The most puerile presidential race in American history
by digby
For Salon this morning, I wrote about the demise of the old trope about the undisciplined young hippies vs the Real Americans at the hands of this latest crop of obnoxious brats running for the GOP nomination:
Reagan was the original Republican “grown-up,” the Big Daddy figure who symbolized everything the Republican party wanted to stand for: masculinity, maturity, dominance. This simplistic archetype has characterised the media’s celebration of GOP leadership since that time. When Bill Clinton, the first baby boomer to become president, first took office, there was a brief sense of excitement about the young commander-in-chief, but it immediately deteriorated into the usual anti-hippie diatribes among the media for the administration’s alleged lack of “discipline” and unruly approach to governance, what with the blue jeans in the Oval Office and the like. This early Miss Manners-esque critique morphed shortly thereafter into the willingness among political reporters to pass along any and all bits of gossip and innuendo, even including dark insinuations of drug running and “murder.” After all, everybody knows hippies have no morals.
And despite his own checkered baby-boomer past as a heavy-drinking hellraiser, when George W. Bush was “elected” in 2000, the entire village celebrated the return of the Republicans to the White Jouse. As pundit Kate O’Beirne
famously said:
You know, remember when Bill Clinton held one of his first Cabinet meetings out of Camp David for an encounter session for his new Cabinet secretaries? Yes. You are not going to — now the experienced grown-ups are here. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are not going to share their inner child with their fellow Cabinet members, and I think it’s about time. It’s so reassuring to have grown-ups back in charge.
This has been the way the press and the establishment have looked at the two parties for nearly half a century. But recently something has been changing. Say what you will about him, but President Obama cannot believably be described as undisciplined or unruly. In fact, “professorial” and “aloof” have been the adjectives most often used to describe him amongst beltway types. Not exactly the stuff of countercultural excess.
Meanwhile, at the same time that Obama was modeling a very mature organizational style, the Republicans all took their clothes off, held hands, and collectively jumped off a proverbial cliff. Now, they aren’t a youth movement by any means. In fact, they are mostly baby boomers too, members of the so-called “Silent Majority” who are having a delayed wing-nut Woodstock in their golden years. From the Tea Party town hall antics and the government shutdowns to the VP nomination of Sarah Palin, the Republicans have been on a rapid descent into crazytown over the course of just half a decade.
But they aren’t stopping either. They just keep regressing. This week, we’ve seen the former “grown-up” party turn into name-calling pre-pubescent fourth graders, most conspicuously by way of Donald Trump’s
broadsides about John McCain. While the conflagration has been extensively covered by the media already, it’s worth it to take a look at the back-and-forth volleys once more, because what they capture is more akin to a middle school food fight than the
Trump famously began the spat with the following dig at McCain:
“He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
“I don’t care if he drops out. Stay in the race, just stop being a jackass…The world is falling apart. We’re becoming Greece. The Ayatollah’s on the verge of having a nuclear weapon, and you’re slandering anybody and everybody to stay in the news. You know, run for president, but don’t be the world’s biggest jackass.”
“I watched this idiot Lindsey Graham on television today and he calls me a jackass! I’m trying to be nice, I’m working hard to be nice. He’s total lightweight. I said to myself, it’s amazing, he doesn’t seem like a very bright guy. He doesn’t seem as bright as Rick Perry. I think Rick Perry is probably smarter than Lindsey Graham.”
Perry and Trump, meanwhile, have been engaged in their own public feud, which started when Perry took the following
dig at Trump:
“Trumpism is a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense”
“Perry should be forced to take an IQ test before being allowed to enter the GOP debate.”
Poor Perry limply
responded by saying that he’s “defending conservatism against the cancer of Trump-ism.”
This is the most puerile presidential campaign in American history — and that’s before we even consider candidates like Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson and Chris Christie.
I suggest we give them all a bottle and put them to bed.