By KEVIN BAKER
Who speaks for the Republican party? The answer is that everyone does
— and therefore, no one does.
Much air time and many trees have been wasted trying to explain the
division, rancor and lethargy that have beset the Republican
nominating campaign, now into its second year and threatening to run
all the way to the party's national convention in late August. But
it's no great mystery. Republicans have fallen prey to one of the
favorite tactics of just the sort of heedless, improvident,
twenty-first century capitalism they revere. Their party has been
outsourced.
For decades, Republicans have recruited outside groups and individuals
to amplify their party's message and its influence. This is a
legitimate democratic tactic that they have carried off brilliantly,
helping to shift the political spectrum in the United States
significantly to the right.
When Republicans came to believe in the 1960s that they were up
against a "liberal biased" media that would never give them a fair
shake, they began the long march to build their own, alternative
information establishment. As chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, Mark Fowler, led the fight to abolish the "Fairness
Doctrine" in 1987, further empowering what was already a legion of
right-wing talk radio programs.
In 1949, drawing on a long history of court decisions; on public
hearings; and on legislation mandating "equal time" for political
candidates, the F.C.C. ruled that holders of radio and television
broadcast licenses must "devote a reasonable percentage of their
broadcast time to the presentation of news and programs devoted to the
consideration and discussion of public issues of interest in the
community," and that this must include "different attitudes and
viewpoints concerning these vital and often controversial issues."
The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the F.C.C.'s power to make such a
rule — but never gave it the power of law. In 1986, a pair of Ronald
Reagan's judicial appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia,
ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was not "a binding statutory
obligation."
Armed with this verdict, Fowler, who insisted on viewing television,
in particular, as not a finite and supremely influential broadcast
medium but "just another appliance — it's a toaster with pictures,"
persuaded his fellow commissioners to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.
Furious Democrats in Congress passed legislation to codify the
doctrine into law in 1987 and 1991, but these attempts were vetoed by
Reagan and George Bush, respectively; Democrats have gone on trying to
make the Fairness Doctrine law to this day, but have always been
stymied by adamant Republican opposition.
Right-wing radio was dominant on the airwaves before the Fairness
Doctrine was abolished. But now it had the field of public discourse
virtually all to itself. It provided conservatives with a direct
outreach to the public, free of any intercession by the "elites" Newt
Gingrich is still denouncing in this season's debates. Right-leaning
media networks such as Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network and
especially Clear Channel Communications soon became major media
conglomerates, with no obligation to broadcast any conflicting views.
The biggest media coup of all for the Republican party, though, was
the advent of nakedly partisan Fox News, created by Roger Ailes,
former media advisor to the Nixon, Reagan and George Bush
administrations. It was Ailes who thereby managed to throw the entire
weight of Rupert Murdoch's worldwide media empire behind the party —
and it was Ailes, reportedly, who kept it on the conservative
straight-and-narrow when Mr. Murdoch toyed with the idea of putting
the empire behind Barack Obama, the new Democrat, in 2008, much as it
had backed Tony Blair's New Labour for a time in Great Britain.
Instead, thanks to Ailes, conservative politicians and advocates saw
both their ideas amplified and their wallets fattened by a dizzying
array of Murdoch television shows, books and newspapers.
But it wasn't just in the media where the Republican party proved
ingenious in outsourcing its rhetoric and shifting the national
dialogue. In 1971, during Richard M. Nixon's first term in office,
Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Republican corporate lawyer from Virginia,
summoned the resources of the business community to the cause with his
famous memorandum to the National Chamber of Commerce, "Attack on
American Free Enterprise System."
Powell wanted "American business" to fight back everywhere it could
against what he saw as the many enemies of free enterprise. Tactics
would include demanding "equal time" on the nation's college campuses
and — ironically enough — on the nation's airwaves, by appealing to
the fairness standards of the F.C.C. Yet more importantly, Powell's
memorandum inspired the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato
Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other conservative think
tanks. Wealthy businessmen and other individuals from Richard Mellon
Scaife to the Koch brothers stepped up, pouring millions of dollars
into right-wing magazines, books and political campaigns.
Powell won himself an appointment to the Supreme Court — and the
nation's capital won itself a major new industry. It may seem as if
lobbyists in Washington have always been more numerous than locusts,
but in fact when Powell wrote his memo just over 40 years ago, there
were at most only a few hundred. Today, there are tens of thousands —
leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry in its own right, and one
mostly interested in "freeing" business from regulation and taxes.
The Republican effort to rally every conceivable outside entity to the
party's cause was wildly successful. Again and again over the years,
conservative policy institutes have armed the party's candidates with
intellectual arguments, while the conservative media barrage has
blasted a way through to high office for even the most lackluster
Republican nominees.
Yet increasingly this meant that the Republican Party was outsourcing
both body and soul. Both what the party believed in and its ability to
do the heavy lifting necessary to win elections was handed over to
outside interests — outside interests that did not necessarily share
the party's goals or have any stake in ameliorating its tactics.
This has become suddenly and painfully evident this year. Party
leaders may not have liked Rush Limbaugh's disgusting attacks on a
Georgetown law student — calling her a "slut" and a "prostitute" for
advocating that insurance companies provide affordable birth control —
but what does he care?
If the Republicans lose the election, it will most likely mean all the
more angry conservatives tuning in and driving up the ratings for Rush
and his fellow radio ranters. Limbaugh is now facing a challenge from
outraged liberals and others urging his sponsors to drop his show. But
the most that the usually garrulous Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney
would allow himself to say was that "it's not the language I would
have used." Rick Santorum averred that Rush was "being absurd," but
implied that was O.K. — "an entertainer can be absurd. He's in a very
different business than I am."
