The Politics of Anger
It isn’t often that I find myself in agreement with Karl Rove. But I believe he was right on when he opined that in the recent Republican debate the question from moderator John King of CNN to Newt Gingrich, about his ex-wife’s statement, gave Gingrich an opportunity to express outrage and disgust and to hit the ball out of the park. It allowed Newt to blame it all on the liberal media, which never hurts in conservative South Carolina and probably won Gingrich the S.C. Republican primary. A lot of angry people heard that question and answer and said to themselves – Yes! There is a guy who tells it the way it is. He’s not some mealy mouthy politician. He’s tough and mean and he’ll be able to take the fight to Obama, who most down there don’t just dislike but actually viscerally hate.
Old Newt, who comes to the race with a long history of all sorts of things that should cause an immediate disqualification from the presidential race, managed with one swing of his rhetorical bat to put himself back into the race. After all, what other candidate could brag of an ego as large as Newt’s, a sense of self-importance that’s absolutely clinical in its grandeur, an almost total absence of any kind of moral fiber, a man who betrayed his wives and mistresses in the most callous and unfeeling kinds of ways, a man guilty of the most obvious hypocrisy when he attacked President Clinton for immorality while carrying on the same behavior himself.
Many Republicans who served with him in the House dislike him intensely and don’t trust a word he says, because they saw him always take care of Newt first and foremost, often at the expense of the country, party and colleagues. Since being out of the House he took it wherever he could get it, like $1.5 million from Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac for what Newt called advice and others labeled quite differently.
But whatever the downside of Newt, he is always smart and views the world without artifice or with utter cynicism, which are sometimes hard to differentiate. We are an angry and disappointed nation. Many feel our best days are behind us and they may well be right. They see their children’s futures as much dimmer then their own and don’t know why. Globalism, a new high-tech world, the shift of manufacturing to other countries and the introduction of robotics has decreased the needs for many kinds of skills and reduced the numbers of jobs. In my own industry the Internet has increased the number of news readers but reduced the revenues to pay for it. The Internet, like the computer, has changed our world, and down deep we know that the old world will not be coming back. This isn’t just a recession; it’s really a shift in the tectonic plates, changing our world forever.
How politicians respond to all this and how voters feel about it dictates how they vote. Actual reality is unimportant. Perception of reality is what drives voters.
In order to win, candidates have to deal first and foremost with the anger of the American public. That’s where the Newt Gingrichs of the world have an edge. Newt couldn’t care less about the solution, he only wants to win. He only cares about Newt. Both Obama and Romney, who strangely enough appear to me to be remarkably similar, are having trouble dealing with the anger. They’re rational, they’re laid back, they’re solution-oriented and they both have great difficulty in dealing with angry people. The truth is that there is only one way to deal with angry people. You give them raw meat to chew on.
That is something the Obama team never did. I can’t understand why there aren’t a couple of dozen people from Wall Street and the banks standing as defendants in criminal courts. Not only did they rob us blind, but they clearly got away with it. We bailed out GM and the rest of the auto industry and did we end up owning half the auto industry as any venture capitalist would have required? No, what we got back in return is they paid us back. Nice. Today, banks go to the Federal Reserve and borrow money at an interest rate of about a quarter of a point. That’s not an interest rate, that’s a gift. It should be called the bank welfare window. None of us can go to the Federal Reserve loan window and say, “I’d like to borrow a few hundred thousand at ? of a point interest, preferably in large bills, thank you.”
Is it any wonder that people are angry? The anger I’m talking about is not just Tea Party anger. It’s also liberal anger. It’s libertarian anger. It’s Democratic anger. It’s Republican anger. It flows from a deep sense of betrayal and I believe whichever candidate can connect with that anger will be the President of the United States.
P.S. I also think that Newt changed the rules of the media political game. In future, reporters and moderators are going to come out swinging. Objectivity be damned.