WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN? 

 Jerry Harkins

“DO YOU KNOW ME?” Thus asked William E. Miller in a famous American Express commercial only ten years after he ran for Vice President of the United States on the ticket headed by Barry Goldwater. No one did remember him. It was not surprising. Republicans specialize in nominating obscure right wing politicians. Think of Spiro Agnew or J. Danforth Quale. And, unlike Miller, they were winners.

The election of 2012 will long be remembered for the losers. The Republican primaries came across as a casting call for “America’s Got Clowns!” The Litany of Losers included Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, Buddy Roemer, Rick Santorum and Donald Trump. The big loser, of course, was the poor bastard that came out on top of this pile of monkeys, Mitt Romney. Had he thought to ask “What’s second prize?” he might have opted for two weeks in Philadelphia. Actually, second prize went to the doctrinaire reactionary, Paul Ryan. Ryan may be Sarah Palin with lipstick but at least he has a measureable IQ. He is a small government conservative who has never worked in the private sector except for some part time jobs when he was in school. He used to be a disciple of Ayn Rand but now claims he gets his political philosophy from Thomas Aquinas who was an early proponent of the divine right of kings.

To be as fair as possible, a few of these seekers were credible representatives of quirky but authentic political philosophies. Ron Paul is a serious libertarian, Jon Huntsman is a serious if eclectic conservative and a successful former governor of Utah, and Gary Johnson is Ron Paul Lite. Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, is another interesting case, moderately conservative, moderately libertarian and a deeply committed evangelical Christian. Of course being an interesting person isn’t enough to impart credibility as a presidential candidate. After all, Paris Hilton is an interesting person. The rest of the Republican pack was comprised of angry ignoramuses with a collective IQ hovering around room temperature. That doesn’t count The Donald, perhaps the scariest presidential hopeful in the history of the Republic. His big issues were President Obama’s birth certificate and the Air Force’s cover-up of the alien landing at Roswell. Romney was the only one of these candidates that could claim to be electable and even he had a lot of baggage. The Republicans flirted with each of his opponents in their turn trying to avoid the obvious but, finally and reluctantly, they settled on him even though many of them considered him far too liberal and some were convinced that he was a member of a religious “cult.”

Like his father before him, Romney is a serious person. He is often inarticulate but nowhere near as goofy as George W. Bush. As President Obama said, he is a generous citizen and an outstanding family man. In fact, had he not been saddled with the inane, demagogic Republican platform, he might have won. As it was, things were close. Still, there was a distinct progressive tone in the results especially in various referenda on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Moreover, the conservatives took a worse beating than the raw numbers suggest. Retrograde ideas are almost always on the wrong side of history.

One of the more interesting losers was Bibi Netanyahu who campaigned aggressively for Romney and who lost no opportunity to speak of the President in insulting and derogatory terms. He keeps insisting that Israel is the only friend we have in the Middle East. To which I reply America is the only friend Israel has in the world. But most Israelis think Americans are all fat, ugly and stupid and can be easily duped. Bibi would make an interesting case study for one of the Freudian journals. His conservatism seems to derive from a compulsive pursuit of his father’s approval. The father was the late distinguished scholar Benzion Netanyahu who often expressed a preference for his older son Jonathan, the hero/martyr of Entebbe. Come to think of it, something similar could be said about Romney.

Bibi leads a nation that has long been suffering from a Wonderland syndrome in its attempts to govern itself. All decisions are subject to the veto of a small minority—about 11½% of the citizenry—called the ultra orthodox or Haredim. The great majority of these people will not serve in the Israeli Army and do not even accept the legitimacy of the Israeli state but insist on being paid by that same state all their lives to study Torah. They constitute the largest segment (about 40%) of residents of both the “legal” and “illegal” West Bank settlements. They account for far more than their fair share of the Israeli budget mostly because of welfare payments and their need for protection. For a variety of complex reasons, they enjoy strong support in Israel and by the leadership of American Jews. These same leaders spent lavishly to defeat Obama, supporting Santorum and Gingrich long after they crash landed. The money was wasted: ultimately 70% of American Jewish voters went for Obama.

But the biggest and dumbest losers of all were the members of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops especially its leader Cardinal Timmy Dolan of New York. They bet the farm on Romney and waged total, unrelenting warfare on Obama, denouncing him incessantly from the pulpit. Their message was clear: you can’t be a Catholic and vote for a candidate who questions our infallibility on matters of sexual morality and who threatens our religious freedom. If you’re not a Catholic in good standing with us, you can’t receive the sacraments and can’t go to heaven. Bishop after bishop took to the hustings to excoriate the President as a moral degenerate out to promote abortion, stem cell research and, horror of horrors, contraception. The National Catholic Reporter had it exactly right the day after the election:

The self-indulgent tantrums of some bishops—comparing the president to Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, warning Catholics that their souls are in danger should they mark their ballots for certain candidates, grossly overstating the threat to religious liberty and playing loose with such terms as “intrinsic evil” and “prudential judgment”—became public embarrassments. 

