Puck’s Words

In the middle of Hollywood, just north of Sunset Boulevard and Cahuenga – Larry King Square, where you’ll find CNN’s Los Angeles Bureau in its fancy glass tower – there’s a mysterious old building with a peculiar lavender inscription across the top – “What Fools These Mortals Be!”

That’s it – no more than that – and there’s no indication of what’s actually in that building. No one seems to know, and that’s Puck’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream of course. Mickey Rooney got to say those words in the quite odd 1935 Max Reinhardt film version of the play – James Cagney was Bottom the Weaver by the way. Hollywood has always been strange. But when you’re stuck in traffic at that corner, waiting for the light to change, you can look left at those five words, or right, at the news ticker that runs around the façade of the CNN building, streaming the headlines – and it all makes sense. The two balance each other nicely. It’s all about human folly. Then the light turns green and you move on.

But perhaps that old building on Cahuenga is full of happily cynical historians, working on their latest books on Mao or Aaron Burr or Ivan the Terrible – as there’s something about the intense study of history that might have you muttering Puck’s words. Shakespeare was meditating on pride and infatuation and narrow-mindedness, but that’s what historians do too. All the assessments of great men and great women must include their very real ambiguities too, as their blind spots are as important as their achievements. Historians, more than anyone else, know what fools mortals can be.

But Kevin Baker doesn’t work in that odd Hollywood building – he’s an historian who works in Manhattan and also famous for his award-winning historical fiction – making the past come alive, as they say. Someone has to do it. But he’s as happily cynical as any Puck, including Mickey Rooney, and back in July 2009, in Harper’s, he gave us Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow It Again:

Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president.

It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guantanamo, a floundering education system.

Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable – indeed he will refuse – to seize the radical moment at hand.

This is followed by a two-thousand-word assessment of the end of the Herbert Hoover presidency – a tale of a good and decent man, and a first-rate thinker, who just couldn’t break from the social and economic conventions of the day, or simply slam those who were obviously making things much worse, and had the world fall apart on his watch. And that’s the thesis here:

Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past – without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.

That was prescient, given how the last years have played out – the changes are incremental and no one, on the left or right, is very happy. As Baker said in 2009:

But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.

That we haven’t had anything like a disaster is, however, a comfort. Maybe Obama considered what Baker had said. Listening to cynics, who know folly when they see it, is always a good idea.

But now, after three years, Baker is going after the Republicans, and after this disastrous primary season – Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry and now Santorum, and Etch-a-Sketch Romney – muttering Puck’s words seems quite appropriate. And now, in a feature-length item in the New York Times, Baker asks an important question:

Who speaks for the Republican Party? The answer is that everyone does – and therefore, no one does.

The problem is, as Baker sees it, the Republican Party has outsourced itself to others:

Republicans have fallen prey to one of the favorite tactics of just the sort of heedless, improvident, twenty-first century capitalism they revere. Their party has been outsourced.

For decades, Republicans have recruited outside groups and individuals to amplify their party’s message and its influence. This is a legitimate democratic tactic that they have carried off brilliantly, helping to shift the political spectrum in the United States significantly to the right.

But this came at a price, and in small incremental steps, like this first one:

When Republicans came to believe in the 1960s that they were up against a “liberal biased” media that would never give them a fair shake, they began the long march to build their own, alternative information establishment. As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler, led the fight to abolish the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987, further empowering what was already a legion of right-wing talk radio programs.

This is followed by a long and detailed history of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, from 1949 to demise – legislation mandating equal time for political candidates is long gone, although the Republicans say the Democrats are working to bring it back, in spite of there not being the slightest evidence this has even crossed their minds. But it’s still a talking point, and Baker reminds us that “in 1986, a pair of Ronald Reagan’s judicial appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia” were the ones who ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was not “a binding statutory obligation.” The players don’t change much. And we are where we are:

Right-wing radio was dominant on the airwaves before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. But now it had the field of public discourse virtually all to itself. It provided conservatives with a direct outreach to the public, free of any intercession by the “elites” Newt Gingrich is still denouncing in this season’s debates. Right-leaning media networks such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network and especially Clear Channel Communications soon became major media conglomerates, with no obligation to broadcast any conflicting views.

And that led to the ultimate Republican message-outsourcing:

The biggest media coup of all for the Republican Party, though, was the advent of nakedly partisan Fox News, created by Roger Ailes, former media advisor to the Nixon, Reagan and George Bush administrations. It was Ailes who thereby managed to throw the entire weight of Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide media empire behind the party – and it was Ailes, reportedly, who kept it on the conservative straight-and-narrow when Mr. Murdoch toyed with the idea of putting the empire behind Barack Obama, the new Democrat, in 2008, much as it had backed Tony Blair’s New Labour for a time in Great Britain. Instead, thanks to Ailes, conservative politicians and advocates saw both their ideas amplified and their wallets fattened by a dizzying array of Murdoch television shows, books and newspapers.

