There are two major phenomena that I am really worried about in this election cycle: The first is the readily apparent bloodthirst or barbarism of the Republican base, evident in the previous two debates, when the audience applauded Rick Perry's record number of executions (234), despite the fact that a few of them--one definite--may have been innocent, a fact that they--and Perry himself--are perfectly willing to ignore. In the second debate, the audience cheered, "Let him die!!" when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul what should be done with a young man who falls into a coma without health insurance. Regardless of what one believes about the size or role of government, throwing a man's life away is not something about which we should be so nonchalant. Suffice to say, on this point, I am more terrified of our electorate than the people we may be electing.
It is true that Obama has not been a very effective President; there are two main things that he is not doing: 1) He is not fighting hard enough for what he wants, and 2) He attempts to accommodate a political party that is not interested in anything less than his own ruin and their ascension to absolute power. But these two points presuppose that we cannot afford to replace him with anything other than a possible Third-Party progressive or another Democrat; these points presuppose that the incapacity and potential tyranny of a Republican candidate is a given. It isn't "Anyone but Obama!"; rather it is "Please someone who can fight harder against the Tea Party than Obama is!"
Today, my parents were watching Fox News (just to see what they were saying), and they were misinterpreting liberals' dissatisfaction with Obama in order to support the notion that the Republicans should win, that Obama wasn't doing the country any good, etc. But this is not at all the case, as I have demonstrated concretely above; no Obama supporter in his or her right mind could possibly want any of the Republican candidates to replace him.
A few weeks ago, I came across an article about a recently-retired Republican staffer who brought up an incredibly terrifying potential reality, that extends in part from everything I said during the 2010 campaigns about Fox News and media saturation: "If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power"1. Imagine the kind of apparatuses that would be required to convince voters that the disappearance of their Social Security checks and health insurance is beneficial. Logic would tell us that the 2010 election strategy should have been a one-shot deal: Get them just crazy enough to put the Tea Party into office, but those freshmen could expect to be voted out again when the voters see the reality of their agenda. But what if it were possible to fool them not once, but repeatedly, even as the more catastrophic, possibly permanent damage starts to manifest itself?
And if it doesn't succeed immediately, it does not take long for the Republican party to recover its abused legion of voters: The many scandals of the 80s and 90s should have been the death knell for the Christian conservative bloc, but during the 2000s, in which many more scandals occurred (such as that of Ted Haggard, Scott Roeder, and George Rekers), that bloc only reemerged in an even more radicalized form called the Tea Party2. The truth is that what that article claimed has already come to pass: The GOP is so successful that it can absorb a near-constant stream of scandals directly caused by its ideology, unleash the most irresponsible policies, and still manage to get elected, merely by changing its facade. It is the Hydra.
1) http://truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779
2) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/crashing-the-tea-party.html
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