THE G.O.P. EDWARDS NARRATIVE EVOLVES. It's hard to pick out the most outrageous statement from last night's G.O.P. debate -- though Scott and Sam have pointed to some doozies -- but the most politically deadly one for Democrats is already clear. Mike Huckabee's quip that Congress has "spent money like Edwards at a beauty shop" was met with guffaws and rolling waves of applause from the Columbia, South Carolina audience. This morning, GOPUSA used "Spending Like John Edwards at a Beauty Shop" as their debate round-up title, and the phrase now appears poised to enter the G.O.P. lexicon as short-hand for alleged Democratic fiscal recklessness and cultural fecklessness, both.
This is awful for Edwards and bad for the Democrats more generally, in that Huckabee's joke conflates progressive tax policies -- Huckabee used the phrase to argue for his "active fair tax" proposal that would "put a "Going Out of Business" sign on the Internal Revenue Service and stop the $10 billion a year that it costs just for them to operate" -- with, to unpack the insult, the presumed vanity of a multi-millionaire. The phrase activates at least three anti-Democratic frames, to take a Lakoffian look at things, and does so very efficiently: the old saw about "tax and spend liberals" (evoked by "spends"); allusions to "limousine liberals" (evoked by the costs of the haircuts); and the ongoing and highly effective Republican effort to contest the masculinity of Democratic men who don't, say, drive tractors (evoked by the reference to the "beauty shop"). It's a perfect example of the classic G.O.P. tactic of turning an admittedly ridiculous, irrelevant cultural or personal attribute about a candidate into a metaphor for that person's policies, by slowly moving the mockery along from the personal to the political, until the candidate himself has become a joke. And once a candidate becomes a joke, the whole party, and what it stands for, begins to, too.
Indeed, the fiestiness on display last night should serve as a wake-up call for people who think the 2008 contest against the G.O.P. is going to be a cake-walk, thanks to the weakness of the president, the example of the 2006 victories, and the alleged weakness of the Republican field. The Republican contenders are going to fight the Democrats, hard, through-out the primary season and after, culminating in a general election contest that will doubtless be as nasty and involve as much ridicule and distortion as have those in perivious years.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
