The Base Likes It Bloody. The Candidates Dish It Up. Do the Rest of Us Have to Swallow It?
Washington Post
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, June 10, 2007; B01
Ron Paul often looks aghast, as though cartoon steam is about to whistle from his ears. He has the startled look of someone who has discovered, once again, that he is the only sane person in the room. Paul had the full, wide-eyed, everyone's-gone-loony look last Tuesday night in the "spin room" after the latest Republican presidential debate, as he criticized candidates who seemed willing to nuke Iran.
"I was shocked! I was shocked!" said the libertarian congressman from Texas. His rivals for the GOP nomination, he believes, are espousing an immoral position that is actually a form of pandering.
"They're worried about the immediate next election, which is the Republican primary, and anything they can do to pander, they'll do it, and they'll forget about what they believe in, they'll forget about the Constitution, they'll forget about building coalitions."
Coalitions? Not a word you hear often on the campaign trail these days. We're already deep into Red Meat Season. This is the season of the marginal candidate whose voice rises higher and higher until it threatens to reach a pitch that only a dog could hear. It's the time when candidates try on entirely new political ideologies the way teenage girls try on skirts at Abercrombie. (If you're Mitt Romney, Reaganesque conservatism is the new black.)
What's different this election cycle is the brutally long primary season -- a full year of posturing, base baiting, sniping and heel nipping that only a political junkie could love. We'll be on this red-meat diet for so long it may kill us.
(Continued here.)
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, June 10, 2007; B01
Ron Paul often looks aghast, as though cartoon steam is about to whistle from his ears. He has the startled look of someone who has discovered, once again, that he is the only sane person in the room. Paul had the full, wide-eyed, everyone's-gone-loony look last Tuesday night in the "spin room" after the latest Republican presidential debate, as he criticized candidates who seemed willing to nuke Iran.
"I was shocked! I was shocked!" said the libertarian congressman from Texas. His rivals for the GOP nomination, he believes, are espousing an immoral position that is actually a form of pandering.
"They're worried about the immediate next election, which is the Republican primary, and anything they can do to pander, they'll do it, and they'll forget about what they believe in, they'll forget about the Constitution, they'll forget about building coalitions."
Coalitions? Not a word you hear often on the campaign trail these days. We're already deep into Red Meat Season. This is the season of the marginal candidate whose voice rises higher and higher until it threatens to reach a pitch that only a dog could hear. It's the time when candidates try on entirely new political ideologies the way teenage girls try on skirts at Abercrombie. (If you're Mitt Romney, Reaganesque conservatism is the new black.)
What's different this election cycle is the brutally long primary season -- a full year of posturing, base baiting, sniping and heel nipping that only a political junkie could love. We'll be on this red-meat diet for so long it may kill us.
(Continued here.)
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