Oh, this is going to be fun, watching the myrmidons of conventional wisdom getting their well-dressed derrieres kicked from one end of America to the other between now and November.
No, not Achilles and his Thessalians at Troy. I’m talking about members of America’s political class. You know the type I mean — the politically correct, mostly Ivy League moderates and liberals pronouncing ex cathedra from Boston-Los Angeles-New York-San Francisco-Washington who dominate the mainstream media, the academy and foundations, and other establishment outposts of sophisticated opinion.
These folks lecture the rest of us about how to run the country; they are keepers of the conventional wisdom. And now, as the 2008 campaign enters the stretch run, we are about to see just how very much these folks know that is nonsense.
Take, for instance, the mantra of “change.” Having nominated Barack Obama and Joe Biden, respectively, for president and vice president — both prominent members of the most unpopular Congress in living memory — the Democratic wing of the political class chants incessantly about “change we can believe in.”
But it’s nothing less than a con job because the only change Obama and Biden offer is rhetorical. In terms of concrete policy proposals, what they offer is more government, more taxes, more regulation, more bureaucrats, more of everything that is wrong with Washington.
Peddling old liberal nostrums dressed up in new slogans works in a Democratic primary, but such moldy junk from the Great Society closet will turn off most of the rest of America once it begins to focus seriously on the campaign, as it will now that Labor Day is behind us.
What the political class doesn’t get is that it has a fundamental misunderstanding of what qualifies as genuine “change” in public policy for a nation whose electorate remains basically center-right, non-ideological and anti-millenarian. Change means less government, not more; honesty, not nuance; and results, not promises.
Such voters rejected the GOP in 2006 because they stopped believing the party’s leaders’ promises of change — i.e., less government, lower taxes, honesty in office. Led by Ted Stevens and his ilk, the Republicans went a bridge to nowhere too far and justifiably got the boot.
So then the Democrats came in and quickly made it clear that, despite their claims to the contrary, they learned nothing during their dozen years in exile. With less than two years as the majority, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lead a Congress with a single-digit popularity rating.
Then there is the “experience” mantra. Clearly worried about the contrast between Obama and John McCain on this score, Democrats were set chirping happily when they nominated Delaware’s senior senator for the second slot on their ticket. And with his silver mane, ready laugh and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairmanship topping off his 36 years in the U.S. Senate, Biden does look formidable to purveyors of the conventional wisdom.
In fact, Biden’s “experience” is part of the problem. Being a Democrat in the Senate for three and a half decades means that throughout his entire career, Biden has either been among those raising taxes, growing the bureaucracy and wasting billions of tax dollars on earmarks, or among those opposing the sporadic GOP efforts to curb such outrages.
True, McCain has been in the Senate nearly as long as the Delaware Democrat, but Republican McCain has credibility as an aspiring reformer, thanks to his consistent opposition to earmarks and other forms of wasteful federal spending.
And that brings us to McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, who literally and figuratively comes from about as far away from conventional Washington as it is possible to be. At the most basic level, what the myrmidons can’t grasp about Palin is twofold.
First, everything about her life story — small-town Wasilla, “Sarah Barracuda,” moose soup-loving wife of a champion snowmobile racer, lifetime NRAer, thrashing Ted Stevens and the Bridge to Nowhere crowd, pregnant daughter, all of it — says to America’s center-right majority that she’s one of them. Alaska-tough beats Chicago-corrupt every time.
And, second, her record makes her the genuine rebel among the four candidates for the White House, the true enemy of business-as-usual in Juneau and Washington, D.C. It matters not that she grew into her role as the outsider fighting the political machine, it only counts now that she alone can say she actually walks the talk about change voters will believe in.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on dcexaminer.com.
