The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [125]
But the joke passed almost unnoticed among most of the population and the commercial media, setting up a near-repeat of the same situation in 2004. The key battleground state this time around was not Florida but Ohio, and once again almost no one noticed that neither of the main candidates was interested in discussing his stance on the key issues that actually affected voters in that state.
Ohio’s economy had been cardinally affected by NAFTA. A onetime manufacturing powerhouse, Ohio now suffered through mass layoffs and crushing economic uncertainty. But when the election rolled around, and both John Kerry and George Bush flocked to the state in search of its up-for-grabs twenty electoral votes, neither candidate mentioned free trade at all. In the national political media, pundits wondered what the “liberal” Kerry (who had voted for NAFTA) would have to do to win votes in a tough Middle America state like Ohio. Chris Matthews suggested on MSNBC’s Hardball! that Kerry might need to save a baby from a burning building; his middlebrow cohort Howard Fineman agreed. “He’s got to do something like that,” he frowned. Unsurprisingly, General Electric, the parent company to MSNBC, had laid off thousands of workers in Ohio in the years prior to the election.
But with the grotesque failure of the Iraq war and with some of the other foibles of the Bush administration came a late change in Republican strategy. Rather than their usual tactic of redefining the center further rightward, by 2008 the Republicans, just like Democrats, were offering to their base a spate of “moderate” candidates whose chief virtue to the party was their potential for a general-election victory against a Democrat like Hillary Clinton. Candidates like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and even Romney fell short according to the usual social orthodoxies, with none of them being born-again Christians or staunchly anti-abortion. Just as the Democrats had done for years, the Republicans were now asking their voters to sacrifice their own interests in favor of a candidate who would be viable to “swing” voters.
As a result, the 2008 presidential race going into the primaries looks like a perfect storm of electoral cross-purposes. With the exception of Barack Obama, all of the major candidates the predominantly antiwar Democratic base will be asked to choose from were originally pro-war. On the other side, fundamentalist Christians may be forced to vote for a cross-dressing pro-choice New Yorker like Rudolph Giuliani. When once again asked to vote against the candidate they dislike, voters on both sides will now have real trouble figuring out which party’s offering they’re supposed to hate more.
But out there, on the campaign trail, you can already feel the vibe changing. Particularly on the Republican side, you can see that the paranoia conjured by all those years of right-wing oracles telling people that they’ve been lied to by the “liberal media” is blowing up in some prominent faces. This is the problem with training people to believe they’re being lied to; after seven years of Bush, some Republicans raised on that kind of education are beginning to wonder just who else exactly has been lying to them.
OUTSIDE THE ROMNEY EVENT in Florida there was a protest of about thirty people, all supporters of antiwar libertarian Ron Paul who came to shout at the cars on their way in and out of the civic center parking lot. When I went over to visit with them, I found that almost all of them told the same story. Excepting a few cases here and there, they were all former dyed-in-the-wool Rush Limbaugh Republicans who had experienced holy conversions. Many talked about being reunited with liberal family members with whom they had argued for years.
“I’m a conservative, I used to be a neocon even, I used to think Cindy Sheehan was…I mean, I ended up going out and buying a Dixie Chicks album, just because I feel bad, you know?