Talked tonight w/my Republican parents re Bush, 2004, the future, Clark [View All]

Well it's interesting. Had the whole family--18 people--to my loft for Thanksgiving. Ruled politics out of bounds for the duration. Parents, brother in law are conservatives; my little bro and me are quite the other thing. Interestingly, nobody seemed to mind, which may well be significant in itself--when right wingers don't want to beat you up (or try) with their latest talking points, that says something.

But tonight the barrier came down. It was just me and my elderly Republican parents. Pop's a long-time conservative, Mom's a moderate-to-conservative. My wife went out to a party with friends and I stayed in to make dinner for P and M. Determined not to bring up politics--what's the use, they're too old, too set in their ways, just leave it lie.

But somehow we got into it. Suddenly I found myself explaining why I despise Bush. Not hate, but despise--there's a distinction. I despise him, I said, above all for having been handed on a silver platter the educational opportunities others have begged for, and being proud--PROUD--of only getting C-minuses and basically breezing through on family name without learning a goddamn thing. I said this is the story of his life. I said his career is a series of failures from which he has been bailed out by people wanting favors from his family. People, often as not, with the last name of bin Laden.

I tried to stop myself. Change the subject. I know my dad will only put up with so much, then he'll start doing the, "Yeah, well what about the Dems'" rejoinders. He's not dumb, he's smart as hell and can cite his own chapter and verse. Instead, though, he's not saying anything. I can see by his face that the rich frat boy shit really gets to him--he's a very smart man, from a very wealthy background (he was at Graham Eckes school in Palm Beach with Ted Kennedy), but it is an American-wealth family of engineering brains and entrepeneurial risk-taking guts. He knows the rich-frat-boy, coasting-on-daddy's-laurels thing from the inside and it fills him with nothing but disgust and contempt. He is proud of having made his own way in a very competitive intellectual environment after his father divorced my grandmother and took his fortune with him, leaving my dad (the eldest) in charge of a big family under the cloud of that social stigma (divorce was not an okay thing in their circles in 1951).

I talked about the PNAC--which they'd never heard of. Went into detail about that, the whole business how Cheney basically triggered it by asking Wolfie and Powell to present their vision plans for the post-Soviet world back in 1989. About the medicare bill. About Grover Norquist and his plans to dismantle the New Deal. About securities regulation and the difference between the American system and crony-capitalism of the kind being practiced in Russia, southeast Asia and increasingly here. How those laws, those regulations, have far more to do with establishing what we consider American democracy than laissez-faire capitalism. Any country can have crony capitalism, and most of 'em do. The rare thing is the system of an impartial judiciary and laws that say you have to play fair and have transparent bookkeeping. All that stuff that Reagan--my Dad's hero--started dismantling back in the 80s.

I spoke openly about how the Dems have caved on this stuff--that Lieberman (my parents lived in Connecticut for 20 years) was as responsible as anyone for dismantling the SEC, but Clinton tried to prevent it. That the difference between bad and worse is often very much more acute than that between good and bad. I said "You guys aren't going to be around to see the kind of world these guys are making, but I will--I'm a Type I insulin diabetic, and I know what this medicare bill is going to mean for me in my old age--and your grandchildren will be." I said "these guys are not conservatives, they are radicals. They pretended to be moderates, but they are not moderates. They are not conservatives. They are radicals who mean to dismantle the New Deal." I said maybe that's what needs to be done, maybe you could make that argument. But they don't have the courage to make it, or to tell people what they are doing. They don't have the guts to do it in public, but if you read Norquist, if you read the PNAC thing, you can see that those are their domestic and foreign policy blueprints.

I told them about Joe Wilson and the Iraq lies, and Plame. My Mom kept saying "But we haven't heard any of this. How come this doesn't get reported?" I said, "Watch Fox News much?"

