George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a unifier. The Democrat Left demonstrated ferociously in the Florida Insurrection that they had no intention of being reconciled to his rule. The ensuing eight years have been among the most sustainedly acromonious and divisive in American history.
Now along comes Barack Obama posing, ironically enough, under the same “unity” motif. Only he does so as the nominee of the party that has spent the last generation poisoning the well of political discourse, and left behind his “bringing America together” pretense months ago.
Florida 2000 was a war in everything but actual flying bullets. 2004 made that look like a Leo Buscaglia seminar. And now? The latest Republican nominee pulls an election-changing trump card out of his sleeve - an actual, gen-u-ine classical feminist in the immediate wake of his opponent’s conspicuous rejection of the “Feminist Pope” - and she and her family are descended upon by the Enemy Media like a pack of rabid wolves. Doubtless to be followed up by an even more vicious domestic campaign “insurgency”.
A precious few have taken note of the trend, and are filled with more than a little foreboding as to where it is headed:
I don’t like the new media war. I don’t like what it has the potential to do to the election, and the country.
The media overstepped. The Republican party resented it. GOP strategists saw a unifying force rising: anger in the base. They too had seen this movie before. They slammed the media. The media shot back: “You’re attacking us for doing our job!”
How did the media overstep? By offending people by going so immediately and so personally into issues surrounding Mrs. Palin’s family. They did not overstep by digging, by deep reporting, by investigating Palin’s professional record.
Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign spokesman on Palin’s foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter’s circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.
In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.
We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.
But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half[???]-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.
This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.
I am worried they won’t. A friend IM’d the day after Palin’s speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. “Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!,” he wrote. “The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out.” He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.
This war isn’t as new (or “light”) as Peggy Noonan wants to believe. See the 2004 links above. Harken back to the Clinton years, particularly his first two, which also happen to be the last time that America was under undivided Donk domination, when the neoBolshevik perpetual, unquenchable rage of today was an equally perpetual, insufferable arrogance. The breed of arrogance that declared politics to be “over” after 1992, that the nation had finally “come to its senses,” “seen the light,” and restored the beknighted Left to permanent power. That galloping triumphalism led directly to the unmasked extremism that jacked up tax rates and tried to fascize the entire health care sector in one legislative gulp.
I see it on the face, and hear it in the voice, of The One on a daily basis. And I see it reflected in the “new” media war against a woman they can’t lay a substantive glove on, leaving them with no other option - like they had as much reluctance as they did glee - but to annihilate her and her family’s name and reputation.
But it’s not a “media” war, in actuality. Using that adjective is akin to describing “conventional” or “nuclear” war - it describes the weapons and their means of delivery. But it doesn’t get at the heart of what inspires and drives the conflict.
Michael Knox Beran gets at that heart, one that I have long seen coming:
The deeper division which Governor Palin’s selection has exposed is religious. Palin has called herself a “Bible-believing Christian.” The idea that a person formed in such a troglodytic, pre-Enlightenment school should hold a high place in the government frightens a class that believes, with all the certainty of its Ivy League vision of the world, that Bible-believing Christians are a threat to the republic….
For the coastal elites, Sarah Palin is the barbarian at the gate. McCain, in choosing her, was “cynical,” because in the contest with a secular messiah her faith will not only energize Catholic and Evangelical constituencies (which regard promises of secular salvation dubiously), but will also excite the paranoiac rage of many in the secular-liberal camp. People in the grip of paranoia have been known to do stupid things in elections.
The paranoia is real enough. Americans, Linker writes in The Theocons, must stave off “a future in which the country is thoroughly permeated by orthodox Christian piety.” In the paranoiac view of the coastal elites, Christian piety is a threat to secular politics. Its methods are those of Torquemada. Its ideas are those of the Stone Age. How can people who find a truer account of the human condition in the Bible than in, say, the Origin of Species be, well, reasonable?
“Reason’s last step,” Pascal said in the Pensées, “is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go so far as to realize that.”
It’s a point which even the Blue People implicitly concede. For they, too, have their pent-up longings, their unreasonable yearnings for perfection, redemption, a world beyond pain. Senator Obama, who speaks of the moment when “the perfection begins” (the moment when the proselyte sees the light and embraces his communal faith) offers the Blue People a secular approximation of the nirvana they seek.
Sarah Palin embodies the alternative ideal.
“Blue” America wants to turn aside to myths and worship false messiahs, and DEMANDS that the rest of the country do the same. “Red” America disagrees, and by that very act of dissent makes itself the embodiment of evil in “blue” eyes, one that demands immediate and total destruction.
Or, to personalize the cultural impasse, Barack Obama poses as the Messiah, and Sarah Palin represents the Genuine Article. Yet she does not presume or intend to impose that upon anybody, while he does. But by the very essence of who she is and what (and in Whom) she believes, the other side has declared her a heretic, an enemy of the state, and marked her for persecution.
And she’s not even Obama’s direct opponent.
Beran concurs that 2008 will be even more ugly, more vicious, and more violent, all the moreso given that this contest was never supposed to be anything but a Dem walkover. Indeed, he argues that the mere presence of Governor Palin on the GOP ticket will make her a more hated figure to the Left than George W. Bush ever was because, despite his overt Christianity, he at least had an Ivy League education as a mitigating veneer of “cosmopolitization.” Personally I’ve never noticed any such mitigation in their Bushophobia. But if that argument is true, and so many libs entertained assassination fantasies about the retiring president, and the likelihood of McCain-Palin winning a third consecutive GOP White House term grows, with the clear implication of what some are calling the “Thatcheresque” Barracuda being his heir apparent….well, mightn’t there be some on the Left, deep in the fever swamps, who simply cannot bear the idea of an undiluted, unapologetic, genuine ”Christianist/fundie/snake-handler/Bible-thumper/etc.” that close to real, honest-to-goodness power? Particularly after enduring “Bushitler” for nearly a decade? Sufficiently that, shall we say, they might not stop at political means if those prove inadequate to stop her ascension?
The Enemy Media tried to abort Palinmania at its conception - call this week its “morning-after pill”. If they can’t succeed between now and November - call it “the first trimester” - then the “war” is destined to get dramatically less metaphorical.
[cross-posted at 
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