Rambo and the GOP

By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Saturday 01 December 2007

I don't know if children should be allowed to watch the Republican presidential debates.

There's so much talk of violence and mayhem as the solution to our ills. The candidates seem so eager to flex their muscles and engage the nation in conflict: Let's continue the war in Iraq. Let's show them what we're made of in Iran. Let's round up those immigrants and ship 'em back where they came from.

It's like watching adolescent boys playing the ultimate video game, with no regard for the consequences. Rudy, the crime-fighter and terror maven, says he's tougher than Mitt, who actually had illegals working on his property. Mitt begs to differ and says he'd like to double the size of the Guantánamo prison.

Are we electing a president or a sheriff?

Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado wants to stop all immigration, legal and illegal. Too much immigration brings problems, he said. Among other things, "it makes it difficult for us to assimilate."

(The bludgeoning of logic is yet another form of violence coming out of the debates.)

We've got the thunderclouds of a recession heading our way. We're in the midst of a housing foreclosure crisis that is tragic in its dimensions. We've got forty-some-million people without health coverage. And the city of New Orleans is still on its knees.

So you tune in to the G.O.P. debate on CNN to see what's what, and they're talking about - guns.

Former Mayor Giuliani, once a gun-control champion, has swallowed the party's Kool-Aid straight from the packet, not even bothering to mix it with water. "People will be allowed to have guns," he said. "I'm not going to interfere with that."

It can be scary for small children to watch the former mayor of New York morph into Wayne LaPierre on national TV.

I'll concede that it's difficult to have a thoughtful exploration of complex issues in a format that allows a candidate just 90 seconds to answer. But the Republicans, far more than the Democrats, go out of their way to present themselves as 21st-century Rambos - a childish, cartoonish posture that solves nothing and can easily lead to tragedy in a world that is in fact quite dangerous.

You'd think that a presidential campaign would be the perfect venue for a serious discussion about Iraq, the greatest foreign policy debacle in the republic's history. But even John McCain, who frequently seems as if he is the class of this G.O.P. field, followed up his comment about appeasement allowing Hitler to flourish with the following simplistic reference to Iraq:

"I just finished having Thanksgiving dinner with the troops, and their message to you is, the message of these brave men and women who are serving there is: 'Let us win.' "

How is that helpful or enlightening? What does he mean by "win?" And win at what additional cost to human life and other resources?

The Republicans running for president are embarrassed to mention George W. Bush. But with few exceptions - Mr. McCain's principled position on torture is one - they want to continue Mr. Bush's failed, often belligerent and sometimes sadistic policies. (On immigration, an issue ripe for demagoguery, most of the howling G.O.P. pack has sprinted away from Mr. Bush, preferring a more macho, politically exploitive approach. Mr. McCain is again an exception.)

The incessant drumbeat of brute force as the favored solution to difficult problems serves to normalize state violence to the point where we hardly notice it. Before his widely reported crack about Jesus being too smart to run for office, former Gov. Mike Huckabee talked proudly about the tough challenge he faced in "carrying out" the death penalty in Arkansas.

"I did it more than any other governor ever had to do it in my state," he said.

The Republican Party has won a lot of elections in recent years. So maybe this crop of candidates knows something about American voters that many us would rather not acknowledge, that too many of them are small-minded, fearful, bigoted and too shallow to recognize policies that are against their own - and their country's - best interests.

Or maybe that's not the case at all. Maybe this lot of Republican presidential candidates is misreading the public, and placing its bet on the wrong side of history.

I hope it's the latter. Maybe voters in the early primaries will deliver the message that a more thoughtful, insightful, inclusive and constructive style of campaigning is desired.

Maybe then we can finally get issues like torture off the table (Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney had a testy exchange over waterboarding the other night) and squarely address the concerns so many voters have about the deteriorating economic climate here at home and America's diminished standing abroad.

-------