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October 8, 2011
The conservatives in the US are angry this year. They're looking for a fighter amongst the Republican presidential candidates who can take hard swings at Barack Obama.They see the country going down the drain. They're looking for somebody with proven results and proven success, who has "grit and determination", who'll come in with guns blazing. That person, for them, will have the authority to do what he says he's going to do.
They want Clint Eastwood, the cowboy as the lone gunslinger taming the lawless frontier, whilst preaching a small-government, light-regulation libertarian philosophy. The underside in the GOP is incompetence and extremism.
The cowboy fighter ain't going to be Sarah Palin. She appears to be content to remain a celebrity; a media figure whose political voice has dwindled. Her political career was brief, bizarre, and sordid. According to the Beltway pundits the two candidates most likely to win the Republican presidential nomination are the Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
The GOP is drawn to arguments that play on male anxieties about strength and potency. Most recent campaigns have featured Republicans asserting that their candidate is manly and strong, while the Democrats’ candidate is effeminate and weak. George W. Bush’s playacting cowboy routine was entirely theatrical, and the intimation of violence in his rhetoric--remember his “bring ’em on” about the Iraqi insurgents---was plain vicarious.
The GOP has been pushed to an extremist anti-tax position by the Tea Party that has elevated ideology above all else. The latter think that turning back the clock to 1925 and freeing America’s Horatio Algers from taxation and red tape is how to ensure economic growth in today’s global economy. They don't understand fiscal policy and don't know their way around the major financial institutions.
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It's really quite entertaining watching Republicans try to argue that despite having been in power for more of the postwar period than they were out of it, they nevertheless bear no responsibility whatsoever for the allegedly awful condition of the USA. Indeed the presidential contenders' main message is that they hate politicians and want to take the country back from those bastards in Washington.
Once upon a time it would have been just as silly to suggest they can take control of Congress and the White House any time soon as it would have been to suggest that Tony Abbott might ever become prime minister of Australia. Now both outcomes look increasingly likely.