Why Republican slogans may go soft:

Gone are the muskets and the battle cries. Euphemisms are starting to come back.

Yesterday Politico’s Jake Sherman and Seung Min Kim supplied an amazing bouquet of Republican happy talk in an update on negotiations in the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.   

“Obviously, it’s important to show that we have a balanced, reasonable plan that actually deals with the drivers of our debt — entitlements — and includes revenue from economic growth associated with tax reform, not job-killing tax hikes,” a House GOP leadership aide said.

Read more: www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/67805.html#ixzz1d7zwmyCu

Why would they concoct such a convoluted vision statement, something only John Kerry and Michael Dukakis would have tried to use on bumper stickers?

Why grease the skids for compromise and cooperation? With two weeks to go, are Republicans already putting country first, or is partisan calculation finally shifting in favor of the peace-makers?  

Michael Tomasky offers a clue from the wilds of Florida. 

“The most important and interesting poll question asked in recent memory is the one Suffolk University finally thought to ask last week, surveying Floridians about various matters in their state. People were asked if they thought the Republicans were “intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not re-elected.” In response, 49 percent said yes, and just 39 percent said no. Among liberals, 75 percent said yes, and among moderates, fully 59 percent said yes (to 31 percent saying no). Interestingly, even a third of conservatives said yes (many of whom presumably thought it was a grand idea to do so). Forty-nine isn’t a majority, but it’s close, and Florida isn’t the country, but, if anything, it leans a little to the country’s right, so this is a shockingly large number considering that we Americans are supposed to believe that no one in our great and celebrated system of government would ever do such a thing. But people are starting to believe it, and it will be the GOP’s worst nightmare if it gets to the point that 58 percent or so of the country agrees. Given that majorities of conservatives and Republicans will never agree with this, a number like 58 (or even 55) will mean that a substantial majority of independents think it’s true.”

Click on: www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/07/michael-tomasky-on-obama-s-secret-weapons-mcconnell-and-cantor.html

Tomasky suggests that continuing partisan gridlock in Washington could be fatal for the Republican nominee. The label of obstructionist could, he imagines, “hang like the stink of garlic around the nominee’s neck.”

It will be interesting to know what, if anything, Mitt Romney will be suggesting to his supporters in Washington as these deficit-reduction talks approach their end-of-November deadline.

Extremist politics: Are slogans in the driver’s seat?

The centrist policies of the Obama administration—as well as those followed by all the other major economies—got us out of a severe economic crisis but not into a decisive recovery. Problems not solved raise the ire of problem-solvers. Consequently, the left and right raise their voices and accuse each other of mindless intransigence and rote thinking.

Michael Tomasky let loose on conservatives in September 29th’s New York Review of Books. His opening target was the entertaining hater Ann Coulter and her latest book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America. However, he goes on to argue that the Republican Party itself is now so extreme that it has lost the flexibility to bargain in good faith, and that its radicalism is the product of self-hypnosis:

“How did this happen? Usually a political movement is driven by its ideas. Then it chooses the rhetoric it thinks best advances the ideas. I’ve long thought that sometime in the 1990s, this normal process reversed itself on the American right, and rhetoric began driving, and even elbowing out, ideas. Once this wall is breached, compromised on any important issue becomes impossible, and responsible policy-making nearly so.”

Click on: www.nybooks.com/contributors/tomasky-michael/

Ideas smartly dressed in clever rhetoric go further than ideas without a common language. However, does rhetoric really have a life of its own? Don’t old ideas have a natural advantage over new ideas? Don’t barkers on both the left and right use slogans because they evoke those ideas?

Let’s acknowledge that even talking about an idea over a considerable period of time creates an advantage for that idea in the market of ideas, and that successful slogans—Just Society, Missile Gap, Balanced Budget Amendment, New Deal, Silent Majority, Save the Planet, War on Poverty, Equality of Opportunity, for instance—make it easier to stop thinking and just hammer the other guy.

In conflict, we talk ourselves into extremes and we stay there until pressing circumstances make us feel a little uncomfortable and eventually open us to change.

The undeniable stridency of today’s leadership of the Republican Party, however, has as much to do with a change in the heartland of American conservatism than with how their heads are wired.

Northeastern conservative gentlemen were not tempered by electoral success—more often than not they lost national elections in the 20th century. And Southwestern conservative radicals have not been radicalized by the corruption of too many defeats. Rather, the power base of American and Canadian conservatism has moved to the younger, less timid, less compromising, and more adventuresome—less established—centers of power. 

The conflicts within society and about the role of government are not any more extreme today than in the past—hopefully, still less so. However, conservatives today fundamentally represent less traditional conservative constituencies.

Former Canadian Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark was scolded for noting that he represented the “building end” of the Canadian federation. Yet, what he said about Western Canada was literally true. The businesses, the sprawling neighborhoods and the wealth of the Western and the Southwestern elites of North America were created over the last two generations, not over the last two centuries. And their reputations and power are less secure.

The upstarts today certainly believe that they succeed by more readily taking risks and by more enthusiastically taking up new ideas—and, in large measure, this is true. Older elites just as surely think that they have been able to keep their power by trimming others’ ideas as well as their own.

That these forces continue to talk to each other and influence each other’s opinions, of course, is critical to sustaining the civility and unified dynamism of this continent.