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| Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign rally in Bowling Green, Ohio, 07/18/12. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP) |
21 July 12
Republicans have questioned the patriotism of Democrats for
nearly a hundred years. But now, at long last, Barack Obama is turning
the tables on the GOP.
ohn Sununu opened the "American" door the other day, and now the Romney campaign is barging through it, plotting attacks on Barack Obama's "biography," which will inevitably include
veiled accusations about his alleged alien cast, his lack of
American-ness. So now that it's open, let's stroll through it ourselves.
What's taking place in the room on the other side of that door?
Republicans and conservatives are bouncing off the walls because
they face a serious risk for the first time in a generation that their
definitions of patriotism and Americanism are losing. And not just
losing - losing to, of all people, Barack Hussein Obama!
The Republican credo that theirs is the party of
patriotism goes back a long, long way, at least to the 1920s. The
Democrats then as now represented society's so-called rabble -
immigrants, wets, cosmopolites of that gin-soaked decade when the urban
population for the first time overtook the rural. Over time, Democrats
added blacks, new immigrants, liberated women, gays. The Democrats have
been the party of the Other. Impugning their patriotism to the target
audience is so easy it can hardly even be called work. In doing so, of
course, Republicans tied the concept strongly to their, um, values: the
all-conquering free market, mostly; a good war now and then; the
occasional (actually, more or less constant, now that I think about it)
campaign against subversives real and imagined (the vast majority). Thus
have things ever been.
You will find, as you scan our modern electoral
history, say since 1968, that the Republican candidate has laid some
Americanism-related charge at the Democrat nearly every time, but that
the reverse has never occurred. Richard Nixon sent Spiro Agnew out to
accuse Hubert Humphrey of being soft on communism
and compare him to Neville Chamberlain, even while Nixon was committing
treason by submarining the Paris peace talks. Democrats can't, and
don't, peddle this merchandise, because it's pointless: they know it
won't stick to the party that has owned the issue for decades.
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