The GOP stays the course, like the train wreck it is

In the late summer of 1964, at a campaign rally in Memphis, Tennessee, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was busy laying the thematic groundwork of modern conservatism: "A lot of my enemies call me simple," he confessed in a state that at least bordered the few deep-southern states he would go on to win. But his confession was no apology. No sir. It was a point of honor because, you see, "The big trouble with the so-called liberal today," Goldwater continued, "is that he doesn’t understand simplicity."

Elsewhere around the country a Hollywood actor, who, 16 years later, after (some say) a major career change, would indeed win Tennessee, was stumping for Barry along similar and repetitive lines: "They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers."

By late fall of 1964, on the heels of one of the most humiliating electoral defeats ever, neither man could have guessed just how fantastically successful the core of their stump speeches would prove to be. Still ahead were the confused amateur hours of the Democratic Party, but of greater import was the explosive triggering of the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, and, of course, into the 21st century, the revolutionary phenomena of the Bush II administration.

At the core of each was the still-determined selling and subsequent eager buying of simplicity, which, just as the revolutionaries had promised, was also at the core of their ruling philosophy. By 2008, however, the nation's carefree party was clearly over, its consequences vividly displayed, its hosts resoundingly thrown over. Perhaps the pornographic peddling of graphic simplicity would work on some future, unsuspecting generation, but not the present one; not after seeing, at long last, its ugly results.

So that's where we stand, politically speaking. More precisely, that's where approximately 4 out of 5 American voters stand. They had finally had enough of the simple-answers routine to complex problems, which they demonstrated with unmistakable clarity at the polls last year and in rather prodigious numbers.

So I ask you, wouldn't you think those Republican pols still aspiring to the White House would recalibrate their message -- mix it up at least a little; maybe acknowledge some of the world's complexity; tone down the thundering simplicity; recognize that a warmed-over 1964 campaign, for the umpteenth time, won't work in 2012?

Well of course that's what you'd think. That's what anyone with even minimal brain-scan activity would think -- except those Republican pols and their 1 out of 5 hangers on. And last week the former were out there, out there on the stump, proving their exception to what is by now a profoundly reasonable rule: If you wish to be taken seriously by a majority, you had best cut the simplistic crap.

Sarah Palin, for example, while introducing a talk-radio son of Barry Goldwater's abovementioned 1964 campaign assistant, undoubtedly thrilled herself and her hyperconservative Anchorage audience, but very few others, as she denounced those "self-proclaimed intellectuals and the smug lobbyists who dominate Washington" -- oh, and "the liberal media" too, naturally. It seems, according to Ms. Palin, they're all involved in a diabolical conspiracy to "approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101."

It "makes you wonder what the heck some in Washington are trying to accomplish here," Palin continued. "It all really is so backwards and skewed as to sound like absolute nonsense when some of this economic policy is explained," which she promptly did. And here it goes: "We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and controls it. And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next [for] debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and controls the people."

The conspiratist paranoia underlying that tangle of bad English and even worse logic may be psychiatrically complex, but by God it happily hits on all of political simplicity's cylinders. Ms. Palin and her little cohort still can't distinguish -- partly because they don't want to, but mostly because they don't want you to distinguish -- between Keynesian pump-priming and Stalinist state-planning. It's the same tired rhetoric from 1964 (or for that matter 1934), that may indeed find a majority target within future generations, but not that of 2012.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was disappointing the moderate base by also warming the True Believers -- the College Republican National Committee -- babbling about the Obama administration's economic "tyranny"; former governor Mitt Romney was occupied in lamenting what he called Obama's "government-led economy"; and Newt Gingrich was huckstering a neoconservative defense of torturers, led by a one-time "chief of staff, secretary of defense and a vice president who concentrated on national security" while his chief contemporary opponent, Barack Obama, was "read[ing] a couple of left-wing books on the CIA."

It -- all of it -- is almost stunning in its message content, or rather lack thereof, but even more stunning is that the GOP seems steadfastly determined to learn nothing from 2008.