November 1, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

By FRANK RICH

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a
Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election
to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war.
No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This
could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of
Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican
“comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural
Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing
field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol
and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have
become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in
full “tea party” drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky,
paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s
undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual
responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of
right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen
to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The
23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And
Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found
her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has
occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and
endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the
guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate
they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When
Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner
and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential
ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and

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Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street
Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman
putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook
page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota
governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to
second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas,
Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On
Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a
fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the
district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days
ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman
complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that
they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a
take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a
hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the
federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a
Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort
Drum.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the
battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable
that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even
better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble
its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad
news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent
in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a
teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year.
But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent
can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits
we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a
Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s
equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John
Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its
Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the
president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge

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mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put
it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion
dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now
routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in
liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis
Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course,
was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand
that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court
black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former
Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone
With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once
their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it
lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the
campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of
America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their
country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group
by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s
still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever
Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of
Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats,
and 44 for independents).

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial
contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in
Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been
devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign
he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel
Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s
counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s
face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had
endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white
hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is
counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and
independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first
time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes

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across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment:
Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the
power to bring this president down.

This column has been updated from the version that appears in print to reflect the fact that
Ms. Scozzafava suspended her campaign on Saturday morning.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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