“It’s hard to look at the Cubs and the Sox as they prepare for spring training and not conclude that both teams have gone backward.”
Tom Frank: It’s really simple. It’s because of the power of money in politics. This is an anecdote I heard the other day, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but do you remember in the primaries Kerry had this line about “Benedict Arnold CEOs”? It was a pretty good line—it was about outsourcing. And he dropped it. Didn’t talk about it anymore. And someone told me that they asked someone on his campaign staff why they got rid of that, and it was because Wall Street didn’t like it. And that’s pretty much the story of what’s happened to the Democrats. They are constrained from talking the way Democrats used to talk—like Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy—they can’t talk that way anymore, because it scares the investors, it scares the people who fund their campaigns. And the basic fact of politics these days is, you’ve got to have money to run your campaign, to run TV commercials.
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During the many hours I spent with Guy, whenever conversations turned to the substance of his politics, my blood would start to boil: he calls abortion “genocide,” finds unions “distasteful,” and thinks the government has no business providing retirement security for the elderly. There’s not much we agree on, politically speaking. But when Guy mocked the style of liberals and Democrats, taking shots at Al Gore’s ponderousness, or the hypocrisy of rich liberals, orperpetually aggrieved undergrads, I’d find myself agreeing, siding with him against my own people. The right has virtually perfected swatting at this kind of low-hanging fruit, and they’ve discovered that if you do it enough, pointing out those parts of the left that everyone finds grating, you almost never have to engage with the substance of what those people, or anyone associated with them, say. They’re dead on arrival.
