Liberal Talk Radio

As you surely know by now, the House GOP leadership scheduled a vote on a resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. They wanted the resolution to fail, of course, but also to get all of the Democratic congressmen on record calling for a withdrawal. It backfired. The House voted 403-3 to defeat the non-binding resolution.

As I’ve noted before, you can often tell GOP media strategy by how it’s being reported on the Drudge Report. Friday afternoon Drudge was all sirens and large-point red type, hyping the “showdown in the House.” Clearly the GOP spin machine was hyping it as the “mother of all battles,” and Drudge was salivating over the prospect of getting some juicy anti-Bush pro-Michael-Moore quotes out of Nanci Pelosi.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. By this morning, Drudge had absolutely NO coverage of last night’s vote. To me, that’s a clear indication that the tactic failed. There was no news to trumpet, no salacious “anti-troop” quotes from Democrats, and the news cycle moved on.

The broader point here, I think, is that the GOP leadership (in the House, certainly) is relatively immature, as Americablog notes today. This immaturity is a natural by-product of how Government works, actually, and I don’t think it will change anytime soon.

Let me explain what I mean.

As an undergraduate, I was enrolled in two of my University’s colleges: Arts & Sciences, and the School of Engineering. The difference in the caliber of the professors was night and day. The A&S school, where I took liberal arts courses like history and philosophy, was chock-full of memorable, eloquent professors. The Engineering school profs, on the other hand, were terrible. This was the dot-com 90s. All the smart computer scientists were in the private sector. On the other hand, the best and brightest philosophers and historians were employed in academia.

The same is true in Government. This may be a broad stereotype, and I don’t mean that it’s 100% true, but for the most part, smart liberals work in government and smart conservatives work in business. So what you end up with is conservatives working in government who are not the best or brightest. And I think this really showed in the House vote last night.

I wish it weren’t true. I wish there were more career conservatives in government. But it’s hard to commit your life to government when all you really want in the world is less government. That is, it’s hard to get up in the morning and go to a job that you really don’t believe deserves to exist!

Again, this is a gross oversimplification, and I don’t think it’s 100% true, but I don’t know how else to explain the performance gap between the two ideologies. GOP policy ideas are pretty half-baked, from privatizing social security to Medicare reform.

Anyway, that’s enough for a Saturday morning. The sun’s coming out. I’m going for a walk…