The recurring motif of the 2014 Georgia Republican Senate primary has been babies.
We’re not talking cute babies. We’re not talking adorable, gurgling, smiling, optimistic babies, the kind you want to pick up and cuddle. Instead, in the first part of the two-phase primary that concluded Tuesday, the candidates have spent millions of dollars on television ads depicting each other as whining, crying, keep-you-up-all-night, it’s-not-my-turn-it’s-your-turn-to-change-his-diaper babies.
Well, color me convinced.
But still the ads have come, one after another, back and forth between the campaigns. Over the past few months, it has produced an edifying intellectual exchange that goes something like this:
“My opponents are all a bunch of babies.”
“No I’m not, you are!”
“Nuh uh, you are!”
As this is being written, we still know don’t the results of Tuesday’s primary, in which the field of five will shrink to two. Given the tightness of the race, it’s even feasible that when you read this, a recount will be required to determine the final field for the July 22 runoff.
But regardless of who survives, I don’t think the second phase of the primary campaign will improve in tone or content. It’s not about the number of candidates; it’s not about the candidates themselves. It’s about the limited, almost non-existent range of opinion that is tolerated in the modern Republican Party. On every issue, there is one and only one “Republican position,” which forces the candidates to fight instead over extremely petty items.
For example, the Republican Senate debates have so far consisted of trying to identify one quoted phrase, one biographical detail, one obscure vote that might be twisted into evidence of a candidate’s deviation from Republican dogma. As Karen Handel put it in one debate, describing David Perdue, “Exactly who is this guy? He’s not a conservative and I question whether he’s even a Republican.”
They haven’t been debates, they’ve been heresy trials.
The result has been a field of five major candidates with no discernable differences on Obamacare, abortion, taxes, spending, immigration, gun control, the economy. The babies are identical — the Peach State Quintuplets — which I guess is why in the ads, the babies wear labels with their names printed on them, just so we can tell them apart.
But when you have a party that tolerates no deviation from the accepted line, when even the expression of a slight doubt is enough to get you voted off Baby Island, where does innovation and adaptation occur? How does the party begin to adjust its message and policies to a changing demographic? Evolution requires at least a degree of genetic variation, and when there is no variation, there can be no adaptation.
Now, given the party we’re discussing, maybe an argument based on evolution isn’t the most convincing approach. It might be better to borrow a metaphor from the business world, pointing out what happens to companies that lose the ability to innovate and that see innovation itself as a threat to their brands.
Tower Records? Circuit City? Blockbuster? Polaroid? It’s ironic that a party that claims to celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit punishes politicians who dare to demonstrate it.
