Frum and the Politics of the Extremes

I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but I think I agree with David Frum. At least in part. I don't want to make it a habit of agreeing with former Bush speech writers, but in his article this weekend in the Washington Post, I found myself nodding along with a lot of what he had to say.

The first half of his article revolves around the following: As the McCain campaign has spent the better part of the last month gasping for air just to stay alive, it has moved far to the right in an attempt to fire up the extreme base of the Republican Party. As Frum says,
“To fire up the Republican base, the McCain team has hit at Barack Obama as an alien, a radical and a socialist...
“The very same campaign strategy that has belatedly mobilized the Republican core has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won.”

There was a hope at the beginning of this election season that we’d moved beyond the politics of extremism. The plan was to move us away from politics as usual and to bring us closer together while still giving us choices on real issues like the economy, health care and the war. Certainly the extremists will always be around—those who are excited by bashing intellectuals and by shouting inflammatory remarks which verge on racism. But if President Bush represented the choice of those people, his failures in office and his horrible approval ratings have shown that leadership from the extremes doesn’t work, and more over, as a country we’re looking for something new. Karl Rove may have been able to ignite enough extremists to “elect” this man twice, but after 8 years of failure, it cannot last.

Frum sees McCain’s attempt to return to this kind of extremist political posturing as a danger for the Republican Party and I’m sure that it is. But I think there is more at stake. I am not worried about the demise of the GOP as much as I am worried about what will happen to our political system in general if Republicans continue to offer up candidates who appeal to a very vocal extremist minority.

I am seeing the results of this in my own feelings at the end of this long election season. Not only have the last 8 years been a disaster, but as the McCain campaign sinks lower and lower in its attempts to use fear to get votes, I find myself getting angrier and angrier—forgetting why Obama was so appealing to begin with.

Frum talks of how, “the political culture of the Democratic Party has changed over the past decade. There's a fierce new anger among many liberal Democrats, a more militant style and an angry intolerance of dissent and criticism.”

The angry right has created an angry left. We are fed up as we should be and I blame a lot of it on the road that we’ve all been led down by the polarizing policies of the machine which gave us 8 years of Bush. The policies of Rove and others to move us to extremes—to pit us against each other on issues which are meant to divide us not unite us, and now recently, McCain’s attempts to place Obama in the company of all of those who are furthest left—the socialists, the domestic terrorists—have left us with no choice but to be angry, and to want to fight back.

If Obama wins on Tuesday it will be for a lot of reasons, but I think that a big part of it will be because we are not willing any longer to play this game of extremes. And although Frum is worried about bringing the angry left to Washington, I am hopeful. Hopeful that when Barack Obama says he represents change that he means it. Hopeful that when Obama talks about hope, he truly believes that he has policies that can restore hope to many of the people in this country who need it more than ever. And hopeful that this man who has inspired so many people to get involved in the process, people who have never been involved before, will not bring to the political world a mob of angry men and women, but people who are hungry for change and who want to move this country not towards the other extreme but who want to reverse some of the horrible policies of the past eight years in an intelligent and measured way. We don’t need an angry extreme left to do this. We need a strong leader who can bring all of us together—right, left, and center—and who can show us that really the things which divide us pale in comparison to the things which we all have in common. We are voting in a very exciting election and I am even more excited about where we are headed if Barack Obama wins on November 4^th.