There really isn’t anything in Steve Benen’s new book The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics that I didn’t already know, didn’t remember, or didn’t notice at the time it happened. I’ve been observing, saying, and writing for some time that Republicans don’t do policy, are not honest brokers, and have been performing an improv act in lieu of responsible governance and good-faith negotiation for the past three decades.
That said, it’s a terrific read, makes its point (which, I think, is irrefutable) with a minimum of spin or editorializing, and most of all, is an excellent compilation of all the anecdotes that add up to the book’s, and my own, inescapable conclusion. Notably, the book spends very little time (if any) discussing Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, or the GOP’s various enablers in the media and on the Internet, nor does it spend any time on GOP paymasters like the Koch brothers or Shelly Adelson, neither do we hear a lot about what Republican base voters (including the fake so-called “Tea Party”) have had to say since the 1990s. The book is entirely focused on the Republican Party itself; the elected officeholders, the candidates for office, the campaigns, and (for lack of a better term) the “platform.”
There is so much good stuff in there that it would be impossible to select enough excerpts to do it justice. So I just want to focus on the part that I thought was the most illustrative of the entire phenomenon, notable because it took place 12 years ago during the 2008 campaign, around the midpoint in time of the GOP’s descent into the fundamentally unserious “post-policy” party it is today. Hopefully I won’t run afoul of fair use by quoting this bit from the beginning of chapter 10, something I remembered but hadn’t thought about in a long time:
Three months before the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama had a wide-ranging discussion with voters in Missouri, and the event touched on energy policy and the climate crisis. After the Democrat highlighted a series of elements of his energy plan, a voter asked what a typical person could do to address the problem as an individual. The senator talked about energy conservation and briefly noted modest steps people could take to help make a difference.
Obama specifically pointed to, among other things, car owners bringing their cars in for regular tune-ups and keeping their tires properly inflated. Relying on data from the Bush administration’s Energy Department, the candidate added that the amount of energy saved through routine auto maintenance would be comparable to the savings the United States would see from coastal oil drilling.
It was wholly unremarkable, except to Republicans. Soon afterward, John McCain said of his presidential rival’s energy plan, “It seems to me the only thing [Obama] wants to do is inflate tires” to improve gas mileage.” …
The Republican National Committee thought it’d be clever to create tire gauges featuring the words “Obama’s Energy Plan” and deliver them to DC newsrooms. …
That same week, the McCain campaign started a fund-raising effort based on the mind-numbing story, telling donors, “Today I’m asking for your help in putting Senator Obama’s ‘tire gauge’ energy policy to the test. With an immediate donation of $25 or more, we will send you an ‘Obama Energy Plan’ tire pressure gauge.”
…
The tire gauge nonsense … offered a striking example of Republicans’ wholesale indifference to the substance of one of the world’s most pressing issues. The Democratic candidate desperately wanted to have a real debate over a vital issue, only to find a rival campaign that literally preferred to play with toys.
There’s a lot to unpack there, even with about 1/3 of the text cut out, but I think it really encapsulates everything that Benen is trying to get across about what “post-policy” politics is: bad faith, dishonest spin, trivializing important issues, setting up (and arguing against) strawmen, unreasonable or baseless criticism of an opponent’s proposal, and most of all, a complete and utter disinterest in actual policy, actual facts, or how government might actually go about actually addressing an actual problem. It’s not so much that Republicans can’t govern responsibly or honestly — and they clearly can’t — it’s that even if they could they wouldn’t even bother to try, because the improv act is easier, more fun, and more lucrative.
One other thing in the book that stood out: in discussing the GOP’s approach to publicly criticizing Democratic policies that have actually been implemented and have actually been proven to work (i.e., accomplish their stated goals) successfully, efficiently, and/or within (or even beyond) reasonable expectations, Benen quotes an “old joke from academia: The policy works in practice, but does it work in theory?” I’ve always observed and felt that Democrats are pragmatic where Republicans are ideological; that’s is a particularly trenchant way of putting it. And one can’t come away from reading Benen’s book without drawing that same conclusion.
Benen doesn’t really get into the other reason why Republicans don’t do policy — viz., because to the extent they have actual “policies” they are vastly unpopular at best and utterly horrifying at worst. As I’ve written before, “policy” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in political discussions even though we don’t necessarily understand what it actually means or refers to:
Expanding access to health insurance, and setting minimum coverage standards, is policy. Building and rebuilding public infrastructure is policy. Raising the minimum wage is policy. Establishing workplace safety standards is policy. Setting immigration enforcement priorities is policy. Proscribing discrimination in the public sphere is policy. Incoherent slogans about “freedom” and “limited government” and “personal responsibility” are not policy. Masturbating to the words “capitalism,” “free markets” and “Job Creators” is not policy. Whingeing about "political correctness" and the "liberal media" is not policy. And being annoyed by liberals (be they real or imaginary) is not policy; in fact, it has nothing to do with policy.
Benen’s book is an excellent compilation of anecdotes that illustrate the difference between slogans and policy, between campaign rhetoric and policy, between ideology and policy, and between made-up nonsense and policy. It’s a must-have, in that it’s important to have all of this in one place in order to understand what happened, how, and why.