George Will's payback

Poor George Will. He's got a huge boehner in his boxers for Jon Huntsman, but he can't -- try and fantasize as he might -- see a path for his chosen love to the White House.

The reason for Will's frustration is quite simple. His party, the once grand old one, has been hijacked by the petty young thing of profound unseriousness: a seething, tempestuous horde of geezers and bigots and thumpers and temperamental medievalists and Hayekian hayseeds who prefer to soar blissfully on the goofweed of ideological purity than swoon over a candidate's dignified record of accomplishment.

It's the latter, of course, that has blighted Mitt Romney's nomination prospects. Watching him run from his singular success as Massachusetts governor is painful for everyone, not just the GOP base. Now Huntsman must run a similar gauntlet of suppressing public-policy knowledge and radiate, instead, a simpleminded slavishness to contemporary Republican doctrine.

When I read Will's description of those whom Huntsman faces in the GOP primaries I couldn't help but feel a certain amount of pity for both candidate and writer. The columnist makes little effort to conceal his contempt for his own:    

Nominating electorates make up in intensity what they lack in size. They pay close attention to presidential politics early, and participate in cold-weather events, because they have a heat fueled by ideology. Cool-hand Huntsman, with his polished persona and the complementary fluencies of a governor and a diplomat, might find those virtues are, if not defects, of secondary importance in the competition to enkindle Republicans eager to feast on rhetorical red meat.

In Will's throat-clearing summary comes more of Will's distress. Having scribbled a hagiography largely on Huntsman's foreign policy preferences -- he was anti-invasion on Libya and is pro-withdrawal in Afghanistan and is hot for a meaner, leaner military -- Will seems resigned to Huntsman's dark destiny:

[I]t is difficult to chart Huntsman’s path to the Republicans’ Tampa convention through a nominating electorate that is understandably furious about Obama’s demonstrably imprudent and constitutionally dubious domestic policies. Even if that electorate approves Huntsman’s un-Obamalike health-care reforms in Utah and forgives his flirtation with a fanciful climate-change regime among Western states, he faces the worthy but daunting challenge of bringing Tea Party Republicans — disproportionately important in the nominating process — to a boil about foreign policy.

In short, the party's most cerebral, most reasonable, most electable candidate in the general has no party appeal, because the party's primary electorate is meshuga.

Yet Will is only getting what he deserves. Other conservative public intellectuals have for two years belittled and warned against the GOP's turn toward tea-party mania -- one thinks of, most notably, Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks -- while Will has smugly tolerated and at times even stoked its injudicious rise. Welcome to your own future, George.

Comments

[Joe Caroli]

If you can shrug off our sacred Constitutional guarantees and freedoms as mere "goofweed", then this piece won't be a colossal waste of your time as it was mine.

[janicket]

You really ought to put down the goofweed pipe, Joe, and try breathing something besides tea fumes.

[Semilog]

Someone doesn't know what the word "sacred" means.

[Krupke]

Teabaggers--the enema of American Exceptionalism (they don`t even know what it means).

Reminds me of the old saying -- he who sleeps with dogs wakes up with fleas. Right now, I see many GOP kingpins (like Karl Rove and Bill Kristol) awakening from a night sleeping on teabag-filled pillows and furiously itching.

[Batocchio]

On the one hand, the karmic payback is well-deserved. On the other, it's sad that one of our major political party considers these public rejections of reality, on so many subjects, a prerequisite for higher office. It accomplished two key goals - helping their donors' profit margins, and pissing off liberals - but it's made competent governing impossible. Ah, hubris.