I described who Wilson was--how he was a Dem, yes, but he served as acting ambassador to Iraq under Bush I and earned the highest commendation for saving lives by getting Americans out of Iraq in the lead up to Gulf War I. And yet these bozos tried to discredit him for telling them the truth about the yellowcake thing. I started getting angry. I said, okay, if Iraq was an intelligence failure, if 9/11 was an intelligence failure, if the Niger yellowcake in the State of the Union was an intelligence failure, not Bush's fault--then WHO HAS BEEN FIRED? Why does Condi still have a job? Why does Tenet still have a job? Why has an agent, whose responsibility was investigating bioweapons proliferation, been outed disabled from within the highest circles of the administration and no one has been fired? Either people should have been fired or Bush is lying--simply LYING--when he says he wants to get to the bottom of these things. And aren't those lies VASTLY more serious than blowjobs (I used the term) in the oval office? Or a $40,000 real estate deal that went awry? Versus Jeb Bush's nifty little schemes to profit off Iraq. Or the similar schemes of others in the highest echelons of the Republican party.

I said, in short, what the fuck is going on here, and who the fuck have you voted for. I said, this isn't new. I said, we started dismantling the New Deal and seriously heading in this direction--badmouthing the Gummint, screaming about Terrible Taxes and Regulation--under Reagan, undermining the legitimacy of institutions like the SEC that have stood between us and the most rapacious forms of robber-baron crony capitalism. I said read David Brooks in the NYTimes crowing about the triumph of the "conservative" project and ask yourself is THIS what you meant by "conservatism"? Is THIS what you had in mind?

They were with me. They don't like Bush. They may be Republicans but they are not stupid and they can see him for what he is. But my Mom said, "But what do you want us to do? Vote for Dean? He's just running on anger."

I said, well, he's actually quite a centrist, and we need someone to simply try to govern honestly, to take us back from this brink. I said, Of course he's angry. He's right to be angry. Look at what these people are doing.

But I can tell Dean's not an option for them. It's an emotional thing, but he just isn't. The associations are all wrong.

As I was dropping them off at their hotel, my Dad turned to me and said, "But what do you want me to do--I can't vote for a Democrat." This is a very proud man; the fact that he could say this, as opposed to merely dismissing everything I'd said out of hand as liber twaddle, is something of a miracle. It speaks very powerfully of what an absolutely pathetic job Bush has done as president.

Yet there it is--he's stuck.

It's not a policy thing, it's a gut thing. An emotional thing.

So I said look at Clark. He's actually to the left of Dean on a lot of things, like universal health care, affirmative action, even gun control. But he is a guy who came up from nothing, who left body parts in Viet Nam, who knows like Ike did the "military industrial complex" from inside (something else we had talked about--that Ike had originated that phrase, and that Teddy Roosevelt had busted up the big trusts the first time around).

Clark has a story for which they can set aside some of their lifelong attitudes about Dems, in order to vote against a guy they know is a fraud--their whole life experience has taught them to recognize such poseurs. And not just against, but also for--he's worn the uniform, he's paid his dues. Understand, the military service thing isn't everything to me--it didn't bother me that Clinton didn't serve in the military, nor does it bother me that Dean didn't. But it gives them a cover they can use when it comes to pulling that dreadful Dem lever in 2004.

They could do it for Clark. They couldn't for Dean. And they are scared, very scared by Bush, by the Medicare bill, by where things are going. My mother--my mother--is the one who used the term "fascism" when we talked about the fear factor--the difference between FDR's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and Bush's "Be very afraid. Be afraid all the time." My mother and father both nodded when I said what kind of party is it that puts you in a state of permanent war--you can win a war against al Qaeda, but not a war against terrorism, and what kind of government is it that wants to be in a war that can never end? My MOM said "it's fascism," and my father--this is just astonishing--NODDED.

They want someone else to vote for. And I think this is a class of voters that the Flying Chimp can ill afford to lose. But I don't think they can pull the lever for Dean. I just don't think they can do it. They could do it for Clark.

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