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THE PARABLE OF THE HOUSEWIFE AND THE HAM: PART I
05/10/2009
There's an old story about a young housewife who was serving Easter dinner to her large extended family. As she prepared the ham to go into the oven, she cut off several inches from each end, tossed out the ends, then placed the ham in the roasting pan and put it in the oven.
Her astonished mother asked why she was cutting off the ends of the ham, as it was wasting a significant amount of meat. "That's how you always did it," the woman said.
"Yes," said the mother, "but I only had a small roasting pan. I cut off the ends so it would fit. Your pan is plenty large enough to contain the whole ham."
Like the misguided housewife, today's Republicans are missing the bigger picture. And so they are engaging in a futile and ultimately self-defeating attempt to fit back into American politics. Like the young wife, they have jumped to a conclusion based on a lack of understanding, but unlike her, they are refusing to accept any new information. They are going to keep cutting off the ends of that ham no matter what size roasting pan they have.
Since the Republicans were trounced in the 2008 election, they have been completely befuddled. They cannot figure out how they could have been so successful for so long, winning five out of the last seven presidential elections (before 2008) and reaching their ultimate goal – holding the presidency and the majority in Congress for six of the past eight years – and now be so completely discredited and powerless. It is unfathomable to them. If their ideology worked so well for so long to keep them in power, how could it be failing them now? It can't be, they have concluded. Their losses in 2006 and 2008 must be due to something else.
The Republicans have concluded that they lost the last two elections (and are probably destined for more losses) because they got away from their conservative ideology, or their "core principles" as they call them. Those core principles are: low or no taxes; cuts in government spending; opposition to gay marriage and abortion; elimination of entitlements, safety nets and social programs; unbending rigidity against illegal immigration; and a militaristic foreign policy (which they call patriotism).
Their core principles are still correct, they insist. What went wrong was that George W. Bush deviated from them. All they have to do now, they believe, is get back to those principles. And so they refuse to accept the possibility that while there may have been a time and a place for their ideology, that time is gone. They are completely blind to the reality that the nation has moved on, for many reasons, and while George W. Bush's miserable presidency provided a push for that shift in the nation's consciousness, he isn't the only reason it happened.
The first mistake the Republicans make is presuming ideology alone was what won them all those elections in the first place. Certainly, when Ronald Reagan came along the conservative message fell on fertile ground. People had been disillusioned by the excesses of the sixties and seventies. The economy under a Democratic president was stalled. There was still a hangover from Vietnam. Welfare was helping to sustain an underclass of single mothers with large numbers of children. There was a backlash to the school bussing meant to achieve racial integration. The Civil Rights, sexual, and women's revolutions and the growth of affirmative action programs had brought rapid change to a nation that felt it was time to slow down for a while. Thus conservative ideology and its call for rugged individualism, lower taxes and less government appealed to many.
With his 1980 election, conservative President Ronald Reagan became the gold standard for conservatism. Republicans thought they would see a long period of dominance of American politics. Conservative Think Tanks were popping up, and by the time Reagan left office Rush Limbaugh had started his long running anti-liberal radio show.
But Reagan didn't win based on ideology alone, much as conservatives want to believe that. Reagan won based on his ability to communicate, his sunny personality and his message of hope. He also continued Nixon's Southern Strategy of turning the South from Democrat into Republican, with his coded messages meant to appeal to race and class resentment and the long simmering hatred of the federal government (i.e. the Yankee North that defeated them). Finally, the collapse of Soviet Communism which began during his administration, made him into a larger than life hero, even if the Soviet Union would have likely fallen from its own economic weakness no matter who was president.
When Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, followed him into the White House, however, it wasn't because of conservative ideology. Bush was actually a moderate, but people liked the old man Reagan and decided they would keep his veep around. For his part, Bush used the public's love of Reagan, along with racist fear mongering (Willie Horton ads) to achieve victory over a terrible Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis.
When the Democrat Bill Clinton came along and defeated the economically clueless Bush in 1992 and then Dole in 1996, the right went ballistic, working day and night to find Clinton's Achilles heal so they could discredit and defeat him. Ultimately they found it in the person of Monica Lewinsky and Clinton's overheated libido, but that didn't mean conservatism was alive and well. Actually, if conservatism had been alive and well Clinton wouldn't have been the object of their witch hunt.
It wasn't until 2000 that the Republicans found a good ideologically conservative candidate, but even he tried to fool the people with the branding of himself as a new kind of conservative, one that was "compassionate." However even the compassionate conservative Bush Jr. couldn't defeat the Democrat Al Gore in the popular vote, and only gained the electoral advantage with the help of the Supreme Court. It was the Court, and not conservative core principles, that put George W. Bush into the Oval office. What kept him there four years later was nothing more than fear mongering and negative campaign tactics similar to those used by his father against Michael Dukakis.
