Why are Republicans so eager to destroy somebody who the folks on the left say is such a sellout? Why did they spend hundreds of millions of dollars with their Citizens United-Liberated friends to undo our majority?
You have to hand it to the Republicans. They know how to unite, despite their differences, when their interests are threatened. But that brings us back to my initial question: why do they fear Obama?
The problem is, Obama, if he's successful, brings back bipartisanship. Bipartisanship means that the pressures that have been forcing generations of Republicans to move hard right on policies go away. Democrats become colleagues as well as competitors. Without a certain degree of separatism, the Conservative movement of today is dead.
There's a reason that the religious conservatives want government to subsidize their children going to sectarian private schools. They're afraid modern culture will undermine their values, lure their children away from the fold.
There's a reason why Republicans have been fighting so hard for their tax cuts for the rich, even to the point of threatening to prevent any legislation from passing if they don't get it.
There's a reason why Republicans fight DADT's repeal, and why McCain so oddly chooses to continue fighting Gays in the Military, despite everything.
We assume sometimes that the reason why the Republicans don't allow the changes to take place is that somehow they don't understand the right of what we believe.
I would say, no, they do understand. But they understand something as well. The professional Right, the politicians and the pundits understand that their continued relevance, and their political domination is built on opposition to the Liberals. That is why even sane Republicans have signed on to the Tea Party's movement, with it's extreme rhetoric. In the face of all that's happened over the last ten years, it takes that degree of extremity in rhetoric to distract people from the ugly facts of the unpopularity and the failure of their policies.
But worse yet, the rank and file, the average person on the Right has been continually fed a whole bunch of information that leads them to believe that all is lost if the Liberals win, and that on virtually every policy front, if any slack is given, our policies and our politics will creep in and undermine everything they've been told for thirty some odd years, if not longer. They know time and generational change is corroding the armor of the right against change, and the shocks of the last few years have badly damaged their ability to push things as they please.
This is what has the Republicans up in arms, in their homes and up in Washington: they feel the world moving on from them and their policies, and they know that once our policies and our politics takes a stronger hold, it's all downhill for them.
The professional right has another fear: that if we succeed in moving our policies, and making them the norm, the conservatives and right wingers at home might get used to, even come to love those policies.
I mean, what better indication of this is there than the hopeless confused war cry of that tea partier, "Keep Government's hands off my Medicare!"? Reporting indicated that many of these people were living off of Disability, social security, getting their healthcare from Uncle Sam, too.
The frenetic extremes of the Right, and their contradictory hypocrisy at other times, demonstrates how fragile the Republican's hold on a large part of their voting public is.
Some of us think that Obama's attempts to create bipartisanship are wasted. While I agree that Obama should be more than willing to put his foot down, and not accept a deal simply to accept one, I think the truth is, if we manage to force the Republicans to compromise on their policies, what they say, what they want, that will be a victory, in and of itself.
Ultimately, today's GOP fights so hard against compromise because their movement has long been built on the ambition to have it all to themselves. Any time a Democrat forces them to a non-ideal solution to the impasse, they suffer for it. Just look at the conservatives who lost in the primaries. The Republicans have so demonized the left, so made compromise difficult to justify, that it's become toxic to them.
This is a deliberative Democracy, and time in terms of policies and the country's needs will not wait for them to get all the power they want and finish off all threats to their rule permanently. It will not wait for them to retake everything. I bet many of the districts the Republicans won are only theirs by a thin margine, and they have to balance on the knife between satisfying a base that hates compromise, and the vast majority of voters who want Washington to work out its differences.
That is our basic wedge issue, I feel: the Republicans refusal to compromise, their refusal to share this government and this country with everybody else. The Republicans in Washington want power, but the system the framers created wants accountability to the people.
Obama had the right idea in the 2008 campaign. Unfortunately, the Republicans deliberately created circumstances where nobody's willingness to bargain was politically favorable. Why? Because to win, they had to divide people, get people thinking once more in their defined, partisan ways. People couldn't be allowed to get used to each other, the newly progressive independents couldn't be allowed to see the other side do good for their economy or anything else.
Not the least of which, we had to once again be pushed to play the role of the ideological left, tolerant of everything except those who didn't agree.
And of course, we had to be turned against each other, the failure to move policy translating into frustration within the party, aimed at itself and its leaders.
I want Obama to be a hard bargainer, but I want the Republicans to look like they're putting the priorities of their donors and everybody else ahead of the needs of the voters. I want the Republican's own base to get pissed off by the concessions that are forced, even if they're minimal. I want folks to realize that we are playing a game that has an opposition here, an opposition that plays the game as hard as it does, because it fears that even mild concessions could grow to become the movement's permanent defeat.
We've bought into a certain mythology that once we won the elections, the forces of history would carry our policy into law without much help from the base being required. We thought the invisible hand would make us the winners. We've looked at the power of media like Television, Radio, and the Internet, and while preaching their power, forgotten that the power is often in who has the presence in that media.
We need protests on the street, if only to provide the nucleation points for the crystallization of public opinion in our favor. The Demonstrations, far from being strident affairs, should be the work of reasonable people who express, when the microphone is put in front of them, reasonable opinions that the American people want.
We need people showing up in Republican town halls to sow doubts about the policies those politicians are seeking, doubts that a conservative audience could appreciate. In districts that are more swingish in nature, we need to put in folks who provoke the Republicans in question who lead people to question the value of that Congress critter.
We can't just sit on our asses and expect politicians to get the idea, or the forces of history to do everything for us. We must act with the agency, the initiative of people who seek to deliberately bring about a change in policy, but who rather than being easy to dismiss ideologues, are normal people who express things in the sort of quiet eloquence that helps make issues plain for people, and plain in our favor.
We must do what the Republicans fear we will do, if we're not divided, not turned against our leaders. We must encourage Americans to embrace the values of bipartisanship, to embrace the mixing in of liberal ideas into the political discourse that Republicans find so threatening.
Let us bring the Republican's fears to pass. Let us support our President when he bargains, while making sure he knows what we will accept, and let us undermine the Republican's ability to say no without political cost. When they filibuster something, let the public know they're doing this. When they force an unpopular policy on the American people, help guide the public to solidify their opposition to the Republicans. Force the Republicans to make the impossible choices between pleasing their base, and pleasing the rest of the public who want action from Washington, not gridlock or a return to Bush policies.