UK: The Adams Family and GOP presidential hopefuls

The Guardian

The party of weird: the GOP 2012 field

The likely Republican party challengers to Obama represent the rise of something strange: the rightwing counterculture


My friend Mark Alan Stamaty, one of the great political cartoonists of our time, used to write a strip called "Washingtoon" whose lead character was a congressman called Bob Forehead. I don't recall that Forehead was ever explicitly identified as a Republican, but he clearly was that: a man of the heartland, of simple values, of imprecations cast toward the big-spending elitists back when Ronald Reagan had only just made that a popular sport. And he was, by his creator's design, a walking cliche – the famous "blow-dried" politician, with the plastic and automatic smile and with every hair in place.

We are at this moment in a gestational phase as regards the likely array of Republican presidential candidates in 2012, and lately I've been thinking about Forehead. Because you look at these people, and I'm talking about seven or eight of them, and there's only one Forehead in the bunch. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has fewer hairs out of place than Forehead himself did, and Forehead was a cartoon.

Other than that, the GOP wannabees are a strange assemblage. For a group of people who come from the party that has usually striven to reflect 1950s sitcom spotlessness, these people look less like the perfect family than the Addams Family.

Gomez is clearly Newt Gingrich, who, with Rick Santorum, was pushed off the air yesterday by Fox News in that rare move on Fox's part that vaguely resembles doing something ethical. You can almost picture Newt, the tectonic plates in his busy mind constantly shifting and colliding, blowing up train sets.

Morticia … Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann?

Actually, I give the nod here to Bachmann. It's not just the raven hair. She is, in her way, a far more layered figure than Palin. The former half-term governor is just not very intelligent and is proud of it. Bachmann, on the other hand, is fairly intelligent: remember, she was reading a "snotty" Gore Vidal novel when it struck her that she was really a Republican. She says outlandish and bizarre things, but not because she's ignorant: she says them because she believes them. And she is – certianly more than Palin, who is a sort of freelance figure interested chiefly in Sarah – the matriarch of the tea party movement.

OK, I'll stop with the direct analogues there. I concede there's not an Uncle Fester in the bunch. But the point is, they're a, let us say, unruly assemblage. Look, by way of comparison, at the 1988 GOP field. George H.W. Bush, a vice president, oil millionaire and former CIA chief. Al Haig, former general and White House chief of staff. Pete Du Pont, governor and gazillionaire. Bob Dole, respected senator-insider. Paul Laxalt, ditto. Now these were good solid Republicans. Intending no disrespect to them, I'd say they were more Forehead-ish than not: straightforward, heartland-besotted, ruling-class politicians.

Of course, televangelist Pat Robertson was in that lineup. His was certainly a kind of Dada candidacy, which made the leap from Duchamp to Dali (surreal, in other words) when he won the Iowa caucuses. That was the first glimmer, now that I think about it, of establishment-loathing, rightwing protest politics in America. Bachmann, Palin and even Mike Huckabee (a southern baptist preacher) are Robertson's inheritors.

What's all this about? How did we go in a generation from a group of Foreheads to a collection of people straining to outdo one another with their dark fulminations about Muslims and socialists and birth certificates and Kenya?

There are many reasons, most of them well-known. The GOP's increasing lurch (heh heh) to the right over the years. The ascendancy of the Clintons, who drove the right mad. The ascendancy of Obama, with his particular set of traits. But I think there may also be something to this idea: conservatives have adopted, to some extent, a counter-cultural way of thinking.

The counter-culture, of course, comes from the 60s and the left. Its motto was: question authority. Through the 1970s and the 1980s, this counter-culture bled into mainstream culture. Conservatives hated this. That is, they hated (and hate) the specific values that came from the left: freer love, more rights for out-groups, hatred of corporations, protests against America, etc.

But at the same time, they absorbed (inevitably, since they live in the culture like the rest of us) something of the mindset of questioning authority. And over time, in an evolutionary process, they lashed that mindset to their values: moral rectitude, impatience with non-conformity, worship of corporations, hatred of hippies (broadly defined, such that Obama is kind of a hippie).

In this way, today's GOP does sort of resemble what happened with the Democratic party in 1972. There was an energy then, among liberal-left youth, that the party tried to exploit and fashion toward its own purposes. But the energy was stronger than the party establishment. And Ed Muskie, the establishment's candidate, wasn't able to hold the line.

There is little doubt that the GOP establishment of our time is better prepared for the onslaught than was the Democratic establishment of George McGovern's time. So they may be able to contain the virus and make sure Romney gets it. Or Mitch Daniels, maybe, the Indiana governor. But Daniels is the David Brooks candidate: the candidate many liberals could grudgingly respect. For that reason, I doubt the right-wing counter-culturalists will have much truck with him.

And maybe, being Republicans – believers in order and authority to their core – the rightwing counterculturalists won't press as hard as their leftwing predecessors did in the 70s. Maybe they'll get this out of their systems and revert to form.

But it's also reasonable to guess that this paroxysm of mania has to play itself out over the course of one presidential election. Let the people in the rumpus room have their way – once. Then the adults take back over. Unless the rumpus roomers somehow win, which is not likely but not impossible. In which case America will be blowing up more than toy trains.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2011/mar/03/us-elections-2012-republicans