PMC Commentary

Is Politico political?

Is it just me? Or is the left drifting to the paranoid shore, seeing bogeymen everywhere, especially where they aren't?

I ask because of Politico, that daily update of Beltway skulduggery, which has also evolved in the palsied mind of the high-profile left as the Great Satan, corporate creature of "the conservative media."

This charge has puzzled me endlessly -- for every piece in which I've detected a slight and probably unintentional slant to the right, I have found another leaning a touch to the left -- nevertheless it has by now settled in as progressive gospel: You just can't trust Politico.

A recent instance of this was a disgraceful appearance by Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson on MSNBC's "The Ed Show," who (my guess: Politico had printed something unkind about him and his over-rehearsed antics) pealed off a litany of vitriol about the publication being a right-wing "rag." Perhaps just as disgracefully, Mr. Schultz let him riff, no questions asked, which is an improbable function of a talk-show host.

Anyway, what brought all this to mind was a morning piece in Politico titled " 'Young Guns' offers GOP blueprint"; "Young Guns" being the title, in turn, of a forthcoming propaganda laugh by GOP Congressmen Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. I quote, from Politico:

"The GOP's 'Young Guns' are long on platitudes and personality but short on policy details in a new book scheduled for publication just weeks before a mid-term election...

"Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, who fancy themselves the vanguard of a modern Republican Party....

"It's an easy read, and that's no doubt how it's intended. But for anyone seeking a fresh idea for the next Republican Party platform, skip it....

"They lambaste both parties, discrediting the GOP's leadership -- of which Cantor has been a member for nearly all of his career....

"... three chapters sprinkled with redundant jabs at liberal Americans and Europeans....

"... there's this doozy from Ryan: 'Americans aren’t any particular nationality.' "

Now I ask you (and you, Congressman Grayson), does that sound like the writing of a right-wing rag?

And I ask for possibly overdue prophylactic reasons. Far too many lefties have slipped into Nixonian ways of painting the media as sinisterly, monolithically hostile to their partisan or ideological designs -- a methodological pitfall that relieves the accuser of self-examination and thereby carries the decided downside of unchecked self-congratulations. And they should stop.

No, I'm not on Politico's payroll and I readily agree that the media in general do a lousy job of political journalism. But fair is fair -- and Politico comes about as close to fair as any publication can -- and paranoia is paranoia -- and the left needs to get a realistic grip.

A gaping puzzlement

It's a damn good thing the Russians at Stalingrad and the Americans in the Bulge dismissed Gallup's foxhole polling of Nazi enthusiasm and instead redoubled their efforts at crushing the fascist bastards.

Which is to say, it's a damn good thing the former thought not like so many Democrats, who've effectively declared surrender before the midterm battle's engaged.

The "enthusiasm gap," reports Gallup, is now a yawning chasm: 50 percent to 25 percent in you-know-who's favor.

Less than two years ago rank-and-file Republicans and their battered party's leadership wandered in electoral wreckage, and many even wondered if the party could survive. Things were bleak -- really bleak, almost bottomlessly bleak. The GOP was pretty much cornered in the South, it was demographically doomed, it had plunged the nation in a Great Recession, it had no credible message or believable escape route, and on and on.

Now? Republicans are like Mel Brooks' Mongo decking the donkey. They got themselves pumped when they needed to be pumped -- when, that is, things looked bleakest. Sure, they accomplished said pumping through every conceivable corruption of political decency. But, they figured, this is war. So fuck it.

One would think -- or at least I would think -- that with a determined, unconscionable opponent like that, Democrats would be fighting mad and twice as pumped. One would think they'd set aside, for just a few months, their internal disputes and their ideological whimpering and their insufferable griping about having coming up short of glistening Platonic Ideals in policymaking.

Yes, one would think. But according to Gallup, one would be epically wrong.

There's still time, of course, for Democrats to muster and engage and rather easily defeat what is, after all, the numerically inferior enemy. Yet deep within the Democratic psyche there seems a masochistic tendency to play the victim; to whine about the bad guys and their assorted bad ways, while withdrawing from the battlefield and going home to pout.