But of course, he's not. Rush Limbaugh is in the very same business
that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are in — and guess who's in charge?
It's not the radio calamity howlers who take their cues from the party
leaders now, but the other way around.
This campaign season we've seen all the major Republican candidates
for president adopt the bombastic, apocalyptic rhetoric of talk radio,
insisting that we will "lose America" if they aren't elected, and
filling their speeches and debates with ugly personal insults,
directed at each other and at President Obama. The results are in the
poll numbers. Unlike the sharp but generally civil 2008 primary fight
between Obama and Hillary Clinton, which galvanized the Democratic
base, the Republican struggle this year has been steadily driving down
the party's appeal and driving up the candidates' negative ratings.
Poll numbers for Republicans in Congress have taken a nosedive, too,
as the party's intransigence on Capitol Hill has allowed President
Obama to appear reasonable by contrast. But what does that matter to
the thousands of lobbyists who bring in more and more of the money for
congressional campaigns? Sure, a Republican victory might afford them
more closed-door sessions on rewriting federal regulations. But
Democratic victories will serve their purpose just as well, making
clear to the money men who send them to Washington that they are more
needed than ever to resist "job-killing regulations."
Meanwhile, Fox News has become a special impediment to Republican
order — largely thanks to its own success. All the enticements of the
Murdoch empire have produced a generation of reality show pols, at
least as interested in landing their own TV series as winning office.
Two of the most popular Republican candidates for president going into
the race, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, both declined to run rather
than jeopardize their shows. Newt Gingrich turned much of his campaign
into book tours for himself and his wife. Ask yourself which was most
likely: that Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann really thought they
could be elected president or that they were looking to improve their
"brand."
And after decades of trying to undo federal campaign-finance laws,
Republicans at last succeeded — only to watch the party's wealthy
sponsors diversify their interests from think tanks to super PACs. Why
bother with all the time and expense of hiring a bunch of
intellectuals to occupy some expensive piece of Washington real estate
and hammer out policy positions — when you can go out and make a
straight cash exchange for a candidate?
Even as Rick Santorum was pleading that sometimes you have to "take
one for the team" in the last Republican debate, his candidacy was
being kept alive largely by money from a single donor, Foster Friess,
the conservative Christian multimillionaire with the Batman villain
name. Gingrich has his own sponsors, the casino billionaires Sheldon
and Miriam Adelson, hawkish supporters of Israel. Does what these
individuals care about most fit in with the Republican party's
election strategy? So what?
It's not that these individual donors believe in things — conservative
Christian stands on abortion, unmitigated support for Israel and so on
— that are so different from what much of the party's base believes
in. But political campaigns, especially national campaigns in America,
are all about nuance and finesse — about just how you say something
and when and where you say it. Presidential candidates need to elide
certain issues at times, either things they know that they cannot do,
but are loath to tell their base; or things that they intend to try,
but cannot tell the rest of the electorate until they have gained
power and built up the necessary public support; or things that they
have no idea how they will handle until certain events play out and
force their hand.
The question of whether or not the United States or Israel should
attack Iran to suppress its nuclear program is a good example of this
last sort of issue. Just what Iran's capabilities are of developing
nuclear weapons, what its intentions are once it should have them, how
successful any attack on them can be and what the consequences of such
an attack might be are just some of the immensely complicated
questions surrounding this debate.
Yet such complexities don't seem to matter much to the ravenously
egotistical Gingrich, so long as they don't much matter to his
sponsor. Money, it's true, has always played a critical role in
American politics. But in the past, presidential nominees did more
than simply try to raise money. They tried to build consensus within
their party. Fringe candidates like Gingrich and Santorum were
generally eliminated from the start by their past defeats or by their
extremist views — college is evil — but if they weren't, our political
system gave them the chance to take their arguments to the people in
relatively small, manageable states and see if they caught on.
Now, none of that really matters so much. Forced to resign as speaker
of the House by your own party? Handed the worst electoral defeat in
your own state that anyone can remember? Way behind in the delegate
count? In some circumstances, it might be good that even though you've
failed previously you can still go out and make your case to the
people. But now you can even fail at that, as well. It doesn't matter.
Just one billionaire can keep you on the campaign trail!
Thanks to their inventiveness, Republicans have stumbled into the
brave new world of American politics. From primaries to photo ops,
from direct mail to voter suppression laws, the Republican party has
almost always been the real innovator in electoral politics, usually
leaving their slower brother, the Democrats, in the dust for at least
a campaign season or two.
Now they've achieved the political equivalent of shuttering that foul
old steel mill and shipping the hard work off for others to do while
they dabble in these fascinating new derivatives. Now their candidates
and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they don't seem to
have the wherewithal to make the party over from within.
The Republican party has been moving to the right for half-a-century
now and generally carrying the country with it. But in the past, even
under the right's greatest hero, Ronald Reagan, this movement came in
fits and starts, as Republican candidates and officeholders had to
accommodate themselves to real-world situations and the qualms of
their constituents. This is the chastening role that elections are
supposed to play. Participating in a democracy means more than simply
insisting, over and over again, in as loud and arrogant a voice as
possible, in as many venues as your money will allow, what it is that
you want. It means listening, it means convincing, it means
compromising — all those things that political parties and their
leaders used to be fairly good at.
At long last, Republicans seem to be finally coalescing around Mitt
Romney's candidacy, and he could still win the presidency if the
economy slumps again. But the longer-term problem will remain: how to
maintain a coherent, mass political party when so many individuals are
empowered as never before to redirect it to their own, personal ends.
Kevin Baker is the author of the "City of Fire" series of historical
novels, "Dreamland," "Paradise Alley" and "Strivers Row." A shortened
version of this essay appears in the March 25 edition of Sunday
Review.
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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