OurFuture.org Blogs: Rick Perlstein

Affectionate Farewells

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:08:51 -0800

Sorting through my email in-box day was a different experience than usual. Most days, when I get a missive from "Ann_Coulter@HumanEvents.com" with a subject line reading "Obama's Lies -- and YOUR Money" (as I did today) or, a similar such email labeled "No Stimulus!" from a group called "Americans for Prosperity" (whose logo, unforunately for them, features a line through "Americans for Prosperity," making it look like they're advertising the negation of American prosperity), I save it, with the intention of possibly sharing it some day with you. I've been blogging here on conservative failure since April of 2007, day in, day out, well over a thousand posts—and I always tried to keep plenty of wingnuttia in reserve for weeks to come.

I announce today, however, with both excitement and a heavy heart, that I'll be moving on from my work here at Campaign for America's Future to begin work on my next book. The transition has been long-planned, but I was genuinely surprised at how melancholy I feel. The people at CAF are extraordinary. Waking up every morning and jumping on a conference call to plan how we were going to try to make the world a better place was a privilege. In fact, when I did it for the last time today, I misted up a little.

One thing that will not change: CAF will still be tracking the Big Con, day in and day out. There will always be conservatives, they will always be failing—and they will always be trying to win back power, through means both fair and foul. They'll come in different shapes and sizes—full-on CPAC-style wingnuts; progress-obstructing Blue Dogs; lobbyists feeding at the public trough—and you'll still be able to monitor their goings-on from writers at least as qualified, and often more qualified, than I.

That said, one last treat: Rush!

I mentioned yesterday that I listened to Limbaugh's show from start to finish on Wednesday (my wife and I have a houseguest this week, by the way, and she said that never has she been more grateful for her noise-canceling headphones). What I didn't say anything about was the second hour. Rush called it his "Gender Summit." Apparently he'd read some poll somewhere that his listenership suffered from a gender gap of 31 points. So he decided to only admit female callers that second hour who either have problems with Rush or knew a woman who had problems with Rush. To, you know, explain to him the mystery—he was flummoxed!

He's ravished by the first caller, but regrets she had to hang up before she could go on the air: she's a student at Cal State, and informs Rush that, as a fan and as a conservative, she's disgusted that Rush is referred to disparagingly at several points in her women's studies textbook. He likes it. He'll return to the point later. This datum, it arrives, will be the skeleton key to understanding the Gender Gap Conundrum.

The switchboards must not be filling up the way he'd prefer, so he puts in another beg for callers to help him, you know, succeed with the ladies. He must know what's coming next, because he seems nervous, making a goofy Freudian slip: "We want this to have an effective climax!" (Well, maybe there's your problem, Captain Bluepill.) He also says he has no problem with transgenders. But "if you've had a chop-a-dick-off-a-me, don't call." ("Honey," I ask my wife, how do you spell 'chop-a-dick-off-a-me,' the surgical procedure described by Rush Limbaugh?")

Someone calls in and admits that, yes, she has a woman friend who listened to Rush once, and hated the experience. He goes into fulmination mode: how could she have any informed opinion about him if she's only listened once?

Well, the caller replies, she thought you were pompous.

"Pompous?!" (he's literally incredulous). "Do you think I'm pompous?"

I've never heard him so nervous. He's never worried about his audience before.

The caller admits that, yes, she's occasionally found Rush Limbaugh a little pomp—though she can't complete the thought because Rush interrupts her.

"Irreverent, yes!" says the man who calls himself "El Rushbo," calls his company the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, brags that he carries out his show with half his brain tied behind his back at all times, and that he's ninety-nine-point-nine percent correct about everything. "I'm not pompous."

He pauses a bit. Perhaps he realizes he's stretched credulity.

"I'm not changing that." He returns to the datum that her friend only listened to the show a single time: "Demand that you and her listen to the program together and report back."

End of call. For bumper music going into commercial, he puts on Barry White making sexual grunts.

Next caller coming off of the break is a conservative—but not a Rush fan. She says she might be if he didn't refer to every woman he talks about in public life according to whether she is a "babe" or not.

Rush's response: he has to say something nice about everyone. If he just mentioned how evil some liberal is, she'd be complaining about how negative he is. He changes tack, saying men can't help it. And after a jab at those crazy feminists won't let men be nice to them, he explains, "God created us this way. It's what ends up with there being babies."

