Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (35 page)

The only proper answer to this question for anyone running for president is “How in the 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 of 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.

Palin’s nomination was an act of faith in Idiot America almost
unsurpassed in political history. Her speech to the Republican National Convention was one prolonged sneer. In what was perhaps the most singularly silly thing ever said of a national candidate of a major party, Republican surrogates up to and including McCain himself argued that Palin’s foreign policy bona fides were established because Alaska is so close to Russia. By McCain’s own standard, then, Sarah Palin could have run for vice president as an astronaut because she comes from the planet closest to the moon.

She then gave a series of interviews that slid precipitously from the merely disastrous to the utterly catastrophic, including one session with CBS anchor Katie Couric in which Palin, lost amid her talking points, simply abandoned verbs entirely. In another segment of the Couric interviews, Palin brought McCain along for help, and she looked like a middle-schooler who’d been asked to bring her father to a meeting in the vice principal’s office.

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. Their faith in Idiot America and its Three Great Premises was inviolate. Because the precincts of Idiot America were the only places where his party had a viable constituency, John McCain became the first presidential candidate in American history to run as a parody of himself.

You could see it all coming that rainy night in New Hampshire,
when all the Republican candidates were alive and viable. They were faith-based and fully cognizant of the fact that they were not running for office so much as they were auditioning for a role, trying for a chance to do their duty on behalf of people who were invested as vicariously in their citizenship as baseball fans are in their teams, or as the viewers of
American Idol
are in their favorite singer. So that was how it happened that, at one point in the debate, the contenders were asked whether they believed in evolution.

And, in response, three of the Republican contenders for president of the United States, in what was supposed to be one of the crucial elections in the country’s history, said that, no, they didn’t believe in evolution. And the people in the hall cheered.

It was a remarkable moment in that it seemed so unremarkable. There was no doubt that the three of them—Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee—were sincere. However, since admitting that you don’t believe in evolution is pretty much tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should immediately have disqualified the lot of them. In fact, it should have given people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s. Instead, it was a matter of hitting the right marks, and delivering right on cue the applause lines that the audience expected.

Within both the political and popular culture, as the two became virtually indistinguishable, the presidency itself had changed, and not entirely for the better. Gone were the embattled, vulnerable presidents, like Fredric March in
Seven Days in May
, who fretted out a military coup that sought to batter down the doors of the White House with Burt Lancaster’s be-medaled pectorals. No modern president could be as humble as
Raymond Massey’s Abe Lincoln, riding that slow, sad train out of Illinois, martyrdom already clear in his eyes.

Even the gooey liberal pieties of
The West Wing
made way for this kind of thing. The show abandoned its original mission, which was to somehow make speechwriters into television stars. (Hey, that’s CNN’s job!) It gradually found itself drawn into orbit around the character of President Jed Bartlet, who originally was supposed to be a presence standing somewhere out of frame. The show became as much a cult of personality as any genuine White House ever has. One more scene of the staffers in the Bartlet White House intoning that they “served at the pleasure of the President of the United States,” and Gordon Liddy might have sprung, giggling horribly, from behind the drapes on the Oval Office set. Even our fictions ceased to portray the president as a constitutional officer who held his job only at the informed sufferance of the voters.

That’s how Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff, could get up in front of a group of delegates from Maine during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and tell them that the president looked upon the people of the United States—his nominal employers, after all—the way all of “us” looked at our children, sleeping in the night, and nobody mentioned to Card that there isn’t a single sentence proceeding logically from what he said that doesn’t include the word “Fatherland.”

The important thing about running for president was to make sure that people were willing to cast you as president in their minds. Be smart, but not so smart that he makes regular people feel stupid. Handsome, but not aloof. Tough always, but a good man to toss a few back with after the bad guys were dispatched. The presidency had conformed itself to the Great Premises of Idiot America. Anything could be true, as long as
you said it loudly enough, you appeared to believe it, and enough people believed it fervently enough.

Expertise, always, was beside the point, and the consequence had been both hilarious and dire: a disordered nation that applied the rules of successful fiction to the reality around it, and that no longer could distinguish very well the truth of something from its popularity. This election, which was said to be one that could reorder the country in many important ways, did not begin promisingly.

The byplay concerning evolution in New Hampshire had been preceded by an even more remarkable conversation in South Carolina on the subject of torture. Surely, there have been few more compelling issues in any election than the question whether the president of the United States may, on his own, and in contravention of both domestic and international law, order the torture of people in the custody of the United States, and in the name of the people of the United States. That the president could do so had been the policy of the U.S. government for nearly five years by the time that the ten Republicans gathered in Charleston for their first ensemble debate. A question concerning the efficacy of torture—couched in a melodramatic, post-apocalyptic hypothetical by the moderator, Brit Hume—was posed to the various candidates.

Speaking from his experience, which was both unique and not inconsiderable, John McCain argued that, in addition to being basically immoral, torture doesn’t work. He was quickly shouted down by Giuliani, who was once tortured by the thought that his second wife wouldn’t move out of the mayor’s mansion in favor of his current girlfriend, and by Romney, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people in Massachusetts were allowed to marry each other, and who announced his desire to “double Guantanamo.”

This was not a serious discussion of the reality of torture, any more than the discussion about evolution had anything to do with actual science. It was an exercise in niche marketing. Evolution and torture were not being discussed in the context of what they were but, rather, in the context of what they meant as a sales pitch to a carefully defined group of consumers. They were a demonstration of a product, as when those guys at the home shows show you how the juicers work. Suddenly, the Republicans all seemed to be running for Sheriff of Nottingham. But it took Tom Tancredo to drag the whole thing over the vast borders of Idiot America.

“We are talking about this in such a theoretical fashion,” Tancredo fumed, ignoring the fact that the whole colloquy was based on a hypothetical. “I’m looking for Jack Bauer.”

The audience exploded. The 2008 presidential election was not beginning well. It did not get appreciably better.

THE
bomb is always ticking.

In 2001, Fox television launched
24
, an impeccably crafted thriller in which a federal agent named Jack Bauer races against the clock—each episode is one “hour” in a day—to thwart a massive terrorist attack somewhere in the United States. The show has the velocity of a rifle bullet. Storylines ricochet off each other with dizzying, split-screened abandon. Its craftsmanship, at least through its first four seasons, was beyond reproach, and no television show in the history of the medium so completely captured the Zeitgeist. Besides reflecting considerable theatrical craftsmanship, however,
24
was something unique in the history of the country. It was the first attempt at successfully mass marketing torture porn.

Over and over again, to get the information he needs, Bauer
cuts up his suspects with knives. He suffocates them. He electrocutes them. He beats them to a pulp. According to a survey by the nonpartisan Parents Television Council, there were sixty-seven scenes of torture in the first five seasons of
24.
Some of the torture was performed by the show’s bad guys, and these scenes mainly served only further to justify what Jack Bauer found himself doing later. The torture always works. The country is always saved.

In a nation thirsting for revenge, vicarious or otherwise, operating from those parts of the Gut most resistant to reason,
24
provided a brimming reservoir of vengeance. The show sold. The show was a hit. It was not a reality show. Instead, it was a show that made its own reality out of the desires of its audience. The co-creator of
24
, a self-described “right-wing nut-job” and former carpet salesman named Joel Surnow, explained to Jane Mayer of
The New Yorker
that the show landed right where he aimed it. “There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done,” Surnow told Mayer. “America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He’s a patriot.”