Inappropriate Content: Kakistocracy©

Over at the Corner, Senator Byrd is catching some flack for his opposition to renewing the Patriot Act. He was for it before he was against it, you see. Republican op Tim Chapman lets loose:

Byrd did not support the law only in 2001... He supported the anti-terror measure just a few months ago as well when it was passed by unanimous consent. So he voted for it—twice—before he is going to vote against it.

This new found strain of the John Kerry virus that is infecting the West Virginian...is sure not to sit well with the West Virginia voters this November.

Senator Byrd is a bit more willing to admit his mistakes than most people. Maybe it’s because his mistakes have been so much more heinous than any other living senator. Maybe he’s just too old and too incumbent to care.

Either way, whenever someone shouts 'flip-flopper!' like that, I flash back to the town hall Bush-Kerry debate, when a woman from the mid-west asked President Bush to name a few mistakes he wished he could go back and correct. Bush moved right into defending the War on Terror. Aside from an oblique reference to wishing he’d fired Richard Clarke, he didn’t admit to a single specific mistake. And he wasn’t lying—he didn’t say he never made mistakes—or even being particularly misleading. In fact, he was following one of the cardinal rules of image politics: don’t admit your mistakes, don’t change your mind, and don’t be wrong.

If you admit your mistakes, people will think you’re someone who makes mistakes and they won’t vote for you. If you change your mind, people will think you’re someone who changes his mind and they won’t vote for you. If you ever say, 'I was wrong,' people will think you’re wrong and they won’t vote for you.

If you change your mind about an important piece of legislation, you’ve caught the John Kerry virus, quite possibly a terminal case.

This sort of image politics isn’t just practiced by Tim Chapman: it’s SOP for virtually every hack on both sides of the aisle. But it’s more than just low-brow politics. The certainty of facing attack for changing your mind—something reasonable people do every day—is yet another of the humiliating degradations we heap upon anyone with the temerity to run for office. It’s one of the things that makes the process of getting elected and governing so intolerable, virtually no reasonable person would consider running for anything.

So you think you can contribute to public life in this country. Are you an intelligent and reasonable person? Then Karl Rove and Tim Chapman (or, if you happen to be a republican, Paul Begala and Daily Kos) are going say you’re diseased!