Watching true believers defend the indefensible -- McCain and Palin's lies -- reminds me of something I learned about Republicans 20 years ago.
I was an undergraduate back then, excited to be in the Nation's Capitol for a summer student internship.
To protect my identity and anyone I might have worked for, I'll avoid identifying the organization itself. Suffice to say it had to do with federal-state relations, and I was on Capitol Hill quite a lot. I also need to mention that I was the only Democrat in an office full of Republicans.
I didn't really want an internship in a Republican office. But it was the best I could get on short notice, and I assuaged my guilt and disgust with the thought that I was, at least, serving the (former) state I lived in.
The office was directed by the sort of handsome, preppy Dan Quayle-type that permeated Washington in the late 80s. He was a nice guy. The other folks in the office were nice people. Republicans all.
At first they were bemused that a Democrat was in their midst. Who had I voted for? Not Reagan??????!!??? Huh??? But the truth was, they weren't really interested in my answers. They didn't want to know my ideological views. What they exhibited from Day 1 was dead certainty that I'd switch parties by the end of the summer.
They didn't just believe that; they told me, calmly and unequivocally, that it "would happen." They seemed to take pride in their ability to "flip" people over to the Right side -- literally. They smiled ruefully at my Democratic affiliation like an indulgent parent who knows that their kid will eventually learn the hard way.
And they tried to groom me. I got sent to all the (supposedly) most inspiring Republican gatherings. My roommate and I found ourselves, one strange afternoon, on the White House lawn listening to speeches by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. (The sole Democrats in attendance, I'm sure, we survived the event by agreeing to clap only when a trite phrase like "children are the future" was uttered.) I was sent to a White House press conference, apparently expected to be awed by the grandeur of it all.
Awed I was not, and Democrat I remained. On my last day's work, my boss took me to lunch in the Senate dining hall -- a special privilege he reserved for his interns' last days. Lunch was nice. It was hard to concentrate with all the famous people sitting around me. But when the boss asked later, in front of the whole office, "how does it feel to be a Republican now?", I told him that, in fact, I wasn't.
They looked at me blankly. Their smiles faded. "You mean we didn't change you?" I smiled and said no.
These people were incredulous. Mind you, no one had ever had a serious discussion about why I should change. Perhaps they didn't take a female college intern all that seriously. But the larger reason, I think, was their starting assumption. They assumed from the beginning that my conversion was inevitable, that every atom in the universe was destined to align with their political sensibility. They simply took that on faith.
When I'm looking to understand all the crap that's going on this year, I look back at my brief 1988 tenure in a Republican office. I remember the certainty, the smugness. I remember that they didn't ask me questions, and maybe they didn't ask many questions of themselves. I remember the disturbing, sometimes unfortunately true, assumption that Republicanism was ascendant.
And I remember with gratitude that shiny surfaces weren't enough to change what really mattered. They never are.