Confronted with the unanswerable argument that her way of seeing things, should it prevail, would amount to the extinction of the human race, she asks him if he at least could refrain from calling female newscasters "infobabes."

Once again he's shocked.

"But I invented the term!... I would say they need to lighten up. Why do they say I have to change who I am?...I'm not going to change that. That's a signature."

Sighs deeply.

"You've got to stop talking down to people," she says. "Maybe men can take this. But women aren't going to take it any longer." You always insist, she says, that "you're right about everything."

(It's just then that I recall someone making a perfect description of Rush Limbaugh's voice: it sounds like a woman imitating her know-it-all ex-husband.)

She says "Your opinion doesn't have to be everyone's opinion"—he interrupts: "It should!" She says something else, he interrupts, she says he always interrupts, and he says it's only because his show has time constraints: "I probably have more respect for my audience than anything than anyone in the media... I don't consider myelf better than anyone in the audience.... I have nothing but love and admiration and respect for all the people in America."

(These are all direct quotes.)

The first caller, the college student in the women's studies class, calls back, much to Rush's thrill. She gives him chapter and verse on the references to him in her "women's studies textbook." She says it's a "required class." Rush, satisfied that the reason the world's women are prejudiced against them is that they have to be so to get a college degree, makes ready to bring the Gender Summit to a close. The college kid tells him how much she adores him, and how she always keeps RushLimbaugh.com open when she's doing web chats with fellow students so she'll know what to argue. But she admits that she still doesn't have the courage to praise him in front of the whole class.

Rush tells her—I swear—to "man up," and she agrees.

Ah. I'm going to miss this job!

Rush from Reality

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:25:13 -0800

I've been listening to Rush Limbaugh for going on twenty years now—since 1989, when my summer job after my first year of college involved driving a daily route which took me from Milwaukee to a little town two hours away. I listened to the whole thing. Every day.

He had been on nationally for only a year. He was not yet a national phenomenon, and when I discovered him, I realized I had stumbled upon something important and extraordinary. I knew about Father Coughlin, the para-fascist "radio priest" of the New Deal Years—I'd read about him in history books—and had an inkling that I'd someday be reading about this "Rush Limbo" (as I first misheard his name) in books as well. For as has been frequently remarked, Rush is an astonishingly gifted talent when it comes to filling the air on the radio. Already, in 1989, people were packing auditoriums around the hinterlands to hear him dispense his wisdom on his "Rush to Excellence" tours. Already, he was an exceptionally commanding presence.

I hadn't listened through an entire three hour show for years, however, until this past November, the day after election day, when I was riveted by the realization that, after twelve years of being alienated by Reagan and Bush from the right, and then eight years of opposing Clinton (I was never a fan) from the left—and then the dark reign of Bush the Second— the intellectual patterns of most of my life would have to be radically reconfigured. America had a president I supported. Everything—especially listening to Rush—would be different now.

It was disorienting to listen to Rush that Wednesday, but not so much that I couldn't draw some conclusions. It made me realize something important, as he rehearsed his horror at what America was about to experience; it made me realize how I should be thinking about the American right now. I ended up hoping that Rush enjoyed extraordinary ratings during the Obama years. It will help, as I wrote last month, "conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to move the country forward. It's a good thing: one sign of a decrepit, declining ideological tendency is that its adherents worry more about reassuring themselves about the purity of their own symbolic identity as liberal-irritaters than on actually getting anything accomplished." As Atrios wisely noted yesterday, that turns "conservatism" into nothing more than a self-referential hall of mirrors, intelligible only to other conservatives. We'll lose them in the funhouse, while we get on with the business of communicating with, and governing, the country.

And so, yesterday, I visited the funhouse again, to see what the hall of mirrors looked like after President Obama's triumphant State of the Union address (Sixty-eight percent of viewers had a very positive reaction, 24 percent a somewhat positive reaction, and only 8 percent a negative reaction)—the day after, in other words, conservatism was ground into the dust once again.

