Chaitred revisited
Don't miss the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's remarkable interview with Jonathan Chait, the self-proclaimed Bush-hater. Chait, ably assisted by Hugh's questioning, manages to tie himself in knots on the issue of whether and to what extent leading Democrats (and Chait himself) are "angry."
Chait raised this subject when he wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times arguing that, contrary to Ken Mehlman's assessment, Hillary Clinton is not making angry attacks against President Bush. Starting with that questionable but hardly indefensible proposition, Chait ends up embracing a definition that equates political anger with the strong belief that a politician or party is seriously misguided. This definition enables him to call Republicans, as well as Hugh himself, angry. On the other hand, it negates his thesis that Hillary is not angry and, indeed, trivializes the whole concept of political anger to which Chait had devoted his column.
Chait's definition is also silly. Anger is an emotion, and (as John and I know from studying the philosophy of psychology) no emotion can be defined solely in terms of a belief or set of beliefs. By taking the emotional component out of an emotion Chait descends into nonsense. If, however, one takes Chait's belief component and adds the emotion he poured forth in his well-known piece explaining why he hates Bush, you get a pretty good working definition of political anger.
As to Hillary Clinton, Chait based his original claim that she's not angry on the fact that her senatorial career has been marked by some moderation on foreign policy and defense issues, as well as some cooperation with Republican colleagues. But recently, she has switched gears in order to shore up her status with the Democratic left. Mehlman is right about that incarnation of Clinton -- she does sound angry. Whether she's genuinely angry at Bush to any major extent, I don't know. My guess is that there are other things she's far more seriously angry about. But this may also be true of lots of people whose hatred of Bush is not in doubt.
Chait also found himself telling Hugh that Bush ran an angry campaign in 2000. If Chait believes this, he is clueless. The genius of the Bush campaign was that it focused on casting Bush in a favorable, likeable light (as a compassionate conservative, a uniter not a divider, etc), not on casting Gore in negative one. Bush and his advisers recognized that, after 8 years, public perception of Clinton and Gore was what it was. Bush could not drive that perception down, and attempting to do so would have made him less likeable. Had Bush run an angry campaign, he could not have competed with the vice president of a popular administration in a time of (superficial) peace and prosperity.
Things are pretty strange right now. Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove keep telling the Democrats what they're doing wrong. They take no risk in doing so because politicians like Clinton can't take their advice and still satisfy the party's base. But Chait is not a politician, so why can't he profit from the advice? Perhaps it's because he's too angry to listen.
