Jonah Goldberg has “a letter to Sarah Palin” column that I find interesting because it touts the importance of policy knowledge, but only for getting elected:
Second, peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government is no substitute for really knowing what you’re talking about. Yes, you can talk well about the stuff you know — oil drilling, energy, etc. — but beyond your comfort zone, you fall back on bumper-sticker language that sounds fine to the people who already agree with you but is useless in winning over skeptics.
President Bush had the same problem you do, which is why there’s a hunger for Republicans who can effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy. That’s why the wonks have the upper hand. Mitt Romney, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and other hands-on types are what the party wants and, frankly, needs.
Note that the emphasis is on articulating and selling, not on understanding and implementing. But even if Jonah still doesn’t believe that the reality of policy is important, at least he now accepts that the electorate does and thinks that Republicans should put forward candidates who at least give the appearance of understanding this reality.
I think that represents some kind of progress.
Davis X. Machina
What passes for wonkery for the GOP will continue to be, as J.K, Galbraith put it years ago, “the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Bill E Pilgrim
Weird. He must be wink proof.
And oh, uh Bobby Jindal, yeah go with that! Good solution. See you in 2012. Wink.
Cat Lady
Krauthammer said the same thing yesterday. Time is ticking and the pundits need someone credible they can start promoting. Sanford ain’t it, Jindal ain’t it, and Palin ain’t it, especially now with the campaign squabbles still being played out in Politico. Mittens is going to look better and better to them.
SGEW
When Jonah “Liberal Fascism” Goldberg is the voice of reason, you have serious problems, blah blah blah.
O! Such lowered expectations. Soon we will see signs of moderating progress when Glenn Beck is less insane than an elected . . .
[searches memory]
Nope. It’s all downhill from here.
The Other Andrew
I have to say…with Obama in office, I don’t think that Romney’s Mormonism will look so scary to the fright(ened)-wingers. Sure, he has magic underwear, but they have to be desperate to put a white man in office.
Dennis-SGMM
Formulating policies that go beyond ensuring the massive transfer of wealth to the already wealthy doesn’t seem to occur to them either. This is just another iteration of “We only need to relabel ourselves and change our marketing and we’ll be back on top!”
Zuzu's Petals
Oh really?
Laertes
Check the reactions to that column.
They. Are. So. Screwed.
The problem these clowns have is that they’ve started to believe their own propaganda. “So what if Palin’s a good-looking idiot who thinks and speaks in bumper-stickerese? So’s Obama, and he won!”
The best part is that they only hear the voices in their heads, and so they still think that Liberals are deathly afraid of Sarah Palin. They’ll probably nominate her just to spite us.
C’mere, conservatives. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiig hug. You’re adorable. I wanna take a picture.
guster
Republicans are anti-government. Acknowledging the importance of policy undermines the whole point.
Tonal Crow
It’s the same old claptrap, which is all about developing new and improved ways to sell the same old putrid snake oil. Goldberg’s piece merely adds to this the admission that the GOP base is shrinking. Gee, I wonder why that is?
A Mom Anon
I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that Jonah or the rest of his pals will EVER scratch any deeper than surface stuff. That would mean actually having to DO something,not just sell it based on surface appearences. Jonah’s laziness goes clear to the bone,it’s a problem in the nearly the entire GOP. They still don’t get it,you have to break a sweat sometimes and get dirty(not BE dirty) to get anything of substance done. This may be a baby step,but that’s about as far as they’ll manage to toddle.
Napoleon
I don’t see where what he is saying is any different then what everyone else is saying. His whole point is that they have to sell their policies better, nothing more.
Trollhattan
Channeling the Kool Aid pitcher: “Oh yeah!”
http://www.conservatives4palin.com/2009/07/another-letter-to-jonah-goldberg.html
That these wackos are allowed to operate kompooters bothers me, but I presume it’s from the day room of some care facility.
Know what I’d pay to see? A Palin-Ron Paul debate.
