Thomas Frank - Wall Street Journal (August 13, 2008)

The Audacity of Nope

August 13, 2008; Page A15

It sounds very nice to say, as Barack Obama has done perhaps too much, that the upcoming election is about "hope" and "change." But those anodyne words conceal what I think is the public's true desire: Negation.

Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama's task is to help them heave it overboard.

It seems hard to believe after all the happy Republican talk a few years ago about a "permanent majority," but the public is now more unified in its antipathy toward the GOP than it has been in a long time -- maybe since Watergate, maybe since the Hoover administration.

From where I sit, the change in public opinion is striking. For the past week I've been on a tour promoting my new book, an account of the sometimes ingenious ways in which conservatives have wrecked government.

This is the second time I have written and promoted a book criticizing the conservative movement -- the other one having been published in 2004. Back then, as I recall, when I would talk on the radio and take calls from listeners, about half of the folks who phoned in just wanted to inform me that I was full of it.

This time, however, defenders of the faith are pretty scarce. Sometimes they pick up the phone to request that I go as hard on Democrats as I do on Republicans. Sometimes they want to engage me in philosophical debates about liberty, equality and justice, or the inherent problems of big government.

To my recollection, though, not one has yet tried to defend the current administration.

Of course, this might just be a fluke. Maybe only liberals listen to the radio shows I've been on. Maybe tomorrow I will finally get the horse-whipping I no doubt richly deserve.

But it might also be an accurate reflection of the national mood. President Bush's average approval ratings are currently hovering somewhere in the high twenties, having recovered slightly from the 19% that one poll gave him back in February, the worst number ever recorded for any president since polling began. (Jimmy Carter fell as low as 28%, Richard Nixon got down to 23%, and Harry Truman sank to 22%.)

This is as it should be. From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Justice Department, our government seems to have been driven into the ground by hacks, cronies and profiteers. From the moneyed halls of K Street to the gated suburbs of the big contractors, Washington now looks like a town of predators, not public servants. And from former Rep. Tom DeLay to Sen. Ted Stevens, the great men of the conservative era have been dropping in disgrace, leaving us the staggering bill for their follies.

The best that conservatives can hope for, I think, is that public opinion will simply harden into a cynicism toward government generally -- that people will transfer the blame for the recent period of conservative misrule to the very institutions that conservatives have abused so grotesquely. There are, naturally, plenty of pundits who have encouraged this blame-the-victim interpretation over the years, and they will be gratified to learn that the public seems to be buying it.

As the political consultant Douglas Schoen wrote in his recent book, "Declaring Independence," "voters are becoming increasingly cynical and demonstrate a record level of skepticism about the government's ability to effect positive change." However, only four pages after pointing this out, Mr. Schoen advises candidates to avoid criticizing the Bush administration, and seems to applaud Mr. Obama for his high-minded "bipartisanship."

This is precisely wrong. If he is to prevail in November, Mr. Obama cannot allow the right to profit from the discontent stirred up by their own misbehavior. Talking about "hope" is very nice when you're leading by 20 points, but what the Democrat has to do, now that John McCain has evened up the score, is take control of public outrage. He should not recoil from the bitterness that's out there. He should speak to it.

At the very least Mr. Obama must begin to offer an explanation for why things have gone so very wrong over the past seven years. He should tell us how, say, the failures of Iraq reconstruction were made inevitable by the conservative philosophy that "government should be market-based," as Mr. Bush once put it.

Besides, attacking Mr. McCain himself is pointless. The man no longer stands for anything. He has transformed himself from a maverick into a cipher, a hood ornament on a hit-and-run machine. He has no more political content now than the constantly changing cast of cynical right-wingers aboard his campaign plane.

That's why this election must be a referendum on Republican rule and the destructive doctrines behind it. It is a contest to put the blame where it belongs.