Listening to an old British public radio show on the Hippocratic oath this morning, I reflected a bit on how people have a tendency to lose a staring contest with a problem. That is to say that we often panic a little when problems get so close that they stare us right in the face, and as a result we do something stupid that makes things worse. For me the type specimen of this is what I called the neoconservative fallacy of foreign policy, a form of false dichotomy in which the existence of an urgent problem (Saddam is a BAD PERSON) automatically compels you to support whatever insane plan Bill Kristol thought up last night.
Doing nothing is almost never the sole alternative to doing something stupid. Even on rare occasions when it is, a smart physician lets a stone run its painful course rather than cut into the kidney and kill a patient. Nonetheless and despite the obvious stupidity of open-kidney surgery in the BC era, kidney stones are uniquely painful and thus create an almost incomparable need for relief. It may be this insatiable demand for enterprising quacks that inspired Hippocrates to create a medical oath that specifically forbids a number of ill-advised interventions, including thou shalt not cut for stone.
They don’t make political consultants take oaths. This could either be because political science lags somewhat behind Christian Science and predicting the Oscars by divining chicken guts as respectable fields in which one can correctly guess the actual results of a given action, or perhaps because as a rule political consultants are scum-sucking weasels that I would not trust with my pet rock. However, if they did, and if the oath resembled the one that Hippocrates wrote for doctoring, then the certification board (Dick Morris, Lanny Davis, Mark Penn and John McCain) would be demanding the head of Reince Preibus.
[…]drastically shorter primary phase, much earlier nominating convention, many fewer debates. Aren’t all of Reince Priebus’s structural reforms basically aimed at dramatically reducing the time period in which the actual Republican party base is on display for the public at large?
No, Reince, you ignoramus*. Look at polling from the 2012 primary and tell me that the GOP would be better off if they had called a vote any time before mid-March of 2012. In September 2011 Rick Perry would have take it in a walk. From October into November the GOP nominee is Herman Cain. From November into January it’s Newt. Newt makes another credible surge in late January followed by a brief but intense flirtation with Rick Santorum (thanks for making his trendline brown, RCP). Only in March does the party settle down and eat its g*ddamn peas.
The extended 2012 primary had a clear and valuable purpose in that it gave the morlocks and hate-filled Jawas of the Republican base time to take each of their ‘dream’ candidates out on a couple of dates, which is all it took to figure out that each one would lose a general election to a pufferfish. Mitt Romney might not make Rich Lowry change his pants, but he does have the ability to keep both eyes focused in the same general direction, he radiates what a crash survivor living on a desert island for sixteen years might describe as ‘charisma’ and he has the good sense to only self-destruct in private.
That the GOP has a perception problem nobody doubts. Whether you fix that by making the process more susceptible to the basest impulses of the base, well Dr. Priebus, I’m sure you will find the answer to that on your own.
(*) And obvious anagram.
Xecky Gilchrist
it gave the morlocks and hate-filled Jawas of the Republican base time to take each of their ‘dream’ candidates out on a couple of dates, which is all it took to figure out that each one would lose a general election to a pufferfish.
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Thank you for this.
Derelict
After the GOP gave control of the primaries over to the Tea Party, it was all over. The fact that the “dream candidates” all turned out to be mental pygmies was no accident. The fact that Romney had to repudiate everything he ever stood for (except for money) was also no accident.
Now that the Teahadists have complete control over primaries, the party will be unable to field anyone to the left of Bachmann–and probably nobody any saner, either.
Tim F.
@Xecky Gilchrist: Ha. Thanks. I post-edited that but then I edited it back because the wording you quoted is better.
Hoodie
I guess not understanding what their base is actually like goes hand in hand with not understanding why normal people don’t like them. If there had been a shorter primary season, they might have had a convention floor fight for the ages, since Mitt would not have had time to outspend everyone else. In other words, the number of debates and length of the primary season was one of the few things they actually did right, and shortening the primary season and reducing the number of debates may make their problems worse. Good.
Ash Can
Ssh. You know what Napoleon said. Never interrupt your enemy when he is
making a mistakeblowing his own ass off.raven
Reince just told Wolf that more taxes meant less money in your car!
Chris
@Hoodie:
Yeah. Their base is like any other normal people in that they expect them to do their job (in this case show up and vote) and otherwise shut up. They don’t really bother learning or thinking much about them. Which is why they’re occasionally surprised when things like the TPM prove more unwieldy than expected.
Suffern ACE
@Hoodie: It’s why they want to limit the debates. No free advertising for the candidates wtihout the money. The one who wins will be the one who actually, you know, hired people to collect signatures so that they could be on actual ballots. One big Super Duper Duper Tuesday with enough electoral votes to seal the nomination might guarantee that only the moneyed guys can win.
Bobby Thomson
Phil Converse wept.
Political consultants are not political scientists.
The Moar You Know
Thank you for pointing out the overlooked obvious: Romney was the best they had. By several orders of magnitude.
