Race in fifth gear

Ron Paul often looks aghast, as though cartoon steam is about to whistle from his ears. He has the startled look of someone...

Ron Paul often looks aghast, as though cartoon steam is about to whistle from his ears. He has the startled look of someone who has discovered, once again, that he is the only sane person in the room. Paul had the full, wide-eyed, everyone8217;s-gone-loony look last Tuesday night in the 8220;spin room8221; after the latest Republican presidential debate, as he criticised candidates who seemed willing

to nuke Iran.

8220;I was shocked! I was shocked!8221; said the libertarian congressman from Texas. His rivals for the GOP nomination, he believes, are espousing an immoral position that is actually a form of pandering. 8220;They8217;re worried about the immediate next election, which is the Republican primary, and anything they can do to pander, they8217;ll do it, and they8217;ll forget about what they believe in, they8217;ll forget about the Constitution, they8217;ll forget about building coalitions.8221;

Coalitions? Not a word you hear often on the campaign trail, deep into Red Meat Season. This is the season of the marginal candidate whose voice rises higher and higher. What8217;s different this election cycle is the brutally long primary season 8212; a year of posturing, base baiting, sniping and heel nipping that only a political junkie could love.

It8217;s no secret that candidates play to the base during the primary season, and that nominees drift toward the centre for the general election. But the centre has become a killing ground. The 2008 campaign has backed up through the pipes so far into 2007 that it may have become impossible for lawmakers to get anything major accomplished. Consider the abrupt demise in the senate of the compromise immigration bill. Compromise? That8217;s collaboration with the enemy!

John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and others have discovered how hard it is to be both a lawmaker and a presidential candidate. All have been targeted for straying from ideological purity.

The presidential race has been in fifth gear since late last year. Something is wrong with an election process that oozes across time and space to envelop our entire political culture. The campaigning has become unmoored from the crucial event of voting 8212; those clarifying moments when citizens go into a school cafeteria or church basement and cast ballots.

Only partisans are paying attention, and partisans aren8217;t political vegans. So anyone seeking the party8217;s nomination must know how to serve up the big slabs of flesh. For Democratic candidates, that means proving that you abhor and abominate George W. Bush more than anyone else on Earth; for Republicans, that8217;s starting to mean pretty much the same thing. Democrats say Bush is a monster; Republicans say he8217;s something worse 8212; a liberal.

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The classic red-meat Republican issues are God, guns and gays, but this year immigration has rapidly become the juiciest one, even more so than the Iraq war.

On the Democratic side, the sneaking suspicion is that front-runner Hillary Clinton may be a neocon, as opposed to what the Republicans believe she is Madame Mao reincarnate.

But candidates should beware: Red meat during primary season can get rancid during the general election. What sounds good today may turn out later to have been a rotten thing to say.