The Presidential Election: The More Things Change the More they Stay the Same

The election of 2008 has a lot of firsts, the first serious African American contender, the first serious female contender, three incumbent Senators running against each other and so on. Yet despite all these novelties the most striking thing about this election is the way in which American politics have returned to familiar patterns.
The Democrats are as divided as ever living up to Will Rogers old saying that he belonged to no organized party because he was a Democrat. Instead of taking advantage the Republicans’ weakness the Democrats are busy trying to destroy each other. Obama and Hillary and their partisans seem to be doing nothing but the Republicans job for them. If John McCain wins the presidency it will largely be the Democrats’ doing and if that happens they deserve to loose.
The Republicans have reverted to type by choosing a tired old war horse as their standard bearer. As in 1996 and earlier the Republicans believe a combination of inoffensiveness and military glory real or imagined will over come a lack of popularity.
The Republicans are living up to their heritage as the party of the bloody flag whether it be the flag of the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam or the Iraq War. The Democrats are living up to their heritage as a party of factions who are constantly at each others’ throats.
Nor are the politics themselves that original this time around, Barack Obama is being attacked because of a sermon given by his pastor, a five year old sermon. A similar thing helped Grover Cleveland win the presidency in 1884. Hillary’s race baiting and class warfare politics targeting working class whites is simply George Wallace’s 1960s populism regurgitated. Obama’s intellectualism and reasoned approach is simply John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier or Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom. Obama’s charm offensive of reasoned rhetoric spiked with folksy jokes and jabs is simply Ronald Reagan repackaged for a liberal Democratic audience. John McCain’s populist blather is simply the insurgent politics of Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ross Perot and it hasn’t been dusted off.
Still the candidates interest me, Hillary Clinton is quite simply the sleaziest and slimiest self serving worm to appear in our political culture since the age of those jackals Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Like LBJ and Tricky Dick, Hillary is scum she will stab you in the back, then slit your throat and steal your wallet for good measure. Her husband was bad, she is worse.
John McCain well I think he is as a low a form of life as Hillary perhaps lower. Okay I’ve heard the stories of military glory and they speak to me of incompetence and single minded self preservation. A third rate fighter pilot who attended Annapolis and got his officers’ commission and pilots’ wings because daddy was an admiral. He was a lousy fighter pilot who got himself shot down over North Vietnam and a self serving weasel who was able to survive and thrive in a Communist prison camp good training for the US Senate. Like his fellow vet, John Kerry, McCain bought his way into the Senate by marrying a rich girl and using her money to buy votes. In the Senate, McCain distinguished himself as one of the Keating Five, he took money from the savings and loan shark who stole old people’s life savings. Later he emerged as a champion of campaign finance reform. Worst of all McCain has showed himself to be a pathetic little toady who does whatever the media tells him to get a sound bite. I don’t want such a man in the White House, he’ll start a war in order to make the evening news.
McCain will pay for this when the whispering campaign against him starts. I can hear it now, “that McCain guy, he was in that Commie prison camp right? There’s only one way he could have survived there and that’s if he was a Commie himself. Notice how he’s been really friendly with them since he got back.” Okay it’s not original and not new but it’ll work, especially with all the guys who were wading through the mud in the jungle and trading bullets with the Vietcong while McCain was getting his picture taken with Jane Fonda. My guess is that the Democratic political operatives have already organized the Patriotic Veterans Against John McCain and John Kerry has already signed up as honorary chairman. Notice that all of this seems disturbingly familiar didn’t we hear it about four years ago but it worked?
So nothing is new in American politics except for Barack Obama brave young reformer and champion of the common man who came from nowhere. Oh wait a minute was that Grover Cleveland’s act and that was 124 years ago in 1884...