Rush came out of the gate blaring, declaiming the irrelevance of such polls. Here was his opening thought: that two years ago Bernie Madoff would have had a 99 percent approval rating. And then: "Somebody told Bobby Jindal to act like he was talking to first graders last night." That was a nifty riff—perhaps Jindal had been sabotaged? He's doubling down on Jindal, urging his listeners not to throw "good conservatives" "overboard." The nautical metaphor was appropriate, because he next repeated Jindal's made-up story about the bureaucrats turning back the Katrina rescue boats—and then lied about the lie. He concluded, "Jindal gets on the phone with the bureaucrat. 'I'm Bobby Jindal. Congressman. If you want, you can arrest me, too.'" (In the original story Jindal had said nothing about getting on the phone.)

Then he dug into the meat of the program: the excoriation of David Brooks. Brooks has radically strayed off Rush's reservation: he believes, heretically, that the way Republicans have governed and politicked over the last eight years deserve a second look. Specifically, he went berserk on the rhetoric of Bobby Jindal—calling his "stale, governing is the problem" bromides a "disaster for the Republican Party," and "insane." So Rush went berserk back. He went back to Brooks' column, which expressed reservations about Obama giving staffers close to him too much power.

Silly David.

This is what authoritarians do, David!.. How could you ever have bee a conservative and not see who they are?... This is what community organizers do, David! We've been trying to warn the country about this, Dave!... We elected agitator. An organizer. An authoritarian!

He went on, of course. And on, and on, and on, and on. Came the first caller, who made the mistake of pointing to Obama's actual language in the speech, and got interrupted by El Rushbo—

Pay no attention to what he says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant.

Unless, Rush didn't have to add, Obama says something Rush considers embarrassing. Then, of course, he means exactly what he said.

I knew I'd heard this before. This was the doctrine of the "principle of reversal" enunciated by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. Welch explained that in order to understand what the Communists are saying, you have to translate it into its opposite. Though it was a principle, of course, that Welch frequently honored in the breach. When a Communist said something he thought was embarrassing, Welch hammered home that the Communist meant exactly what he said.

The sole authority, of course, qualified to decide when a Communist meant the opposite of what he said, and when he meant exactly what he said was Robert Welch.

I'll have more later today. For now, suffice it to say this: a political tendency that relies on esoteric pope figure to interpret the actuality of plain reality is not in a good position to win the loyalty of a nation. It is, instead, a cult. Enjoy the spectacle: that is what the conservative movement is becoming.

Maddow: The Big Con's Being Foiled

Rick Perlstein — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:18:16 -0800

I was honored to be able to discuss the first month of Obama's term Friday on the Rachel Maddow show.

Legacy Loans

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:32:50 -0800

[I wrote this post for TPMCafe's discussion of Will Bunch's fine book "Tear Down This Myth" but lost the instructions on how to post to TPM, so while I await them I'll bank the post for you folks here]

Apologies for the long post; I didn't have time to write a short one. Apologies too, for weighing in too late to contribute to the conversation.

They say a liberal is someone who won't even take his own side in an argument, and so it was with me this Pressident's Day. I received an astonishing document in the mail maybe a month ago, from Brian Lamb of C-Span, asking me to rank every president from one to forty-three on ten "Individual Leadership Characteristics." I remember chuckling at the ILC's fine-grained sensitivity. Maybe there are people who can really responsibly rank John Tyler vis-a-vis Ulysses S. Grant as to their "Administrative Skills," Grover Cleveland versus Calvin Coolidge as to their "Morality Authority"—but I am not that man. I sent apologies to Mr. Lamb; I hadn't, I explained, anything near the erudition to carry out the appointed task.

Then, last Monday, I learned that America's "presidential historians" had, without benefit of my input, named Ronald Reagan the tenth-best president in United States history.

I looked down the columns of participants, and saw the name of Annelise Anderson of the Hoover Institute, who I'm sure is a perfectly decent soul, public servant, and scholar, but whose most recent contribution to the republic of letters has been the editing of hagiographic collections quite explicitly designed to burnish Ronald Reagan in the marketplace of historic reputation.

Here's how Anderson introduced her co-edited Reagan In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America

The triumph of free markets and democracy over totalitarianism is the great political story of the 20th century, and Ronald Reagan was one of its most visible authors.

There is no doubt that he was the Great Communicator; and the words with which he so adeptly communicated live on. Not only his spoken words, but his written words, too — which survive in his own hand, in numerous speeches and letters he drafted on yellow pads.

