Used to be, the Republican Party for better or worse tended to follow the American system — run a candidate who would be in charge if he (he, this is Republican history) won.
So Thomas Dewey, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon — if they won, they’d be the president.
But look how Republican presidents since Reagan (and arguably Ford) have had a pattern:
Their job is to get elected — and then they tend to have powerful forces given power to actually do the policy part.
Reagan had former CIA Director and ultra ‘insider’ George H. W. Bush doing who knows what with the national security establishment (with Reagan’s tacit allowing of course), resulting in things like Bush involved in the Iran-Contra scandal that had Reagan telling the country his heart said we had not traded arms for hostages but the facts said we had, while ten of his top officials were on their way to convictions.
George W. Bush had Dick Cheney — who literally selected himself to be the VP — to do his thing while Bush’s job was to be folksy, get elected, and then appoint the Neocons to run things.
(I remember and anecdote of a young staffer at the White House saying that at the height of the 2008 crisis, he overheard yelling at his Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary that he ‘had to tell Bush what he was doing, he’s the president!’— and that was at the end of eight years as Bush had gradually had some increased power.)
And now we have trump. Eighteen other Republicans who couldn’t beat him and be the party’s front man for the country — no Ted Cruz or third Bush presidency — and the Republican Party is again in power, and again we have the situation of a ‘front man’ to get elected who they want nothing more from than to sign their agenda for plutocracy — this time the direct manipulators are the Mercer family, who supplied support and the top staff form trump in his campaign and now presidency — people like Bannon and Conway — as well as top appointees like Jeff Sessions.
We heard more about this thanks to the great reporting of Jane Mayer, who also wrote “Dark Money” about these figures like the Mercers and how they are so disproportionately politically influential.
Daughter Mercer told trump she would save his floundering candidacy, but he’d have to do as he was told with the Mercer staffing.
She went on to be on his transition committee, placing the people she wants for the radical Mercer agenda — if you’re not familiar with it, think Bannon and Koch.
Grover Norquist — coordinator of evil by the rich — laid this out quite clearly speaking about electing Republican presidents:
We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. [...]
Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.
And even trump can use a pen.
It’s good to keep in mind to inform American not only ‘what a jerk’ that front-man trump is — that front man’s almost entire job is just to appeal to the people, and trump did it well enough — that’s not as effective attacking the guy they PICKED to be appealing, as unappeaing as this one is, just as Democrats attacking George W. Bush on things like his idiocy were less effective with the country attacking the ‘appealing front guy’ rather than the Dick Cheney neocon agenda — as attacking the interests who want to use that front man for his signature, his only job to get elected.
We’re largely still waging war on trump as if he’s that traditional leader — that what he thinks is the issue, when it’s pretty damn clear the agenda he’s a front man for is a lot more the issue.
We need to not only attack the front man du jour — that won’t really work well given they’re systematically picked to be as appealing as possible while serving plutocracy — but to have the country understand more and more the agenda of plutocracy the Republican Party has become subservient to.
David Koch first tried that traditional approach — running as the VP candidate on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 with a radical but accurate agenda (google it, it’s amazingly evil) — and then after being trounced realized this issue, that getting his monstrous agenda of plutocracy passed was done much better by hiring ‘front men’ to win the elections, than trying to be that front man; that funding propaganda to win elections made a lot more political sense — Reagan blathering about a shining city on the hill — than honestly saying they want plutocracy.
And they’ve been extremely effective, now controlling all three branches and almost enough states to change the constitution itself however they want.
Because in part Democrats haven’t done well enough at pointing out the plutocracy agenda as the real candidate on the ticket whoever the front man is.
How many people have even heard of the Mercers who have such high influence with trump?
Paul Ryan is trying to do both — fight for plutocracy while being a front man, by always framing his kill the poor policies as helping the poor (symbolized by his famous phony ‘soup kitchen’ stunt).
A lot of Americans don’t like the plutocracy agenda (almost none do who aren’t very rich and not even all of them), but they do like the best person Republicans can find to run for office.
Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the country right now and a big reason is how he addresses that real enemy — the agenda — more than the personalities of the front men.
Let’s be clear — no president is elected without the backing of groups. And that’s how it should be.
But there’s a big difference between the type of groups democracy intended — labor, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, broadly representing the public interest — and a small number of billionares who are at war with that public interest. Every president has ugly compromises made, but these Republican frontmen are wholesale enablers of massive harm to the public interest on a different scale, people who are against democracy and the interests of the American people beyond what plutocracy allows.
Let’s have Democrats talk more about those interests and that plutocratic agenda, rather than just the front man — who was designed to be as appealing as possible and distract from the policies.
How many voters base their views on whether they ‘like’ the Republican front man? Many — and they’ll defend the person they ‘like’ and ignore the issues they don’t.
That’s the problem, that’s exactly what a ‘front man’ is designed to do. It’s like when a company doing terrible things hires an attractive spokesman — Reagan did this job for GE — as their public face.
And we really don’t get that far just attacking the front man. Things have changed from the days when ‘the leader’ was the emperor, the king, the force for change. Republicans figured that out.
