Frank Rich describes the two opportunists -- two ol'-fashioned snake-oil perps -- as "the tag team that nowadays runs the conservative movement for fun and profit." So much for the real heft of Palin and Beck. We're aware of that. But I think we've been missing the bigger point: it's also a very good way of weighing the actual heft of the incumbents of the conservative movement.
It's feeling kind of lightweight these days. John Cornyn: zap! Mitch McConnell: ouch! Dick Cheney: pow!
The “Randslide,” in the triumphalist lingo favored by Sean Hannity at Fox News, was the Tea Party’s first major election victory. As Charles Hurt, another conservative commentator, wrote in another Rupert Murdoch organ, The New York Post, this was no “qualified” win by a moderate with Tea Party support, like Scott Brown in Massachusetts. “What we saw Tuesday night in Kentucky,” Hurt enthused, “was a pure, unalloyed victory for the Tea Party” in which “the son of the quirky congressman from Texas trounced the establishment candidate who had been groomed and supported by leaders at the highest levels of the Republican Party.”
Ain’t that the truth. The opponent whom Paul humiliated, Trey Grayson, was the protégé of Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s senior senator and the G.O.P. Senate leader. Grayson was also endorsed by Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and John Cornyn, the Texas senator who presides over the Republicans’ Senate campaign committee (and its purse strings). But Paul had the supporters who matter, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the tag team that nowadays runs the conservative movement for fun and profit.
No one has gone so far as to use the word "fad." It's an old word describing earlier and much less damaging crowd pleasers like hula hoops, Mohawks, Nintendo, and American Idol.
That's because the real politik of America's corporate and conservative crowd have left us with an economic crash which -- finally! -- leaves most of us desperate for a way to move away from the teevee and deal with crumbling realities.
But you can tell things could change very quickly: the louder the shouts of triumph, the less secure the shouters. If so, then the Palin fad, the sock-in-the-crotch fantasies of contemporary conservatism, are walking dead.
Rand Paul? Well, amble through Frank Rich's wonderful compendium of What Paul Wants and you'll find you agree with the nimble candidate in a number of positions. He's against the Patriot Act; he's against unnecessary military action... like Iraq and Afghanistan. But.
But he's got the racist itch. That may appall most of us, but it gets him the support he needs. Rich writes:
The usual Tea Party apologists are saying that it was merely a gaffe — and a liberal media trap — when Paul on Wednesday refused to tell Rachel Maddow of MSNBC that he could fully support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But Paul has expressed similar sentiments repeatedly, at least as far back as 2002.
His legal argument that the federal government cannot force private businesses to desegregate is the same used by Barry Goldwater, a frequently cited hero of Paul’s, when the conservative standard-bearer voted against the Civil Rights Act at its inception. It’s all about the Constitution, not race, you see. Under fire, Paul ultimately retreated from this stand — much as the new Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, finally withdrew his April proclamation saluting Confederate History Month. But not before both men’s messages reached their intended demographic.
Rand Paul's politics of resentment is more consistent than that of those other Republicans, the ones clinging to power.
Mitch McConnell, long a go-to Republican for corporate interests in Washington, didn’t just vote for TARP but called it “one of the finest moments in the history of the Senate.” That’s why he’s running around now claiming that the Senate’s financial reform bill is another “bailout” catering to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. In fact that bill is an attempt, however flawed, to police those whose reckless and possibly criminal behavior brought down the economy. McConnell has zero interest in curbing Wall Street. He just hopes that if he keeps screaming “bailout” in a crowded Capitol, the Tea Party crowd will forget that he (and a Republican president) helped engineer the mother of all bailouts. John McCain, who also voted for TARP, may need a similar subterfuge to save his neck in Arizona.
So what can we expect in November? Which side will make sure it votes? Will Rand Paul outlast Pokemon? Is Sarah Palin more than just a poodle skirt? Will they carry the day in November? It depends almost entirely on Democratic cohesion and the political savvy of President Obama.
Tea Partiers will turn up at the polls, and not just in Kentucky. Democrats are less energized in part because even now the president has not fully persuaded many liberal populists in his own party that he is on their side. The suspicion lingers that a Wall Street recovery, not job creation, was his highest economic priority upon arriving at a White House staffed with Goldman alumni. No matter how hard the administration tries to sell health care reform and financial reform as part of the nation’s economic recovery, these signal achievements remain thin gruel for those out of work.
The unemployment numbers, unlikely to change drastically by November, will have more to say than any of Tuesday’s results about what happens on Election Day this year. Yes, the Tea Party is radical, its membership is not enormous, and its race problem is real and troubling. But you can’t fight an impassioned opposition merely with legislative actions that may bear fruit in the semi-distant future. If the Democrats can’t muster their own compelling response to the populist rage out there, “Randslide” may reside in our political vocabulary long after “Arlen Specter” is leaving “Jeopardy” contestants stumped.
And America itself will turn out to be a fad that eventually gets left behind.