But then there was other outsourcing:

In 1971, during Richard M. Nixon’s first term in office, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Republican corporate lawyer from Virginia, summoned the resources of the business community to the cause with his famous memorandum to the National Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”

Powell wanted “American business” to fight back everywhere it could against what he saw as the many enemies of free enterprise. Tactics would include demanding “equal time” on the nation’s college campuses and – ironically enough – on the nation’s airwaves, by appealing to the fairness standards of the FCC. Yet more importantly, Powell’s memorandum inspired the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other conservative think tanks. Wealthy businessmen and other individuals from Richard Mellon Scaife to the Koch brothers stepped up, pouring millions of dollars into right-wing magazines, books and political campaigns.

And they became the Republican Party, and Powell went to the Supreme Court – “and the nation’s capital won itself a major new industry.” The number of lobbyists and advisers exploded:

Again and again over the years, conservative policy institutes have armed the party’s candidates with intellectual arguments, while the conservative media barrage has blasted a way through to high office for even the most lackluster Republican nominees.

It was pure outsourcing:

Both what the party believed in and its ability to do the heavy lifting necessary to win elections was handed over to outside interests – outside interests that did not necessarily share the party’s goals or have any stake in ameliorating its tactics.

And that seems to have led to the current situation:

Party leaders may not have liked Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on a Georgetown law student — calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” for advocating that insurance companies provide affordable birth control — but what does he care?

If the Republicans lose the election, it will most likely mean all the more angry conservatives tuning in and driving up the ratings for Rush and his fellow radio ranters. Limbaugh is now facing a challenge from outraged liberals and others urging his sponsors to drop his show. But the most that the usually garrulous Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney would allow himself to say was that “it’s not the language I would have used.” Rick Santorum averred that Rush was “being absurd” but implied that was okay – “an entertainer can be absurd. He’s in a very different business than I am.”

But of course, he’s not. Rush Limbaugh is in the very same business that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are in – and guess who’s in charge? It’s not the radio calamity howlers who take their cues from the party leaders now, but the other way around.

The Republicans abandoned their own party to others, and now they’re paying the price:

This campaign season we’ve seen all the major Republican candidates for president adopt the bombastic, apocalyptic rhetoric of talk radio, insisting that we will “lose America” if they aren’t elected, and filling their speeches and debates with ugly personal insults, directed at each other and at President Obama. The results are in the poll numbers. Unlike the sharp but generally civil 2008 primary fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton, which galvanized the Democratic base, the Republican struggle this year has been steadily driving down the party’s appeal and driving up the candidates’ negative ratings.

Poll numbers for Republicans in Congress have taken a nosedive, too, as the party’s intransigence on Capitol Hill has allowed President Obama to appear reasonable by contrast. But what does that matter to the thousands of lobbyists who bring in more and more of the money for congressional campaigns? Sure, a Republican victory might afford them more closed-door sessions on rewriting federal regulations. But Democratic victories will serve their purpose just as well, making clear to the money men who send them to Washington that they are more needed than ever to resist “job-killing regulations.”

And it’s Baker’s contention that Fox News has become more of a problem than an asset:

All the enticements of the Murdoch Empire have produced a generation of reality show pols, at least as interested in landing their own TV series as winning office. Two of the most popular Republican candidates for president going into the race, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, both declined to run rather than jeopardize their shows. Newt Gingrich turned much of his campaign into book tours for himself and his wife. Ask yourself which was most likely – that Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann really thought they could be elected president or that they were looking to improve their “brand.”

And then there are the few ultra-wealthy sugar daddies:

Even as Rick Santorum was pleading that sometimes you have to “take one for the team” in the last Republican debate, his candidacy was being kept alive largely by money from a single donor, Foster Friess, the conservative Christian multimillionaire with the Batman villain name. Gingrich has his own sponsors, the casino billionaires Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, hawkish supporters of Israel. Does what these individuals care about most fit in with the Republican Party’s election strategy? So what?

So we now have something that’s not much like a political party at all:

Thanks to their inventiveness, Republicans have stumbled into the brave new world of American politics. From primaries to photo ops, from direct mail to voter suppression laws, the Republican Party has almost always been the real innovator in electoral politics, usually leaving their slower brother, the Democrats, in the dust for at least a campaign season or two.

Now they’ve achieved the political equivalent of shuttering that foul old steel mill and shipping the hard work off for others to do while they dabble in these fascinating new derivatives. Now their candidates and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to make the party over from within.

And what has been lost is listening, convincing and compromising – “all those things that political parties and their leaders used to be fairly good at.”

But no more:

At long last, Republicans seem to be finally coalescing around Mitt Romney’s candidacy, and he could still win the presidency if the economy slumps again. But the longer-term problem will remain: how to maintain a coherent, mass political party when so many individuals are empowered as never before to redirect it to their own, personal ends.

What fools these mortals can be… as it says on that building down the street. And historians are a cynical lot. That comes from looking at the details.

And now the Republicans are stuck with Mitt Romney, the choice of somebody, but clearly not the choice of the party, whatever that might be now. And Steve Kornacki comments on that predicament:

The good news for Mitt Romney is that the big names in conservative politics are starting to acknowledge the overwhelming likelihood that he’ll be the Republican presidential nominee and line up behind him. The bad news is that it’s taken them an excruciatingly long time to reach this point – and even now, their support seems reluctant, qualified, even grudging.

