gutting” the work requirement in the welfare program, and of course the ad that edited several sentences out of  an Obama speech to make it sound as though he were saying that small business owners didn’t build their own business.  That one has become the de facto theme of  their nominating convention.

            Romney’s top television advertising strategist, Ashley O’Connor, defended the welfare ad by saying simply, “It’s our most effective ad  . . .”  The most telling—one might even say chilling—summation of the new Republican approach to campaign advertising came from Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, who  declared calmly, “we’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

            Newhouse’s comment is a polite way of saying that the Republican party’s official position on campaigning is that it can—and will—say whatever it thinks will best serve its interests regardless of whether it’s true.

NUMBER THREE

            The Republican party has the ability to spend upwards of a billion dollars on this campaign.  That’s with a B.  Way over half of that is coming directly from a group of 26 billionaires whose commonality is hatred of Obama, and from money raised anonymously by 501(c)(4)’s like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS or funneled through non-profits like the Chamber of Commerce.  The Democrats are trying to put on a brave face and talk about how their superior grass-roots mobilization will balance the scales, but they know that’s fanciful thinking.  The amount of money that Republicans can pour into swing states over compressed two or three week periods of time is staggering—and frightening.

Put these three factors together and you have what most scares me about this election.  A Republican victory would in essence say three things:  first, the surest way to return to power is to make certain the incumbent accomplishes as little as possible, even if doing so causes the country to suffer; second, say whatever it takes to make your opponent look bad (or yourself look good) regardless of the truth; third, any election, even one for the most powerful office in the world, can be bought.

Those three things in combination, and what they portend for the future is what scares me most.  If the Republicans lose, that loss would to some extent indicate the country’s rejection of the path the GOP has marched on over the past four years—the three things enumerated above. If the Republicans win, the Democrats will have a choice starting in January of 2013.  Do they want to be minority partners in the governing of the country, or do they want to begin a 4 year, no-holds barred, scorched earth campaign to reclaim the presidency in 2016? 

If they choose the former, the country will shift course radically, and, in my view, for the worse, but its fundamental institutions will remain intact.  If they choose the latter, well, sometimes it’s good to be old enough to not have to look very far into the future. 

Because that future could well be a hateful, or at least hate-filled place where American politics becomes the hunger games.