May 16, 2007

Man, this party is in trouble. The second debate Tuesday night didn't exactly raise anyone's stature.

More encomiums to Ronald Reagan. More de rigueur support for cutting government spending and fiscal responsibility (as if the party had any credibility left on this issue). There was the Fox News panel challenging far-right Senator Sam Brownback's conservative credentials. In the parallel universe of primary politics, if you're not ready to cut every department in the federal government but the Department of Defense, you're a liberal.

Mitt Romney, badly in need of a new dye job, declared that he's "glad the terrorists are in Guantanamo" because "I wouldn't want them to have the access to lawyers they'd have here." Score one for American values--just as long as we don't apply them to nonAmericans.

Duncan Hunter "won" the immigration debate with the most absurdly Orthodox yet useless (and wasteful) position of extending a fence across 850 miles of the 2,000 mile Southern border.

Abortion was a hot button, as other candidates tried to wrap their minds around Giuliani's failure to oppose abortion in every possible circumstance. At least he was "honest," Huckabee said, in a swipe at the admittedly oily frontrunner, prochoice/prolife wishy-washy Romney.

Then there was my own former governor, Tommy Thompson--defending his support for stem cell research by stating twice that the research is conducted at the University of Wisconsin (note to Tommy: you are running for President of the whole country).

Mike Huckabee got off the biggest laugh line of the night: "Congress is spending money like John Edwards at a beauty shop." Ouch. Clearly the Republicans have discounted the notion of either a woman or a black man as president, so they've started early with the Swift Boating of the Democrats' third-place contender. In 2000 they labeled him the Breck Girl, this spring Ann Coulter called him a "faggot", then came the You Tube video of Edwards checking hair and makeup just like every other candidate and talking head on television (only most do it without cameras rolling). This is the same Karl Rove-style politics the country has endured for almost eight years. It's mean. It's ugly. And it appears to be stuck in a time warp.

Being for the Iraq war come hell, high water, or the complete defection of the citizenry from the cause was a candidate requirement. No one wanted to talk about how badly things are going. Or how badly out of favor this Administration has fallen for its lies and mismanagement of the war. Everyone pretended there is still credible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.

My favorite candidate of the night was Ron Paul. In the only bracingly honest moment of the debate, Paul told his party they've completely blown the War on Terror, and made things worse with the misguided adventure in Iraq. "They don't come over and attack us because we're rich and we're free," Paul declared, heretically. "They come over and attack us because we're over there," he said.

Paul invoked a Reagan moment no one else on stage wanted to remember: when the saint of conservatism confronted an Islamic terrorist attack on Americans that was the precursor to 9/11--the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Lebanon--and promptly withdrew. This was either, in Paul's view, pragmatic avoidance of entanglement in Middle East politics, or, in the view of others, a retreat that emboldened bin Laden, showed Americans' lack of resolve, and led us to where we are today.

In any event, it is exactly the debate about foreign policy, intervention, and how America should deal with terrorism that Americans across the ideological spectrum ought to be having. But Paul sounded like a crazy egghead in this crowd, which preferred cartoonish, ahistorical posturing and easy applause lines about how tough they will get with terrorists (you know, like the Al Qaeda leadership, including bin Laden, that our tough, Republican Commander in Chief has failed to apprehend.) Chest-beating, not rational debate, is what the Republican candidates have to offer. These are not the men who will help our country find its way out of Iraq.

Paul, an arch conservative isolationist who opposed the war in Iraq, stood up to his party and to Rudy Giuliani’s shameless milking of his 9-11 credentials to say, not once but twice (after Rudy demanded a retraction), that "blowback is real." Wake up Republicans, we can't just do what we want in other countries--if we walk all over the rest of the world "we do so at our peril."

It was an almost stunning departure from the unctuously base-kissing script. The Republicans need to hear it. Giuliani quickly returned to the tired old "I'm tough on terror" channel. But that moment of honesty left a lingering impression.

The morning of the Republican presidential candidates' debate in South Carolina, Jerry Falwell dropped dead in his office. His legacy--the organized, voting Christian Right base--was palpable in the debate hall. But the energy that it brought to the party in the 1980s--when the movement was gaining strength--was notably absent. Falwell leaves behind an impressive organization. It would be a mistake to think that his obituary will mean the end of his movement. But the political party it infiltrated and directed for the last two decades appears to be drowning. That's the news that may truly signal the end of an era.