The upside of a GOP House

In one political corner alarms are sounding, and in the other, corks are popping, because the House, as district polling strongly suggests, will go Republican.

I'm certainly no cork-popper, yet, aside from the lugubrious prospect of the GOP wielding subpoena power -- it remains almost inconceivable that this decade's harvest of such prodigiously incompetent pseudoconservatives could even fake casting judgment on others -- is the concept of a Republican House through 2012 actually a gloomy one?

As President Obama made clear again earlier today, from the White House, his problem (and ours) lies in the Senate, not the House. The Dems could hold a 434-1 House majority and it wouldn't mean a thing, since all good things swiftly come to an end in the upper minority.

His latest tax-cutting, job-promoting small-business bill "has been languishing in the Senate for months," decried the president, "held up by a partisan minority that won't even allow it to go to a vote."

"I ask Senate Republicans to drop the blockade," he continued, which of course they won't. Not this summer, not this fall, not next year or the year after.

The thing is, though, might it be politically better for Obama to have Republican senators, in their likely continuing minority, blocking legislation in cooperation with a House Republican majority rather than a House Republican minority? A new majority in the lower chamber would distribute ownership of the economy's health; the party could no longer claim powerless outsider status; it would be on the accountable hook in 2012, just as Democrats are now.

As for subpoena power, yes, gloomy indeed. It would, however, in the long run, probably work less to the GOP's benefit than Obama's. With the economy still in the dumps in January, 2011, all the voting public would need to hear, to realize their momentous electoral error, is that GOP House chairmen are gearing up an elaborate buffet of investigative committees rather than job-creation bills.

The fundamental point here is that as long as the GOP wields minority veto power in the Senate, nothing will get done for the next two years anyway. And Obama must be pondering his next chess move: Is it better to get nothing done with some Republicans in charge or to get nothing done with both chambers on his partisan side?

Glenn Beck, just another face

Well, his tears were a nice touch.

They came roughly in the middle of the few, preposterous minutes I spent with Glenn Beck on Saturday. The first of those minutes he devoted to something about another George Washington being somewhere in the crowd, who, perhaps a mere eight years old now, would in 25 years mount the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and announce either the coming or culmination (I was a trifle vague about which) of his American dream.

Or at least I think that's what I heard. Following Beck's drift was tricky, since he sloshed from George to Martin to Abe -- and at one extended point, Moses, who, by the way, "had a stick" -- in torrential currents of historical reinvention which were, admittedly, vastly amusing, but therein also quite distracting. Which is to say, I couldn't stop chuckling. And that rendered my full attention to Beck's insights a rather bumpy endeavor.

But those tears of his -- ah, that clenching of the throat, that breaking of the voice, that Swaggartesque timing of Vesuvian emotion. Well, as I said, nice touch. For one transcendent moment, I was as Proust at the theatre, marveling at the splendor of low theatricality.

Too soon it was that we were then thrust back into Beck's "history" tutorial, now featuring the Gettysburg Address. He recited it and suggested its immense relevance to today, with which I wholeheartedly agreed, since all I could think of as Beck exploited Lincoln's mass eulogy was that the bloody thing was necessary only because states-righters, wrapped in a violently false philosophy, had gone madly demagogic.

But that's just about enough said. I refuse to spend much time on Beck, either watching him, listening to him, or writing about him. For there's little of fresh value that one can note, or long bear, about a megalomaniacal, messianic, world-class crackpot of cosmic ambition and honorable void.

His artistry, as it were, is no secret. Beck is but the most recent manifestation of yet another Face in the Crowd; he mixes subatomic particles of truth with complex molecules of fabrication and distortion and then hawks the resulting swill to a pitiably ill-read, inexcusably credulous audience.

Before Beck, there was a Beck; after Beck, there'll be another Beck. Because with sufficient glibness and loads of marketing talent -- two human commodities hardly rare -- one can sell absolutely anything to appreciable chunks of the American people.

