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The two bantered for a minute or so about how Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann were always pushing him out. To me this is pretty telling. It shows that for the former presidential candidate from Colorado some of the things he says are designed to get the Republican base riled up and to get him more attention from the media.
There is an idea, which Republicans seem to subscribe to, that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The problem with following that idea, and having many in your party or movement follow it is that it generates a competition. If saying some thing controversial will get your face on TV, well then saying something almost fringe crazy will get you even more attention. Since notoriety is variant of a zero sum game (there is only so much attention and influence to go around, so if someone from your side has more, you generally have less) it means they have to keep saying more and more intensely controversial or insane or offensive things to stay at the top of the hill.
I am coming to the conclusion that Rep. Tancredo is basically a media clown. He does not really believe the boarder-line (and sometimes over the boarder line) racist things he says. This can be seen in the very prickly manner that he defends charges of racism. It is hard to have your words shown to you and then have a conclusion drawn about you that you know is not true. It must be doubly hard to live with that and know if you show you are not racist or xenophobic then your carefully built career will come down in flames.
So, we can write Tancredo off as a disingenuous and dangerous clown, but where does that leave us with other folks like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann? We know that the human mind is really malleable. Repeated information becomes set in the mind and gains greater mental weight than things heard only a few times. This is even truer with things that we say.
Rep. Bachmann and Sarah Palin say really insane things all the time. They are also very good at sticking to lines that seem effective them or their handlers. Add to this the fact they say them in front of adoring crowds, who give validation to the words by applause and cheers. Think about what that kind of reinforcement might do.
Here is the danger of making your main appeal one of incendiary rhetoric. Yes, it excites your base; sure it gets you noticed and talked about; but in the end you have to either be able to pull back or start to live the crazy things you are famous for saying.
This is the trap that the work of Frank Luntz has put the Republican Party into. They have primed themselves with the words that will let them vilify the position of the Democrats. They are comfortable with saying them over and over and over. Since these words are emotionally charged, they have built up a dependency in their base, an addiction if you will to the emotional high of anger at the Democrats. It now takes more intensely emotional words like traitor, like Socialist, to give the base that high.
They can't stop doing stoking this fire, lest they lose any chance of relevancy, yet if they live these words over and over and over, they risk being sucked into the world where the words are no longer a means to an end, but reality itself. We can see this kind of thing in the shouts of "Baby-Killer" and "You lie!" from members of Congress, in situations where they are wholly inappropriate. The rhetorical message has become internalized and is being lived.
Can the Republicans pull back from the abyss of believing their own sculpted hype? I don't know. I do know this should be a cautionary tale to anyone in any political movement about the dangers of an angry echo chamber. Anger seems like a good motivator for your base, but there has to be something more than anger, or like a fire that always needs new fuel, it will consume what you are trying to build. Perhaps more importantly, following this path leads you to a place where there can be no compromise, no flex in your policy. This eventually leads to a place where you might be able to get elected, but you will never be able to govern, even when you are in the majority.
The floor is yours. |
