The Other McCain

“The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, June 15, 2009

The Texas governor has failed to eradicate the few remaining “pockets” of Democrat Party “enthusiasm” in the Lone Star State, according to liberal Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress:

I’m prepared to say that I was surprised to discover substantial pockets of enthusiasm for President Obama among the population of Texas. Not Austin hipsters, either. Decent grownup family people. White southerners with accents, even. Frustrated, to be sure, with the overall situation but also alarmed by the extremism of a Michelle Bachmann and generally inclined to see today’s problems as part of the Bush legacy. If I were to generalize from the sample of people I happened to discuss national politics with, I’d say that Rick Perry is in a surprising amount of trouble in his home state.

Via Maggie’s Notebook, who provides a map to help Texas Republicans locate and wipe out the few remaining Democratic bastions:

What inspired this outbreak of silliness was a Washington Post column by Richard Cohen:

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.
Let me call the roll. I am talking about are writers and editors, lawyers and shrinks, Wall Street tycoons and freelance photographers, hedge funders and academics, run-of-the-mill Democrats and Democratic activists. They were all politically sophisticated, and just a year ago some of them were still vociferous Obama supporters. No more.

What does this mean? Yglesias wants us to believe it means nothing, that Cohen is just over-generalizing based on a small sample of anecdotal contacts. But I would argue that what Cohen is seeing, and what Yglesias doesn’t want to see, is evidence of the Carter-ization of Obama.

Yglesias is too young to remember exactly how and why Jimmy Carter’s presidency failed. After eight years of GOP control of the White House, liberals in 1976 very much wanted to see a Democratic presidency succeed. And when Carter’s policies quickly proved unpopular, liberals blamed Carter personally.

This personalization of blame was to some extent legitimate. Behind his trademark toothy smile and his soft-spoken “trust me” rhetoric, Carter was a very thin-skinned and arrogant man. The staff he brought with him to the White House — Jody Powell, Ham Jordan, et al. — seemed to have the idea they could push around senior Democrats in Congress. Grumbles about the political incompetence of the Carter administration were heard long before the failure of Carter’s policies became apparent. Another factor in liberals scapegoating Carter, however, was their refusal to recognize how Carter’s failures represented a failure of liberalism, per se.

Liberals believe that liberalism is right. They believe that liberal policies should be both successful and popular.

So when the Carter administration proved to be a policy disaster, and when that disaster led to political unpopularity for Democrats — the party that defines the meaning and embodies the spirit of liberalism in America — liberals were faced with a choice: Admit the failures of liberalism, or find an explanatory excuse.

The scapegoating of Carter was the convenient excuse that permitted liberals to avoid confronting the evidence that liberalism had failed.

As such, it was a continuation of the excuse-making that had attended the collapse of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society consensus in the 1960s. Liberals offered numerous excuses for LBJ’s failures, claiming for example that Johnson’s policy of “escalation” in Vietnam represented an abandonment, rather than a continuation, of JFK’s policies. Liberals used the Vietnam debacle to assert that LBJ wasn’t really a liberal, and portrayed the implosion of the Democratic coalition under Johnson as entirely a product of anti-war sentiment.

Yet LBJ had been a liberal his entire political career. His policies, both foreign and domestic, were formulated by liberal advisors and endorsed by liberals in Congress. When LBJ failed, however, the failure was attributed to LBJ and not to liberalism.

So, too, with Carter and so now with Obama, as Richard Cohen observes:

The Hamptons are a redoubt of New York liberalism. . . . I expected more than a few people to defend the president. No one did. Everyone — and I do mean everyone — expressed disappointment in him as a leader. In that area, they thought he was a bust. Some articulated detailed critiques — the nature of his stimulus program, for instance. They argued that more money should have gone into long-term infrastructure programs. Most, though, skipped the details and just registered dismay: Where had their “change” agent gone?
In general, Obama was faulted for lacking political skills.

See? It is a lack of “political skills” — a failure attributed to Obama personally — that liberals identify as an excuse, rather than daring to think the unthinkable: Obama is failing because liberalism doesn’t work.

They can’t allow themselves to think that, because if they did, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore.