Blogs: Rick Perlstein

Plastics!

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:10:14 -0400

News that shower curtains might make people sick is alerting consumers to the problem of toxins in plastics. A recent report by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice found that some curtains –- sold at major chain stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, K-mart, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart -– contain high concentrations of toxic chemicals like phthalates. These have been linked to reproductive defects and developmental problems in infants.

Parents pay attention when it comes to toxic substances and child safety. They were caught unawares by last year’s toxic toys incident -- which led Mattel to recall millions of children’s products made in China. But this summer, concerned parents might hear some good news, because Congress is working to reauthorize and reform the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission was set up in 1973 to "protect the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death" from more than 15,000 varieties of consumer products. The agency is charged with enforcing mandatory standards for products, banning and recalling products, researching potential hazards and developing voluntary standards for industry.

Over the years, the commission has grown weak. But only last year did the public begin to take notice. When the agency had to recall millions of children's toys, it was unable to pass safety rules or take action against violators, The Wall Street Journal reported. A sharp decline in resources is one reason for the agency's inadequacies. Three commissioners are supposed to run the agency, but for the last two years, there have been only two. Perhaps even worse, in the past several years, the staff has been cut by more than half, to about 400 employees....

Read the report here to learn how your shower curtain can kill you.

McContainers

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:13:59 -0400

Contest: caption this photograph...

Here's my entry: In a bid for Midwestern voters devastated by runaway manufacturing jobs, John McCain and Joe Lieberman pose with shipping containers in Third World country seeking free trade deal.

And now...the rest of the story

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:55:23 -0400

Here's the rest of my answer to my friend who asked me to explain why conservatives are in disarray. Nothing that will be new to longtime readers, who—newbies, too!—are invited to contribute their own reflection in the comments:

1) There has been, by conservatives own self-definition, a "modern conservative movement" at least since the Goldwater campaign of 1964. Ever since, they been explicit and sedulous about their goal: first control the Republican Party, then control the government. In 2001, with Republican control of the presidency, congress, and the federal courts--and conservative control of the Republican Party--for the first time since the inauguration of the movement, for the first time, and on their own terms, conservatives had a chance to govern. They governed, too, with exceptional popular wind in their sails (at least since 9/11/01), and with the benefit of an extraordinary infrastructure that let them staff the federal government from top to bottom with personnel steeped in the ideas and habits of an extraordinarily self-conscious "conservative movement." This single blunt fact cannot be overstated: here was the first chance in the modern era conservatives have had to prove themselves. And they failed. Imagine if somehow Leon Trotsky had survived and was restored to the leadership of the Kremlin, after generations of "Trotskyists" had built an entire culture around the notion that if only they were in the Kremlin, the revolution would have succeeded. But their reign proved to be shit from start to finish. The psychic wounds would be profound. The disarray, mutual recrimination, confusion, anger, are only to be expected.

2) Consider P.J. O'Rourke's famous joke: "conservatives say government doesn't work, and then they get elected to prove it." Conservatives make much of their movement's plurality, their intellectual divisions. But all the while they united around Ronald Reagan's nostrum from his 1981 inaugural address, "government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem." The point is obvious, and frequently stated: people who despise government have trouble governing. But when you look at the question of disarray, the question goes deeper. How to reform "conservatism"? Certain "reformers"--Douthait and Salam, Brooks--say, Stop despising government. But if that's the reform, again, disarray, mutual recrimination, confusion, anger, are only to be expected: it forces an identity crisis. You can't simply turn on a dime against something that was supposed to be a core principle and not suffer wounds.

3) A culture of bad faith and cheap grace. I presume you saw my review of Edwards' book:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR200805...

Note how Edwards seems to have comforted himself all these years with a "fact" that is simply untrue: that the line-item veto--and, by implication, the imperial presidency itself--was something liberal Democrats, not conservatives, supported. Nearly every conservative has some version of this--some way of saying that if self-identified conservatives fail or fall short, it's because they're not "really" conservative. But the standards of what is a "conservative" are subjective, shifting, self-contradictory, and always self-serving. A conservative will always give himself the out of saying "conservatism has never been tried." The culture feeds off its own refusals of personal intellectual responsibility.

Bills Come Due

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:30:53 -0400

A friend recently asked me to summarize why conservatives seem to be in such disarray these days. I listed four reasons, in separate paragraphs; "BIlls come due," was how I began the fourth:

Much of what conservatives do in power--or, if not in power, much of the way conservatives use minority power to obstruct--involves starving public goods in a way that feels good in the present (low taxes!) with consequences only apparent in the future. To take a blunt example, the waste-water infrastructure built during America's great postwar era of public investment was designed to last fifty years. Tax-cut mania coincided with the precise moment that those fifty years are up. So America is falling apart. Why conservative disarray? I imagine that on some level conservatives grasp these consequences.