Limiting debates is reasonable, if all your candidates have the charisma of a rendering plant. In that, Rince is pretty smart. Short term gain, but a long term loss when in 2016 the GOP nominates a candidate that is actually suffering from rabies.
srv
I still like my idea since the Reagan Re-animation effort have so far failed.
Just put Reagan on every primary, put up a poster-board of him at the debates for the others to fellate and let him win the nomination.
Then default to the Democrats because he’s dead. It’s a win-win. Best election evah and you don’t have to actually, you know, govern.
Bobby Thomson
The reason for limiting the debates isn’t to produce a different candidate. It’s to limit the amount of time for an Adelson-backed spoiler to shiv the front runner.
Eric U.
trying to forget the whole experience, but it seems like Romeny was the pre-ordained establishment candidate and he only managed to save himself through the long process. So if they had arbitrarily cut it off when any of the other pikers were in the lead would have been an existential crisis for the party. Can you imagine Santorum, Cain, or Perry as candidate? It actually makes me happy to think about that.
Tim F.
@Bobby Thomson: Political professionals apply political science in the same way that medical professionals practice medicine. That political science is about as advanced as rock worship (and clearly regressing since Tocqueville) only makes the whole enterprise kind of sad.
That said, Obama’s consultant people clearly have a better handle on this most dismal of dismal sciences than McCain or Romney’s people did. So there is that.
Warren Terra
Didn’t they just extend the primary season because they saw how in the Democratic contest of 2008 how an extended contest between two serious, charismatic candidates could dominate the news for months and build armies of dedicated supporters ready to dominate the ground game in the fall?
Dave
Cutting for the stone referred to removal of bladder stones by surgery. Physicians were not surgeons and should therefore not perform surgery.
Roger Moore
I’ve heard this called the kinetic fallacy, and it goes something like, “We need to do something, my plan involves doing something, therefore we must follow my plan.” It’s a ridiculous approach to setting policy, but people still seem to listen to it.
And, FWIW, the stones that Hippocrates was saying not to cut for were bladder stones, not kidney stones. Kidney stones are painful as hell but will generally pass without intervention; it’s actually the passing that’s the painful part. Bladder stones, OTOH, will not pass and can eventually kill the patient without intervention. And the injunction in the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t say that all interventions are wrong; rather it suggests that they should be left to experts (“I will not cut for stone, even for the patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners”).
MattF
As a matter of fact, I believe ‘cutting for the stone’ refers to bladder stones, not kidney stones. At least, this is what my urologist told me when he, somewhat gleefully, informed me that he was going to violate his oath by surgically removing the collection of stones in my bladder that were causing me various kinds of grief that I won’t bother trying to describe.
ETA: I see that Dave and Mr. Moore just beat me to it. However, I still have the advantage of personal experience.
Woodrowfan
@Ash Can: “Never murder a man when he’s committing suicide.”
Zifnab
That’s not far. The only candidates with the resources for an actual ground game were Perry (who flamed out as soon as he opened his mouth on national TV), Romney, and Santorum.
After that, you have to get down to tacks and ask “Who wins the big five? California, NY, Texas, Ohio, and Florida?” Santorum wasn’t winning NY or California, so he was basically ‘effed on day 1. Had Perry been rendered mute, he’d get Texas and maybe Florida. No one else except Gingrich had the ability to carry a state.
Once Perry dropped out, Romney was going to win. Period. End of discussion. Full stop.
Obama knew that for the same reason he know how to win the Dem primary in 2008 and the general in 2012. Obama knows how to count votes. Apparently, that’s a rare talent in Washington, because the delusion that anyone who can’t get votes can get elected to city dog catcher continues to prevade the Pund-o-sphere.
Citizen_X
@The Moar You Know:
So, you think it’s gonna be Ted Cruz, huh?
I’m for a long primary, BTW: more time for rich assholes to throw their money away on their favorite loons, less time for them to spend money in the general. That’s my take.
Chris
@Eric U.:
I wonder if one of those freaks winning would actually have been enough for the GOP establishment and big money to actively try and sabotage their campaign based on the notion that even a Democrat would be better than someone that insane.
Eh, probably not. They’d just have supported him and hoped they could control him by stacking his cabinet with Top Men.
Bobby Thomson
@Tim F.:
Bullshit. I’d like to see Rinse run a regression. Or tell me what APSR stands for.
Zifnab
@Chris:
What do you think Gingrich was up there doing? Every time he opened his mouth, he dug the shiv into Romney’s back a bit deeper. As far as I can tell, he served no other practical purpose.
Roger Moore
@Warren Terra:
I think it’s a result of internal fights within the Republican party. The wingnuts still don’t make up enough of the primary voters for a true wingnut candidate to win the election, but they do control enough of the party apparatus to change the nomination process. So the wingnuts in party are trying to change the process until a wingnut can win. How they expect to win the general election with a candidate who isn’t even popular enough to win the Republican nomination without rigging the primary is an open question.
Chris
@Zifnab:
I have to say, I hate Newt Gingrich as much as, well, any politician with an R after his name, but watching him stick it to Romney was almost enough to make me forget that. “The only reason you didn’t become a ‘career politician’ is because you lost your reelection race to Ted Kennedy!” Wooo, BURN.
