A little more than 20 years ago, back when I was a baby reporter for an alternative newspaper in Boston, we had an election for governor. The Democratic side was a true bloodletting, a rematch between former Governor Michael Dukakis and the incumbent, Edward King, who had pretty much Atwatered Dukakis out of the Corner Office four years earlier. (There was an equally spirited undercard bout for lieutenant governor between Evelyn Murphy and a dour assistant DA from Middlesex County named John Kerry.)
That race sucked most of the oxygen out of the political atmosphere, leaving even less than was customary for the Republican side of the contest and those of us sentenced to covering it. The three Rs in question were an old-line Yankee gent named John Sears, a millionaire newcomer named John Lakian, and a cheery state representative from Holbrook named Andrew Card.
Sears ended up winning the nomination after a bizarre campaign in which Lakian, the rookie, was discovered to have manufactured almost his entire resume. Andy Card finished a respectable third, and we became as friendly as it's possible and proper to be across the great divide. So it's not easy for me to tell you that, at a meeting of the Maine and Massachusetts delegations during the Republican National Convention last week, my old friend Andy Card said the single most terrifying thing I've ever heard from a representative of an elected government -- even a dubiously elected government like the current one.
Card is now the White House chief-of-staff, and it was he who had to interrupt the ensemble reading of The Pet Goat in order to tell George W. Bush that someone had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center, thus starting the clock on the now-famous Seven-Minute Glaze. Card was talking to the two delegations about that moment, clinging to the GOP talking points like a nun to her beads. The president “didn't introduce fear into any of those young children or through the national media, to the American people,” explained Card. Then, he attempted to explain how the president feels about the 200 million-odd souls who are, after all, his employers:
“It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.”
Let us leave aside any discussion prompted by Card's remarks that might uncomfortably contain the word “Fatherland.” Let us take him at his word -- namely, that the president of the United States looks at the world's longest-standing free democratic republic and sees . . .
A middle-schooler.
I wish it hadn't been Andy Card who gave us this peek behind the curtain, because I know him to be a sensible, decent person who wouldn't have mouthed this lunacy unless he really meant it. If it had come from one of the wolverines in Karl Rove's shop, it wouldn't have been half as frightening. Nevertheless, what Card said perfectly encapsulates this administration's approach to governance -- its fundamental contempt for democratic restraints and its hubristic insolence toward any limits on its political appetites. Our president is our Daddy. He will make his wars to keep us safe, and all we have to do is love him back, and do what he tells us to do. Go shopping. Go on happy vacations. Leave the decisions to Daddy and to Daddy's friends. They run things so we don't have to.
Can any principled conservative (which, alas, for the moment, leaves out John McCain) seriously maintain this argument? Can you imagine Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan, or even Alexander Hamilton, for pity's sake, endorsing this nonsense? Hamilton may have thought the “American people” to be an unthinking mob, and he may have been a little less willing to trust them than I'd have liked him to be, but, glorioski, he never looked upon them as children who must be sheltered and nurtured by their government. This isn't politics. This is pious psychopathy run completely amok -- Peggy Noonan now d/b/a Lizzie Borden, Constitutional Scholar.
If the Democrats can be disdained as enthusiasts for the “Nanny State,” what does Card's formulation make the GOP? The Mike Brady bund?
Of course, Card isn't alone in feeling this way. The White House has been enabled in its paternalistic delusions by an elite, celebrity media that feels very much the same way. Just this week, columnist Deroy Murdock recalled the arrival of combat jets over Manhattan on September 11 by writing “that emotion was as vivid as having my mother or father run to my aid when I hurt myself as a little boy.” And the inevitable Howard Fineman once compared Bush to “Shane . . . because he has to protect his family.” The first pundit that jams a binkie in my mouth loses a finger, I swear to God.
(Thank the Whoever for James Wolcott, who's since pointed out that Fineman obviously has no clue about the movie he cited, let alone the president's proper role as the head of the executive branch).
And let us recall the extended unpleasantness in Florida four years ago. Almost from the beginning, the Timmies and Chrissies and Jeffies and all the tiny Foxies were unanimous that somebody, somehow, should act to avoid the “constitutional crisis” that would occur if we all just followed, well, the Constitution, which has in it provisions that would have made for a messy couple of months but which, after all, would have stuck us with George W. Bush anyway, and would have avoided giving William Rehnquist one more opportunity to debase himself.
There was an unmistakable subtext throughout the coverage that the American people needed “closure” because they couldn't be trusted to govern themselves, a belief quite obviously shared by five-ninths of the Supreme Court. It has its roots in the developed sense within the media and its audience that self-government consists mainly of the media's ability to navigate from one disconnected episode to another -- which is why speakers at the Republican convention could cite both Richard Nixon and Reagan's dubious finagling in Central America with impunity from the podium, secure in the knowledge that nobody would point out the obvious fact that Watergate and Iran-Contra were both way stations on the road leading to the bunker in which our government has stashed itself. The connective tissue of institutional memory has been allowed to wither to the point where both of those festivals of felonies seem as separate from one another as two sitcoms that premiered 16 seasons apart.
There is a tedious ongoing debate about why the political media behaves the way that it does, but there seems little doubt that modern rightist campaigning and the modern political media share views of their primary audience that are uniquely consonant with each other. Neither one takes the work of self-government seriously any more -- the rightists, because it would interfere with their plans to restore the shine to William McKinley, and the media, because the work of self-government makes terribly bad television. It's to the rightists' political advantage to have the children parked in front of the TV, and it's to the economic advantage of the political media to provide the simple and flashy distractions.
In 2000, as the very notion of an elected president hung in the balance, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court pronounced that there was no constitutional right to vote for president, but what were we fed? A cheap B-movie thriller, starring Timmy and his Magic Marker and Jeffy and his magic anecdotes, and this was as good as it got. Basic institutions of government cracked at their foundations -- perhaps permanently -- and we got a dumb-show cliffhanger from a bunch of television stars, glistening with unctuous reassurance and utterly terrified to tell the truth to us about what was plainly happening under their noses. And it hasn't gotten any better since then. We were lied into a war because it was easy for the liars to create a television drama and easier for television to broadcast it.
Small wonder, then, that we are in the hands of people who do their jobs firm in the belief that we are children. The media encourages them to believe it, and they encourage us to act like it. Let us cheer the silly meat-puppet from California who couldn't even make a decent movie, because it's a hoot to see him up there slandering Hubert Humphrey. Let us believe that an entitled pack of think-tank gangsters is keeping us safe by playing mumblety-peg in the most volatile region of the world. Politics is something the grown-ups do in the parlor. Let's all get tucked in and pretend that we didn't see Daddy half-blotto at the dining room table, holding his head over a stack of bills that are dangerously overdue.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
