40 years of political devolution, in 266 words

Their generational difference is slight, but the disparity in intellectual maturity is immense.

Here's a pastiche of Michael Gerson of the Bush-Cheney era, in which magical thinking became the Republican Party's guiding methodology:

The Republican ticket will go large ... Romney’s admirable, unexpected goal ... the emergence of a leader ... [Ryan] combines a sober realism about a teetering, unsustainable entitlement system with a bubbly, Jack Kemp-like belief in the promise of unleashed enterprise ... the bold, controversial Romney.

And here, also from this morning, is David Stockman of the early Reagan administration era, in which empirical thinking was still permitted at least a small foothold on the GOP's slippery slope:

Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

Stockman is gun-shy, and it's hard to fault him. He experienced firsthand his party's embryonic descent into fiscal madness and he emerged from that mortifying encounter incubating irrational fears of all deficits and essentially all modern economic management. He is the ideological equivalent of the old Trotskyites turned communist witch-hunters.

But he's not nearly unhinged as Gerson, who's been marinating in political fantasy so long he reeks of it. To Gerson, fantasy is normal, fantasy is even real, because fantasy is all he's really known.

So we've the older, repentant bulls, begging forgiveness and seeking redemption; and we've the playful pups, flopping and bouncing around carefree, cracking their heads on hard inconsistencies without bother or even notice.

Comments

[Peter G]

I have many dogs. I do not care that the pups among them occasionally crack their heads. Mostly, as you observe, they do not even notice. It is what they do to the damn carpets that is the problem.

[Robert Lipscomb]

Who came up with the Jack kemp comparison - as a positive. Kemp never won the big one as a quarterback or as a presidential hopeful. he's the political equivalent of taking credit for inventing the leisure suit.

[majii]

Gershon must have fallen and bumped his head--HARD. Unleashed enterprise, especially on the part of Wall Street, is what got us in this mess in the first place, along with two wars, Medicare Part D, the Bush tax cuts, and TARP--all of which the republicans didn't bother to pay for. Expecting Romney and Ryan to clean up the mess the republicans created by implementing the same policies is like expecting a fox to be a good security guard for a henhouse.