What a person writes reflects his thinking and his values, and gives us greater insight into his soul than a ghosted speech, a press conference, or even a private conversation. Reagan's writings may, therefore, be his most important gift to us — because they explain the man behind the accomplishments. They reveal the thinking that drove his policies and strategies as president (and, earlier, as governor of California). And they reveal the knowledge, intelligence, determination, and discipline with which he pursued both public office and the goals he set for himself, once there....

The man who emerges from these writings is different from the public figure we all know. It was often said about Reagan that "what you see is what you get," and in a way this is true — he was open and honest and believed what he said. He spoke from the heart. But Reagan's amiability, adroit use of humor, unfailing courtesy, decency, and confidence in his own beliefs do not fully explain his extraordinary success. These graces — and that success — were sustained by the Great Communicator's greatest asset: a formidable intellect, as a reader, a thinker, a strategist — and a writer.

Most of the texts in the collection are radio scripts Reagan wrote during the years he spent as a syndicated commentator between his tenure as California governor and his 1980 run for the president. When the collection came out its hagiographic intent was rather explicit; indeed it was inscribed in the very subtitle: "...Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America"—this almost was revelation. (The more toned-down original working subtitle was apparently "A Life In Letters, and Reagan's Path to Victory"). The title, meanwhile, was even more heavy-handidly ideological: the notion of newly discovered texts in Reagan's own handwriting was quite histrionically presented as clinching evidence that Reagan was not stupid but smart ("a formidable intellect, as a reader, a thinker, a strategist").

To someone who never thought Reagan was stupid, reviewing all this has been strange. Such unalloyed special pleading is not particularly scholarly. It fits right in, however, with the extraordinarily self-conscious political strategy with which conservatives have persued the matter of Reagan's historical reputation—as a political campaign.

One of the things I liked most about Will's book restoring the "reality-based Reagan" is that it's not just a model of responsible historical debunking—though it's certainly that: tough-minded in spirit but moderate in tone, responsible in its scholarship but readable in its execution—but that it's also a work of investigative journalism, sniffing out and explaining the story of how this campaign—this literal conspiracy to place right thumbs on the scale of historical judgment—came about.

Even before before reading Tear Down This MythI had heard, in a vague-ish sort of way, about the Reagan Legacy Project: the campaign of conservative to get some public building or monument named after Reagan in every county of the United Stations, to get his face on the dime, even to chisel Old No. 40 on Mount Rushmore. About a year ago, I was fascinated by a presentation by Brad Woodhouse at the 2008 Take Back America conference. Reagan's approval rating at the dénouement of the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987, Woodhouse, pointed out, was forty percent—the lowest of his presidency. A year later it was 57 percent. By the end of his term if was 63 percent. According to Woodhouse, this was not merely the product of a sudden surge in leadership capacity by our 40th president, nor just a sentimental outpouring for an old man after years of public service. It was the result—he claims—of a campaign.

I'm not saying the only reason Reagan ended his term in the good graces of two-thirds of Americans was that ideologues got to work in 1988 squeezing extra points of public approval for a discredited president like the last drops of juice from a dried out lemon. But I suspect it may have been a contributing factor.

And yet you don't even have to agree that his final approval rating had anything to do with the self-concious promotional efforts of conservatives to be offended by their activist manhandling of historical memory. As Will Bunch ably demonstrates, at various points in his career, Reagan often rehabilitated his falling popularity by tacking to the left. He did things like increasing spending. He did things like cutting and running from America's hopeless engagement in a religious civil war in the Middle East (that would be Lebanon, after the bombing of the Marine barracks." He negotiated disarmament with Gorbachev—the most proximate explanation for the popularity with which he left office.

But every last time he did something like that he was excoriated by at least some conservatives for selling out conservatism.

But if he hadn't, he wouldn't have been popular.

But the fact that he was, fortuitously enough, popular in the last months of his presidency, when his connection to conservative purity was most tenuous—and here's where the hustle comes in—"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-woodhouse/another-presidential-lega_b_153154.html">"[allowed] his conservative disciples to redefine his conservative disciples to redefine his presidency as an example of successful conservative governance." And that part worked—objectively so. Newt Gingrich drafted off the public's vague perception that being called a "Reaganite" was a desirable thing, and synonymous not with a flexible ideological pragmatism but with conservative principle, all the way to a conservative takeover of Congress.

