The Bad-Daddy Party [John Podhoretz]
The Republicans are being rapidly rebranded as a party of men who exemplify the least attractive, most pathetic aspects of the gender—they are the stubborn, arrogant, lazy, incompetent (Iraq, Katrina), hypocritical, crude, nasty fathers, Homer Simpson crossed with Tony Soprano, the kind of men who snarl and posture as old-fashioned patresfamilias but don’t come through when and where it counts. The GOP is becoming the deadbeat-daddy party.This gets at the image problem for the Republican Party better than anything else I’ve seen — and why an outlier event like Larry Craig’s arrest comes to seem emblematic of the GOP’s troubles rather than being about nothing more than Craig himself.
The Junior Pod needs to get out of NYC just a tad more often.
Let’s re-write that a bit: The Democrats are rapidly being rebranded as a party of men (and women) who exemplify the least attractive, most pathetic aspects of the genders - they are stupid, stubborn, lazy, incompetent (Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco), hypocritical (Flyboy Gore, Windmill Teddy), unpatriotic, obstructionist, unladylike (Boxer, Pelosi, Hillary Clinton), anti-American (Kucinich, Schumer, Reid) ignorant, inexperienced, rash (Obama), and corrupt to the bone and liking it that way (Jefferson). Which is why a typical event like Howard Hsu’s arrest comes to seem emblematic of the Dem’s troubles rather than being about nothing more than the utter greed and corruption of every Democratic candidate connected in any way with him.
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That was a head shaker for me too. Most puzzling of all was his contention:
JPod is entitled to think that, but I can’t imagine how he comes to that conclusion based on the gibberish he quoted. Maybe he should trek through the Lincoln Tunnel to Jersey to see the Dems in action; maybe even interview U.S. Attorney Christie about his latest arrests while he’s here.
The Atlantic off the Jersey Shore is still warm JPod, dip your toe in it!
I’ll bet that in forty years more people will remember and like them than remember Danny Thomas now.
Soprano and Simpson?
Two hugely popular figures.
The Republicans should be so lucky.
Of all the characters to compare them with, why pick those two? Especially not T.
No, I think it would take many steps of movement in the right direction for any politican to be as liked and popular as Homer or Tony.
In the future, all impressions/reputations will be short-term. One thing that’s broken down in my lifetime is shared experience. When the three TV networks were dominant, a large portion of the public had shared knowledge of popular culture. As the MSM’s share of the public’s attention has withered, the shared experiences they generated have become fewer and fewer. Homer and Tony may be among the last ones, and they just don’t last long in the public’s memory.
Big stars who were household names for decades are forgotten, like Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, and yes, Danny Thomas. Clark Gable was hugely famous, but his co-star in his last film, Marilyn Monroe, became an icon while he’s forgotten. Only the rare icon gets enduring fame. In the political realm, There’s JFK and Reagan. Who remembers Senator Proxmire and his golden fleece awards, or Senator Fulbright, or even Hubert Humphrey?
All our institutions are failing to give us common experiences, even the schools. Ask a high school senior to name the origin of the line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. They don’t read Dickens anymore, or any of the authors known to generations. The only shared memory in high school might be the mystery meat in the cafeteria, and that’s going away since kids are going to McDonald’s for lunch. The only national experiences we share are events like 9/11, covered by all of what’s left of the MSM, and it’s painful to see the memory (and the lesson) receding so quickly.
The loss of that shared experience at so many levels is going to impact the political parties. On the bright side, the image of a party can be remade in a short period of time, but the downside is that enduring consensus is going to be more difficult to build. I wouldn’t worry about any label that gets hung on any party or politician: it’ll be forgotten soon enough.
I think JPod is alluding to George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, which is an excellent book if you stop about two-thirds of the way in, before he starts seriously propagandizing for the left.
Lakoff shows that much public discussion of politics is informed by metaphorical models which liken the relationship between government and citizens to the relationship between parents and children. (Despite this being a bad way to conceptualize politics, I think Lakoff is right that most Americans do conceptualize politics in this way.)
Lakoff posits that liberals match the “Nurturant Parent” model of the family, while conservatives fit the “Strict Father” model. Conservatives, since about the mid-1960s have successfully caricatured liberals as being “Indulgent-Permissive” parents. (Liberals gave conservatives plenty of ammunition to support the caricature.) What JPod is saying is that Bush is giving ammunition for the liberal caricature of conservatives as being “Abusive-Neglectful” parents. Right now, that caricature pretty much only resonates with committed partisans of the left, which is why Republicans keep getting elected despite the chicken-little cries of the end of the world if we elect Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Dole/Bush.
This was the guy that kept the military from switching to margarine. Besides Dick and Dan’s Fickle Finger of Fate award was much better.