Every four years a president is elected and someone like me excoriates the press corps covering the election for failing to focus on the big issues that should have mattered. This year is different. This year’s big issue is the economy, and no one’s going to overlook it. But major resources still need to be devoted to the fringes.
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Akin’s faux pas got a lot of media attention, though too little of it pushed past Akin himself to the hypocrisy of the Republicans who tried to throw him off the back of the wagon. And almost no attention was paid a day or two later to a Republican who’s far more wild-eyed than Akin but not necessarily any battier. That’s county judge Tom Head of Lubbock, Texas, who a day or two later let it be known he’d like to raise an army to repel the United Nations troops he expects President Obama, if reelected, to be sending into his county. “He’s going to make the Constitution irrelevant. He’s got his czars in place that don’t answer to anybody,” predicted Judge Head, who doubles as Lubbock County’s chief of emergency planning. The judge said Obama will “try to give the sovereignty of the United States away to the United Nations. What do you think the public’s going to do when that happens? We are talking civil unrest, civil disobedience, possibly, possibly civil war.” Wishing for a force of “seasoned veterans,” Head allowed that “we may have two or three hundred deputies facing maybe a thousand U.N. troops. We may have to call out the militia.”
At some point I found myself actually feeling a little sorry for David Brooks. Brooks is a moderate Republican who pleads for a high-minded debate of big issues. His August 20 column in the New York Times, “Guide for the Perplexed,” framed the election this way: “Entitlement spending is crowding out spending on investments in our children and on infrastructure. This spending is threatening national bankruptcy . . . If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station . . . If Democrats can’t come up with an alternative on this most crucial issue, how can they promise to lead a dynamic growing nation?”
Above Byrne’s column—with its emphasis on Republican disagreement—was one by George Will that contradicted him. Will observed that the Republican Party “under the beneficent influence of the tea party has never been more ideological or more ideologically homogenous.” (Will didn’t explain why a party so ideological should run the country. Maybe he doesn’t think it should.) He went on to fault Obama for immaturity and to suggest Mitt Romney could win in November by weaning away from Obama voters “who like the idea of him but not the results of him. As Holman W. Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal astutely writes, ‘Obama’s great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.’”
“Romney was a precocious and gifted child,” Brooks wrote. “He uttered his first words (‘I like to fire people’) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.”
