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Thursday, March 09, 2006

South Dakota special

When I think about South Dakota, I think about all kinds of things.  Like this little item from way back when:

Nader Sees a Bright Side to a Bush Victory
by Melinda Henneberger

Dearborn, MI, November 1, 2000 –

Mr. Nader said he did not think there would be much difference between the justices Mr. Gore would choose and those Mr. Bush would appoint. After all, Democrats had helped confirm Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hadn’t they? Besides, “You can’t really predict how Supreme Court justices will behave.”

And he called the possibility that a court packed with Republican appointees could overturn Roe v. Wade a “scare tactic.” On Sunday, Mr. Nader said in a television interview that even if Roe v. Wade was overturned, the issue “would just revert to the states.” Just?

“Here’s what happened on that,” he said wearily. “The scare tactic is that would end choice in America, and I just said that’s not true, but I should have been astute enough not to mention that.”

He said he did not in any case believe for a moment that Mr. Bush would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. “The first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble and they know it,” he said.  He described the party’s opposition to abortion as just for show, “just for Pat Robertson.”

My point is not that Ralph Nader was secretly pro-coathanger.  My point is that Nader, like all too many men on the left, doesn’t believe that the right-wing culture warriors really mean it.  They think it’s all shadow-boxing, a distraction, a sop thrown to the radical fringe.  That same attitude can be found, as I’ve noted before, in Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, where Frank writes, “Values may ‘matter most’ to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won.  This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent in across its decades-long history.  Abortion is never halted.  Affirmative action is never abolished.  The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble.  Well, maybe and maybe not, folks.  You might think, along similar lines, “the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” and you’d be, ah, wrong, you know.  Besides, there’s a nasty time lag between that first back-alley death and the repeal (if any) of a state’s draconian abortion law, and in that time-lag, that state’s Republican Party might or might not be in deep trouble.  It’s hard to unseat incumbents in this jerry-built and gerrymandered system, after all.  So there’s no guarantee that popular outrage against back-alley deaths would jeopardize a state’s elected GOP officials en masse.  But we can be pretty sure that women with unwanted pregnancies would be . . . how shall we say? in deep trouble.

As for Nader’s belief that Gore would probably have appointed people like John Roberts and Samuel Alito: well, that’s reason number 22 I didn’t think his political judgment was worth bothering with.

Now, would Joe Lieberman have appointed people like Roberts and Alito?  Hmmm, I’d say the odds are only about 3-to-2 against.  So while I’m revisiting the grievous wounds of 2000, let me take a moment to consult with some Democratic consultants.  Who should Gore have picked as his running mate?  In June 2000, a prominent pair of Democratic strategists wrote:

By choosing former Georgia governor Zell Miller as his running mate, Al Gore could add intellectual brainpower, rhetorical firepower, and lots of plain old populist piss-and-vinegar to this staid election. . . .

At a time when politics seems moribund, Zell would bring energy. When people are looking for heroes, Zell’s the real thing. And when Democrats need someone who’s not afraid to open up a can of whupass on the radical right, they need look no further than Zell Miller.

For those of you unfamiliar with this “populist” lingo, “open up a can of whupass on” does not actually mean “join forces with.” Which is why these consultants turned out to be, ah, wrong.  Now, OK, so Gore didn’t take this particular piece of advice.  He did the next worst thing.  Fair enough.

By the way, those consultants were Paul Begala and James Carville.  You know, the guys who are now advising us to “take it back” using various strategems that include, in Charles Pierce’s immortal words, “pitching the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population overboard piecemeal.”

Digby and Amanda have been just brilliant on this lately, as you probably know. These are my two faves [link all fixed!  thanks, folks] for the month of March, but please feel free to toss more links into comments.

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 09:44 AM
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