CrypticWorks and the Tea Party

The NY Times' story this week on FreedomWorks' "boot-camp" training of tea party organizers -- "Shaping Tea Party Passion into Campaign Force" -- left me adrift, again, in the unknown waters of tea party ... policies?

Shaping the tea party's passion into a "campaign force" I got; it was the passion itself that somehow fled the story. Passion for what?

I don't mean extracting some strategically ambiguous reply -- Less government! Less taxes! -- from the interviewed FreedomWorks apparatchiks and attending tea partiers. What others would like to know the answer to is, How much less? What departments and agencies should be eliminated? How much would be saved? What are the offsetting costs to society of the savings? What, in FreedomWorks' alternative free-market society, would take the place of those amputated departments and agencies which were once created out of grossly conspicuous need?; that is, who in the free market would step in to do the unprofitable work of, say, hunger, or education, or protecting as opposed to exploiting the environment?

We learned none of this. It may be that FreedomWorks' "boot-camp" drill sergeants weren't saying, or were being unquotably coy about it all. If that was the case, the Times should have told us. Instead, we learned that FreedomWorks "has done more than any other organization to build the Tea Party movement"; that "For 18 months, the group’s young staff has been conducting training sessions ... across the country, in hotel conference rooms or basements of bars"; and -- this sort of thing is invaluable only if one knows absolutely nothing about campaign rudiments -- that "Through its political action committee, FreedomWorks plans to spend $10 million on the midterm elections, on campaign paraphernalia ... [and] voter lists, and a phone system that allows volunteers to make calls for candidates around the country from their home computers."

What of policy, though? The word did erupt once: "This movement, if we can turn out hundreds or thousands to the streets to protest and wave signs and yell and make an impact on public policy debate," said FreedomWorks' top organizer to the attending pious, "then we can make a lot of difference." So we know they wish to "make an impact on public policy"; we just don't know what policies, or why, or how.

Taking pity, I guess, on adrift readers such as myself, the Times did pause about midway in the piece to inform us that FreedomWorks "want[s] to build a like-minded community, an endeavor that is as much fun as work," which read as though the Times was quoting from a FreedomWorks real-estate brochure. But don't get the idea they are merely an admixture of playful laborers, for, continued the Times -- Bring up the angels! -- "they are also deeply ideological."

OK, now we're getting somewhere, I thought. How deep? This deep: "a portrait of Ayn Rand hangs on the office walls along with one of Jerry Garcia."

Assuming that that in-depth reporting might not clarify your every fogginess, the Times elaborated: "FreedomWorks was founded to promote the theories of the Austrian economic school, which argues that economic models are useless because they cannot account for all the variables of human behavior, and that markets must be unfettered to succeed."

And other economists say ... what? Which economic models? Are Keynes', for example, really "useless"? Do other economists actually claim they can "account for all the variables of human behavior"? Are "fettered" capitalists suffering unsuccessfully today?

You likely would have asked such questions, and I might have asked such questions. But the Times didn't. Or if it did, it didn't bother reporting the answers.

So, what's the precise goal -- that is, the intended, ultimate policy goals -- of FreedomWorks' training program, which is but a practical means to an ideological end? After reading the Times story, that's still a mystery. The tea partiers and their sponsoring parent remain a cipher of negativity and subtraction -- Less government! Less taxes! -- but little else, which of course is the mystery that preserves its attraction.

Nudging Palin onward

If the apparent primary victory of Alaska's morbidly anti-government, Palin-backed Joe Miller will help push the backer herself into the presidential primaries of 2012, then call me a Miller Man.

We have all wondered what spectacularly bedlamite act of political ruin would finally rein the GOP back into this cosmos, and let there be no doubt that "Palin for President" -- my God, I get giddy just typing those words -- is it.

I long for it, ache for it, find myself neurotically wishing to fast-forward through the potential crisis of this fall and all the dreadful government deadlock of 2011 so that we can finally have some fun: watching that ursine fabrication of such bloated ego and vacuous mind skyrocket through Iowa and South Carolina -- and with luck (ours, not theirs), Republican primary voters ushering her all the way to the nomination.

I once held insurmountable doubts about this gleeful specter of a Palin nomination, but hardcore GOPers' avid determination to hit absolute rock bottom has since surmounted them. There is, after all, hope, and no longer just the long-shot kind. This week, Palin-backed Joe Miller's success adds to that hope and I hope there's still more to come.

For sure, a Palin candidacy would represent loads of unwholesome fun for the entire nation -- a neon-blinking confirmation of GOP primary politics, in all its insularity, going wretchedly nuts. And a Palin nomination? Ah, there's the ticket -- back to sanity, in time, that is.

As mentioned, absolute rock bottom: that's the political geography in which the GOP would find itself in the wake of a Palin calamity, from which it would then have to pull itself up, and out.

There'd be so little of the party remaining -- what group, other than angry, aging, wolf-hunting fundamentalist white guys would she leave unalienated? -- it would then be far easier for sober GOP strategists to redefine, reconstitute and reassemble the party, perhaps on the honorable grounds of a Burkean conservatism.

This is serious stuff, not just another opportunity to take easy potshots at Palin. We're all -- nearly all, anyway -- experts at that already. This is, rather, about rescuing the two-party system and what should be the intelligent differences it offers.

Principled betrayal?

"On Monday, one of President Obama's top consultants hosted a fundraiser for Crist," recounts The Hill this morning. "Democrat Freddy Balsera, who led the president's outreach to Hispanic voters during the 2008 presidential campaign, is now openly aiding Crist's Senate bid despite White House backing for Meek."

That, as you know, is the way things have been going for Florida's Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. No matter whom he's vanquished to date, and no matter what he does from here on out, Kendrick Meek's upper-house bid is doomed.

I know that, you know that, Kendrick knows that, and for damn sure the White House, which dearly needs another friendly face and empirically huggable vote in the Senate, knows that, hence what it giveth to Meek in dreamy formalities it taketh away in sober utility.

All of this poses a fascinating dilemma for Florida's liberals, which reduces to the simplest of formulations: principle versus pragmatism.

Are they to stand by their party man -- who's already puffing that last smoke and awaits only the blindfold -- thus vastly abetting right-winger Marco Rubio's swearing-in ceremony? Or do they inch away from principled allegiance and tactically hurl an anti-Rubio ballot through the independent conduit of Crist?

Along philosophical lines, which is the deeper violation of liberal principle -- the liberal or the independent vote? If casting one's ballot for the certified liberal candidate is, by Election Day, demonstrably tantamount to aiding Rubio's inescapable victory, and therefore contributing to the right's Congressional re-ascendancy, has one actually cast a liberal vote? Or is such an act but a paradox of principled betrayal?

Some will argue the choice in principled terms only, rejecting, with near religious fervor, any compromise with conscience. Others will argue that the frisson of individual Conscience Unbound is an unacceptably huge price to pay for six ... long... years ... of Rubio-reactionaryism; that the pragmatic detour, by way of Crist, is in philosophical fact the only acceptably principled roadmap.

Fortunately, although at the considerable risk of sounding all Dudley-Do-Right about this, there is a correct answer: yours.

Fighting the bad fight

By tender design or unpardonable oversight, Politico's 8/23 piece, "Dems urge Obama to take a stand," marooned a discussion of what seems increasingly central to the left's discontent.

If you missed reading the article and absorbing its main point, not to worry, for unquestionably you've absorbed it in some familiar form elsewhere: "By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy -- and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented 'pragmatism' -- [Obama] has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies."

That Obama's enemies will distort every facet of his presidency is of course to be expected; it's what they do. What intrigues, however, and what prompted Politico's coverage, is the battle taking between the "professional left" -- progressive bloggers and "cable guys," as one interviewee put it -- and the president, which, as you can see above, is a battle defined as one of "confusion and disappointment" for the former.

Maybe so, although "confusion" is a monumentally ambiguous word. Confusion over, precisely, what? That Obama's Democratic majority is in fact a relatively conservative Congress, thereby circumscribing the president's once-larger and more conventionally progressive policy ambitions? Whatever.

