Before the 2016 election—before the death of reason—elections impresario and general numbers dude Nate Silver put together and posted on his fivethirtyeight website the video shown above, “Long Before Trump, There Was Ross Perot”. What was interesting to me was not so much Perot seen as a precursor to Herr Donald as the conviction expressed by both George H. W. Bush deputy campaign manager (and now more or less former Republican) Mary Matalin and then Vice President Dan Quayle chief of staff (and now more or less former Republican) Bill Kristol that it was Perot who cost Bush the election.
Although as Nate himself explains, repeatedly, all the polls show that Perot took votes equally from Bush and Clinton, Mary and Bill both insist that that couldn’t be the case, although they base their argument not on data but rather their belief that Bush “deserved” to win and therefore should have won. It’s surprising (a little) that neither election pro Matalin nor history buff Kristol remembered what happened to Winston Churchill after he won World War II (a crushing defeat that gave Great Britain the first real, unfettered Labour Government in its history) or the Democratic Party in the USA in 1946—the first Republican Congress since 1932. If ’46 had been a presidential year, Truman almost surely would have gone down to defeat as well.
There is a natural ebb and flow to politics, to which, Republicans foolishly believed, they had become immune, thanks both to the great god Ronnie and the inherent and inescapable looneyness of the Democratic Party. And now look! An actual goddamn hippie in the White House, in direct violation of God’s Will!
Supposed sophisticates Matalin and Kristol never seemed to have asked themselves, if their supposition that Perot cost Bush the election was true, why did so many Bush voters go for Perot rather than their man Bush? What was so attractive about a jug-eared fast talker who quit the race five months before the election, alleging vague conspiracies against him, and then jumped back in two months later? Why would good Republicans vote for such a freak over a genuine war hero and triumphant commander in chief?
As I’ve frequently said, the Republican Party never accepted, and never recovered from, the shock of Bill Clinton’s election. Some, like Kristol and Matalin, seemed to think Clinton’s victory to be somehow invalid because it was “immoral”. Others were simply stunned by Bush’s massive unpopularity—his share of the popular vote (37.4%) was lower than any Republican presidential candidate since Roosevelt crushed Alf Landon in 1936 and considerably lower than Wanderin’ Walt Mondale’s 40.6%, garnered while being stomped by Reagan in 1984. Worse than Walter! That hurts!
For whatever reason, the hatred that rapidly formed against the Clintons for shattering the illusion of the once famous “mortal lock” on the presidency possessed by the Republican Party was phenomenal. The stunning growth of conspiracy theories that explained this ejection from Eden first blossomed, this transformation from Hyperion to satyr, an obsession that has come to define the Republican Party ever since, which now lives within the Fox tunnel. Kevin Williamson, semi-rational (at times) before his swiftboating/swiftbooting from his brief gig with the Atlantic for advocating that women who get abortions be hanged,1 put it this way:
A great deal of damage already has been done [to the Republican Party by Donald Trump], and there’s surely more to come. But there is a vicious cycle at work, too: Trump has an agency all his own, but the outrage merchants of Fox News and talk radio were on the lookout for their Trump before Trump came along. Trump fulfills a narrative necessity: There must always be betrayal. You cannot sell what they are selling without it. If the Democrats are in power, then they are betraying the country; if the Republicans are in power, then the “establishment” is betraying the country, “the country” here meaning the 0.8 percent of Americans who watch Tucker Carlson’s show on any given evening.2
As I’ve repeatedly charged, it was “respectable” conservatives as much as the mouth-breathing dittoheads who laid the groundwork for Trump.
1. I believe that Williamson, wanting more or less to be a dick, had argued that hanging was the best way to execute a human being and then, later, agreeing that abortion could at least be considered murder, suggested “provocatively” that if that were the case, then hanging would be the way to go. Instead of admitting that he was just being a dick, several times over, and that he was just “kidding” when he proposed the execution of several million women, Williamson stuck to his guns, and his nonsense. Well, there are rewards for being obnoxious to feminists, but writing for the Atlantic is not one of them.
2. In an earlier post on things right wing, I posted the above quote from Kenny Boy, and then added the following: Yet even Williamson, after that crushing aside, has to take it back in an awkward parenthetical: “(That isn’t to mock Tucker Carlson; he’s a gifted man, but relatively few people watch cable news for the same reason that far fewer people read National Review than US Weekly.)” Uh, Kevin, you first implied that the 0.8 percent of Americans who watch Tucker Carlson’s show on any given evening are frothing followers of Steve Bannon and then in your next sentence you compare them to the rare spirits who delight in the frothy neo-Buckleian wit of the National Review? Why not just plaster a bumper sticker on your forehead that says “Tucker I’m Your Bitch!”
