"The Republican party, it seems, is now a wing of Fox"

Tomasky directs me to a poll published last week. One of Beck’s big targets has been an organisation called Acorn, for which Obama once worked as a lawyer and which helped him get out the vote during his presidential campaign. Republicans accused Acorn of voter fraud, and this year it has been the subject of embezzlement and other scandals, to which Fox has given a great deal of coverage. As a result, this poll suggests, a majority of Republicans thinks the election was stolen. “Only one in four Republican voters thinks Obama won the election legitimately,” Tomasky concludes in amazement. “What do you do with that? It’s like trying to argue with people who think that the grass is blue and the sky is green.”…

Then I speak to David Frum, author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again and a former speechwriter for Bush (Frum is responsible for the phrase “axis of evil”). He is much more specific about Fox’s relationship to the Republican party (and, by extension, its possible effect or non-effect on the Democratic party). Frum says: “If you’re someone like me – a Republican who would like to govern the country again – Fox is a gigantic trap. There is no way this kind of talk is going to govern American public opinion as a whole.”

He quotes a story told by the novelist Tom Wolfe (a famous Republican), about an occasion when he met the German novelist Günter Grass (who has his own complicated political history). Grass said: “The dark night of fascism is falling in the United States!” and Wolfe said: “The dark night of fascism may be falling in the United States, but it always seems to land in Europe.” In other words, Frum says: “This is a highly stable political system. And the system screens out extremists. It’s just that the entertainment system rewards extremists. So there’s a gap. The real confusion in the Republican party right now, the real danger, is that it will appease the Palinites much more than it needs to.”…

Frum concludes that Republicans “have a lot to worry about” in the face of Fox and its friends. In the 90s, he says, Republicans would have used something like this healthcare bill to push through changes they wanted without leaving their fingerprints on them, and let the Democrats take the blame if they were unpopular. Now, however, these televisual carny barkers are in the way, and “it makes it impossible for your leadership to make any kind of deal”.