Never forget the D-minus, as I always remind loyal readers. Now (h/t Atrios) the mainstream media is starting to get the picture. Best quote: "Everybody is drinking somebody else's waste water." Best seven-word rebuke of the threadbare ideology of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps conservatism I've ever heard.

The Pumafinks, Part 2: The Movie

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:26:54 -0400

Do these guys look like Democrats to you?

Cheney's Greatest Hits!

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:41:11 -0400

Earlier this afternoon I wrote about how "tactically speaking the party of conservatism is more the heir to Watergate than it is to Goldwater." Here's a little tidbit from the archives dug up by Sean Wilentz in his new book The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008: it's May, 1975, and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times has just broke the story of a secret submarine mission inside Soviet territorial waters.

Here's Dick Cheney's handwritten notes on how the Ford administration might proceed next: "go after Hersh papers in his apt."

Our long national nightmare, it would appear, was not quite over.

[To clarify: this would be Mr. Cheney proposing breaking into Seymour Hersh's apartment. Wilentz does indicate that, to Cheney's credit, he thought they should seek a search warrant first. Those were the good old days...]

Pop Quiz

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:53:44 -0400

Here's a pop quiz to help me set up an argument I'd like to make. Please, everyone eyeballing this post, give me in the comments your guess (no cheating!) how much new money for the environment was added to federal spending when Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Pumafinks

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:56:31 -0400

This blog does not endorse candidates nor back a political party; should, say, John Sidney McCain or any other Republican come to their senses and reject their devotion to the conservatism that has been destroying America's democratic birthright lo these past several decades, and come to Jesus and accept progressive values, we will welcome them with open arms. We have not been shy, however, in arguing that tactically speaking the party of conservatism is more the heir to Watergate than it is to Goldwater: revisit posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I say this as preface to reminding us all that Watergate-style dirty tricks have been by now baked into the cake of conservative politicking (as Pat Buchanan continues to boast, and as Thomas Frank's stunning next book, which I've been reading, will irrefutably demonstrate). I say this as a preface to a demonstration about how it might be happening in the hear and now, the better so we can ward it off.

As I've demonstrated in Nixonland, key to Richard Nixon's smashing reelection success in 1972, and indeed his entire political career at least since the Hiss case in 1948, was to connive to get Democrats directing their vituperation at each other. Key to this were the operations that Nixonites referred to as "ratfucking," which I describe beginning with a discussion of the decline and fall of the candidate Nixon most feared to run against in 1972, Maine senator Edmund Muskie:

A stink bomb went off in one of his offices; a mysterious press release went out in Florida that the Muskie campaign was illegally using government-owned typewriters. Ten black picketers paced back and forth on the sidewalk in front of his hotel in Tampa calling him a racist for comment, back in September, that a Democratic ticket with a black running mate would have a hard time getting elected. An ad appeared in the February 8 issue of a Miami Beach Jewish newspaper: "Muskie, Why Won't You Consider a Few as a Vice President?" (Muskie hadn't said a word on the subject.) Flyers referring to Muskie's Polish heritage began appearing in Jewish neighborhoods: "Remember the Warsaw Ghetto...Vote Right on March 15."...

All of the other viable Democratic candidates—save the one Richard Nixon wanted to run against, George McGovern—suffered similarly during the primaries:

one morning Scoop Jackson's supporters opened their Tampa headquarters and found it plastered floor to ceiling with Muskie stickers A thousand cards circulated through a Wallace rally reading, "If you like Hitler, you'll love Wallace.") (The other side read, "A vote for Wallace is a wasted vote, on March 14 cast your vote for Edmund Muskie.") A press release on Muskie campaign stationery said Hubert Humphrey was anti-Israel.... On "Citizens for Muskie" letterhead, the Nixon operatives sent out letters addressed to "Dear Fellow Democrats (the same salutation Nixon's campaign used in 1962 when it apprised potential voters that [Democrat] Pat Brown was under the thumb of a left-wing organization that had adopted the "entire platform of the Communist Party"). The Florida letter read, "We on Senator Ed Muskie's staff sincerely hope you have decided upon Senator Muskie as your choice... However, if you have not made your decision, you should be aware of several facts." These included that Henry Jackson had sired an illegitimate daughter in high school and had twice been arrested for homosexual activity in Washington, D.C., and that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving in the company of a "known call girl" generously provided him by a lumber lobbyist.

Another letter on McCarthy stationery asked his supporters to ignore his name on the ballot and cast their votes for Humphrey. Actual rats scuttled through a Muskie press conference; ribbons tied to their tails read, 'Muskie is a rat fink." On television poles...elves posted giant signs, attributed to a "Mothers Backing Muskie Committee," reading HELP MUSKIE SUPPORT BUSING MORE CHILDREN NOW.... Democratic millionaires got a letter on Muskie stationery asking them not to donate: Muskie wanted small donors, not "the usual fat cats."