The word with which I wish to take issue, though, is "disappointment." Quite the contrary: The vocal and high-profile left, I have finally become convinced, is positively -- paradoxically -- elated that Obama has "disappointed," since the accusation plays not only into the left's conspiratorial mindset of betrayal by powerful forces ("See? We told you this would happen"), but opens enormous vistas from which to launch its moral superiority, perhaps the single most insufferable quality of polemical progressives.

The exhortation most commonly heard by the vocal left is that Obama should "fight." Fight, fight, fight. The left wishes to fight and so Obama should fight. Fighting is preferred to and elevated above policy wonkishness, above the practical politics of Congressional coalitions, above actual progress. Indeed, progress appears to be the least of the left's concerns; it just wants to fight and to bloody its enemies and to even the score, etc. etc.

This factional and dare I say ideological development is as dispiriting as it is noteworthy, since it reminds me of ... anyone care to take a guess? Bingo -- the modern right, those ill-tempered pseudoconservatives, whose political jollies come chiefly in fighting, fighting, fighting.

If the left permanently adopts the right's anger-as-political-platform and aversion to compromise-politics, well, it's not exactly hysterical to speculate about the similarly permanent degeneration of our traditional two-party system, which, for all its blemishes, has served us rather well. Which is to say, the nation needs one side to stay cool, until the other burns itself out and reforms.

A lunatic blunder

At some point, it seems, a political party's addiction to malicious, self-defeating lunacy takes on a life of its own.

Case in point: the GOP, a plurality of whose rank and file, according to Pew Research, now believes President Obama to be Muslim (31 percent) rather than so obviously Christian (27 percent)-- an advertised belief of frightening proportions that could very well rob the party of what was recently a virtually guaranteed successful November.

The GOP had going for it the most prized political prize there is: a re-dipping economy and high unemployment in the ruling majority hands of its opponent. Republicans could have slid into home plate with nary a dust-up.

But, because their party has become thuggishly addicted to unscrupulous tactics and the very basest of any means to an end, it just couldn't resist the emotional kick of a headlong dive into even deeper sewage.

From the outside looking in, such a tactical blunder makes so little sense that one is hesitant to call it a blunder. But I simply can see no upside to this GOP-ginned Obama-as-Muslim "controversy," stoked yesterday by no less than the Senate minority leader.

This was a blunder, despite what national polls say about the NYC mosque dispute per se -- one of such enormous potential it easily could reverse, and possibly already has, whatever electoral gains the GOP had made. Thirty-one percent of Republicans may be malicious and lunatic, but I still doubt that 51 percent of all Americans are.

Stay tuned for the next generic poll about party preferences for Congress.

Dowdy b.s.

Yesterday morning I sat and watched, on "Meet the Press," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell once again butcher the American political tradition of bipartisan respect -- respect, not necessarily cooperation. Just basic, mutual respect.

Is President Obama a Christian? Well, he says he is, deigned McConnell, who, being the noble mensch that he is, was willing to take Obama "at his word." I half expected and wholly desired that host David Gregory would then ask McConnell to what religion he claims to belong -- prefaced by the host's similarly stated graciousness that he was willing to take McConnell "at his word" -- but such fair-minded turnabout failed to meet with the press' approval.

Just prior to watching McConnell I read Maureen Dowd, who aptly diagnosed that America "is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment." Dowd expanded on this twofold causation by citing the virulent Rush Limbaugh and the evangelist Franklin Graham -- or was it evangelist Rush Limbaugh and virulent Franklin Graham -- yet she omitted citing anyone on the fear-and-disinformation institutional "right," such as the aforementioned Senate minority leader ... or the House minority leader, or the Senate minority whip, or the House minority whip, or virtually all members of the Senate Republican caucus, or virtually all members of the House Republican caucus, or the Republican National Committee's asylum king ...

But, foolish me, not to fret, for the real cause of America's "weird mass nervous breakdown" had yet to be unveiled by Dowd.

