One Utah

Conservatives are already preparing a post-election narrative (no surprise here - as 2004 starting looking like Kerry couldn’t pull it off, progressives began preparing a post-election narrative).

By all indications - the presidential race aside - this is shaping up to be a bad year for Republicans and conservatives. Current polling suggest Dems could emerge from this year’s election with a 100+ majority in the House and 56 to 60 seats in the Senate. On the heels of 2006, we could see a major political realignment.

Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, they’re predicting an electoral college blowout for Obama - 350s for Obama to 180s for McCain. They’re also predicting a solid popular vote win for Obama - 52 to 46 with 3rd party and independent claiming the rest.

If things play out in line with the current polling and predictions, Republicans and conservatives are headed for a no good, terrible, awful, very bad election day. What we’re seeing, already, is the crafting of a post-election narrative in which conservatives justify their losses on several factors.

The first - which is already being trotted out with a vengeance - is claims of widespread fraud. Conservatives have been deliberately confusing the distinction between voter registration fraud (which occurs every year) and actual voter fraud. Yesterday on CSpan, the Ohio Secretary of State gave an interview in which she explained that out of seven million voters, her office has found 7 instances of actual or attempted voter fraud (I’m on a really slow connection now but I’ll see if I can locate the the transcript and append it when I’m on a faster connection). IOW, there if voter registration fraud if Donald Duck registers to vote; there’s not voter fraud unless Sam Jones shows up claiming to be Donald Duck and votes. I have no idea what the figures are for Utah but if Ohio’s numbers hold that means in Utah we have one or two instances of voter fraud. It’s simply not a big enough problem to sway the election.

Connected to the bogus claims of fraud is a second narrative in which Obama isn’t a legitimate President. We saw this against Clinton in the 90s with an insane vengeance. Clinton won a wide EC victory in both his races but never cleared the 50% line in his popular vote. If Obama pulls off a six point spread, this line of attack is much harder to make, but it’s going to happen.

The other side of the conservative post-election is the inside baseball stuff - much of which, like the fraud claims, is based less on reality than on ideology. The primary target here will be John McCain. Conservatives will argue McCain was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign, he was never a real conservative, that he failed to attack Obama in the way he should have, on and on. I think we’ll even see commentators defending Sarah Palin, arguing that McCain failed her in failing to be a real, red meat conservative; Palin certainly excites the Know-Nothing side of the conservative movement and she is, in many ways, George Dubya Bush in heels - a disciplined (deluded), stay on the message campaigner America tried that and it hasn’t worked out so well. While it is true that McCain has run a bad campaign and has been a poor candidate, the field on which he’s playing is brutal this year. I doubt any Republican campaign could have pulled off a win this year.

Which brings me to part two of the conservative insider narrative. Conservative will blame Bush fatigue for the loss. The argument will be that Bush is unpopular and dragged down the party. When forced to analyze why Bush is unpopular they will argue he’s not a real conservative - the argument will be he ran as a conservative but did not govern as one. It’s of course nonsense - Bush has been a textbook Republican, following the Grover Norquist playbook to a “T”. But in wingnutland, the problem is always that “we” have failed conservatism - never that the ideology is unworkable in the real world. Bush’s myriad failures will be attributed solely to him and his lack of sufficient conservatism; Bush will be reviled by the right as a failed conservative, not as a failed president.

Some conservatives and Republicans are going to deal with reality. Via Kos, we see this great quote from Ross Douthat:

This is what a lot of conservatives are going to be telling themselves after election day: That Obama cheated, that the media cheated, that McCain wasn’t a conservative anyway, and that the only reason Sarah Palin wasn’t a hit with swing voters is that the press - with an assist from conservative quislings like Frum and Brooks and Parker and Noonan - poisoned the well. And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat.

Which is a great segue: Conservatives after the election are going to ramp up their attacks on the media to previously unseen levels of loony.

Finally, in the post election season, conservatives - having already purged the moderates from the Republican party - are going to pull the Republican party even further to the right; arguing even more passionately that America is a center right or conservative nation, they will argue that the Republican party needs to more fully and completely embrace conservatism to win elections.

The conservative coalition - corporate lobbyists, libertarians, neocons, paleocons and religious conservatives is in for a rough few years. The paleocons (i.e. Pat Buchanan) are all but defunct and mostly dead. The neocons are utterly discredited. The corporate wing of the party has been completely discredited. The libertarians have largely left in disgust at the remaining true believers - the religious wing of the party. The religious right is still a potent force, able to mobilize voters and raise money easily. OTOH, these are the same end of the roaders who think Bush is doing a good job. They can make lots of noise, but their crusades against contraception and reproductive freedom, their opposition to death with dignity, their opposition to science, and, well to be honest, any idea new since about 1865, puts them on the wrong side of every pressing issue in America today. As a movement, however, religious conservatives aren’t going anywhere. They will remain the core of the Republican party, drawing it ever further to the right. Don’t be surprised if their darling, Sarah Palin, makes serious (and successful) run for the Presidential nomination in 2012. In Sarah Palin, all the right wing lunacy comes together in a single package - hatred for the media and modernity, opposition to reproductive freedom, scorn for learning and science, and a passing acquaintance with ethics. Sarah Palin is the religious right’s poster child and they love her beyond all reason (heck, they’ve already decided Troopergate is nothing more than a political smear dreamt up by the DNC).

Parting thoughts. We’re watching as a major American political party implodes. Andrew Sullivan has called it the end of the conservative era. Whichever way you describe it, it’s not going to pretty. The coming civil war in the Republican party is going to be brutal; whether the realists and pragmatists or ideologues win will tell us a lot about what’s going to happen in American politics. Thomas Schaller, in Whistling Past Dixie, argued that the Republican party’s trajectory is into a regional party forced to run national campaigns every four years. While the Democratic party is forging a national coalition between progressives, liberals, and moderates, the Republican party seems to be cleaving more and more to the hard right. Having purged most of the moderate already (John McCain is about all that remains of the moderate wing of the party, hence the Republican base’s disdain for him), there are for institutional forces within the Republican party able to hold back its rightward lurch; the hard right conservatives will win and will take the party further and further into wingnut land, creating a minority party seething with anger and resentment. To put it another way, if you think McCain-Palin rallies are ugly, I’m betting we ain’t seen nothing yet.

This entry was posted Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), American History, American People, Barack Obama, Bigotry, Bush Failures, Conservative Sell-Outs, Conservatives, John McCain, Party Politics, Political Corruption, Republicans, Sarah Palin. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.