Last week, the McCain campaign almost cost a U.S. charity millions of dollars. That's because the person charged with writing a big proposal -- me -- could not peel his eyes away from the news sites and blogs. John McCain's convention bounce held up even as his campaign took political lying to a new extreme. I felt despondent and helpless, much as I had in the aftermath of Katrina in early September three years ago -- rubbernecking at the wreckage, forced to acknowledge that, yes, our nation is, right now, as bad as all that.
A Barack Obama victory in November may yet put us on a better path. But the polling numbers say something very dark about more than half of our country. The GOP base is unreconstructed, still in love with the know-nothing, militaristic, evangelical populism perfected by President Bush and Karl Rove. They believe that Bush failed only by governing too moderately. Another constituency, smaller but decisive, will vote for anything shiny. Sarah Palin, for instance.
I suppose we knew this already. The coalition of the extremist and the irresponsible brought us two terms of George W. Bush.
But something seems different now. I find myself almost nostalgic for the campaign machine that toppled Gore in 2000 and destroyed Kerry in 2004. The Bush machine lied, smeared, and appealed to the worst in Americans. But it did so with a kind of genius. As Paul Krugman recently wrote, "The Bush campaign's lies in 2000 were artful -- you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned." Bush misled the public, but he did so with elan.
In 2004, Bush's most infuriating lines were also beautiful, indisputable stories. "We liberated more than 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan." Liberals could point out the case for war had been built on false premises. We could document the bad consequences of the war. But Bush's fiction of liberation had roots in facts: we did get rid of Saddam Hussein. Bush said, "We fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here." The line tells a heroic epic and is no more contestable than a good movie.
Something else about the Bush machine compelled respect. Bush's campaigns were waged on behalf of something: movement conservatism, that concoction of wrong but coherent policy ideas cooked up over 20 years in the laboratories of the Heritage Foundation and the Weekly Standard. These policies advocated for unrestrained markets, privatization of social security, education, and most other government functions, minimal taxation -- all those wrongheaded riffs on the themes of "choice" and "ownership." On the stump, Bush promoted an agenda in which his supporters passionately believed, even as he framed it to appeal to (or, at least, not scare off) the great, non-ideological majority.
And what of McCain '08? Today, movement conservatism reels under the weight of its governing failures. The right wing think tanks haven't had a compelling new idea since the 20th century. McCain himself rose to prominence by being the lone notable conservative who didn't play by the conservative movement's rules -- absolute loyalty and message discipline.
Other than his military service, McCain's only story is that he will be a reformer. The to do list on his reform agenda has exactly one item: reduce earmarks, which account for 2 percent of the federal budget. Otherwise, his talk of "shaking up Washington" is like icing without any cake. It's a description of a policy platform that does not exist. Despite his antagonism with movement conservatism, his real platform, the list of policy ideas he recited in his acceptance speech, are the movement's cold leftovers of tax cuts, deregulation, health accounts, and school choice. Not even the ideologues believe any more that these policies will bring a new age of prosperity and freedom. At best, they hope to protect the interests of those who have benefited from Bush's rule.
Palin has made the McCain campaign more attractive but also more incoherent and shameless. She brings many of Bush's stylistic attributes, bluster, folksiness, and disdain for complexity, without his serious commitment to movement conservatism. One reason she's often compared to an American Idol contestant is her lack of originality. Like a singer belting out a cover tune, she creates the impression of conviction because she believes in the limelight, not the song itself. In her story telling, she misses the key distinction between myth and disprovable assertion. "I told Congress, Thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere!" Um, no you didn't.
McCain has put together a sort of zombie campaign, with all of Bush's anti-democratic intent and none of his skillful artifice or animating purpose. It's almost an experiment in pushing the dark politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove to their most absurd extreme. Can you win an election with character assassination but without any real commitment to an issue agenda? When appealing to conservative resentments, is it really necessary to spend a lot of time feigning commitment to higher ideals? Do you really need to plant absurd character smears with outside groups, or can you just smear directly in your own ads? When misleading the public, is it really important to ground the spirit of a lie in some letter of the truth? Or can you just get away with anything?
Perhaps there's a movie analogy that works better than zombies. Movement conservatism has become like the Terminator towards the end of the movie -- the flesh hanging off, its titanium foot dragging. All that remains is the will to attack and win.
I don't think it will work in the end. McCain's campaign is not good enough at the aesthetics of lying to retain the swing voters he picked up at the convention. But even an Obama victory will not absolve us from reckoning with the political culture that has made it a close race.
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