Will Bunch's niftiest intervention is correlating the second, more formal wave of right-wing Reagan legacy-building—Grover Norquist's literal "Reagan Legacy Project," with its dimes and Mount Rushmore and more—with conservatives' strategic efforts to discredit the Clinton presidency in the late 1990s, culminating in his politicized impeachmet. By then, Bunch argues, they had successfully cassted the dye. Bush reassured distrustful conservatives in 2000 by labeling himself, not George H.W. Bush's heir, but Reagan's heir.

The book I reference above, Reagan In His Own Hand, came out in 2004. It's a valuable volume. I've used it in my research on Reagan in the 1970s, and will use it much more before I am through. But I cannot yet however arrive at a judgment over whether, as Annelise Anderson claims in her introduction, whether her chosen texts in fact fairly and satisfactorily establish Reagan's "knowledge, intelligence, determination, and discipline with which he pursued...public office" or his ever-present "humor, unfailing courtesy, decency, and confidence in his own beliefs." Martin and her co-editors, after all, could only put a fraction of Reagan's radio scripts between two covers. It will take a trip or two to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley for me to discover whether their selections were reasonably representative, and whether or not other, excluded, texts better evidence, among other traits, whether Reagan on the radio in the 1970s—is it possible?—ever proved himself indisciplined, unknowledgeable, uncourteous, or indecent. I can't judge these things because the product Reagan In His Own Hand itself is so obviously a part of the broader, and quite explicitly political, public relations project on the part of the conservative movement. It's part of a successful campaign.

How successful? By 2008 Republicans held presidential primary debates at the Reagan Library, in front of Air Force one, figuring "conservatism" as a synonym for "Reaganism" and "conservatism" transitively as a synonym for "virtue."

I hope I don't betray any ideological stripes if I claim that Reagan's legacy is actually more complicated than that, while movement conservatives have an ideological interest in keeping it simple. And that is what Will Bunch quite responsibly shows. One of the most important things about the book is that it will make liberals think better of Reagan. It is, quite literally, fair and balanced—to Reagan. But it is fair in its judgment of the conservative movement as well, I believe. It will make many feel worse about it, because it so plainly lays forth their politicized distortions of the complexity of Reagan's legacy. "There is no doubt that he was the Great Communicator," Annelise Andereson writes. No doubt? No historian should ever say there's "no" doubt about anything.

I'm not claiming to write from some pristine, disinterested position of ideological purity. Especially considering the reason< for the necessity of my two time-starve apologies at the top of this post the same. I'm just saying that when Annelise Anderson opened her mail and received C-Span's survey, she didn't worry so much about her lack of qualifications in judging the Cleveland v. Coolidge Morality Authority question to throw the thing away. I suspect instead that if nothing else she voted strategically by putting Reagan on top of all the categories.

I reproach myself for not voting strategically in return by putting RR at forty-third place across the board—strategy in the spirit of doubt. Even though I don't actually think Reagan is rock-bottom in any of the categories this would have been the principled vote nonetheless. The writers who make a living at saying Ronald Reagan is the Greatest American Who Ever Lived do so not (or only partially) as an act of scholarship. They do so (at least partially) as part of a well-financed, decades-long propaganda campaign. I should have sent in the survey with Reagan the only one ranked, 43rd in every category, as a pragmatic gesture in the interests of the highest principles of historical inquiry. I don't think Reagan is the 43rd best president; nor do I think he's the tenth best president. But one historian ranking him 43 across the board as a matter of rote, to cancel out the one who most likely put him at Number One as a matter of rote, at least resets the scale back at zero.

In which the blogger expresses a certain generosity toward conversatives

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:54:59 -0800

Last night I debated Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review at Northwestern University on the proposition, "Resolved: The hour of conservatism has passed." It was a curious evening, right from the beginning—when, while meeting and greeting some of the undergrads, the topic of Jonah Goldberg, who'd visited the campus the previous month, came up.

I asked if any of them knew what Goldberg's mother's job had been in the Nixon administration. None knew that Lucianne Goldberg—later famous, of course, for persuading Linda Tripp to illegally tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky—had been paid $1,000 a week from the Nixon White House to impersonate a reporter for the "Women's News Service" in order to spy on Democratic campaigns. ("They were looking for really dirty stuff," she has related. "Who was sleeping with who, what the Secret Service men were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane—that sort of thing.")

