Rick Santorum won the three primary-type elections yesterday. Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado. A sweep. But really, I should put that Won in quotes. He “won” by virtue of garnering more votes than the others, which I admit is the traditional way in which winning is established.
But, really, did he? The largest voter turn-out was Missouri, with 6% of eligible, registered voters going to the polls. Out of that he took somewhere around 40%, which means he got less than 3% of Missouri’s potential vote. It was worse in the other two states, Minnesota with 1% and Colorado with 2%.
And yes, these are caucuses, nonbinding, no delegates are assigned based on these, it was more a moral support effort.
But still. In the past, it has been the Republican base that has been the most energized in these things, and this time their showing was pathetic. Less than.
So, what exactly did Santorum win?
Not much, but please, let us not make assumptions. It’s a long way to August, much less November, and all kinds of bizarreness can happen before then. The idea that Rick Santorum could be the GOP nominee for president fills me with both glee and trepidation. Glee because the only candidate the GOP has fielded that has a chance of challenging Obama is Romney, no matter what the Party faithful might wish to believe. Trepidation because I tend to hedge my mental bets these days concerning the political landscape and the thought that Santorum might actually unseat Obama scares the bejeezus out of me. In his own way, he is as polarizing as George Wallace in 1968. (Gingrich less so, for two reasons—he is inconsistent in his message and he is far too intellectual. He’s the closest thing the GOP has right now to an Egghead, something they have tended to vote against for a very long time due to a nebulous perception that “average” Americans won’t vote for someone who is too smart.) The positions he has taken on privacy issues troubles me no end. Even if he couldn’t get his program through Congress on these matters, the fact that enough of my fellow citizens would put him in office would frighten me. It wouldn’t be Santorum who would concern me so much as my next door neighbor.
Hence, my admonition that we should not feel smug, we who would rather see Obama get a second term than any Republican who has the remotest chance of winning. National politics is a fey and fickle creature and has surprised people before.
But more than that, if I read this correctly, we are seeing the self-dismantling of a major political party. For the first time in decades, the Democrats are showing more solidarity and cohesion than the Republicans, and may end up being the remaining “super power” when this is over, the GOP having splintered into factions that will eventually recombine into something else.
There is a danger here that comes with all such victories, that of self-satisfied, uncritical assumption of Being Right.
Being Right is the disease to which the Republicans are succumbing. Not that they have been—right, that is—but that they have built their entire strategy on the assumption that (a) this is what people vote for and (b) that they in fact are right. It has led to a number of unfortunate distortions of the political process in the name of saving the country that, I think, have also led to their current malaise. It has pushed the Republicans into more and more strident and restricted positions from which they have become ineffective in the actual job they’ve been hired to do—namely, govern the country. (I mean, seriously—who gives a damn about who is or is not allowed to get married when there are 58 million adults without jobs? And given the ranking of American schools in math, science, history, and reading, does anyone think allowing prayer in the class—which as a silent practice is not now prohibited—is really the issue we need to focus on?)
Americans as individuals can make the call as to what is right. That’s not what we send representatives to Washington do establish. We send them there to conduct the people’s business, a phrase I haven’t seen in general use for a very long time. Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about that, but this is a tactical question. I do not look to Washington to tell me what my morals should be. Nor do I want Washington telling my neighbor why I am not to be trusted because I have ideas that might run counter to the current rhetorical postures on offer.
Democrats have no better claim than Republicans on that. While much lip service is given to America’s pluralism, at the end of the day, when the campaign ads run, and the blood flows in the primaries, both parties indulge in the politics of false unity. They both paint Americans as this or that and our differences are minimized to the point that if someone actual has a distinct need or identity, we either ignore it or try to force him or her into a mold that conforms to current prejudice.
A political party that feels it has a mandate as representing True Americans is a dangerous thing, because it can forget to represent All Americans. Cycles of rapid turn-over in congressional seats are indicative of the kind of blunt messaging an ill-served electorate sends when they elect someone who then goes to Washington and doesn’t do what they were sent to do, but instead takes winning that seat as a ticket to try to make the government conform to his or her vision of True America. (I sent you there to rein in spending, not gut the SEC. I sent you there to fix Social Security, not blame the Democrats for pursuing socialism. I sent you there to do something about education, not shoehorn in your pet projects.)
The Democratic Party has its share of blindnesses and prejudices and we should all be wary of seeing them burgeon into the kind of bombastic over-confidence that the Republicans are now paying for in their own party. Since the Depression, the Democrats have more and more become the party of the One Solution To Fix It All, blithely ignoring local conditions and the very uniquenesses both parties like to brag about but neither really knows how to deal with. If there is a problem, a federal agency must be created to fix it, and while that has certainly been effective in some things, in other matters it has been an irritant if not downright destructive.
(The model for federal agencies, it seems to me, should be NASA. No, seriously. When you look at NASA and how it is structured and what it is actually supposed to do, it’s a terrific idea. It hasn’t, of course, stuck to its original concept, but close enough for an example. NASA is publicly seen as a government space program that is supposed to do all of our off-earth exploring and so forth. This is a mischaracterization. NASA was established as a federally-funded research-and-development organ that would create the technology to be used in space exploration, with the idea that, once developed and tested, this technology would be available to the private sector or to universities to do with as they will. NASA was supposed to continually develop solutions that we could then take off the shelf and use. It was never intended to set priorities and dictate the direction we would take, although by default it has done so. This would be an effective model if deployed more as it was intended. Other agencies do exhibit these protocols—OSHA, for example—but many are imperial, dictating rather than assisting. This is a product of the kind of arrogance we have yet to figure out how to be rid of in government.)
Starting now, with what is so evidently happening to the Republican Party, all of us should be more aware of what the Democrats do. I shy away from predictions with too much specificity—the more detailed you get the farther off target you fall—but if not this year then by the next election cycle I would not be surprised to see the rise of an effective third party and the eventual obliteration of the Republican Party as we have known it. I don’t think this would in itself be a bad thing—in 1976 they courted and in 1980 brought in an infection that has transformed it into something its own leadership is uncomfortable with and cannot effectively control—but I don’t think it would be automatically a good thing, either.  We have seen what happens in countries with only one political party and we should fear it.
