Page: Brain-dead mudslingers score victory for right wing

By Clarence Page

Garrison Keillor's column was not available for today.

Score one for the right wing. Conservative witch hunters, notably Fox News' Glenn Beck, are claiming victory for hounding President Barack Obama's green jobs czar out of office. Yet the victory also highlights a gaping deficit in America's conservative movement. They've become more adept in recent years at trashing liberal ideas than at coming up with new ones of their own.

Van Jones, a San Francisco Bay-area activist for environment-friendly “green-collar” industries, resigned as the president's special adviser for environmental jobs after weeks of mud slung up against him by Beck and other conservative media pundits. His credentials are outstanding, but these are politically polarized times. At a time when nervous parents were threatening to pull their children out of school, for example, ironically to avoid hearing Obama speak about the value of education, the outspokenly progressive Jones hardly had a chance.

At 40, Jones is a bright, charismatic organizer who came up from a small-town Tennessee childhood to graduate from Yale Law School and become a rising star in the world of environmental activism. He's author of a New York Times best-seller “The Green Collar Economy” and was named by Time Magazine this year as one of the “100 most influential people in the world.”

Like Obama, he has a knack for reaching across lines of race, class and political parties - until now, anyway - to create jobs and help save the environment. At the center of his vision is the creation of “green collar” jobs, a phrase he popularized for jobs that can provide family-supporting wages and upward mobility to higher skills and help save the planet, too.

But while Jones was calling for “one country,” Beck and Company were digging into his background like a political campaign's hit squad to smear Jones as a “communist-anarchist radical.” Yes, Jones dabbled in radical politics in his younger days, but that was then. Beck and Company apparently don't think much of political redemption, at least not when it is claimed by a liberal.

Most embarrassing to Jones are YouTube videos of him speaking his mind before he was appointed to his White House post. They include a well-publicized vulgarity that starts with “A” and has an “H” in the middle. He employed the A-word to describe Republicans during a February meeting. He's apologized, but the flap made him too big a headache for the White House.

Significantly, Jones' remarks hardly ventured further to the left than Beck's rambling commentaries swerve to the far right. But Beck's a talk-show host. When he goes over-the-top and accuses Obama of “deep-seated hatred of white people,” as he did recently without offering evidence to back it up, he gets bigger ratings. A presidential appointee would get the ax.

But the larger significance of Jones' departure is what it says about the conservatives who pushed him out. As Sam Tanenhaus, a biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, writes in his new book-length essay, “The Death of Conservatism,” the movement that turned the Republicans into the party of ideas with Ronald Reagan's rise has become a movement that sadly cares more about attacking other people and their ideas.

The GOP's conservative base has legions of talk-show pundits to fire up their hearts, if not their minds.

n Contact the writer: cpage@tribune.com