The Great Disappointment

By BJ

I’m not paranoid like Ron, and I don’t get spooked by Zogby’s ever-fluctuating poll predictions that the right grasps onto whenever they happen to swing their way.  In fact, I rather like the fact that they keep pushing these kinds of outliers, since their outsized prominence in the discussion these last few day makes it less likely that Obama supporters will think the election is in the bag and stay home instead of getting out there and voting.

For my money though, the election is in the bag, (and Gallup’s latest numbers do help in that regard), which gets me wondering as to what the fallout on the right will be when they awaken to the reality of a President Obama.  John Rogers is having much the same thought.

I don't think I'm far off in pointing out that a lot of the mainstream conservative rhetoric here is downright apocalyptic. A lot -- not all, but a lot -- of McCain/Palin supporters are utterly convinced that Barack Obama's America will be the socialist wasteland they've been fearing their entire adult lives.

So what happens when ... it doesn't happen?

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein can disagree all they want, but when push comes to shove, most of Obama's policies are magnificently boring. I had a friend just today say "But John, you're in that top 1%! Your taxes are going to go up!" To which I replied: "Strangely, I can live with the idea of my taxes going from 36% to 39.5%. That's not exactly nationalizing the means of production."

. . .

But the best monsters are always the ones just offscreen. In their thrashing for purchase against Senator Obama, Senator McCain's campaign may have over-reached. An awful lot of conservative leaders have declared that an Obama presidency is October 22, 1844 in the great battle of freedom versus socialism. Interesting to see what happens when the people who've been fed a steady diet of terror images -- state-run medical care with month-long waits, abortion kiosks in the mall and forced gay-friendly kindergarten education -- encounter instead a higher minimum wage, guaranteed health care, and the occasional bit of science-based policy.

Of course, as the first comment points out, many of those screaming the S-word are like the dog that barks incessantly at the mailman, the reality of a centrist Obama will just never penetrate their clouded brains.  Hell, most of them still think Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were best buds who planned 9/11 together.  One suspects rather than be disappointed they will instead choose delusion and convince themselves that Barack Obama's America is a socialist wasteland.

On the other hand, there are no small number of folks out there actually hoping Obama is some kind of radical lefty socialist, (well, by American standards).  They are likely to find delusion much harder, and therefore their disappointment much greater.

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Comments

[cvcobb01]

It reminds me of when I worked on a day-to-date television show and we kept sending crews out to report on the whole David Koresh Waco disaster.

The reports were unhinged -- inside the compound, true believers were convinced that the Apocalypse was really truly happening right then; that the book of Revelations was right and the world was ending in blood and fire around them. And for far too many of the children, the leaders inside made sure that the last bit literally came true.

But a larger number of them lived to see another day, and now stumble along in real life. Perhaps we should check in with them to see how their belief system has held up since. Might give us a pretty good idea as to how mainstream conservativism will fare.

[Dave Peters]

Voting is a right, but it is also a matter of conscience. So what, in this situation, should people of good faith do with their vote?

Until quite recently, there was the rough possibility that Senator McCain might be able to muster enough votes in enough Bush-states to prevent Obama becoming the president. For fiscal conservatives, for libertarians and all those who were scandalised by the policies of big spending, war and now government bailout and who saw both parties as equally culpable, a vote for McCain could be justified only on the basis that he was, in some way, less likely to continue these policies than Obama. There was some sense to holding one's nose as his campaign dragged US politics into the gutter, as he chose a manifestly ill-equipped populist as his VP and voting for 'the lesser evil' on the basis that he might block the Democrat Congress's worst proposals.

It is clear now that McCain cannot win. Even the most Republican-friendly polls show that in the states he has to hold to win, he is between 3 and 10 points behind in most of them with less than 3 days to go. If Obama holds all the Kerry states, pretty much any two will give him victory, and if he only wins Ohio, it's game over. That makes a vote for McCain purely symbolic, rather than pragmatic. This will be the last chance for two years for any Republican-leaning voter to declare what kind of policy direction they'd like the country to take. Unless one wholeheartedly grasps and endorses McCain's policies, including his 100 years of occupation, his purchase of toxic mortgages and bank equity and so forth, the question arises -- why should you cast a vote for him. Is this the message you want to send to the leadership of the Republicans as they contemplate how to respond to what is likely to be the most crushing defeat in perhaps 40 years? Do you want Sarah Palin to be a contender in 2012? Most leading Republicans are privately appalled and some are publicly appalled as well.

Shouldn't Republicans who don't entirely endorse McCain's policies take this opportunity to vote for Bob Barr, or Ron Paul, or Mike Gravel or someone that really speaks truth to power. And if there isn't anyone whom they can in good conscience endorse, shouldn't simply they find something better to do between now and the time the polls close than vote?

[Peter G.]

Frankly I pity the poor bastards. During the last few election cycles the losers could at least contemplate a move to Canada or some other place more in keeping with their political philosophy. Where can a poor Republican go. Their only alternative is to turn inward or, horror of horrors, try to examine where they all went wrong.

[Richard Hershberger]

I think the flaw with the "socialism" analysis is that it assumes that any significant fraction of the people parroting this talking point have any conception of what socialism is. As they use the word "socialism," it is nearly devoid of semantic content. All it means is "stuff I disagree with."

Remember back when the talking point was that Obama was an appeaser, just like Neville Chamberlain? The campaign flunkies were sent out to the cable news shows to dutifully repeat this point. One of the hosts asked the flunky what specifically Chamberlain had done that he disagreed with. It soon became clear that the flunky had no idea of who Chamberlain was, or anything about him other than that he was an "appeaser." This guy hadn't thought to spend five on Wikipedia before going on television: because it clearly never occurred to him to treat the "Neville Chamberlain" talking point as a substantive discussion of historical parallels, or fancy egghead stuff like that. It was just that day's talking point.

The "socialism" meme will probably quietly die out. It is possible that it will survive, and the 25% who think that Bush is doing a bang-up job will faithfully explain to anyone who is willing to listen that whatever it is that they think Obama is doing is "socialism." Pay this no heed: if it wasn't "socialism" it would be some other word.

[Fran Barlow]

Well said, Richard ...

"socialist" "muslim" "atheist" "terrorist" "black separatist" "liberal" -- from the lips of the Republicans, these terms are empty of lexical content. They are mere rallying cries to the faithful.