It shouldn't really be laid, if I correctly followed her drift, at the irresponsible feet of malicious talk-radio hosts, or hocus-pocus shamans, or even conservative officeholders, whom one would expect to honor a somewhat higher tradition.

No, the real pathogenic agent here is -- you got it -- President Obama, because "nothing bums out a nation that blows with the wind like a self-appointed messiah who disappoints."

Just how has Obama disappointed? Why, according to Dowd, the man is too ... rational.

He "owes his presidency to the intense feeling he stirred up," noted Dowd (while minimizing the greater intensities that eight years of G.W. Bush's maladministration stirred up), but then he "turns out to be a practical guy who can’t deal with intense feeling." Further, Obama is "too lofty to pay heed to the daily bump and grind of politics," thus his refusal to wallow in the pubescent slime of today's schoolyard politics makes him "easier to demonize."

So the victim becomes the perp, the target the weapon, the blameless object of scorn the blameworthy object of scorn.

I consider myself, too, a rational man. And were I in Obama's shoes I believe I'd take that last full measure of supreme but possibly inadmissible rationality by telling the scurrilous likes of the nation's Mitch McConnells and the clueless likes of its Maureen Dowds to just go fuck themselves.

No doubt that would be "intense" enough, but would it really make me less easy to demonize?

Retro-progressivism

One would think that recent trends -- an outsizedly detached, uninformed electorate willing in its ignorance to entertain the very loopiest of right-wing humbugs, such as POTUS' birthplace or religion -- would at last cause progressives to rethink the attainability of their eponymous movement.

"Progressivism" -- our late-20th-century and somewhat craven retreat from conservative-stained "liberalism" -- originated in the earliest portion of that century from the idea that we could make, and hold on to, sociopolitical progress, chiefly through the exercise of human knowledge and reason, as exemplified in the new and exciting fields of psychology, sociology, economics, political science and professional history. America's fin de siècle would be the re-dawning of the Age of Enlightenment in the form of the Age of the Experts, to whom "the people," at once better informed through compulsory education and mass communications, and more affluent through the material upsides of industrialization, would listen.

Why, even democracy itself could be improved, or so it was thought by progressives, through fine-tunings of its mechanisms: popular referenda, the recall, secret ballots, that sort of thing.

"Progress" was open-ended -- and assured.

Then came the stupendous carnage of the Great War, before we had reason to start numbering global wars. Its progeny: the horrific, totalitarian oppressions and even vaster carnage of European fascism and Soviet communism. To be somewhat chronologically imprecise but close enough, these developments caused American progressivism to morph more modestly into liberalism -- the idea that liberty was chief among the left's goals, with true liberty at risk but nevertheless securable through international vigilance of foes and domestic regulation of rapacious corporate power.

The notion of "progress" as an assured, unbroken path for humanity -- and for sure, the utopian idea of man's perfectibility -- sustained fatal blows throughout the past century, all of which were academically canonized in the rather depressing emergence of the "post-modernist" school of thought.

Yet, here we are, still at the relative dawning of another century, fresh from the global barbarities of the last, still stumbling through ancient prejudices and tenacious ignorance and sectarian violence and totalitarian footholds, as well as locally suffering from pseudoconservatism's creepingly successful demand that America return to the 19th century's Gilded Age -- and what do the opponents of all this socioeconomic-political retrogression call themselves?

Let's face it: We're in a holding action, realistically attempting little more than the preservation of what progress we did make in the 20th century -- e.g. Social Security, Medicare, civil rights, the explosion of the middle class -- and waiting for demographic changes, if nothing else, to open the possibility of another Age of Progressivism.

We're just not there yet, and liberals might as well be honest about it.

A small thought about a big subject

Over the years I've come to realize that what I'm doing, at this very moment, is the world's most colossal waste of time: writing about politics on the Internet.

For a number of years I wrote columns here, on my own site, which were picked up by various progressive Web sites. The sociopolitical benefit? Absolutely none, since only like-minded progressives read them. Oh how we love to be comforted. I then moved directly to a progressive Web site, where I wrote for more than two years. At first I supplied some familiar comfort to readers, but increasingly I introduced some rather uncomfortable truths (at least I was pretty sure they were truths, which I still believe). The sociopolitical benefit? Absolutely none, since "progressive" readers simply tuned out or denounced that which they found uncomfortable.