When there’s not a core party any longer the compromise candidate satisfies no one:

Take Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator and one of the most influential voices in Tea Party politics. The South Carolina senator provided Romney with a big assist on Thursday, declaring that “I’m not only comfortable with Romney, I’m excited about the possibility of him possibly being our nominee” and hinting that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich should reassess their candidacies. What DeMint didn’t do, though: actually endorse Romney. So, officially, he still hasn’t taken sides in the race.

Then there’s Jeb Bush, who offered his support for Romney after Tuesday’s Illinois primary … in a brief prepared statement that was decidedly light on praise for the candidate. There was no splashy rally to make the announcement, no round of television interviews and media appearances to promote it – not even a simple, quick press conference or joint appearance. Just a subdued statement that saluted Romney for winning Illinois, pointed out that many states have already voted, and repeated some boilerplate Republican rhetoric about the economy.

Kornacki says they’re just scared:

Even conservative leaders who privately believe Romney is their party’s best option are afraid of being remembered as the one who put him over the top.

And this may be because no one knows what the party is anymore:

Essentially, the election of Obama in 2008 prompted conservatives to open a two-front war. One was aimed at Obama, which was nothing new – as the examples of Presidents Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy and Roosevelt all attest. A Democrat in the White House invariably prompts alarm and hysteria on the right.

The second front, though, was less predictable: an insurrection against the Republican “establishment.” This grew out of the right’s need to explain Obama’s sweeping victory. It couldn’t be that the 2008 election had served as a national repudiation of conservatism, so conservatives retroactively turned on George W. Bush and the Big Government brand of conservatism he’d practiced (a brand of conservatism that, in turn, had grown out of the right’s interpretation of Bill Clinton’s success in the 1990s).

But perhaps this insurrection against the Republican establishment was based on the sense that there wasn’t one anymore. They had left the building long ago. But Kornacki is more concerned with what went wrong with what was supposed to have been the party’s establishment:

Bush, the story went, had betrayed true conservatism and wrecked the country in the process, creating a political climate that made voters susceptible to Obama and his teleprompter-aided pleas to give the opposition party a chance. The appropriate response, conservatives decided, was to insist on absolute ideological purity from Republicans going forward, and to cleanse the party of those who exhibited Bush-like tendencies on domestic issues.

But their desire to simultaneously oppose everything Obama did forced a redefinition of conservatism, which is how Romney got in trouble. In his ’08 campaign, when he positioned himself as the right’s alternative to John McCain, the universal healthcare law he’d championed in Massachusetts had been an asset for him; he’d used a blueprint drawn up by conservatives in the early 1990s to address a major issue on which Democrats traditionally enjoyed an advantage. But when Obama used Romney’s Massachusetts law as the blueprint for his own national program, conservatives felt compelled to call it socialism and oppose it with all their might.

Thus did Romney become the “moderate” in the Republican presidential race – the candidate who most reflected the brand of Republicanism that Obama-era conservatives had dedicated themselves to extinguishing. Between 2008 and 2012, Romney actually remained consistent on most issues, sticking to the very conservative positions he staked out when he came to the national stage. But his image within the party changed, leading the same conservatives who had sung his praises in ’08 – like DeMint, Rush Limbaugh and even Santorum – to distance themselves from him.

Yes, but Maybe Romney was running for the nomination of a party that had long ago handed its operations, and what it stood for, to third parties, individuals with their own concerns, who have systematically riled up an uninformed base with self-serving scare stories. Nevertheless what’s left of the party’s titular establishment has to deal with that odd base, so they’re wary of endorsing Romney, out of fear:

To win over the skeptical conservative base, he needs influential figures on the right to vouch for him. But if they vouch for him, they risk being declared establishment sellouts trying to force an impure nominee on the GOP. And they know that any dramatic gesture they make now will be remembered. What if Romney wins the nomination, loses in the fall, and the conservative base concludes they were tricked again – that it’s time to redouble their purity crusade? Or what if Romney wins in the fall and, like George H. W. before him, tries to govern from the middle as president, prompting a GOP civil war. What conservative leader would want to spend the next four years explaining why he or she played such a critical role in elevating that kind of president?

They’re in a tight spot. They’re the party establishment of a party that’s not their party, or anyone’s. And that leads to Kornacki arguing this:

The most logical conclusion to draw from this is that they actually want Romney to be their nominee, and that they’ve wanted him to be their nominee for most, if not all, of this process. But they’re scared to death of having their fingerprints on it.

So the Republican Party, that was supposed to be half of American politics, balancing out the idealistic Democrats with solid common sense, when the Democrats got too pie-in-the-sky impractical, outsourced itself to others, with their own agendas – and all we have is fear and nonsense on that side. And we needed them, or needed what they used to be.

Ah well. Tomorrow it’s errands here in Hollywood, and once again being stuck in traffic at the intersection on Sunset – with Puck’s words on one side and CNN’s headlines streaming on the other side. And now they say the same thing.