All inside-out

The narrative from Tuesday’s primaries is pretty hard to miss—incumbents, boo!; ‘outsiders’ yea!

And yet, What exactly is a political ‘outsider’ as we understand them here? Ronald Reagan somehow managed to convince everybody that he stood outside the system while protecting the powerful and crushing the rest of us with that goofy, feel-good smile.

Bill Clinton played the outsider game as he galloped into Washington from the Ozarks to promptly triangulate his way through eight years of delivering NAFTA to the corporate elite, dismantling financial regulation, ripping up the safety net, caving to the Christian right on sex ed and institutionalizing antigay discrimination in the military while fucking interns.

It will be fascinating to see if the libertarian Son of Paul from Kentucky wins a Senate seat and joins his Republican colleagues in covering for Wall Street and British Petroleum with the excuse that ‘government interference’ in the free markets is bad. Or if liberty-worshipping Paul and his tea-bagger buds will think poorly of Arizona’s stop-and-frisk-Mexicans law. In any case, how nice for the Repubs to have to figure out what to do with this potent and quite wacko movement whose latest poster child wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

The Obama team apparently has decided that it should look like the adult in the room and eschew capitalizing on this outsider/populist fury to push its program, even the financial reform package that would be a natural fit. I suppose it’s admirable that the White House refuses to pander to the more offbeat and impractical solutions. But the last guy who decided to stick to a moderate, centrist position in the face of the right-wing drumbeat was named John Kerry. Anyone remember him?

Anyway, the fascination with supposed outsiders is pretty much bullshit. We do not generally find real outsiders delightful or admirable but repugnant, and the faux worship of a Lone Ranger figure riding in to save us is usually a cover for a dishonest discourse.