If you’ve been paying attention to the prorogation of the Canadian Parliament — and I’m having a hard time paying attention to much else — you’ll know that a common talking point for those who support the decision is that “average Canadians” don’t care that much about the two week hiatus.  As Graham Fox who was on Power and Politics noted yesterday,

I don’t think that Canadians who are out there in the country getting their kids from school, doing their shopping, getting to hockey and all of those things really care about prorogation. And I think in this case that it is a very run-of-the-mill story. I don’t know that many Canadians know that in the last twenty years Parliament was prorogued fourteen times, which puts the average session of Parliament to a year and a quarter. So this is quite an ordinary thing and I think when people start looking at it, they’re not going to care. They’re going to turn on the hockey and care about that instead.

The more I hear that line — that “average Canadians” don’t care about this issue –  the angrier I get. It’s not that I think that Fox and others who are offering this line of thought intend to demean the people about whom they’re talking, but that is, to my mind, what they wind up doing. It’s a sort of subliminal line that goes as much to what trend-setters and decision-makers think the public ought to care about as it does to describing what the public in fact does care about.

And in so doing, I think it winds up feeding people a line about what the scope of interest, understanding, and engagement of the “average Canadian” happens to be that, in selling individuals fall short of a robust sense of citizenship and civic engagement, seems to me to be a clear if subtle example of the soft bigotry of low expectations. [Read more →]

It would be another sign of “insane rage” and “violent escalation of rhetoric.” And: RAAAAAAACISM.

But string up a mannequin of Sarah Palin from a rope, and it’s just all in good Halloween fun.

Well, wonder no more, Michelle, because one such effigy* was recently found in Plains, Georgia, home of 39th United States President Jimmy Carter. The reaction from the vast liberal media conspiracy? What response there has been (not a front pager, this one) has stuck to, uh, just the facts, ma’am.

Meanwhile, Instapundit author Glenn Reynolds’ proof positive image of Obama’s haughty condescension has set the blogosphere alight with speculation and debate while the Rush Limbaugh death watch has PoliGazzette’s Jason Arvak sounding the death knell for relevance, focus, and seriousness in political blogging (due exception to the League noted),

And people wonder why fewer and fewer people even bother to write for the blogosphere any more. What’s the point? It’s all just scripts and sharp-elbowed attacks these days. Relatively few bloggers care about anything but somehow “winning” in their hate-war against those who disagree, and the very few who try to sustain some kind of real discourse get shouted down or, more commonly, just plain shunned by the systematic refusal of links.

In 2009, just four short days ago, I probably would have been right there with Jason in shaking my head about all of the above stories and the range of reactions to them, but a ten day blogging sabbatical complete with time to reflect on just what the hell I do on a day-to-day basis at this very site has yielded a slightly different response. I think we need to stop running through the agonized shirt tearing about the ridiculousness of the political blogosphere every time the antics of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Al Franken, or Keith Olbermann take centre stage and reconcile ourselves to a hard truth: this is our politics. [Read more →]

Today, Dave Weigel documents another set of examples of this, demonstrating the ways in which the media’s (and, for that matter, Palin’s opponents’) insistence on paying attention to her Facebook and Twitter ramblings, making them into major stories, even if with the intention of disproving those ramblings.   The entire post is worth a read and does an excellent job of showing exactly how the media and some of her more vocal critics are playing right into Palin’s hands.  I especially liked this paragraph:

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.

Weigel goes on to present a couple examples of this strategy in action, and concludes that Palin’s actions are “incredibly savvy,” but that the media’s response to those actions “is ridiculous, bordering on pathetic.”  I couldn’t agree more.  Again, please do read the whole thing.

Enjoy…

Scott: So, out of curiosity, I decided to run the numbers and of the 23 posts at the Dish today (November 17 @ 2:24pm MST), 13 are about Palin. That just seems creepy to me.

Erik: Totally creepy.

Mark: No doubt. Then again, the entire blogosphere seems to have an unhealthy obsession with Palin. Check out memeorandum. I count no fewer than 14 Palin-related headlines at the moment, and I think it was even more yesterday. Sully’s just the worst among equals it would seem.

(Sadly, Mark couldn’t participate after this due to professional obligations. Next time!)

Scott: Palinmania is the most morbidly fascinating phenomenon to hit US politics since Monica Lewinski. It’s like a train wreck that is dying to be seen as culturally significant by all of it’s true believers who are going down with the flames. The question is whether it is a sincere movement or just a novel blip. Andrew could be helping to determine that quandary, instead he’s simply muddying the waters by not just believing, but hyping the hype.

Oh, for a William F. Buckley of the twenty-first century…

Erik: It’s symptomatic of our current political discourse. On the one hand, many typically thoughtful conservatives like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat almost had to support her in order to remain part of the conservative movement (whereas truly dissident conservatives like Larison took a very different approach). Meanwhile, liberals can use her to their advantage since even the most thoughtful of their intellectual opponents have to at least mildly support her for now. It’s just personality politics taken to its monstrous conclusion.

Scott: Which prompts the question: is politics inherently glib?

[Read more →]

So here’s my running theory on politicians.  And here I’m thinking high-level ones.  e.g. Someone willing to run for president of the United States in the media age.

In order for someone to be willing to go through the insanity that such a process is, they have to be, well, insane.  My baseline assumption is that all such politicians (of whatever political persuasion) have some deep-seated “off” tendencies.  I assume they are some pretty emotionally messed up human beings in some pretty key existential areas.  [That's my basic running theory on all human beings btw, it's just with politicians of that level, they end up with way more power than the normal person.]

Think of these names:  Tony Blair, The Clintons, George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and yes the current President.  Not lacking in egos those folks, to put it oh so mildly.

But they are still human beings and should be afforded the basic decency, particularly in relation to their families, that such humanity brings.

On the other hand, personal biography matters.  This is my second basic principle of politics:  people don’t really change, politicians even less so.  Call it the political law of karma if you like: the conditions will play out.

As a wise friend of mine once told me, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

With politicians this is oh so true. [Read more →]

“Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin’s unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning – specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy -  we feel it’s vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else.” ~ Andrew Sullivan, on why The Dish has “gone silent” today.

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

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