Tonal Crow
@guster:
No they’re not; they’re anti-bidness-regulation. But they love government when it comes to unconstitutional spying, lying us into war, tossing people into prison for smoking pot, torturing detainees, indefinite detention without charges, beating peaceful protesters, stealing our tax dollars to promote their religion, and wellnigh every other act hateful to Liberty.
vishnu schizt
Progress? Acting like you give a shit while stabbing your neighbor in the back is somewhere in the 10 commandments of repubiltardism. Like Atwater promoted, its all a fucking kabuki theatre to them. Atwater felt the only honest sport was professional wrestling, at least they didn’t pretend it was real. Why did Bush send a bunch of 20 somethings to run Iraq? Why did he staff the justice department with a bunch of ideologues? Why was some asshole who ran a horse fetish club appointed to run FEMA? Its all politics to them, that’s why Rush can sit an make up shit that everyone knows is untrue, and be the defacto leader of the party, nothing matters except perpetuating the myth so a bunch of dumbasses will vote for them and keep them in power. They don’t want it to work, government that works is a radical that can’t be controlled, and if you can’t control outcomes you can’t maximize power and profit. The fact that Sarah is a pathological delusional liar is a feature not a bug. There’s no fucking progress, just a different tact.
lizzy
It is truly frightening that the GOP still believes the winning recipe is a couple cups of charisma, a tablespoon of policy and a dash of intelligence.
Nellcote
But she can’t talk truthfully about “stuff” she knows. I’ve never heard her state that she raised taxes significantly on oil producers in Alaska and that gas pipeline she touts is a fiasco/boondoggle waiting to happen.
Notorious P.A.T.
That’s because Republicans think their problem isn’t their beliefs but how they are “sold”. It’s not that the American public has rejected lowering taxes on the rich (paid for by reducing benefits for the American public) but rather that the American public doesn’t know how great lower taxes for the rich would be. If only the party could explain it better!
Notorious P.A.T.
No doubt. Anyone who thinks we can drill out way out of our energy problems is a. . . non-expert on energy.
guster
@Tonal Crow: None of that is government, dammit! That’s military and law enforcement.
Those two things and government have exactly zero points of intersection. Do I have to explain everything around here?
guster
Gr. I double-posted and can’t figure how to delete the second one.
Fuckin’ Harry Reid.
LD50
Well, I suppose it’s a good sign that they admit he won.
Mike in NC
The main thing they have their hands on are their dicks.
Surreal American
Blasphemer! Heretic! Away with you to a Red State-run leper colony!
Comrade Stuck
Jonah is now just one more name on Sarah’s guillotine wish list.
Martin
I thought they just concluded that debates weren’t about facts? Oh, so they want just enough facts that they don’t look too stupid, but not so many facts that it blocks the starbursts and have-a-beerness.
As far as I can tell, the only thing they really want Palin to do is to erect her tower of lies on a skeleton of facts so the true believers have something to grasp onto, rather than building it on nothing at all. But they still want their tower of lies.
And I agree, governance doesn’t factor in at all – even for law enforcement or the military, seeing as Bush fucked up both of those as well, and McCain/Palin was regularly arguing for a continuation of that disaster.
Cat Lady
@guster:
I blame gay marriage.
Surreal American
Shorter Doughy Pantload: The secret of political success is competency. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Dennis-SGMM
Republicans had their policies formulated for them during the Reagan years. They already know that they’re right so for them it’s just a matter of re-phrasing and marketing until they catch on. Dems work on new policies and spend so much time crafting them that they convince themselves that no one could fail to be bowled over by the rightness and fairness of their work. They often forget that these things do have to be explained to people in ways that both make sense to them and demonstrate how these policies will make their lives better.
KG
In Goldberg’s defense (I hate you, John, for making me type that): understanding should be necessary to articulating; and, implementing is more a process for appointees, which you don’t get to make until you get elected (by articulating and “selling” (stupid advertising jargon infecting everything else) through the course of a campaign).
The more interesting thing is that we are starting to see the chowder head/numb nut types starting to get tired of Palin’s act. It’s like a year later, they figured out what the rest of us did shortly after the GOP convention last summer.
SGEW
O/T
Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article The Great American Bubble Machine is now (officially) up, Jonas Brothers free. Also, free.
Brachiator
Jonah Goldberg giving advice to Sarah Palin …
Let’s see, just how ridiculous is this?
Like Governor Sanford giving advice on abstinence.
Like Ralph Nader giving advice on winning elections.
Like Bernie Madoff giving investment advice.
