Oh Really? The American Politics edition
Sep. 10th, 2012 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakApparantly the Republican strategy to counter the effect of Bill Clinton's rock star performance in support of Obama is to try and divide the Obama and Clinton camp again by suddenly discovering they like Bill Clinton and think he's been an awesome president. This is hilarious in general if, like me, you don't suffer from complete amnesia over the 90s and the violent hatred the Republicans spewed in the direction of both Clintons back then, and hilarious in particular coming from Newt Gingrich. Mind you, I'm entirely willing to believe Gingrich has mixed feelings. After all, he actually was important in the Clinton era. (As opposed to now, where he's being out-viled by the Tea Party folk by a mile.) Also, because you can't make such stuff, up, he actually told his wife (not sure whether it was the one he dumped in the hospital or the one after that), who told Newsweek in 1996, that the reason why he always took Dick Armey along when going to negotiate with Clinton was that "I melt when I'm around him".
Sadly for Newt, the chapter in Clinton's memoirs on Gingrich shows not many signs of his foe crush being reciprocated, but it is an entertaining and clever take not just on Gingrich but those forces in the Republican party which dominate today.
On the home front, Newt Gingrich, basking in the afterglow of his big victory, kept up the withering personal attacks that had proved to successful in the campaign. Just before the election, he had taken a page from his pamphlet of smear words, calling me 'the enemy of normal Americans'. On the day after the election, he called Hillary and me 'counterculture McGovernicks,' his ultimate condemnation.
The epithet Gingrich hurled at us was correct in some respects. We had supported McGovern, and we weren't part of the culture that Gingrich wanted to dominate America: the self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truth-claiming dark side of white southern conservatism. I was a white Southern Baptist who was proud of my roots and confirmed in my faith. But I knew the dark side all too well. Since I was a boy, I had watched people assert their piety and moral superiority as justifications for claiming an entitlement to political power, and for demonizing those who begged to differ with them, usually over civil rights. (...)
Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didn't think much of his claim that his politics represent America's best values. I had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems and shortcomings. That's exactly what the 'New Right' message did. But it had enormous political appeal because it offered both psychological certainty and escape from responsibility: 'they' were always right, 'we' were always wrong, 'we' were responsible for all the problems, even though 'they' had controlled the presidency for all but six of the last twenty six years. (...) Gingrich and the Republican right had brought us back to the 1960s again; Newt said that America had been a great country until the sixties, when the Democrats took over and replaced absolute notions of right and wrong with more relativistic values. He pledged to take us back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to 'renew American civilisation'.
Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, women's rights, a clean environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed in and worked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of the governors I'd served with in the late 1970s and 1980s. In focusing only on the excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white southeriners did against Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat. There was something to it, but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the Union. On the big issues, slavery and the Union, the South was wrong.
Now it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to obscure the good done in civil rights and other areas. Their blanket condemnation reminded me of a story Senator Daniel Pryor used to tell about a conversation he'd had with an eighty-five-year-old man who told him he had lived through two world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and all the other upheavals of hte twentieth century. Pryor said, 'You sure have seen a lot of changes'. 'Yeah,' the old man replied, 'and I was against every one of them!'
Still, I didn't want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they had done us. He had some interesting ideas, especially in the areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurialism, and he was a committed internationalist in foreign policy. (...) But Gingrich didn't stop there. The core of his argument was not just that his ideas were better than ours; he said his values were better than ours, because Democrats were weak on family, work, welfare, crime, and defense, and because, being crippled by the self-indulgent sixties, we couldn't draw distinctions between right and wrong. (...) Soon he would charge, without a shred of evidence, that 25 percent of my White House aides were recent drug users. Then he said that Democratic values were responsible for the large number of out of wedlock births to teen mothers, whose babies should be taken away from them and put into orphanages. When Hillary questioned whether infants separated from their mothers would really be better off, he said he should watch the 1938 movieBoys Town, in which poor boys are raised in a Catholic orphanage, well before the dreaded 1960s ruined us all.
Gingrich even blamed the Democrats and their 'permissive' values for creating a moral climate that encouraged a troubled South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, to drown her two young sons in October 1994. When it came out that Smith might have been unbalanced because she had been sexually abused as a child by her ultra-conservative stepfather, who was on the board of his local chapter of the Christian Coalition, Gingrich was unfazed. All sins, even those committed by conservatives, were caused by the moral relativism the Democrats had imposed on America since the 1960s.
I kept waiting for Gingrich to explain how the Democrats' moral bankruptcy had corrupted the Nixon and Reagan administrations and led to the crimes of Watergate and Iran-Contra. I'M sure he could have found a way. When he was on a roll, Newt was hard to stop.
And now, because I can, a pair of counterculture McGovernicks:
Sadly for Newt, the chapter in Clinton's memoirs on Gingrich shows not many signs of his foe crush being reciprocated, but it is an entertaining and clever take not just on Gingrich but those forces in the Republican party which dominate today.