All this dreck issued—you guessed it—from the White House and Nixon's reelection campaign headquarters. Such "false flag" operations were an anchor of their campaign strategy: as Buchanan put it in a 1971 memo, to "focus on those issues that divide the Democrats, not those that unite Republicans," as their "guiding political principle." The point was to make it impossible for the Democrats to unite together at their convention in Miami Beach, and henceforth during the autumn campaign. It worked. At the end of 1971 pundits were predicting Democratic victory, whichever of their strongest candidates ended up with the nod. Then, soon enough, as I write, "In the watering holes where rival campaign staffers met to unwind, to gently chide each other, strike up flirtations, exchange war stories, imbibe with reporters—a veil of hostility descended between camps."

Different watering holes now, but same story.

No, it's not that some of the Hillary die-hardism isn't utterly organic, the product of sincere dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. But that was Buchanan's point in 1971: None of this stuff works unless you build it off divisions that already exist in Democratic circles. You exacerbate them. You light the fuse. You make it easy for good Democrats to rationalize that they're doing the right thing, as Hubert Humphrey rationalized to the president on election night in this private conversation that he was doing the right thing when he implied he helped sabotage George McGovern for the general election.

You find the loose thread in the coalition. Then you pull, pull, pull on it until it unravels. Think of this next time you hear about PUMA PAC, the "grassroots" organization still fighting for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama, but was chartered by a Republican.

Blood of the Lamb (II): "I'm the guy that sourced it!"

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:09:28 -0400

Yesterday I reflected on how conservatives can be categorized by the methods by which they maintain their own pristine innocence. Until this morning, however, I had never quite seen a conservative maintain his pristine innocence while simultaneously admitting his guilt. Watch Pat Buchanan discussing Richard Nixon and the divisions of the 1960s in this MSNBC video starring the dynamic duo of Pat Buchanan and yours truly. At around timestamp 7:59 I criticized the way the Nixon administration in 1971 tried to link Senator Edmund Muskie, Nixon's main rival for the presidency in 1972, to Trotskyists who organized an antiwar demonstration. Pat defensively barks out: "That was and Evans & Novak column! And it was sourced!"

Then, the punchline. Literally in the same breath he utters, "I know! I'm the guy that sourced it!"

Translation: that wasn't a Nixon administration dirty trick! I should know! I'm the one who performed the dirty trick!

I know, I know. I was confused, too. Just tried to keep smiling...

Blood of the Lamb (I)

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:31:48 -0400

A big part of how I understand the American right—it's lurking behind most of what I write, though I rarely discuss it explicitly—is the concept of innocence. Most conservatives I've met and corresponded with can be most usefully taxonomized, not according to whether they're "theocons" or "neocons" or economic conservatives or whatever else, but by the particular routines by which they wash themselves in the blood of the lamb—in other words, how they pronounce themselves and those they class themselves with to be without sin: conservatism never fails, it is only failed. The conservative African American thinker Shelby Steele has borrowed a concept from Soren Kierkegaard to describe what he sees as black Americans' tendency to bad-faith excuses that exempt themselves for any possibility of owning their own failures: "seeing for innocence." Myself, I've found this an indispensable concept for understanding how contemporary conservatives assess the past, present, and future of their movement. Conservatives are really crappy at personal responsibility.

I reviewed a fascinating recent iteration: the book by former American Conservative Union head Mickey Edwards defining conservatism as a philosophy reverent toward the Constitution and distrustful of executive authority; so thereby any Republicans who profane the Constitution and abuse executive authority can't be conservative. Here's an even blunter strategem: that, despite the successful decades-long conservative crusade to take over the Republican Party lock, stock, and barrel, if a Republican does something bad, it has nothing to do with conservatism. This version comes from Jonah Goldberg:

I agree with most folks quoted as saying that the GOP is in deep trouble and that conservatism is something of a mess these days as well. But for Packer, these terms — conservative and Republican — sometimes seem like interchangeable terms, while for me they are not. I think this may be one of the reasons why I thought the piece was so structurally flawed. He begins by arguing, asserting really, that conservatism begins with Nixon in the late 1960s, when Tricky Dick crafted a strategy of exploiting resentments, which any student of intellectual conservatism knows is simply wrong. Nixon did not like or trust the Buckleyites and the Buckleyites were hardly wild about Dick either. This fact should help one keep in mind that treating conservatism and the modern GOP as interchangeable is an analytical error of the first order.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone: if Jesus had uttered his admonition at a CPAC conference, you'd have to duck for all flying rocks.

I got that Goldberg quote from Kevin Drum a month ago, who ably debunks it here.

(Ten...nine...eight...seven...six...five...four...: I'm counting down until the first conservative responds by pulling out another of my favorites. I've written it down and placed it in a sealed envelope, to only be opened once this particular protestation of innocence starts gushing forth, to prove how predictable our friends on the right are.)