Colin Powell keeps insisting that the Republicans lost the presidency because of right-wing extremists like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who, in his view, have become the public face of the Republican party, and thus will ensure its permanent marginalization.

Others argue that the Bush administration had allowed Republicanism to become a cowboyish clique of the selfish who wanted a free hand to make money and let others less fortunate be damned. David Frum offered the novel notion that Rush Limbaugh’s girth, past drug use, checkered marital career, and palatial digs were emblematic of the party’s out-of-touch self-indulgence, especially when contrasted with the athletic, happily married, and transracial Barack Obama.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ADVERTISEMENT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

But none of these explanations rings true — especially since most of the current critics themselves were, in the heyday of 2002–03, either enthusiastically working for, or writing in praise of, the very administration whose policies they now claim caused the present mess.

LIMBAUGH & CO.?
First, the real public expressions of extremism in American politics recently have not been from the Right — not surprisingly, perhaps, given that for much of this new century the Republicans smugly controlled most of the government.

It was not Rush Limbaugh, for example, but Michael Moore who announced that the 9/11 killers wrongly selected a blue-state city, or that the al-Qaeda insurgents were Minutemen-like patriots. Moore, remember, was no marginal figure but the darling of the Democratic establishment, who flocked to the gala opening of his crude propaganda film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Indeed, if one were to follow the logic of this new Powell doctrine that public expression of extremism sinks a party, then the Democrats would never have won back the Senate and the House. Senators as diverse as Dick Durbin, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy shrilly compared American soldiers to terrorists, Nazis, Pol Pot’s thugs, and Saddam’s Baathists.

The most inflammatory public figure of the last two years was, in fact, Barack Obama’s own minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who uttered vile racist characterizations of everyone from Italians to Jews, as part of his generic “G-d damning” of America. So far we have not seen a conservative version of Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint, or anything like Jonathan Chait’s New Republic essay that began, “I hate President George W. Bush.” Colin Powell himself has been demonized in scurrilous terms, but the epithets have come not from Rush Limbaugh, but rather from such observers as that old cultural icon of the Left, Harry Belafonte, who once quite unapologetically compared the secretary of state to a “house slave.”

THE CYCLES OF AMERICAN POLITICS
There were historical reasons why it was unlikely that the Republicans were going to win the presidency last year. It has always been difficult to extend a party’s control of the executive branch for 12 consecutive years; the Democrats themselves had not done it since the Roosevelt-Truman years. In 30 out of the last 50 years, Republicans have controlled the White House, hardly proof of a conservative implosion. Over the last half-century, the general rule was that a Democrat could not win the presidency unless he had the cover of a Southern accent. That both JFK and Obama defied that conventional wisdom suggests that only the rare appearance of a charismatic youthful Democratic candidate can balance the stigmatization of out-of-touch northern liberalism.

The elections of 1964, 1976, and 1992 were all heralded as the beginnings of new permanent liberal majorities. In the first two cases, the inept governance of LBJ and Jimmy Carter ensured that Republicans were back in office in four years. Bill Clinton extended Democratic rule for eight years; but he did so without winning a majority of the votes in either election. Take Ross Perot out of the equation in 1992 — and perhaps even in 1996 — and Clinton might well not have won. Clinton survived Monica because no Americans were killed in his Balkans War, and because Dick Morris taught him the arts of triangulation, while the Republican Congress forced spending cuts that led finally to two years of budget surpluses. He left office popular, despite Monica, with balanced budgets and an assurance that the era of big government was over.

THE SEPTEMBER MELTDOWN
John McCain was ahead of Barack Obama when the September meltdown occurred. Had the financial panic not transpired until December, there was a 50-50 chance that McCain would have won — despite deep defections from the conservative base. In that case, we would be talking now about the continued Democratic propensity for self-destruction by nominating liberal northern presidential candidates like Obama, Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, and Mondale.