Bill Kristol, the neocon chickenhawk pundit who assured us in early 2003 that the way to become more respected in the Arab world would be to go to war against Iraq, who repeatedly assured us of how easy that task would be, and who has never met a war he didn't like (so long as it wasn't HIS neck being risked in it), has revealed the true Republican strategy. In a column in today's Washington Post, he described what the Republicans had to do in response to President Obama's proposals as follows:
Conservatives and Republicans will disapprove of this effort. They will oppose it. Can they do so effectively?
Perhaps -- if they can find reasons to obstruct and delay. They should do their best not to permit Obama to rush his agenda through this year. They can't allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965. Slow down the policy train. Insist on a real and lengthy debate. Conservatives can't win politically right now. But they can raise doubts, they can point out other issues that we can't ignore (especially in national security and foreign policy), they can pick other fights -- and they can try in any way possible to break Obama's momentum.
Kristol began this thoroughly execrable column by making it clear that he considers President Obama "uppity" (my word, not his, but the attitude is clearly his):
[N]o one should doubt Barack Obama's ambition. His silent dismissal of the efforts of his immediate predecessors -- he mentioned none of them -- is only one indication of the extent to which he intends to be a new president breaking new ground in a new era.
So one would assume that this means that an astute student of history like Mr. Kristol had studied up on the initial addresses to Congress of previous Presidents, discovered that they had mentioned the achievements of their immediate predecessors, and determined that our uppity new President broke with tradition. Right? Not really.
In his first address to Congress in 2001, Dubya mentioned President Clinton by name not once, and the only reference to the accomplishments of his administration (you know, things like keeping us largely at peace and balancing the federal budget for the first time in decades) was a whine about how much federal spending had increased during the Clinton administration, and about how our problems would be solved by cutting federal spending and taxes. If Mr. Kristol complained about that at the time, I somehow missed it.
Nor did President Clinton, in his initial address to Congress, mention the accomplisments of any of HIS immediate predecessor, unless you consider John F. Kennedy, who had been dead for 29 years, to be an "immediate predecessor." The first President Bush did speak of the accomplishments of President Reagan, but that's hardly surprising, given the fact that he'd never have been close to the Presidency if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan's continuing popularity and the fact that he had been Reagan's Vice President.
I've got a challenge for Mr. Kristol: Tell us who the last President was who, in his initial address to Congress, spoke of the accomplishments of his immediate predecessor of a different party. I don't pretend to have gone through every one of those addresses, but I don't remember it ever happening, and I remember these addresses going back to the 1960's. In fact, given the fact that the reason for a change in the party of the President is generally that the public doesn't think so much of the accomplishments of the previous occupant, I seriously doubt that such a thing has ever happened in our history.
I've got another question for Mr. Kristol: Exactly what were the accomplishments of his immediate predecessor that you think President Obama should have praised?
Making us more respected in the Arab world, as you predicted? Um, I don't think so.
Reducing federal spending? Not quite.
Surely, inducing a new era of prosperity by reducing taxes on the rich, as you still seem to think was the thing to do? Nope, that doesn't work either.
Keeping us at peace? Nope, that doesn't work so well either.
Surely, by cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, we improved our balance of trade? Nope, can't use that one either.
Reducing unemployment? Nope, not that one either.
Well, at least all those tax cuts must have caused the stock market rise over the course of the Bush administration, right? Nope, not even that! On the day before Dubya took office, the Dow closed at 10,588. On his last full day in office, 8 years later, the Dow closed at 8,281.
So I ask you again, Mr. Kristol, which "accomplishments" of the Bush administration do you think President Obama should have recognized in his initial address to Congress. There's a reason that in a recent survey of historians, George W. Bush was regarded as one of the worst Presidents in American history (and even then, I think the historians were unduly charitable not to rank him at the VERY bottom).
But I guess we all owe you a debt of gratitude for being so candid about the aims of the Republicans now -- not to actually try to achieve compromises to move actions more toward their way of thinking, but merely to, in your words, "obstruct and delay." I guess you're all little Rush Limbaughs now, aren't you? You merely hope that President Obama (and therefore the country) fail. If you achieve this goal, you might get yourselves back into office and give us more of the "successes" of the past eight years. At least we know where you're coming from.