MattF
@Chris: Actually, Noot’s political party isn’t ‘R’, it’s ‘Me Me Me’. That said, gosh, he really does hate Mitt, doesn’t he?
fuckwit
Reagan was a bubble. A demographic bubble. Gingrich, even Shrub, were the popping of that bubble (or zit? maybe that’s a more apt metaphor).
The “God, Guns, and Greed” coalition, created by the excreable Grover Norquist, is finally done with.
Just to recap. In the late 70s and early 80s, Grover Norquist had the evil genius idea of trying to weave a coalition out of right-wing religious fundamentalists, right-wing warmongers and neocons, and right-wing 1% capitalists and industrialists. He did this via a breakfast, every week.
He sat them down, smoothed over their differences, and had them all agree on the things they agreed with: fascism, American-style. A fascism in which there is no government. A fascism in which power is weilded by the powerful: churches, the military, and corporations. Everyone gets along! Everything is privatized: all services are provided by corporations, the military, and the church. That pesky govermnent is drowned in a bathtub, thus the horrible oppressor, the common enemy, that government of the people, is removed from existence, allowing churches, military, and the ultra-rich, to rule with an iron fist.
This was sold to us common people as “freedom” and “patriotism”. It was sold tribally, as fist-pumping red-white-and-blue loyalty and “we’re number 1!”.
The vast majority of us bought that line of bullshit for about 30 years. Then we started to see that, um, we were getting fucked in the ass the whole time. This revelation came sometime in the middle of the Iraq war, and became painfully obvious to everyone after the financial collapse.
So, bubble-be-gone. It has run its course.
Chris
@MattF:
You say potato, I say potatoe…
Rex Everything
That is motherfucking funny.
MikeJ
What’s funny was that until 2008 the everybody just *knew* that a short primary season was the way to go because you united the party around one candidate early and started attacking the other party as soon as possible.
Then the Republicans saw Obama/Clinton suck up all the oxygen. McCain was the Republican candidate from the beginning and he all anybody wanted to talk about was the Democrats. So the Republicans went out of their way to lengthen the primary season for all that earned media. It actually worked too. They got their least crazy candidate and everybody was watching the Republican race.
Letting the public see what Republicans actually think is a bad, bad, bad idea, for Republicans.
sm*t cl*de
Given the title and the topic, I was expecting the Bosch painting.
Chris
@MikeJ:
It really is, which is one of the reasons Goldwater did so bloody awful in 1964. Reagan, Gingrich and the Bushes were smart enough to run on vague cultural resentments and not unveil their plans for Social Security or Medicare until after the election. Today’s teabaggers have forgotten that and chosen to let the freak flag fly high in elections. Worse; they actually think it helps them win votes.
Zifnab
@MikeJ: Well, the joke will be on them in 2016. We’ll have another open election season with Democrats sucking up oxygen. And Republicans will once again be holding their dicks trying to explain why Rand Paul got stuffed in a bag and dumped in the river while Christie, Jeb, and Rubio sucker-punch each other by pointing out when the other guy called someone a beaner.
The Reverend Lowdown
When I talk with my repub acquaintances, they seem to have lost their sense of cockiness, since the election. They literally thought that Romney would win in a landslide and are shell-shocked to be in a world where that didn’t happen. They don’t blame the ticket, Rove or the party. More or less, they think that the electorate(aka Dem voters) are idiots, takers, etc(the usual fox memes). When we talk about 2016, they are not very optimistic. Although, when I mention that if Hillary runs, then she will wipe the floor with whoever they put out there. Shockingly, they nod in agreement. Their despair is pretty awesome, I have to say
pattonbt
@Zifnab: Sorry to say though, we will not have two candidates like we did in 2008 for 2016. I’m not saying were are going to have bad candidates, but they will pale in many ways to Obama and Clinton (even if Clinton runs).
2008 was about a lock D win year as was ever going to be. Hitlers dog could have been the D nominee and won. The R’s were in free fall and the Bush / Cheney stench was awful. Add in the history of either a black man or woman as the candidate and both being great candidates, and it was always going to be amazing and a tremendous ride.
2016 there will not be one candidate that will inspire from the outset and “history” will not be in the making (even if it is Hillary, Obama stole the “history” thunder, as it would have been if Clinton won and Obama ran to take her place). Clinton can still be great and win, but it will be a little bit lessened. Plus, I dont see who could play the number 2 role to her like Obama did. As Peggers Noonus said in 2004, the D’s got Obama “savor”. There was no candidate D to savor from 2012.
The R’s will still have their serious problems in 2016, but if their candidate is taller, more well spoken, more likable than the D candidate, they may easily win. I think it is folly to think that the D’s have any lock on the Pres election now or ever. Its a one time shot and the more telegenic candidate generally wins, regardless of party affiliation.
Ramalama
FYI the novel “Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese is one of those quiet stealth bombers of a novel I found I could not put down.