We may not have John Edwards to kick around anymore – though that hasn’t stopped us from putting the occasional boot into his backside, has it? – but he did leave us with a paradigm that remains useful in surveying the political landscape circa November 2009. Forget, for the moment, Edwards’ rhetoric about the rich and the poor, and focus instead on the two wildly disparate narratives about the nation’s politics that have emerged over the past 12 months. On one side are those are still living in Bamalot, who see slow but steady progress toward fixing enormous problems in the economy, health care and foreign policy; on the other are those who see nothing but dollar bills flying out the windows of the Capitol. On one side are those who remain quietly, but fiercely proud of what America accomplished last autumn; on the other are those who loudly trumpet their conviction (or who put up with people who remain convinced) that the president himself is not an American.
On Tuesday, in a couple of states, one side sat contentedly on their asses and did nothing; the other harnessed themselves into an angry, energized mini-electorate that drove to the polls and turned their governors’ mansions from blue to red.
There was something deeply ironic about HBO’s decision to debut its new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening. At the same hour on every news channel, a debate was raging as to whether Obama’s “movement for change” had hit a roadblock with the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. But over on pay cable, it was Decision ’08 all over again as the Edward Norton-produced doc replayed the goings-on behind the scenes of Obama’s primary and general-election victories – and portrayed his opponents as little more than flies to be swatted along the path to the inevitable.
So, yes, the dichotomy was ironic – but it was also a nice metaphor for Tuesday’s outcome. Obama’s voters, feeling like they did their job last year and remaining pretty happy with the way things have gone since then, stayed home and watched TV, while the unhappy folks dragged their butts to the polls and changed the status quo. Such is democracy in America – particularly in these off-off-year elections, when the voters of New Jersey and (particularly) Virginia love to send Bronx cheers to the party in power. (more…)
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.