CULTURE WARRIOR

CULTURE WARRIOR 

I have enlisted in the culture war. 

I resisted this choice for three decades. I thought politics was about issues more than personalities, about the economy and peace and war more than testosterone and ego and Rambo, about progress more than resentment, about community more than cultural combat. I thought the Civil War had made us one nation rather than a collection of individual states, that the great war between the states had turned the United States into an "is" when it had previously been an "are". I thought the almost century long struggle for civil rights would redeem the promise of both Jefferson's Declaration and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, that all could be equal and that, in the wake of the fight, the combatants might exhibit charity for all. 

I was wrong. 

John McCain went to St. Paul last week and thinks he bought a ticket to the White House named Sarah Palin. If he wins this election, it will be for the same reasons Nixon won in 1968, and Bush II was able to steal it in 2000. They call it organizing the base. That sounds better than organizing extremists. But it comes down to the same thing. Sarah Palin is just the new face, the new bottle into which the extreme right wingers have poured their old culture war wine, an anti-science, anti-choice, anti-gay, abstinence only, gun-toting "pit bull with lipstick" who rails against federal earmarks in a state that could not survive without them. 

If you plopped down on the planet for the first time last week and watched the Republican Convention, you could never have guessed that they were the people running the show for the last eight years. Speaker after speaker sang the same song -- vote for McCain-Palin and throw the bums out. Someone forgot to remind them. They are the bums. 

This was a convention at war with itself . . . and much of its party's past. Record federal deficets? Throw the bums out and cut spending. From the crowd that did the spending. Corruption in government? Throw the bums out and reform. From the party that gave birth to Jack Abramoff and turned K Street GOP only lobbyists into a fourth branch of government. A government that can't deliver basic services like emergency aid in a hurricane? Throw the bums out. From the same people who sold your government to private contractors, let New Orleans drown, and pretended they had fixed things during Hurrican Gustav when the real hero there was God (the storm was simply a lot weaker than predicted) and the levies are still not big enough to withstand anything worse. 

They did this with a straight face. And no small amount of personal insult. Mocking Obama, Palin claimed that Mayors are like "community organizers", "only they have actual responsibilities". Some Mayors do. She, however, wasn't one of them. Her town of Wasilla, Alaska was run on a day to day basis by a manager. That allowed Sarah the time to go to Washington to get her federal earmarks. Or to study up on global warming, on which she says "the jury is still out". 

The other former Mayor -- Rudy -- was, of course, even better at outright snottiness. That's because it is part of his DNA. One of Rudy's New York City predecessors wrote a book about him called "Nasty Man". And in St. Paul, Rudy did not disappoint. When he took to the podium and assumed his "I'm the Chairman of the Board and two guys have given me their resumes to be CEO" stance, he noted that Obama was a "community organizer" with that "are you kiddin' me" "fuhgeddaboutit" tone that only New Yorkers can pull off. Thus, to a guy raised by a single mom, who became the editor of the Harvard Law Review, navigated the shoals of Chicago politics to become a Senator at 43, and just wrested his party's Presidential nomination from a machine, Rudy gave the finger. 

The Republicans in St. Paul never told us what they would do. They just told us who they are. Every speaker mentioned McCain's imprisonmment in Vietnam and lauded their war hero, which I guess is nice coming from a crowd that doesn't particularly respect war heroes if they come from the other party. Just ask John Kerry. Governor Palin told us she was just a "hockey mom" who turned down that bridge to nowhere. But we now know that "she was actually for the bridge before she was against it", which again is OK with them so long as you are not John Kerry. 

Taxes and terrorism also took their (repeated) turns at the podium. In case anyone had forgotten 9/11, there was a long 9/11 video, not that they would ever politicize such a "We are all Americans" tragic day. The pit bull in lipstick told us Barack wants to "forfeit" in Iraq. Does this mean we declare the mission accomplished and radically draw down our troop strength immediately, even if the war has not been won and the enemy is reconstituting itself? Just like Bush and John McCain did in Afghanistan? I don't know. Sarah left that part out. On taxes, she claimed Barack would not "tax you" but would "tax business", which for the GOP is not a difference. Of course, what Obama said was that he would lower middle class taxes and raise the rates that the wealthy pay. Oh well. 

I particularly liked Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. Romney claimed there must be change from a liberal government to a conservative one. Maybe he was talking about Norway or Sweden. Thompson sounded like he was forever trying to clear his throat. Which is what happens when the speech you are giving rails against the "Beltway insiders" club, of which you for many years were a card carrying member.

None of this bothered the guns, gays and God crowd. They have been saved. Sarah Palin is 44. Were she to run for President at McCain's age, she would be doing so in 2036. She will be around for awhile. She is their kind of extremist. Right down to trying to fire the town librarian who wouldn't get rid of the books she found offensive. Or the state public safety commissioner who wouldn't fire her ex-brother in law. Pit bull in lipstick? Perhaps. But what she really turns out to be is a my-way-or-the-highway culture warrior, a sort of Bush II in a skirt. An extremist on choice, gays and sex education who calls herself a reformer even as she abuses power, Sarah Palin will fit in perfectly with the peculiar family the GOP has now become, born of the marriage between intolerant evangelical fundamentalism on the one hand and a corporatist K street on the other. She has the same views on execitive power as George W. Bush -- it's hers to abuse, especially if she thinks God is on her side (and she always does). She is also getting quickly up to speed on the GOP art of hunkering down in the face of legislative investigation. In her case, these views and this apporach have caused problems only for a town librarian, a relative, and their various supporters. In Bush's? Well, we didn't hear anything about that at their convention either. 

Some people think Sarah Palin was McCain's best decision. I think it was his worst. This self-proclaimed country-first maverick has catapaulted onto the national scene, perhaps for the next thirty years, an extreme right wing culture warrior. I have seen this movie before and it has a bad ending. Back alley abortions. Torture. Sky-rocketing teen pregnancy rates. International disdain. Crippling deficets. Anti-gay prejudice. Saturday night specials. Dead cops. Bad schools. No health care. And no security. 

The right wing is right about one thing. 

This is war. 

Sign me up.