Author: RB

Meet the Press had a little segment on presidential candidate blogs this week, with a bunch of people who don’t read or write blogs. The most interesting thing about it was their complete avoidance of political commentary/punditry blogs; it was as if the only blogs that exist are either diaries or fundraising ploys run by the paid staff of cynical politicians like Mad Howie.

There was one interesting question raised about the Internet and politics in general, and it went something like this: to attract attention on the Internet, you have to be extreme, and this has obviously worked for Mad Howie. But to get elected, you need to be moderate. So does “winning” on the Internet necessarily forecast losing the election? My guess is that it does.

Another issue about all this is whether foaming-at-the-mouth candidates are giving the Internet a bad name, and whether that bad name’s deserved. For months the Itologists have been claiming that using the Internet makes people more compassionate and caring, but all the evidence I’ve ever seen about this depersonalized medium points to just the opposite conclusion.

You can read more about MTP at BuzzMachine.

Judging by the reaction to the Club for Growth’s hilarious Mad Howie ad, Dana Carvey’s Church Lady produced a whole passel of offspring. Check out the clucking from John Perry Barlow, the illustrious Joi Ito, and Dean’s hired bloggers. Once again, we see concrete evidence that the people who made Michael Moore a millionaire have no sense of humor.

Pioneer Wellbert John Perry Barlow steps outside the gated community with a load of mush that would have sailed by without a challenge on The Well, only to be slapped upside the head by Misanthropyst Don McArthur. Barlow retreats and cops a plea (guilty of hyperbole, but not of mush-headedness) and many bloggers applaud, others offer raspberries.

Here’s another raspberry. Barlow wants to stipulate that his people, the “anti-Bush” side, have failed to deliver their policies effectively because their rhetoric has been too hyperbolic. With all due respect and in the spirit of respect for everyone’s inner child, I beg to differ. What lurks behind the over-heated rhetoric of the anti- crowd is not a set of unappreciated but superior policies, but no real policy alternatives at all. Let’s take a few examples.

The antis don’t like the Bush tax cuts as a means of stimulating the economy. In their stead they offer no alternative, unless you consider universal health care to be an economic stimulus, a hard position to champion.

The antis don’t like the Patriot Act as a means of closing the noose on terrorist cells operating on American soil, but offer no alternative for dealing with a loosely joined network that relies on e-mail and cell phones for communication.

The antis don’t like pre-emptive invasion of terrorist states as a means of knocking foreign support out from underneath terror networks, but offer no alternative apart from UN jawboning that failed to produce a constructive result in Libya during 20 years of sanctions that hurt innocent people or in 12 years in Iraq with similar results.

The antis would do well to study President Bush. His demeanor is a lot more personable and open than is Howard Dean’s, although he’s every bit as direct. The president is able to speak softly because he carries policies that have produced clear and obvious results: a growing economy, a reduction in terrorist attacks, the overthrow of a genocidal regime, and, in Libya and Iran, a reduction in WMDs in the hands of terror-friendly states. The president has even beaten the antis on the traditionally Democratic issues of health care and education, passing an education bill that increased federal funding to the schools and a Medicare bill that offers prescription drugs to the elderly, both coupled with programmatic reforms important to conservatives.

Left-wing, anti-Bush politics are too much about emotion and identity and not enough about policy. For thirty years, the Democrats blindly supported a dysfunctional welfare system by telling themselves that only they really cared about the poor, but it was Republicans who came along and finally made the program work in 1996 when they made it an avenue to work and not a permanent dependency plan.

So all this talk about rhetoric and manners is nice, but it doesn’t go very far. Unless the left can come up with some realistic and practical policies, they’ll continue to be the weak sisters of American politics, all alone in their gated ideological communities crying to each other about how nobody understands them, and losing election after election.