This column needs to begin with an apology to the Secretary of State. Hillary, the primary reason I was unable to support you last year was my belief that your presidency would become mired in the same irrational Republican hatred that hobbled, then crippled your husband’s tenure. I was certain that, between the two of you, only Barack Obama could tame the rabid beast, by virtue of the generational shift he represented and the fact that his last name (however exotic) is not Clinton. I also believed, I freely admit, that his detractors would sense the need to tone down their belligerence and behave with more civility in order to avoid the stench of racism.
Whoops!
As if we needed any more evidence, the events of the last several days leave no question that the Republican Party has removed itself from the mainstream of political discourse. It doesn’t matter who the president is – Obama, or Hillary, or Jesus Christ himself (whom we all know would be backing single-payer). The small minority of Americans who still call themselves Republicans (hovering around 25 percent) have driven into insanity’s ditch, and are spinning their wheels furiously … not to pull themselves out, but to dig in deeper. The orchestrated assaults on town-hall meetings across the nation this week do not – cannot – reflect the GOP as a whole, but they’ve showcased the party’s public face: a tiny, frightened (and frightening) group of people, bought and paid for by special interests, who are hellbent on stifling the nation’s policy debate by hijacking the get-togethers with vicious invective and then shouting down any attempts to move intelligently past their outbursts.
Two weeks ago, when President Obama was asked why he was pushing Congress to finish its work on healthcare legislation before the August recess, he benignly noted that “if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town.” Four days after that recess began for House members, anyone who wasn’t already clued in now knows the real reason his deadline was so important to the Democrats (and why extending it was so important to Republicans like Michael “Slow down, Mr. President” Steele). Obama and Steele both knew that once the congressmen’s planes left Washington, they’d be flying straight into a shitstorm of well-organized lunatics desperate to see them, and Obama himself, fail. (more…)
One of the hoariest clichés out there is the notion that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” Both Obama and John McCain campaigned last fall with uplifting calls for bipartisanship – McCain because he needed to overcome the Republican brand, Obama because he wanted to run up the score and break through the “50-percent-plus-one” nightmare of the Bush years. But even now that Obama has achieved that breakthrough, he’s still governing (at least for the moment) in poetry, and Monday’s visit to the Hill was nothing if not poetic.