Biting at the Mirror

Because the lines that others had quoted from it seemed to hint at either subterfuge or publicity-seeking, I hadn't bothered to read, much less comment on, disgraced ex–Times chief Howell Raines's bit of advice for John Kerry. Perusing it on Lane Core's blog, however, I note a few statements that are particularly interesting in light of other pieces that I've read lately.

Although many commentators have focused on Raines's bluntness with respect to Kerry, the most remarkable thing about the piece — "remarkable" being a measure of size, not surprise — is the degree to which the condescension and snobbery fairly ooze through the pores in one's monitor. Ours is "an electorate schooled to respond to simple messages"; "greed will make folks vote for Democrats if it's properly packaged." If this piece can be taken at face value, it appears that Mr. Raines has learned nothing from his downfall. In his attempts to manipulate the simple, greedy American public, he transformed the New York Times into a discredited rag, and now he would have the Democrat candidate for President follow the same course.

In his smarmy arrogance, he does, however, reveal what many conservatives have sensed beneath the disingenuous arguments of leading liberals. This something is the classic tendency to describe one's opponents by looking in the mirror. Consider:

Kerry has yet to learn to do what Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney do when they're in the hot seat. They take over the interview even when they have nothing to say and nothing to sell.

Big mike, no message. That's an interesting observation, coming from a man in the process of advising a party whose biggest problem is that it is defined most starkly only in opposition to the other's ideas.

Americans aren't antagonistic toward the rules that protect the rich because they think that in the great crap-shoot of economic life in America, they might wind up rich themselves. It's a mass delusion, of course, but one that has worked ever since Ronald Reagan got Republicans to start flaunting their wealth instead of apologising for it. Kerry has to understand that when a cure is impossible, the doctor must enter the world of the deluded.

The elite self-avowed "corporation-bashing" hater of business believes the possibility of individual economic advancement to be an illusion. I don't know much about Raines's background, but I get the sense of an old-money snob standing in the corner, with his veins cracking through his powdered skin, sneering at the nouveau riche. Perhaps the poor can never become wealthy, in his view, because they can never become the only type of rich that counts.

Projecting onto conservatives his own emphasis on deceiving the deluded fools who, unfortunately, have at least the power of the vote, Raines insinuates — as a truth so obvious as to require no analysis — that the Laffer curve is merely legerdemain. The idea that confiscating too much of the income for which people work will discourage them from working is taken as a self-evident deception. (Perhaps the missing analysis is that we filthy masses will work because that's what filthy masses do.) The lesson that Raines draws from this analysis is astonishing, from a certain perspective:

It means that he must appeal to the same emotions that attract voters to Republicans — ie greed and the desire to fix the crap-shoot in their favour.

From a supporter of the party of big government! The party of leg-up affirmative action and class warfare. The party of identity politics and give a man a fish so that he'll have to come back to you for a fish tomorrow. Of government benefits for illegal aliens and of abortion on a whim.

Now, it is absolutely true that — to many conservatives' objections, including mine — part of President Bush's strategy has been to absorb some of the votes on offer for big government bribery. That, however, is only a problem from the President's political right. What Raines and his ilk have apparently concluded, as they seethe to the President's left, snarling as he moves toward them, mirror in hand, is that liberals must do more of what they've tripped themselves up by doing too much.

By interpreting the Republicans', and conservatives', success as the product of false promises and appeals to the worst in people, rather than the best, some liberals conclude that they've simply been attempting to buy off too few people. In response to conservative advice that retirement preparation be a matter of individual risk and individual reward — founded on a faith in the American system and the American economy — Raines slaps some lipstick on an aging (toothless) redistributionist whore and calls her a "pot-of-gold retirement" that is "as secure as Cheney's investment in Halliburton."

One wonders, though, with the Rainses' giving no indication that their wealthy is up for grabs and with economic possibility's being seen as a delusionary lie, from whom the wealth is supposed to be redistributed. Indeed, one could argue that citizens' beginning to wonder just that is among the larger problems that liberals currently face. The simple electorate has begun to notice that, when asked "who will pay?," the Democrats have really only been holding up a mirror. And Raines's advice? Hold the mirror higher.