These men—these elderly celibates in their medieval finery—failed utterly in their attempt to elect Romney. In pressing their extremist rhetoric, they relinquished whatever credibility and integrity they might have had as well as any claim they might have had to a place at the decision-making table. The Catholic vote turned out to be pretty much a mirror of the national vote. The bishops aligned themselves with the born again Protestants for whom no indictment is too scurrilous, too vituperative, too fraudulent to broach. These are the people who truly believe that God hates fags and loves rapists. You expect such bombast from the likes of Donald Trump, Fred Phelps or Pat Robertson but not necessarily from those professing a respect for the ten commandments. Perhaps it is only sad to hear Billy Graham endorse Mr. Romney and the red meat Republican platform. But it is unforgivable for his son, Franklin, to say he was not sure that Mr. Obama was a true Christian and that he could not definitively say that the President was not a Muslim. Wink, wink!

One more thought.  Whatever else you think of him, President Obama is a pretty smart guy. (Do you think Michele would have married a dummy?) So it is eminently possible that he and his team picked their fights early in the campaign. On the issue of providing contraceptives as part of the health care reform, he could have avoided trouble by offering Timmy Dolan a more appealing compromise. He has often said government is the art of compromise, a position that has cost him the enthusiasm of the leftie ideologues. So he could have shut Timmy’s war down. But he didn’t. I can easily imagine a meeting at which he said, “Let’s see if we can sucker the Catholic hierarchy into a hissy fit about contraception.” He had nothing to lose as conservative Catholics weren’t going to vote for him anyway. By exposing the extremism of the bishops, he made it easier for the laity to laugh at them and vote for him. If so, it was like shooting sitting ducks. The bishops screamed, ranted, foamed at the mouth and pronounced their collective anathema while the electorate was treated to a Loony Tunes episode of Elmer Fudd’s rage. Given their edifying antics, the President is now free to proceed with his agenda without regard to the delicate sensibilities of the bishops.

There is a cancer eating at the heart of all the Abrahamic religions, a yearning for ancient verities that is often prosecuted with violence. The Catholic hierarchy, the Haredim, the Taliban and the Christian fundamentalists are more alike than different. Arrogant, intolerant, hypocritical, cynical, sanctimonious. They will oppose anyone or anything that they imagine competes with them for absolute power over the lives of the unannointed. In a wealthy and religious country like America, there is more a stake and their pursuit has become obsessive to the point of self-destruction.

It is revealing that the religionists find themselves in league with the Masters of the Universe, the Wall Street malefactors of great wealth who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Obama with attack ads that would make Vlad the Impaler blush. They don’t like his attitude toward regulation. They believe they should be free to perpetrate any damn thing they want. They pine for the good old days when they could turn subprime mortgages (pigs’ ears) into investment grade securities (silk purses), peddle the result to chumps (clients), bring the global financial system to its knees and make obscene fortunes for themselves in the process. This particular group may have been the only non-Mormon cohort of voters who were actually enthusiastic for Romney. After all, he was one of their own. The happy days of laissez faire seemed just around the corner.

As the votes were being counted on election night, a group of hedge fund managers and private equity investors were celebrating Romney’s victory at Del Frisco’s steakhouse in Boston. It was a private affair, a sort of pre-party for the election post-party. Fully 107 men (of course) had flown into Boston in private jets to mark the occasion. To everyone else watching the returns, it was obvious that they had nothing to celebrate but, like their friend Karl Rove, they were in denial. They cheered when Mr. Rove went into melt down on Fox Television. Like the bishops, they had persuaded themselves that victory was merely a matter of manipulating the unwashed masses. As teenagers, both groups seem to have been mesmerized by George Orwell’s, 1984, and its ideology of the Big Lie. War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. They really did not believe the economic meltdown was caused by Obama’s policies just as the bishops really did not believe that Obamacare would render Catholicism illegal. The prelates were worried about losing the remnants of their power and were driven to squander whatever moral influence they still had. The Wall Streeters were worried about staying out of jail, a prospect that has seemed more imminent ever since Bernie Madoff drew a sentence of 150 years and a $17 billion fine. With so much at stake, it’s really not immoral to lie or, as Frank Rich wrote in New York, to enlist in “the post-fact alternative universe.” As Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative himself, once said, “…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

In recent days there has been much soul searching among those who lost so much on November 6. Although some leaders have suggested it might be time for the Republicans to come to grips with the issues of concern to women and Latinos, the predominant reaction has been finger pointing. There are also claims that the Democrats “suppressed” voter turnout in Ohio which would be laughable if it were not another example of the Big Lie at work. Then there are those who are bravely asserting that nothing has changed. Senators McCain and Graham announced that any nomination of Susan Rice to be Secretary of State would be dead on arrival in the Senate. Rejecting a nomination before it is made is business as usual. Mr. Romney himself is complaining about “gifts” the administration “gave” to various constituencies, including women and young voters. He counts health care reform complete with free condoms as such a gift. It is a sobering thought that, in spite of such patent nonsense, 59,189,598 Americans voted for him. It may be, as Sophie Tucker had it, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” but fifty-nine million Americans made a terrible mistake on November 6. Add to that the ninety-three million eligible voters who didn’t bother to vote and you could get pretty depressed. Given the alternative, however, we can take comfort or, at least, refuge in Shakespeare’s insistence that all’s well that ends well.

The election of 2012 did not end well for the Republican party and its supporters. Obviously, it will require several more doses of shock therapy before there is any hope of intelligent debate among the losers. It is hard to know where GOP should begin which, I freely admit, makes me happy at least for the moment.