Frank Rich thinks the Republicans are showing signs of decline. If nothing else, Tucson gave them a sharp shove downhill.
In the aftermath of President Obama’s Tucson sermon, civility has had a mini-restoration in Washington. And some of the most combative national figures in our politics have been losing altitude ever since, much as they did after Bill Clinton’s oratorical response to the inferno of Oklahoma City.
Glenn Beck, according to ratings books, is getting more ridicule than kudos. Murdoch, Inc., is looking befuddled.
Its newest right-wing book imprint had set its splashy debut for Jan. 18, with the rollout of a screed, “Death by Liberalism,” arguing that “more Americans have been killed by well-meaning liberal policies than by all the wars of the last century combined.” But that publication date was 10 days after Tucson, and clearly someone had second thoughts.
Sarah Palin is losing it. People aren't buying tickets to her events and the polls show fewer and fewer American are buying what she has to sell.
As for Obama in the post-Tucson era, the GOP no longer has a whipping boy. His numbers are up. Which leaves, Rich says, a key question: what does the right have if not Obama?
If the right puts its rabid Obama hatred on the down-low, what will — or can — conservatism stand for instead? The only apparent agendas are repealing “Obamacare” and slashing federal spending as long as the cuts are quarantined to the small percentage of the budget covering discretionary safety-net programs, education and Big Bird.
In other words, a party without a program. CPAC, says Rich, was nearly wiped off the front pages by a revolution in Egypt. Santorum -- Rick Santorum! -- thinks he can run at the front of the pack in 2112.
But no one (with the odd exception of George Will) takes Santorum’s presidential ambitions seriously. Romney, on the other hand, is the closest thing the G.O.P. has to a front-runner, and he is even more hollow than Santorum. Indeed, his appearance at CPAC on the morning of Friday, Feb. 11, was entirely consistent with his public image as an otherworldly visitor from an Aqua Velva commercial circa 1985. ... His snarky, cowardly address also tiptoed around “Obamacare” lest it remind Tea Partiers of Massachusetts’s “Romneycare.”
Okay. But the big question is whether Obama (finally!) is taking advantage of the GOP's disarray. He "sometimes coasts at these junctures or lapses into a pro forma bipartisanship that amounts, for all practical purposes, to inertia."
Obama’s outspokenness about the labor battle in Wisconsin offers a glimmer of hope that he might lead the fight for what many Americans, not just Democrats, care about — from job creation to an energy plan to an attack on the deficit that brackets the high-end Bush-era tax cuts with serious Medicare/Medicaid reform and further strengthening of the health care law. Will he do so? The answer to that question is at least as mysterious as the identity of whatever candidate the desperate G.O.P. finds to run against him.
Even if Obama pulls up his socks and fights, he still has the Republican party involved in a constant sniper fight against him. They're aiming at Democrats' strong supporters, public service unions. And they still have "Citizens United" and Fox, albeit a shabby, limping Fox.
What blows my mind is that Republicans can so easily find support for decimating unions and Democrats seem to have no sense of what it takes -- not much -- to finish off Fox. I bet half of the left doesn't even know what that would take and that they could do it. Not even Frank Rich raises the possibility.