What ultimately proves the rejection of conservative "core principles" by a majority of Americans, however, are the results of the 2008 election. The Democrats increased their majorities in Congress and their presidential candidate won more electoral votes and more of the popular vote than any candidate since Reagan. Conservatism had been rejected, first in the primaries by the nomination of a moderate Republican, and then in the general by the defeat of that Republican and his ultra-conservative running mate, chosen at the last minute out of desperation.
The 2008 election didn't just reject conservative ideology, however. It also rejected the tactics used by conservatives to win elections over the past thirty years. Fear mongering, divisiveness, negative campaigning, race-baiting, bullying, and pettiness – all recent tactics of the Republican Party – were finally rejected by the voters.
McCain's campaign tried to convince the voters that Obama would not keep them safe, while his supporters waged an underground on-line campaign highlighting his middle name of Hussein and hoping people would connect him to Saddam, Muslims and ultimately terrorists. It didn't work.
McCain's campaign (especially in the person of Sarah Palin) tried to paint Obama as a socialist, communist, fascist and finally terrorist (not realizing, apparently, that these are four very different "isms") while the bloggers tried to say he was not born in this country. It didn't work.
McCain's campaign, right wing radio, and cable television tried to use Rev. Jeremiah Wright's fiery and colorful sermons against Obama, while people like Rush Limbaugh made fun of Obama's African heritage and black skin color in derisive commentary and songs. It didn't work.
Pro-life groups said Obama was "anti-life" and some bishops in the Catholic Church, siding with Republicans, threatened parishioners with excommunication and damnation if they voted for Obama. It didn't work. Catholics voted for Obama in the same percentage as did the general population.
In 2008, the post 9/11 trance was finally broken, making the tired old Republican tactics of fear mongering and character assassination ineffective. A charismatic candidate came along, the progressive counterpart to the conservative Ronald Reagan, who was elected by a large margin, defeating not just his opponent John McCain, but also the bullying, negative tactics of the conservative movement.
We now turn to the second mistake the Republicans are making: thinking the people will return to conservative ideology if they can either: a) remake the image, the brand, the outward appearance of conservatism (by electing a black party chairman, selecting an Indian-American governor to respond to the State of Union, using a female governor as a celebrity spokesperson); or b) get the people to believe that the policies of George W. Bush, the most unpopular president in recent history, were not really conservative.
Neither of these tactics will work because neither addresses the real problem outlined above. The attempt to appear less white and less male has become a joke. All three of these Republicans have been the butt of jokes from the Daily Show to Late Night to SNL. Painting a party multicultural does not make its core multicultural, nor change one failed policy. (One thinks of lipstick on a pig.)
As for distancing the conservative movement from George W. Bush and claiming he was not pure enough, Bush's policies were actually quintessentially conservative and included all elements of that ideology: militarism, the lowering of taxes, pandering to religious fundamentalists, corporatism and supply side economics.
The militarism of Bush, Cheney and the neoconservatives led to two unwinnable wars, a feeling of betrayal on the part of the American people, and the contempt of the rest of the world. Lowering of taxes on the wealthy led to the erosion of the middle class and ballooning federal deficits. Pandering to religious fundamentalists led to – lots of hostility between groups of Americans but little else. The goals of the fundamentalist leaders – to ban abortion and gay marriage – were not achieved and in fact probably never will be. The American people do not like political ideologues preaching to them about morality. Finally, corporatism and supply side economics, complete with deregulation of financial institutions, has led to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The current problems of conservatism are not because Bush and Cheney failed to be conservative. Conservatism itself has failed. The American people have rejected conservatism – its principles as well as its tactics. They have rejected supply side economics, neoconservative dreams of a New American Century, and arrogant militarism.
The nation has evolved and moved past the divisiveness of Vietnam and the backlash against the sixties. Newer, younger Americans who find Vietnam, the sexual revolution and the culture wars to be historical curiosities are now voting in large numbers.
Barack Obama's prescience was uniquely suited to this time of change. He could see that the post 9/11 spell had been broken and the American people now recognized the Bush bamboozlement for what it was. Obama embraced the younger, more progressive, and racially diverse electorate. After all, he was one of them. He recognized that they wanted more fairness and less greed, more diplomacy and less war, more tolerance and less moralistic evangelism, and more multiculturalism and less white male dominance.
The Republicans, on the other hand, remain stuck in bullying, whining, bickering, fearmongering, and stubbornly opposing everyone who doesn't agree with Rush Limbaugh. Though some in the party wanted a "listening tour" (before Rush objected), they not only refuse to listen, they refuse to learn, evolve, or change. Their fundamentalist rejection of evolution is actually an apt metaphor for the behavior of a party that can't evolve, can't learn from its failures and mistakes, and cannot see the changing demographics of the nation.
The other apt metaphor, of course, is that of the housewife who continues to cut off the ends of the ham even though she has a larger pan than her mother had. Were she to continue to cut the ham, throwing away good food because she was too stubborn to see her mistake, she would feel right at home in today's Republican Party.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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