In an earlier piece, John quoted the latest Frank Rich article, focusing on Rick Perry's electoral chances against Obama, which are not zero.
Here's more from Mr. Rich on the value of extremism as a political method. Note the implied recommendation, which he makes explicit later in the article. (My emphasis below, and also my paragraphing, to accommodate our narrower columns, as his are very long.)
The important thing to remember about Perry is that he’s anathema to Mitt Romney, Karl Rove, and many conservative pundits no less than to liberals. His swift rise does not just reflect his enthusiasts’ detestation of Barack Obama. Perry’s constituency rejects the entire bipartisan Establishment of which Obama is merely the latest and shiniest product.Later in the article, Rich excoriates all the supposed "bipartisan" initiatives, such as No Labels, the Starbucks CEO–inspired "no giving to partisans" campaign, and the hedge fund–financed Americans Elect (which I keep misreading as "America's Elites"). These are all pretend-Dem types positioning contra-Obama should he stray into an actual Dem position.
For two decades, the elites in both parties and in the Beltway media-political combine have venerated a vanilla centrism, from Bush 41’s “thousand points of light” to Clinton’s triangulation to Bush 43’s “compassionate conservatism.” They’ve endorsed every useless bipartisan commission and every hapless bipartisan congressional “Gang of Six” (or Twelve, or Twenty, not to mention the new too-big-not-to-fail budget supercommittee).
Perry, by contrast, is a proud and unabashed partisan. If he’s talking about gangs, chances are they’re chain gangs, not dithering conclaves of legislators. He doesn’t aspire to be the adult in the room, as Obama does, but the bull in the china shop of received opinion. Despite all the flak from political gatekeepers of most persuasions, he didn’t back down from calling Social Security “a Ponzi scheme” and “a monstrous lie” in his first national debate. Indeed, he touched the third rail of American politics and lived. Gallup found that his stand didn’t hurt him a whit among GOP voters. Though most commentators across the spectrum awarded the night to Romney, a CNN survey found that more Republicans by far came away feeling that Perry had the better chance of beating Obama. They, unlike Washington’s political aristocracy, may actually know what’s going on in America.
Whether Perry snares the big prize or not, he could prove a shock to the system tantamount to Barry Goldwater in 1964—and just as misestimated now as Goldwater was then. In Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein’s landmark 2001 book on the origins and triumph of the conservative insurgency, we’re reminded of how Washington’s wise men thought Goldwater’s landslide defeat signaled the decisive end to his movement. James Reston, the New York Times’ reigning sage, spoke for them all when he declared that Goldwater had “wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage.”
But as Perlstein points out, “After the off-year elections a mere two years later, conservatives so dominated Congress that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t even get up a majority to appropriate money for rodent control in the slums.” The premature obituaries for the right, in Perlstein’s judgment, constituted “one of the most dramatic failures of collective discernment in the history of American journalism.”
What those journalists in the D.C. bubble failed to discern was that the bipartisan national consensus over the central role of government—which had held firm through the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations—was kaput. The Reagan revolution was in the wings.
In effect, these folks are doing from the right exactly what Kerry Eleveld strongly urged progressives to do from the left — be a royal pain in the butt, since that's what moves him most.
Rebellion or accommodation? Challenge the "bipartisan" elites — the Romneys & McConnells in the R-party, the Obamas & Reids in the D-party? Or surrender to the elites (who like each other a whole lot more than they like either of their constituencies) because the other party is worse.
Rich is suggesting that we act like Goldwater and go for it. Yes, that other Barry lost; but then his crew won in spades. Taking over a party is not a one-step process. You have to clear the old to make way for the new — chainsaw first, then hammer and nails.
As Rich points out near the end:
We are at a genuine juncture that cannot be adjudicated over a Starbucks latte while easy-listening music soothes in the background. A radical movement controls one of the two parties. That party is so far right that when Ron Paul, now polling third among the GOP contenders, told a debate audience this month that “9/11 came about because there was too much government,” not a single one of his opponents dared object. Like it or not, Obama is the sole alternative to this crowd in 2012.For Rich, the "newly feisty Obama" is the answer to his prayers, and presumably ours as well. Yet his Goldwater analogy hangs in the air as an implied set of questions.
Do we dare to eat a peach? Do we dare to risk the Goldwater alternative, ignore our fears, delay our gratification, in search of a greater, later prize?
GP
