England for Obama

Bob Cesca talks about the sheltered place that the Right inhabits -

“So the far-right needs to remain insulated from unfriendlies, which is why talk radio is a more comfortable format – calls can be screened and reality can be obfuscated. In other words, it’s a lot easier to suggest that the president-elect is a terrorist on a talk radio show where, you know, a tidal wave of facts won’t get in the way of the lies.”

- and he’s right. And this is one of the reasons why, as I told my friend Nick on election night, the Republicans’ choice of Sarah Palin pick went so horribly wrong for them. Why it was such a horrendously, massively, wrong choice.

And I’m not talking about favourability ratings here. Or about one’s own personal take on Palin.

I’m talking about the fact that, throughout the campaign, John McCain and his peeps were trying to attack Barack Obama on, well, anything that came to hand. He’s an elitist! He’s scary! His name sounds funny! He doesn’t know what he’s doing! He’s naive! He’s not like you and me!

And the thing is: all of these attacks simply didn’t marry up with the objective truth. The McCain camp spouted their ‘truths’, endlessly, and yet the American people saw something quite different. They saw a man who wasn’t scary. Who did appear to be just like them. Who was capable and who did seem to know what he was doing.

That’s why the attacks didn’t stick.

And yet: there was one line of attack that, in actual fact, was reasonable. That did have its basis in objective reality and not simply in the narrative that the Republicans wanted to carve out.

That line of attack was that Barack Obama was inexperienced.

And then they went and blew it all on choosing Sarah Palin.

‘Inexperience’ was the one line that McCain et al could have stuck to – and which could have worked withe public. Because it was the only line of attack against Obama that was reasonable and possibly valid.

People have been commenting on how Fox News and the right-wing shock jocks have contributed to the Republicans’ eventual demise because they have, in fact, been a massive sticking plaster over a gaping sore. A gaping sore that the Right have refused to acknowledge… partly because they’ve had the undying devotion of, yes, Fox News and the right-wing shock jocks.

The Right haven’t been living in our world. They’ve been living in theirs. And I don’t even mean that in a partisan way. They’ve been living in the bubble that they created, and not the real world, with all its changes, all its flaws, all its liberalism and all its, erm, reality.

One would like to think that the bubble will, now, finally burst. I’m sure that Fox will do its best to maintain it – and as Bob Cesca points out, post-election day, it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of bursting – but it really isn’t in the GOP’s interest to remain in their parallel universe, no matter how cosy and safe it feels to them.

Like the Conservatives over here in 1997, they’re back in their cave, defeated, in-fighting, letting blood and licking their wounds (and it’s no mean feat to do all those things at once). But the Republicans will have to emerge from that cave/bubble/insert metaphor here in order to work out where they went wrong, and what they need to do to to regain ground with the average American voter.

And hopefully, like the Conservatives over here, it will take them at least 10 years to do so.