The Impossible Task and the Incompetent Candidate

Ross Douthat brings to our attention a monologue by Rush Limbaugh, and it’s well worth reading. I would suggest that you go read the whole thing along with Ross’ response, but I’m not a cruel man, so I’ll excerpt the part that I want to talk about here.

Now, I wish to ask all of you influential pseudointellectual conservative media types who have also abandoned McCain and want to go vote for Obama (and you know who you are without my having to mention your name) what happened to your precious theory? What the hell happened to your theory that only John McCain could enlarge this party, that we had to get moderates and independents? How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents?

Ross says the whole speech – an attempt to shift blame for McCain’s coming defeat away from mouth breathing troglodytes like Limbaugh and onto those remaining moderate conservatives who have decided to vote for Obama. The problem with this quote in particular (along with the piece as a whole) is that it doesn’t make any sense. Ross argues that the whole thing makes a kind of internal sense if you squint hard and don’t think about it too much, but I’m not sure about that.

What Limbaugh is saying here is just patently absurd. Part of what more realistic conservatives were saying when they argued that McCain – and only McCain – even had a chance of catching up to Obama was that McCain would have to appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. This is true. McCain was the only person who was running for the Republican nomination that even had a shot. And he proceeded to take that shot and throw it into the deepest, darkest well he could. For this, Limbaugh sees the end of moderation.

Limbaugh asks, “How the hell is it that moderate Republicans are fleeing their own party and we are not attracting other moderates and independents?” Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that McCain never made any effort to attract those people? McCain was always presented with an impossible task: He is a deeply unpopular figure among the Republican base, not a group known for the embrace of unpopular heterodoxies. He had to make sure that those people were with him first and foremost. Without the hardcore 28%, there’s no there there. McCain always had to run hard right to appeal to those people. The whole joke of Palin was that she was supposed to be the bone that would satiate them so he could get down to the important business of convincing moderates and independents not to notice the slavering horde behind the podium.

These were always going to be impossible balls to keep juggling. The two groups are just two far apart for a politician running in an inherently hostile environment, from the incumbent party of one of the most unpopular presidents ever. McCain – and Republicans in general – were always given an almost impossible task. What no one could have predicted was just how truly, epically McCain would fail at it. McCain 2008 is going to go down in history as being one of the most ineptly run major party campaigns ever. People will study it for years to come, looking for clues in what not to do.

Moby Dick Blogging

Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels. It’s fascinating the way it combines a huge number of genres and sources of information into one cohesive whole, from the history of the word “whale” to discussions of (at the time) scientific theories about whales, the process of hunting, butchering and transporting whales, the place of whales in the global economy. And that is just the stuff surrounding the main narrative, the story of a man who’s barely there surrounded by a representatives from all over the globe, stuck on a ship captained by a madman at war with nature. It’s epic stuff.

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat are worried about a particularly dire sounding adaptation of Moby Dick into a movie. Of course it’s not going to be a good movie. Most great works of literature can’t be turned into successful films. It’s absurd to think that they could. Most great works of art are extremely medium specific. This is why it’s so rare to hear a great cover of a great song, especially one as idiosyncratic as something like Moby Dick. It’s much easier to turn a bad book into a great movie (say, The Godfather, Fight Club or The Shining) than a great book into a good movie (Wings of the Dove, perhaps. An okay movie, but an amazing book). I’ve only seen a couple of films that truly topped good to great novels that they were working from: No Country for Old Men to name a recent example, but also Blade Runner, Election and American Psycho.

If Patrick Stewart and the CBC couldn’t kill Moby Dick, I think we’ll live through this one as well.

Questions Asked, Questions Answered

Ross Douthat, my second favorite conservative Atlantic Media blogger, sums up the presidential race so far:

I would add, too, that there's a lot more to running a successful administration than having a President with decades of foreign policy experience. You wouldn't know it from listening to John McCain of late, admittedly, but that's because foreign policy experience is his trump card against Barack Obama, so he's playing it as often as he can. But an effective administration needs to be able to communicate and charm and finesse its way through difficulties, to appease its base and reach out to the middle, to talk fluently about kitchen-table issues and appear in touch with the hopes and fears of the average voter. This is not, to put it mildly, the sort of politics and governance that John McCain excels at. And consider, for a moment, the political landscape that he wakes up to every morning. He's running for the Presidency at a time when the Republican brand is in the toilet, with a party that seems unable to excite its hard-core supporters or woo swing voters, and a leadership - McCain included - that gets the heebie-jeebies when called upon to discuss any topic save terrorism, 9/11 and the Surge. Even if by some Jeremiah Wright-aided miracle he edges out Barack Obama, he'll limp into the White House as a John Major-in-the-making - an aging politician who won an election that belonged by rights to the other party, facing Democratic majorities in both houses, a media that will be primed to treat Senators Obama and Clinton as the default co-Presidents for the next four years, and a conservative base that's just waiting for an opportunity to turn on him. Does this sound like a recipe for a successful Presidency?

Nope, Ross, I can’t say that it does.