So this I share with the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed members of the Northwestern Political Union, when one of the College Republican members pipes up: "I'd do that to help my party!"

It was yet one more confirmation of the point I made late in 2005: that the kind of chicanery we associate with Watergate is not incidental to conservative movement politics, but central to it, perhaps even foundational. "Nixon knew," I wrote, "that if you had a dirty job to get done, you got people who answered the description he made of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy: 'good, healthy right-wing exuberants.'"

I referenced, especially, Tom Charles Huston, the former chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, who in his inaugural address in 1965 excoriated conservatives "who abuse the truth, who resort to violence and engage in slander," and "who seek victory at any price without regard for the broken lives...incurred by those who stand in the way."

Mr. Huston, of course, was the Nixon staffer who wrote up an action plan for the White House to spy on enemies and break into offices.

What does it mean that the member of Nixon's staff who was closest to the conservative movement, who was best-versed in its literature and its habits, was not merely the most ruthless malefactor on Richard Nixon's staff but the one most convinced he was acting on principle? I've never gotten a straight answer from a conservative about that.

I could have built my debate presentation last night around that very fact. I chose not too, however. You might say I was overly kind, or lost my nerve; either way, I figured the task of defending conservatism in 2009 was herculean enough, so I made a much softer argument, one I've resisted before (we're all feeling our way through this brave new Obama world). It was a version of this one in Sam Tanenhaus' "Conservatism is Dead" and this one by Tom Reiss in 2005. I argued that the things that make conservatives conservative are eternal verities in the human animal: the reasonable desire for stability, predictability, prudence, and a baseline moral consensus. I argued that conservatism's intellectual commitment to understand humans' limitations, and their scouring of the historical record for moments when the utopian urge to force a heaven on earth have brought us a sort of hell instead, were exceptionally valuable. I cited Russell Kirk's "six canons of conservative thought"—things like respect for tradition, an affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence, a belief that property and freedom are closely linked, and a respect for the value of prudence—and said that, more or less, I personally concur with them.

Then I said that a movement that embraces Sara Palin as a leader, the movement of Newt Gingrich and Jerry Falwell and Phil Graham's crusades to destroy banking regulation, cannot protect them. In fact, I argued that the people we now call "liberals"—certainly a politics like Barack Obama's—does a better job. For instance, if you believe property and freedom are closely linked, and the moral hazard of severing work from reward, the worst example in our generation has been the outright theft of workers pensions specifically, and the dismantling of the defined-benefit pension system generally.

But you won't hear the people who call themselves "conservatives" ever talking about that.

Ultimately, I argued that conservatives these days seem more pathetic than dangerous. I cut them a break. I told the audience about the time I went on right-wing talk radio and the host started ranting about gay marriage. I told him I pitied him. Because 20 years from now, people like him will look like what racists like Lester Maddox look to us like now—pathetic relics, rolled over by the ineluctable tide of progress. I explained that I later realized, actually, that 20 years from now this particular host, and the vast, vast majority of conservatives won't have anything to worry about on that score, because they'll simply forget their former resistance and write it out of their own history altogether. That if, 20 years from now, we celebrate a Harvey Milk Day in addition to a Martin Luther King Day, we'll soon start seeing articles in the National Review about the how Milk, properly understood, is really a conservative, and why does the left insist on claiming him for themselves? And, probably, some future Republican president will nominate a Supreme Court justice married to someone of the same sex who merrily, happily shredded the New New Deal reforms of Barack Obama right alongside John Roberts and Sam Alito.

Because conservatives will always be with us. I admit it. They'll always be annoying, and always will be standing in the way of genuine reforms that can make the world a more stable, predictable, prudent, and moral place—the true goal of the kind of the kind of politics we pursue here at Campaign for America's Future. The point is just to keep them as far from the levers of power as possible.

So I lost the debate over whether the "hour of conservatism" had passed (the audience voted). Kind of my own fault. In classic liberal fashion, I couldn't even take my own side in an argument. But I don't mind. I'd rather throw a debate and win a $800 billion stimulus bill to reeducate the American people about what progressive government can do for them, than the other way around. The Age of Obama, I suppose, is rubbing off on me. Conservatives just don't scare me as much any more.