In various other venues there are ultraconservatives -- more accurately, pseudoconservatives, since they're far more reactionary than genuinely conservative in political sentiment -- who publish their columns, which are then picked up by ultrapseudoconservative Web sites, to the same wasted effect: preaching to the choir, to deploy the anticipated cliche. And, as well, there have been some on the other side -- say, David Frum, David Weigel, Christopher Buckley -- who on occasion broke with their ideological ranks and published what they regarded as alternative, respectable, albeit uncomfortable truths. The benefit of it all? In effect, online assassinations, since "conservative" readers simply tuned out or denounced that which they found uncomfortable.

We are fast arriving at the contemptible and utterly counterproductive point in which we chat only with ourselves, assuming, of course, that we agree with one another in virtual entirety. No dissent, no dissenters, need apply. And I'm grieved that we progressives have become as guilty as those close-minded right wingers we once belittled for such. We have become a politically activist nation of absolutists only, since those activists who seek de-escalation, compromise and the political spirit LBJ once evoked -- that of Come let us reason together -- are quickly sidelined, either by one's own private yearning, as in my case, or forced resignations, such as the cases of Messrs. Frum and Weigel and Buckley.

What haunts me, in practical terms, are the acute words, from March of this year, of the conservative (not ultra, not pseudo, just conservative) David Brooks. Haunting, because the absolutist left and right are now so deluded as to the unmistakable virtues of their likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds, arguments and idealisms that it now takes a conservative columnist to keenly understand our progressive president:

"In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism.... But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office."

I'd quibble only about the "many" people, for the many by now may be the most -- which leaves exhortations of compromise, de-escalation, reason etc. etc. as merely the raw meat of a very negligible minority.

I've tapped out this little piece of introspection in only the last 15 minutes or so, applying a trifle less linear thought than usual, so perhaps by tomorrow morning I'll regret it; perhaps by then I'll see it as whiny or shallow or whatever. But frankly, right now, at this very moment, I see it as one of the truest expressions of political opinion just about anywhere within our insular Webs.

Obama's (mostly) Realpolitik

For more than a year, "movement" progressives, with almost singular focus, have admonished President Obama to emphatically "fight," to rhetorically bloody his opponents, to somehow shame the right with outspoken liberal clarity, since only then would the country come to comprehend the issues of the day with the selfsame clarity and thus regard the modern right as nothing more than the dull-witted collection of over-the-top reactionaries that it is.

Last week, against internal White House advice, Obama stood up as a stern advocate for religious tolerance, which, sad to say, it seems, now passes for a "liberal" position. What then came to pass? This week, polling analyst Charlie Cook released fresh projections for the midterms, announcing that within the last week a staggering 10 additional Democratic House seats had moved from the safe to questionable column. In view of that significant shift, Cook is now projecting that Republicans will regain 35-45 seats in November (39 are needed for a GOP House majority).

Coincidence? Was it just a quirk of timing, a peculiar happenstance, that soon after Obama interposed himself in the left-vs.-right mosque controversy, Democratic numbers in no less than 10 swing districts tanked? Cook wouldn't say. But I, for one, don't believe in coincidences of such magnitude.

To my friends on the left, this development should provide some key of insight as to where Democratic numbers in toto would be today had Obama, for the last year and a half, repeatedly presented himself as a "bold progressive," which "bold progressives" themselves have relentlessly demanded of him. Yet, the key will likely unlock nothing in their minds, since their minds remain closed to the immense political reality that ours is a centrist country -- a statistical phenomenon proved by Gallup year after year in its national surveys of ideological self-identification -- whose disposition, it follows, is rather unfriendly to doctrinaire liberalism.

I'm hardly fond of that reality. But I find that acknowledging unpleasant facts is always preferable to swimming in triumphalist delusions, which, I regret to add, is precisely what movement progressives are downright drowning in.

