They're back. The reactionary fringe group American Issues Project (AIP) is running a new ad on FOX News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNBC and FOX Business Network, attacking Charles Schumer specifically, the stimulus package generally, Democratic policies globally, and by wearying implication, President Obama. As unflattering images of Schumer float across the screen, the deep familiar voice of grim concern that is a hallmark of these kinds of ads intones, "That's a trillion dollars of your money borrowed and spent by people like this." Yep, the patriots who brought you "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," the truth-seekers behind "Domestic Terrorist Bill Ayers is Barack Obama's Best Friend Forever," are back with an ad exhorting us to resist the juggernaut of something they like to call "Big Government." Elsewhere, Governor Bobby Jindal tries to channel 1980's Republicanism in his response to President Obama's speech before Congress while CNBC "reporter" Rick Santelli becomes boffo cable catnip after he calls homeowners who are in trouble losers. Yikes.
Is there some kind of fundamental out-to-lunchedness going on here? Are they nuts? Why now? What's the urgency almost two years out from the next Congressional elections? It's the narrative baby.
Nearly a year ago now, some Republican poobahs began grunting about the need to "rebrand" the party. I suppose this was both political--"We've got to get the stink of Bush off us"--and pure cosmetics (all those aging white men with their grim rictus smiles didn't exactly scream change). John McCain, it turns out, was not the brand the party--or the country-- was looking for. McCain's politics, whatever they really were (and are), failed. But cosmetics was another matter. When conservative writer Rich Lowry publicly shared his adolescent mastubatory fantasy featuring Sarah Palin, it was clear something was up. While McCain's politics failed, Palin's telegenic down-market persona offered the campaign's only real pizazz. And look! She's popular and she's the real conservative.
So they failed. Whatever it was they wanted to say, McCain was too deeply flawed a messenger (McCain, after all, never knew what he really thought). Apparently, in their witless confusion they could not recognize that their ideas failed, their ideology failed. Defeat may have grieved them, but it offered no wisdom. Like Gollum prowling through his sad existence, Republicans would now be consigned to searching for the missing talisman that could restore lost glory. And the name of their fetish is rigid unyielding humorless soul-killing impoverishing market-based carnivorous all-against-all utopian individualism. This is what Republicans call rebranding.
So now comes the narrative. Or more accurately, the old wine in new bottles. The AIP (whose initials, oddly, are the same as the Alsaska Independence Party), Jindal, Santelli, and the rest of this dreary cohort are not pushing some new and authentic populist revolt against our shrouded overlords. No, they are repackaging the old complaint, the old idiot's tale of victimhood, the old politics of resentment and division. Their populism is little different than the sham politics the leadership of the Christian Right perfected in the last decades of the 20th century. It is little different from Nixon's invocation of the Silent Majority. It is an old companion and adversary. It is wedge politics designed to harness the resentment and anger of Americans out there in the heartland. It is exploitation.
Of course Jindal, Santelli, and the AIP aren't meeting together in a star chamber somewhere. They are not plotting. They are simply bending to the mainline of market-based politics, privatization, and nutty hyper-individualism. They are reflexively running back to what they know, running back to a particular brand of crazy that has worked for them in the past. In this, of course, they are tracing well worn paths that run through our cultural/political landscape. The trouble is, resentment and division are proven winners in American politics. In the end, it is their witlessness that makes them so dangerous.
Personally, I don't think they have our best interests at heart. Let's keep an eye on them, shall we?