On the home front, Newt Gingrich, basking in the afterglow of his big victory, kept up the withering personal attacks that had proved to successful in the campaign. Just before the election, he had taken a page from his pamphlet of smear words, calling me 'the enemy of normal Americans'. On the day after the election, he called Hillary and me 'counterculture McGovernicks,' his ultimate condemnation.
The epithet Gingrich hurled at us was correct in some respects. We had supported McGovern, and we weren't part of the culture that Gingrich wanted to dominate America: the self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truth-claiming dark side of white southern conservatism. I was a white Southern Baptist who was proud of my roots and confirmed in my faith. But I knew the dark side all too well. Since I was a boy, I had watched people assert their piety and moral superiority as justifications for claiming an entitlement to political power, and for demonizing those who begged to differ with them, usually over civil rights. (...)
Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didn't think much of his claim that his politics represent America's best values. I had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems and shortcomings. That's exactly what the 'New Right' message did. But it had enormous political appeal because it offered both psychological certainty and escape from responsibility: 'they' were always right, 'we' were always wrong, 'we' were responsible for all the problems, even though 'they' had controlled the presidency for all but six of the last twenty six years. (...) Gingrich and the Republican right had brought us back to the 1960s again; Newt said that America had been a great country until the sixties, when the Democrats took over and replaced absolute notions of right and wrong with more relativistic values. He pledged to take us back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to 'renew American civilisation'.
Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, women's rights, a clean environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed in and worked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of the governors I'd served with in the late 1970s and 1980s. In focusing only on the excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white southeriners did against Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat. There was something to it, but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the Union. On the big issues, slavery and the Union, the South was wrong.
Now it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to obscure the good done in civil rights and other areas. Their blanket condemnation reminded me of a story Senator Daniel Pryor used to tell about a conversation he'd had with an eighty-five-year-old man who told him he had lived through two world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and all the other upheavals of hte twentieth century. Pryor said, 'You sure have seen a lot of changes'. 'Yeah,' the old man replied, 'and I was against every one of them!'
Still, I didn't want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they had done us. He had some interesting ideas, especially in the areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurialism, and he was a committed internationalist in foreign policy. (...) But Gingrich didn't stop there. The core of his argument was not just that his ideas were better than ours; he said his values were better than ours, because Democrats were weak on family, work, welfare, crime, and defense, and because, being crippled by the self-indulgent sixties, we couldn't draw distinctions between right and wrong. (...) Soon he would charge, without a shred of evidence, that 25 percent of my White House aides were recent drug users. Then he said that Democratic values were responsible for the large number of out of wedlock births to teen mothers, whose babies should be taken away from them and put into orphanages. When Hillary questioned whether infants separated from their mothers would really be better off, he said he should watch the 1938 movieBoys Town, in which poor boys are raised in a Catholic orphanage, well before the dreaded 1960s ruined us all.
Gingrich even blamed the Democrats and their 'permissive' values for creating a moral climate that encouraged a troubled South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, to drown her two young sons in October 1994. When it came out that Smith might have been unbalanced because she had been sexually abused as a child by her ultra-conservative stepfather, who was on the board of his local chapter of the Christian Coalition, Gingrich was unfazed. All sins, even those committed by conservatives, were caused by the moral relativism the Democrats had imposed on America since the 1960s.
I kept waiting for Gingrich to explain how the Democrats' moral bankruptcy had corrupted the Nixon and Reagan administrations and led to the crimes of Watergate and Iran-Contra. I'M sure he could have found a way. When he was on a roll, Newt was hard to stop.
And now, because I can, a pair of counterculture McGovernicks:
no subject
Date: 2012-09-10 11:59 am (UTC)I remember our very own Norman Tebbit once tried to argue that there was a fundamental connection between the moral laxity of the sixties and poor spelling and grammar. I can't quite remember which he thought caused the other, but I do remember sitting round the (mostly female) sub-editors' desk planning a response which started "As a woman of loose morals and fanatical orthography..."
no subject
Date: 2012-09-10 12:11 pm (UTC)I would say several leading Democrats have admitted to Ronald Reagan's charm, but then, they were never obsessed with Reagan's sex life, so that admission isn't nearly as incriminating. :)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-11 08:55 am (UTC)I feel like this should be on a t-shirt or an icon or something. :D *I*'d wear it.
In re: the OP, that picture is ridiculously adorable. :D
no subject
Date: 2012-09-11 10:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-11 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 06:51 am (UTC)(I don't think WW draws on the Clintons at all as far as the President and First Lady are concerned, though the various aides, otoh, are based partly on the Clinton White House - notoriously Rahm Emanuel = Josh Lyman.)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-12 05:36 pm (UTC)