Hip to be Square

I felt like this was too good not to post over here. I was reading Obsidian Wings this morning and publius posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article by Mark W. Davis about a Republican Policy Committee produced CD (and podcast) called Freedom Songs: The American Empowerment Agenda, a CD with spoken word discussions of Republican talking points.

From the Journal article:

I have on my desk a CD sent out this spring from the Republican House Policy Committee. Fat, 1970s lettering bears the title, "Freedom Songs." The cover image of the CD package is a sepia-tone photo of Teddy Roosevelt.

Open it up and you are treated to photos of Warren G. Harding staring into the horn of a crank phonograph, Herbert Hoover listening to a wireless, and a glum-looking Calvin Coolidge simply glowering at a camera. In an accompanying letter, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan writes that the CD includes "riffs by Dr. Russell Kirk," as well as "the pounding rhythm section of the Austrian School of Economics."

Kitsch is best when it’s unintentional. This CD seems to come from the same realm of boneheaded, ham-handed obliviousness as the kind of 1950s hygiene videos they used to mock on MST3K.  But what really interests me about this whole thing is, just how bad can Republican youth outreach become? Does the Republican Policy Committee not have any interns to run this stuff past? The Democratic Party has captured my generation's vote almost by default, without having to try too hard – the Republican Party has just made itself too unlikable to almost anyone under thirty-five who wasn’t homeschooled.   Part of it obviously has to do with the Republican emphasis on culture war politics in the last couple of elections. But, short of kicking out the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party, is there anything they can do to win back the youth vote for this generation?

They could at least put some Ted Nugent songs on there. The kids still like the Motor City Madman, right?