I have a friend, a brilliant corporate lawyer, retired from a high-pressure career and now an officer in an important humanitarian foundation. He's a real high-level guy, active throughout his life in the power stratosphere. He's one of the most decent men I have ever known. I feel for him today.
A Republican of the old school, he always, I think, considered me, if not naive, at least a non-serious person politically. After a family dinner in 1980 the TV came on, a speech by Candidate Reagan. My friend and the older members of the family watched, approving.
I stood in the back of the room, aghast as the Old Ham rolled out the shtick that had served him so well as the host of Death Valley Days in 1952. The horrifying thing was it was exactly the same! He didn't look much older, hadn't become wise or acquired any gravitas. It was a gig, and he did it well enough to get by, just like he always had. If JFK, as Norman Mailer put it, was America's Leading Man, Reagan was America's TV Host.
I confronted my friend after the speech, privately. "My God!" I said, "How can you support this clown? He's a stupid man reading platitudes someone wrote for him. You want him to be President?" My friend smiled.
"It doesn't matter," my friend said. "It's not him. It's the people around him. They are the people we need to get things right. He's just the way they will get into power."
He didn't mean this in a dark Machiavellian way. He was just stating the facts as he saw them. This was the way the world worked. It wasn't about idealism, or visionary leadership; it was about getting the right people and policies in place with the least fuss. Republicans and conservative Democrats would take things in hand, fix the economy, give some Arabs bloody noses, face up to the Russkies, get the peasants, lefties, and unions in line, and all would be well.
I was silent. It was easy to see that this was the way the ball was rolling. I despised it. The nation was going to elect a second-rate actor president, and the Republican Party didn't care, it served their purposes.
In my lifetime (born 1941) the presidents had been: a Titan, the toughest motherfucker around, the conqueror of Europe, a warrior-poet, a legislative genius, a tragic genius, an unelected placeholder slightly less dumb than Reagan, and a Christian visionary. They were all too human, but they were deep, wide, and real, worthy of love and hate (except Ford.) Reagan was a pygmy compared to them (except Ford.) But he was lucky.
His luck held. The bullet missed his heart, taxes were raised in time to save the economy from voodoo economics, and the Soviet Union collapsed on his watch. The nation let him skate on Iran-Contra in gratitude.
But the rot had set in. The Republican Party had acquired a taste for weak presidents. They didn't want high drama, just melodrama and business as usual, like the good old days. Harding. Coolidge. Hoover (until the Depression thing.) Bush the First was a disappointment; he tried to lead and they regretted not his passing.
The banners of Reaganism were raised in the Congress. The Republicans took control and fought Clinton to a standstill with a toxic alliance of fundamentalists, corporate capitalists and warmongers, who practiced the nastiest American politics since the 19th Century. The Republicans then found their New Reagan, an affable second-rater, charming and biddable, a fake cowboy who had presided over Texas and once had an interest in a baseball team. Unfortunately, no one noticed that his hobby seemed to be putting people to death. He found it amusing when they begged for mercy.
They made Cheney VP to keep him in line.
Two years ago I saw my friend again. We talk rarely. I reminded him, unkindly, of our conversation about Reagan all those years ago, and asked him if he would say the same about Our Current President. The bodies were really piling up at the time, and my friend turned pale. "You realize, of course, that Bush is the worst president in history," he said.
"Yes," I replied. "But who are you going to get to replace him? McCain?"
"McCain is very, very conservative, underneath all that straight talk," my friend said. It was not a compliment.
The Good Republicans, like my friend, are wandering on a darkling plain, exiles in a world they made. There are embarrassments. All those dead people litter the landscape. Their killers control the party. They killed the people to win an election. That torture thing. (The videos will surface some day, along with the suppressed Abu Ghraib material, perhaps the tapes Sy Hersch mentioned, featuring sodomized children.)
And the small stuff. The Habeas Corpus thing. The wiretapping thing. One could go on and on. The economy. The fucking ice caps are melting! The fucking oceans are dying!
It is not a good time to be a Good Republican.