Goldberg is the freakin’ Sarah Palin of punditry. Only with more ignorance and arrogance. And fewer winks.
His supposed advice quickly dribbles into nonsense when he touts Mitt Romney (the male version of Sarah Palin with a little more PR slickness) as an example of a GOP wonk with the upper hand.
Every day I say a little prayer that the GOP keeps moving in this direction.
Svensker
I need help decoding this. Is he saying Romney, et al, are wonks? Or are they hands-on types? Is that one and the same thing?
If Romney et al are NOT wonks, then who ARE the wonks?
Sorry for the stupidity.
guster
@Cat Lady: Absolutely! You don’t have to tell me about gay marriage–I’m a card carrying member of the Society to Preserve Equality for Real Marriage. They’re a great group. I adore SPERM.
Tony J
When Goldberg says –
Followed by –
and –
What he’s actually saying is that the GOP it utterly screwed, because a decades long policy of promoting and embracing dumb-but-greedy candidates like Palin – and Bush – to high office has left the GOP saddled with a rump majority of elected representatives so beholden to an extremist Base that ‘The Party’ he speaks of no longer has much power.
For examples, see – Steele: The Most Malleable and Easily Manipulated of Michael-based Metals.
It won’t work, and he knows it. There is no way to shut up the “Don’t elect us, we’re crazy” wing of the Republican Party, no matter how many letters he writes to their current Golden Girl, but Jonah wants to position himself as close to the money-pit as possible in anticipation of the GOP’s final, catastrophic defeat in 2012, so he can say “I told you so”, and get paid for it by whatecer rises from the ashes.
Zuzu's Petals
Hmm, can’t help but notice that Jonah’s letter appears shortly after the announcement that Palin has won this year’s “Sitting Duck Award”:
Comrade Stuck
@Svensker:
I think he meant to say wanks instead of wonks. That is how I read it anywho.
Keith
I would have *hoped* that her beauty queen/sex symbol photo shoot in Runner’s World would have convinced Jonah et al that she’s not cut out to be a serious presidential candidate in 2012.
Mike G
Classic corporatespeak from Doughy Pantload.
“Why won’t people buy our rancid horsemeat anymore? I know! We need a big, bombastic advertising campaign!”
Dennis-SGMM
It might have if his blood hadn’t rushed to his lap first.
Brachiator
@Svensker:
Weren’t they the cuddly little creatures in the Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi?
Zuzu's Petals
It’s official. Just announced.
Palin will not run for re-election
Martian Buddy
That reminds me of this column from Amity Shlaes; it’s probably been mentioned in one of the many Sanford threads, but it seems relevant here. Her vision of a brand-new GOP party platform is…
…wait for it…
…drastic spending cuts (including entitlements) and tax cuts (especially the capital gains tax.) Tax cuts and spending cuts are the new tax cuts and spending cuts.
Granted, she also proposes giving up on the social conservative crap — which a bold suggestion when one considers that the fundies are a good chunk of the GOP’s remaining base.
Robertdsc-iphone
And to think they have a legitimate shot at 2012 because of Obama’s mismanagement of the economy and Wall Street.
SiubhanDuinne
Not only is she not running for re-election in 2010, she is stepping down as Governor in about 3 weeks! What’s THAT all about?
SiubhanDuinne
@ SiubhanDuinne
Never mind, it’s all being discussed one thread over.
Tonal Crow
@Dennis-SGMM: Exactly correct. And, I would add, Democrats almost always forget how to explain their policies in emotional terms, while GOPers never fail to do so. And that’s been central to the GOP’s success (despite having only toxic waste to sell) and the Democrats’ failures (despite having a significant number of good ideas to sell).
tc125231
Maus
That’d be brutal. He is smarter than her beyond a doubt, and some of his stances are far more principled, but I really do wonder how much more either would hurt the country. It makes me sad that Paul is so able to see the bullshit and at the same time so naive thanks to a total unquestioning adherence to his theory, and the thought that it’s possible to have a truly laissez-faire economy. If he had any amount of cynicism towards the “Captains of Industry” and didn’t base his life off Randroid utoptianism I’d like the dude better politically.
Well, also if he didn’t associate with douchebags and supremacists, but still.
pseudonymous in nc
Gotta love Pantload’s timing.