Marco Rubio, Sarah Palin And Idiot America-- Can It Work In Florida?

The election for the Florida open senate seat pits a weak and ethically-challenged Democrat, Kendrick Meek, against either popular mainstream conservative Governor Charlie Crist or an in-over-his-head extremist and teabagger candidate, Marco Rubio. Some of us think we're better off with Crist as the GOP nominee, because he might not be as destructive and obstructionist in the Senate as Rubio. Others of us think we're better off with Rubio as the Republican candidate because he's probably too extremist to win a statewide race. Obviously no one can be sure of how the electoral calculus would really play out. However, I recalled how Charles Pierce started winding down his brilliant survey of our country's political landscape, Idiot America, with the story of what happens when deranged extremists take over a political party. He sets the scene as the last presidential campaign was getting into high gear:

In August, in what was the first major event of the general election campaign, both Obama and John McCain went out to California to a "forum" organized by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church. The very notion that an affluent God-botherer like Warren should be allowed to vet presidential candidates was in itself a sign that the opportunity that twinkled briefly in the election [that the country was coming to its senses after the self-inflicted poison and bullshit of the last decade] was largely lost. At one point, Warren turned to Obama and asked, "At what point does a baby get human rights?"

The only proper answer to this question for anyone running for president is "How in Hell do I know? If that's what you want in a president, vote for Thomas Aquinas." Instead, Obama summoned up some faith-based flummery that convinced few people in a crowd that, anyway, had no more intention of voting for him than it did in erecting a statue of Baal in the parking lot. Subsequently, Warren gave an interview in which he compared an evangelical voting for a pro-choice candidate to a Jewish voter supporting a Holocaust denier. And the opportunity went a-glimmering.

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there. Desperate to disassociate himself from the previous administration, which had spent seven years crafting policies that it could sell to Idiot America while the actual America was coming apart at every seam, McCain instead wandered deeply into Idiot America himself, perhaps never to return. He embraced the campaign tactics used to slander him in 2000, even hiring some of the people who had been responsible for them. He stated that he couldn't now vote for his own immigration reform bill. He spent a long stretch of the campaign in violation of the campaign finance reform bill that bore his name. He largely silenced himself on the issue of torture.

He really had no choice. The Republican party, and the brand of movement conservatism that had fueled its rise, had become the party of undigested charlatans. Some of them believed the supply-side voodoo that so unnerved Jonathan Chait. Some of them believed in dinosaurs with saddles. Movement conservatism swallowed them all whole, and it valued them only for the raw number of votes they could deliver. The cranks did not assimilate and the party using them did not really care whether the mainstream came to them. It simply hoped there were enough of them to win elections. The transaction failed the country because it did not free the imagination so much as bridle it with conventional politics. It niche-marketed the frontier of the mind so rigidly that, by 2008, you couldn't run for president as a Republican without transforming yourself into a preposterous figure.

To win the primaries, you had to placate the party's indissoluble base. (This is what ate poor Mitt Romney alive. He went from being a rather bloodless corporate drone to being a rip-roaring culture warrior and ended up looking like a very big fool.) Having done that, you then had to tiptoe away from those same people without alienating them completely. The more successful you were at this delicate fandango, the more preposterous you had to become, especially if, like John McCain, you'd tried to avoid the cranks for most of your public career.

Once McCain got the nomination, he was denied his first choices for vice presidential candidates because neither of them passed muster with the base he had so debased himself to woo. He ended up with Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, whose hilarious lack of qualifications for the job was interpreted at the Republican nominating convention as the highest qualification of all. She said so herself... If the country took its obligations to self-government at all seriously, the presence of Sarah Palin on a national ticket would have been an insult on a par with the elevation of Caligula's horse. However, the more people pointed out Palin's obvious shortcomings, the more the people who loved her loved her even more. She was taken seriously not merely because she had been selected to run, but also because of the fervor she had stirred among people in whose view her primary virtue as a candidate was the fact that she made the right people crazy.

Marco Rubio is winning every single GOP straw poll among the party's activist base-- and winning them by jaw-dropping landslides. He may well win the closed Republican primary in Florida. But will mainstream voters go along with a die-hard, flip-flopping obstructionist whose only asset is that he's not gay and that he's extreme enough to satisfy the ragtag teabaggers, KKK secessionists, birthers, deathers and lunatic fringe maniacs who call the shots in the Republican Party pup tent these days?