I have been reading kos for maybe a month now, and this is my first diary.
In the current New York Times Magazine Matt Bai publishes an ode to Giuliani that seems to come from a complete historical vaccuum in terms of what it overlooks and brushes aside. It suggests that Giuliani is not only one macho badass (like we need that), but that he will make up for Bush's colossal failures because...he's supposedly a better manager.
Why is it important for us to counter this perpetuation of the Giuliani myth (myth being a polite term for bullshit)?
Because Giuliani is riding the misguided fantasy of the Big Tough Daddy into a strong national appeal. A Democratic lock in '08? Fuhgedaboutit. It is very bad tactics to underestimate the power of the Big Daddy narrative, especially given the MSM's track record of caricaturing our candidates. What's worse, if Giuliani were elected, he would pose an enormous threat to peace, safety, and everything most Americans hold dear.
I believe fighting Giuliani is the most important thing we can do, and this article needs to be attacked.
If I were a diarist of greater determination, organization, and commitment, I would structure this piece in the following way.
I. Evidence that many Americans want a big tough Daddy to protect them, the ornery-er the better.
II. A rant about how ineffective fucked up this is in terms of making the world safer or getting anything useful done.
III. Excerpts from Bai's piece that show how wholly he is buying Rudy's inaccurate and dangerous assumption of this narrative.
Hmmm...well at the risk of making this perhaps longer than a diary "should be," here goes.
I. Lots of People Want a Big Bad Daddy to Make it All Better
Full disclosure: there's a little bit of this in me. Maybe I've just spent too much time watching Shrek 2 with my daughter and hearing Jennifer Saunders singing "I Need A Hero," but let's be honest - isn't it only the frighteningly pure among us who don't feel a teensy weensy tug when presented with a savior fantasy? (Gore in '08 anyone? Right there with ya, buddy!)
One touching articulation of this longing came from an endearing Ohio Republican mom in So Goes The Nation who said Bush was "just kinda like a strong Dad, and I want that." If you haven't seen the film yet I highly recommend it. I found this Republican mom sincere and appealing, and I think we're better off trying to understand these people than just dismissing them all as "wingnuts."
In FWIW's excellent diary on understanding Republicans he quotes Glenn Greenwald's summary
of John Dean's argument that "the 'conservative' movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power." (emphasis mine)
Finally, I also have to credit George Lakoff and the fine folks over at Rockridge Nation for perhaps most clearly crystalizing this insight about the hunger for the Big Daddy (or Mommy - hello, Lady Thatcher.)
II. Alright, So What's the Problem With That?
Um....you read dailykos right? ok....next section :)
But seriously, I believe that investing too much authority in Big Daddy feeds what I consider the two main sources of people doing harm: Wanting To Do Evil Deliberately, and Being Too Stupid Not To.
As Lord Acton told us, when the Maximum Leader has all the power he or she becomes corrupted and winds up Doing Evil deliberately, e.g. evicting psychiatric patients out of spite like Giuliani (ty Miss Laura), or outing CIA agents & torturing people.
In the category of propagating Evil Through Stupidity, I know from my professional background as a leadership consultant that if Daddy is supposed to have all the answers, things turn to doo-doo fairly reliably. In this vein consider Rudy over-riding his Emergency Management advisor's recommendation to put the Command Center in another borough and insisting that it be housed in.....the World Trade Center.
III. My hero, Matt Bai. NOT
I didn't know anything about Matt Bai before I read his Rudy smooch-fest, but I have been reading about media distortions of Al Gore in 2000 (ty NYPopulist) and about the un-spun reality of Giuliani's New York in Harpers' August cover story (sub required). Bai's piece both glosses over Giuliani's myriad failures as a narcissistic micro-manager, and repeats unchallenged the absurd, paranoid notion that more ass-kicking is what's needed.
Giuliani’s answer to all complex foreign-policy dilemmas was essentially the same: the American president had to be someone the rest of the world feared, someone a little too rash and belligerent for anyone else’s comfort.
OK but...what about the fact that everything under Bush seems to have turned to shit? Well that, apparently, is because Bush isn't a quantitative, key-metric-oriented manager like our man Rudy.
By stressing his managerial competence, Giuliani is able to signal that he is like Bush — only more effective.
OK, so if I have this right then...the problem isn't that we're alienating the entire world, it's that we aren't counting how quickly we're doing it.
In perhaps the example that most makes me think "and he gets paid for this??", Bai offers no questioning of the following troglodytically-stupid comment from Norman Podhoretz, a key Rudy foreign-policy advisor who speaks to his campaign team daily:
"I mean, there are between 1.5 and 2 billion Muslims in the world. Not all of them are Islamofascists. But if even 10 percent of them are, you have staggering numbers."
Well gee, there are about 300 million people in the U.S....not all of them are violent crazies like Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber, but hey - if even 10 percent of them are, that's 30 million Unabombers!! Daddy, Daddy, save us!
Read the Bai piece for yourself, and comment on your favorite examples of either:
1 - Patent lies about Rudy's so-called effectiveness (guess what, crime dropped nationwide during his term, and not because of his mad skillz)
2 - Absurd pseudo-logic perpetuating the misguided appeal of the Big Daddy narrative.