Holding Down the Fort from Chicago

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:43:17 -0800

Out in Washington, most of my Campaign for America's Future colleagues are at a great CAF-sponsored conference on "Thinking Big, Thinking Forward"—about how to achieve the kind of ideas for the economy that we need, not the ideas Susan Collins and Ben Nelson will support. Our research team has just kicked in a major report on the subject, "Beyond Recovery: America's Public Investment Deficit." And ABC News has done a major piece on our efforts on their website. They call our side of the debate the "Krugman Democrats," quoting Bob Borossage extensively, after Paul Krguman's columns demonstrating that if it's actually economic recovery we're after, the stimulus needs to be much bigger. I would call people who say that "reality-based Democrats," not "Krugman Democrats," but at least they spell Bob's name right, so that's OK.

Meanwhile, on the subject of being divorced from reality—I subscribe to a service called "Publisher's Lunch," a tip sheet that announces the latest book deals. Here's a new deal just signed:

Brian Jennings's CENSORSHIP: Talk Radio in Jeopardy, a comprehensive look at the Fairness Doctrine and the potential risks it poses to conservative talk radio, to Anthony Ziccardi at Pocket, with Kathy Sagan editing, by Frank Breeden of Premiere Authors Literary Agency.

Good to know that while Democrats, and hopefully some Republicans of good faith, put their shoulder to the wheel saving the economy for future generations, the right will be keeping busy with an entirely imaginary conspiracy theory.

ABC News Reports: All the President's Bling:

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:23:11 -0800

Please, please, please excuse my French. But ABC News today ran a story that felt to me like they were saying: "N****r gets to ride in a free limousine."

Read it yourself. Tell me what you think. But first page back through your memory banks, and ask if you can recall the secured transportation, or their budget for entertaining heads of state--say, duries the presidencies of Bush, Reagan, or Bush; or even, for that matter, William Jefferson Clinton--described in the media as a "perk."

I detect a racial undertone, and some will find me oversensitive. Fine. Let's look at this ideologically. When Gov. Jerry Brown of California, cognizant of the political damage the conservatives' "limousine liberal" stereotype was doing, switched to a modest sedan...the conservatives just made fun of him for that. Liberals can't win. And ABC News insults us all.

Playboy in Braille

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:59:55 -0800

That, at this do or die moment of peril for our economy, is what the religious right would prefer to focus on. From a Focus on the Family email soliciting volunteers to call senators to oppose the nomination of David Ogden for deputy attorney general:

Pornography and Obscenity: Ogden has extensively represented Playboy, Penthouse and other pornography businesses on numerous occasions and even argued to force the government to use tax dollars to publish portions of Playboy in Braille at the Library of Congress.

This is really, really, important, says Dr. Dobson:

Again, I am asking every Focus Action team member to call their two senators and strongly oppose the nominations of Ogden, Johnsen and Perrelli. This is absolutely crucial. Despite all his talk of “change,” Obama is moving to politicize the government and staff the Justice Department with pro-abortion, pro-pornography, anti-family activists. Thank you so much for making your voice heard on behalf of life and family.

Take action to save the economy instead.

These are the people with whom President Obama is attempting to negotiate in good faith

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:52:58 -0800

From The Politico, on a recent Republican retreat:

Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, the chairman of the Republican Conference whose office organized the three-day retreat, kicked off the final dinner with a clip of George C. Scott as Gen. Patton imploring his troops, “We’re going to kick the hell out of (the enemy) all the time, and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose.”

Queen of Fleece

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:34:28 -0800

Dave Weigel penned a must-read about the flat-earther who's driving the Republicans' anti-recovery strategy. It reminds me of my thoughts when Jonah Golberg published Liberal Fascism. I wanted to publish a three word review: "It will work." Because that's the only real relevant thing to say, about his book, and about Amity Shlaes's made-up story about the failure of the New Deal: the very fact that a respectable-looking, book-like object exists that says liberals caused all the world's problems will is cover enough for powerful people to claim that sound scholarship demonstrates that liberals caused all the world's problems.

Good arguments, bad arguments, it does not matter. For the next two generations at least, a considerable plurality of your literate fellow Americans will, upon hearing you're a liberal, believe you to be on board with eugenicism and will hold you responsible for the Depression. Get used to it. That's how the Big Con works. Like Vincent Foster said in his suicide note, about the Wall Street Journal editorial page: they lie with impunity.