The odd “change” gambit of the Republicans

There were basically three themes running simultaneously at the RNCC last night. One is that Obama is weak, will raise your taxes for no good reason but has no experience and doesn’t know what he’s doing. One is that John McCain was a POW and that this alone means he’s a great president. The third was that if you want some real change, vote McCain.

I’ve already covered how non-Mavericky John McCain is, but for the time being let’s just ignore that and consider how strange that message is.

At one point, the face of George W Bush showed up on their big TV screen to promote McCain and his strength of character. At one point he said “He’s not afraid to tell you when he disagrees. Believe me, I know.” Joe Lieberman even went further in his remarks:

If John McCain was just another go-along partisan politician, he never would have taken on corrupt Republican lobbyists, or big corporations that were cheating the American people, or powerful colleagues in Congress who were wasting taxpayer money.

The crowd laughed and applauded Bush’s line, and they absolutely exploded at Lieberman’s, cheering like maniacs. But keep in mind we’re talking about the Republican president, and the corrupt Republican lobbyists, and his powerful colleagues in Washington. The Republicans at the convention were cheering that McCain… was defying them.

Campaign manager Rick Davis recently said that the election “is not about the issues,” and if the spectacle we witnessed is to be believed, he’s right.

The Republicans have been long-arguing that McCain voted against Bush much of the time and voted against Republicans a lot of the time. Supposing that this was true, the subtext from this claim is that McCain was right all the while and their constant criticism of him was wrong. During the primaries, remember, Republicans really did speak out against McCain as not being a “true” Republican (Rush Limbaugh was especially venemous).

So when they now tout the very thing they used against him, aren’t they implicitly saying their own policies were wrong?

When a sitting president of the same party as the candidate gets up and says “he’ll be a great president, he went against me a lot!”, you have to ask yourself what that’s telling us. Keep in mind that these are the same people who voted Bush in back in 2000 and 2004, and most of the people in attendance are the Republicans McCain broke step with.

I don’t believe we’ve seen it before that the incumbent party is claiming to be the party of change. The SCOTUS is 5-4 conservative, we’ve had a Republican president since 2000, and the Republicans had control of Congress from 1994 to 2006. Then even after they lost control, thanks to lacking a veto- or filibuster-proof majority, no Democratic legislation was able to make it through. No forcing of timetables on Iraq, no changes on FISA and the NSA, PATRIOT Act still chugging along, no health care reforms, nothin’.

Yet there you had Mitt Romney sitting on the podium and he actually said, “We need change all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington!” By the way, I could definitely write a gigantic post that does nothing but explain why Mitt Romney’s speech was the most illogical thing I’ve heard in a very long time. In fact, I will later, but moving on.

Republicans have had control of this country explicitly since 2000, and arguably had a great amount of control after 1994. The only way they can claim they stand for change is to admit that everything they’ve been doing for the past 14 years was wrong. So they throw a John McCain at us, quietly saying “we’ve been wrong all this time, vote for the guy that stood up to us!”

If you really want to vote for the guy that stood up to Bush and the Republican establishment, here’s an idea: vote for the guy that isn’t speaking at the Republican convention and being endorsed by Bush. Just a thought.