Fear of a Charismatic President
Jun. 11th, 2008 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feste_sylvainThe Infamous Brad (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks) wrote an excellent article on Barack Obama, and those who fear him.
Go. Read it. It's very well written.
Final Jeopardy music.
Okay. Now here's what's wrong with his argument:
Charismatic rhetoric is bad, no matter which side of the fence uses it. Charisma encourages listeners to stop thinking. It catches them up in the swell of emotion (in this case "hope"), and by keeping their eyes on the prize, it sweeps aside such petty details as how to accomplish the agenda.
bradhicks makes a few other basic errors as well, such as when he says:
1974 had not been "over a generation before".bradhicks is probably referring to Herbert Hoover's administration, which indeed made many errors, but those economic policy errors were dwarfed by those of FDR, who turned a nasty recession into the Great Depression and managed to get away with it by appealing to the country in his regular charismatic radio speeches, the "Fireside Chats". But I worked for the Ford campaign in 1976, and I watched appalled as the Republicans nominated Reagan in 1980, and I can tell you quite confidently that the Republicans' biggest hurdle in 1980 was overcoming the legacy of Watergate.
Of course, Jimmy Carter's ham-handed Keynesian mishandling of the economy provided the opening for the Reagan campaign to exploit, and The Great Communicator applied heavy doses of charisma to convince people that supply-side economics was the answer. He invoked the "Laffer curve", and his people coined the phrase "trickle-down economics", and after running against the national debt for five years, Reagan signed budgets which massively accelerated its growth.
Did you catch that? I'm accusing the icon of conservatism of liberal spending. And I've got the numbers to back that up. This becomes important because I am a conservative in principle, not in some received wisdom or inertial label. Bush has been spending money hand-over-fist, with the first $2 trillion and the first $3 trillion budgets. There isn't a conservative running for president, as McCain talks about cutting taxes, but he hasn't said word #1 about cutting spending.
So I rankle whenbradhicks says:
I see nothing but hatred for what we'll call "Red Staters" in his article. He accuses Baby Boomers of peddling their idealism to the most recent pitch, and believes that those who fear an Obama presidency view his young(er) followers of behaving in a cult-like fashion.
Well, yeah. That's what I fear. When I recoil in horror as my friends' eyes glaze over with hope, I fear two things: that they are going to support any number of unworkable agendas in the service of this hope, and that when reality comes by later to collect the rent on those schemes, that their hope will be dashed hard.bradhicks insists that "his generation" is already too cynical to let that happen; I have major doubts.
Understand this: despite my conservative leanings, I do believe that the Republicans (and therefore McCain) must lose this election. Not only that, but they have to lose it big enough so that not even Diebold can make a difference. We have got to get rid of the GOP pork trough, we have got to get rid of the theocrats in the executive and judicial branches, we have got to get out of Iraq, and we have got to convince the National Republican Party that economic liberty is just as important to voters as their other civil rights. This won't happen with a "maverick" candidate who is as far out-of-touch with the private sector as McCain is.
But we have got to have a principled and loyal opposition to an Obama administration. We must oppose his policies which won't work, and will hurt people. And we must oppose them for that reason. I do agree withbradhicks that we must end the nastiness, and the only way to do that is to dispose of the poisonous ad hominem that Roger Ailes and Karl Rove have made the Republican counter-point to everything.
bradhicks) wrote an excellent article on Barack Obama, and those who fear him.Go. Read it. It's very well written.
Final Jeopardy music.
Okay. Now here's what's wrong with his argument:
Charismatic rhetoric is bad, no matter which side of the fence uses it. Charisma encourages listeners to stop thinking. It catches them up in the swell of emotion (in this case "hope"), and by keeping their eyes on the prize, it sweeps aside such petty details as how to accomplish the agenda.
bradhicks makes a few other basic errors as well, such as when he says:Ronald Reagan, and his speech writers, knew that trying to make the conservative case to America in 1979 and 1980 was an uphill battle. Nobody trusted the Republicans, not just because they'd screwed up the country so badly in the past (that was over a generation before, who was thinking about that?) but because conservatives had a reputation, already by 1979, of being nothing but haters.
1974 had not been "over a generation before".
bradhicks is probably referring to Herbert Hoover's administration, which indeed made many errors, but those economic policy errors were dwarfed by those of FDR, who turned a nasty recession into the Great Depression and managed to get away with it by appealing to the country in his regular charismatic radio speeches, the "Fireside Chats". But I worked for the Ford campaign in 1976, and I watched appalled as the Republicans nominated Reagan in 1980, and I can tell you quite confidently that the Republicans' biggest hurdle in 1980 was overcoming the legacy of Watergate.Of course, Jimmy Carter's ham-handed Keynesian mishandling of the economy provided the opening for the Reagan campaign to exploit, and The Great Communicator applied heavy doses of charisma to convince people that supply-side economics was the answer. He invoked the "Laffer curve", and his people coined the phrase "trickle-down economics", and after running against the national debt for five years, Reagan signed budgets which massively accelerated its growth.
Did you catch that? I'm accusing the icon of conservatism of liberal spending. And I've got the numbers to back that up. This becomes important because I am a conservative in principle, not in some received wisdom or inertial label. Bush has been spending money hand-over-fist, with the first $2 trillion and the first $3 trillion budgets. There isn't a conservative running for president, as McCain talks about cutting taxes, but he hasn't said word #1 about cutting spending.
So I rankle when
bradhicks says:We're going to try our damnedest to bring an end to the nastiness, the American-on-American hatred that has been your generation's legacy for the last almost 50 years.
I see nothing but hatred for what we'll call "Red Staters" in his article. He accuses Baby Boomers of peddling their idealism to the most recent pitch, and believes that those who fear an Obama presidency view his young(er) followers of behaving in a cult-like fashion.
Well, yeah. That's what I fear. When I recoil in horror as my friends' eyes glaze over with hope, I fear two things: that they are going to support any number of unworkable agendas in the service of this hope, and that when reality comes by later to collect the rent on those schemes, that their hope will be dashed hard.
bradhicks insists that "his generation" is already too cynical to let that happen; I have major doubts.Understand this: despite my conservative leanings, I do believe that the Republicans (and therefore McCain) must lose this election. Not only that, but they have to lose it big enough so that not even Diebold can make a difference. We have got to get rid of the GOP pork trough, we have got to get rid of the theocrats in the executive and judicial branches, we have got to get out of Iraq, and we have got to convince the National Republican Party that economic liberty is just as important to voters as their other civil rights. This won't happen with a "maverick" candidate who is as far out-of-touch with the private sector as McCain is.
But we have got to have a principled and loyal opposition to an Obama administration. We must oppose his policies which won't work, and will hurt people. And we must oppose them for that reason. I do agree with
bradhicks that we must end the nastiness, and the only way to do that is to dispose of the poisonous ad hominem that Roger Ailes and Karl Rove have made the Republican counter-point to everything.
