The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [55]
At some point in the midst of all of this, hurrumphing “political analyst” Jeff Greenfield comes on-screen. Commenting on the Democratic talking points, he has this to say: “They look to be very focus-group-tested for maximum appeal.”
Says this approvingly, smiling, with admiration. I reach over to the night table, feel around for the bottle, eat the last of my pills…
Most of the people I know who follow politics are whooping it up today, reveling in the walloping defeat the evil Bushies suffered at the polls, but it’s the other shoe that’s about to drop that worries me. I can already feel in my bones what’s coming. I’ve made quite a few friends among Democratic congressional staffers in recent years, most of them long-suffering political slaves laboring in windowless minority offices on the Hill—good guys most of them, sincere seeming, who’d tell me shocking tales of being ritualistically shat upon by the likes of Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert. They’d complain to me about the treatment their bosses suffered, sell it to me as crime against democracy, the People, and I’d buy most of what they were saying, because in most cases they were right.
Something tells me I’m going to stop hearing from those guys now. The phones are going to go cold. And I’m going to start seeing their bosses on TV with dumb grins on their faces and big erections in their pants, high on the smell of money and ’08 White House invites.
No voter wants to believe he doesn’t really matter, so he buys into the idea that there are two substantively different parties frantically competing for his attentions, the ideological fate of the country hanging on his decision every few years. It flatters the average citizen to think that way. The reality is that the dominant characteristic of our political system is the unchanging nature of the political consensus—while the two parties agree about most all of the important things, they disagree violently about the inconsequential stuff, providing the fodder and the drama for an endless political “struggle” that plays itself out in entertaining fashion every couple of years.
This business about waiting for the Baker-Hamilton report was a classic example. With popular discontent over the war raging, the Democratic Party still refused, technically, to come out against the war. It fudged the question of its original support for the invasion by claiming to have been misled en masse (despite the fact that even a small child could have seen through Bush’s idiotic argument for the invasion back in 2002), and as for the future, it refused to make any promise to try to end the conflict. Instead, for the biggest issue of the election season, for a national vote that for most people is their only political decision in years, the Democrats avoided taking any stance at all, essentially saying, “We’ll wait to see the conclusions of a random independent group of academics, and then we’ll make our own decision.” Basically, they punted and put the game in the hands of the defense.
The midterm elections might have marked the high point of the Bush revolution, the day the tide started receding, but it also marked the beginning of a new era. What followed would be a period dominated by the Democrats, in particular by the Democrats’ skillful massaging of the war issue. It would be a period where the Democrats would prove absolutely that it is possible in America to govern entirely on the appearance of principle—while changing absolutely nothing.
ABOUT A MONTH after the elections I dropped in on a few friends in Congress, just to see how the power transfer was going. All over the congressional complex—in House buildings like Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon, and Senate halls like Dirksen and Russell—minority staffers were moving into the bigger, plusher majority offices in the Capitol Building.
At one committee office I found a gang of young Democrats openly chortling at the Republicans’ misery.
“You wouldn’t believe those guys,” said one. “They actually came by our office after