Obama has governed from the pragmatic center-left not because he's a traitor to the lofty progressive cause, as so many of the cause's advocates have come to believe, but because that's essentially where the country is -- in or around the center; because he's the president of all 50 united states and not some motivational speaker for a 20-percent liberal base; and because he's a damned smart politician who understands both preceding realities.

Had Obama indeed thundered as an undisguised progressive for the last 18 months, Charlie Cook would not be speculating presently about widespread Democratic losses; he would, rather, simply declare them a done deal.

Populism vs. Principle

President Obama "is right on principle, but he will get slaughtered on the politics."

Those were the quoted words, printed yesterday in the Washington Post, of an anonymous Republican consultant about the NYC mosque controversy. They neatly if not brazenly framed the scurrility of GOP tactics and Reason's predicament: Populism is to democracy what demagoguery is to politics -- and both forerunners now rule the pseudoconservative scene.

As a stand-alone quote it could have been charitably interpreted as less an endorsement than an objective observation -- "It's a damn shame that 'principle' is so easily demoted, but whatcha gonna do?" kind of thing -- but as the Post's piece progressed it became depressingly apparent that collective endorsement trumped singular observation.

Chimed a GOP pollster: "Intellectually, [Obama] may be right, but this is a very emotional issue to many Americans, and ... it seems as if he has a tin ear to the politics of the issue." Concurred a GOP strategist: on the mosque controversy Obama "represents the elites of our country and not the average American."

So Obama is both right on principle and right intellectually, which the GOP freely confesses but then openly casts in the demotic: He's an "elitist," since intellectual principles popularly opposed (with a little demagogic assistance) are "elitist."

Anti-intellectualism has of course a long and dishonorable history in America, but generally its purveyors sell it as the sublime: The virtuous people know in their gut what's right, and no eggheaded professor or politico, with all his statistical charts or scholarly tomes, is going to convince them otherwise.

What's shocking about the above quotes, however, is that the GOP is unabashedly reworking and even exacerbating America's anti-intellectual tradition. We know and openly concede, say GOP tacticians, that Obama & Friends are right, we know they're standing on proper principle and we recognize the intellectually valid and popularly ignorant when we see it; but screw it, screw it all, they further contend in almost audible Wagnerian tones -- we just don't give a damn what's right or wrong, if not caring means a few more votes.

Shocking. And frightening.

Mosquerade

The problem isn't that the GOP is sociopathic to the core, or that it's willing to amplify and exploit every sociocultural rupture for merely another diseased vote, or that it can so easily cast to the Devil any potential concerns about political integrity or monumental constitutionalities or even common decency.

The problem, rather, is that the GOP has minor reason, as the NY Times framed it this morning, to be "worried about the risk of being seen as intolerant or not supportive of the right to freedom of religion." Because, to put it another way, the problem is that nearly 70 percent of the American public is, in practice, intolerant of religious freedom, as a CNN poll recently found about the proposed NYC mosque.

But let's go a bit farther. The even deeper problem isn't so much that the majority public is ignorant today, but rather that Americans in general have learned so little from all their ignorant yesterdays.

One would think that after a couple of centuries of flash phobias, baseless terrors and hysterical anti-isms -- anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, anti-civil-rights-ism, anti-gayism and all other manner of anti-Otherness, Anglophobia, Francophobia, Hun-phobia, anti-immigration, McCarthy-style anti-communism and its earlier manifestations of anti-Redism, anti-intellectualism, anti-rum and anti-rebellionism, anti- ... fluoridation? -- that we would have spiritually mellowed. By now.

Yet all that's required to revalidate our ignorance and reanimate our intolerance is the shortest match and grossest distortion, both of which, these days, the GOP is always happy to supply. When one ponders the party's deepest and most stirring roots -- its ideological ancestries of post-revolutionary republicanism and civic virtue and Burkean modesty -- one vividly sees just how far, for want of a better word, it has traveled.

Ironically, however, the GOP's lingering presence is now grounded almost exclusively in American sloth.