Who on Earth would claim the next election matchup is Pragmatic Democrat vs. Radical End-of-All-Regulation Republican? Time’s Joe Klein would, in Time’s June 27 cover story on the GOP candidates. He ended the piece like this:
Some presidential campaigns - 1960, 1980, 1992, 2008 - are exhilarating, suffused with hope and excitement. This is not likely to be one of those. It is likely to be an election that no one wins but someone loses. It will be a reversal of politics past: a pragmatic Democrat will be facing a Republican with all sorts of big ideas, promising an unregulated, laissez-faire American paradise.
Obama will have to come up with a stronger argument than "It could have been worse," but in tough times, the continuing presence of a government safety net is far more reassuring than the message that you're on your own. And in the end, all the Republican talk of repealing and defunding may prove too radical for an American public that is conservative in the traditional sense, and wary of sudden lurches to the left or right.
Joe Klein is about as honest in this passage as he was when he spent months denying he was the "Anonymous" author of Primary Colors. If Americans don’t want "sudden lurches" to an ideological pole, what would Klein call the first two years of Obama? Its radical increase in spending and debt was hardly what America was promised by...well, Joe Klein four years ago, at a similar juncture in 2007. Obama was pragmatic, even conservative:
"But Obama's is a determinedly conservative boldness. He is a lovely speaker, yet his tone is more conversational than oratorical. He offers little in the way of red-meat rhetoric to his audiences, some of whom are surprised, and disappointed, by his persistent judiciousness. He is solid on the essentials of most issues but daring on noneâ€"he swims contentedly in the Democratic Party's mainstream, unwilling to lose any potential voters with, well, the audacity of his proposals."
Obama's gamble is "that in a time of rancid partisanship, after six years of a presidency dedicated to bullying its domestic adversaries and international allies, an Obama candidacy will prosper by offering the exact opposite: flagrant, thoughtful consensus seeking. Which is very audacious, indeed."
Obama was never an extremist, and never failed to meet a test for moderation. By contrast, while Klein had a few nice words for Michele Bachmann (she didn't have the "bitter solipsistic" tendencies of Palin), the extremism is still dangerously out of control among conservatives:
But a nomination race that is comfortable for Bachmann has to be uncomfortable, sooner or later, for the more moderate politicians in the field. Gingrich, amazingly, was the only candidate willing to fly in the face of Limbaugh Law, repeating his worries about Ryan's Medicare plan: "Remember, we all got mad at Obama because he ran over us [on health care reform] when we said don't do it. Well, the Republicans ought to follow the same ground rule. If you can't convince the American people it's a good idea, maybe it's not a good idea." When Newt Gingrich is the voice of reason on a Republican stage, the rightward lurch of the party has become a dangerous, inbred, self-destructive thing...
Indeed, for relatively moderate candidates like Romney and Pawlenty, all the tests of ideological purity are trick questions that will leave them either unworthy of Tea Party support now or untenable in a general election. And so they are forced to endure implausible ideological purification rituals - Pawlenty's recent, silly tax-lowering scheme, for example - or empretzel themselves in order to explain past bouts of political sanity. Romney's latest defense of his successful universal health care plan in Massachusetts is a particularly grisly example of the latter: it was O.K. for him to impose an individual mandate but wrong for the President to do the exact same thing, because health care is a problem that should be left to the states to solve in their own ways. That leaves Romney open to an obvious question: Does he also intend to destroy Medicare by sending it back to the states?
Klein tried to say nice things about Mitt Romney's moderate tone in announcing for president (he didn't trash every government program and assumed some good will from President Obama), he can't say the same for the Palins and Cains:
And yet there is a jittery sense among Republican savants that Romney is a straw man, ready to be toppled, because the party has changed irrevocably. It has traded in country-club aristocracy for pitchfork populism. The Tea Partyers and talk-show hosts who define the new Republican Party believe in the opposite of primogeniture. They believe in the moral purity of political virginity. After Sarah Palin, amateurism has become a Tea Party hallmark. Herman Cain, the African-American business executive who was the Teasies' flavor of the month - before the debate - emphasizes his total absence of governmental experience, to roars of laughter and approval on the stump.
The "Teasies"? Which copy editor at Time indulged that bigfoot Klein on this lame sobriquet?
