This is, of course, the internet. That means people can say they are whoever they want to say they are. Many people are telling the truth, many others are not, and none of us really knows the difference.
I will tell you, honestly, that I am 40, I am female, and I have been a liberal as long as I can remember. Believe me or not, it makes no difference to me. I was 10 years old when Reagan was elected, and I remember crying. I also remember finding it a mighty strange coincidence that the Iran hostages were released right after he was sworn in. It didn’t seem right, even to my 10-year old brain.
Why mention all this? Join me for more, below the fold.
I’m telling you this by way of explaining that I was politically aware well before the age at which I was old enough to vote. I remember Carter being talked about by Republicans as weak. As well-meaning, but just too soft to be president. Not tough enough.
In 1984, I was excited by the selection of Geraldine Ferraro as the vice-presidential candidate. Then, as now, there were few women candidates and it was exciting to see a woman’s name on the ticket. Of course that election was a blow-out, and I was a little stunned by Reagan’s sweep.
In 1988, I was able to vote for the first time. I must admit, I was very disappointed. After years of Reaganomics, of union-busting and Iran Contra, there was no way I could vote for George HW Bush. I would be lying, though, if I said I was thrilled with Mike Dukakis either. Once again, the Democrat was painted as weak and ineffective. I thought Willie Horton was way overblown and I resented the Republicans for running on such a non-issue. I voted anyway, and watched the results come in for the Republicans. Bush was predictably awful, and his running-mate Dan Quayle the butt of endless late-night jokes with his mangling of the English language.
It was at this point that I began following politics in earnest. Pre-internet, I relied on magazines like Newsweek and Rolling Stone and organizations like National Wildlife Federation and NOW for my news. I was dismayed by the rise of the Moral Majority, and remember being told by several Republicans I knew to just ignore them, that they were the fringe and had little say in the party. If only that turned out to be true.
Clinton was not my first choice in 1992, but of course I voted for him anyway. It was during the Clinton years that I saw what the Republican think tanks had been building all these years. The coordinated attacks against him and Hillary were unstoppable. Facts never got in the way of the story. Nothing they did was good enough, and they were blamed both for everything they did and everything they did not do. He won re-election anyway. Unable to paint him as weak, they colored him instead as a flip-flopper, someone who had no will of his own, someone who read the polls to decide what to do, someone who was beholden to interest groups and not the people.
His term ended and it was Gore’s turn to run, and the GOP was quick to bring back the “weak and out of touch” narrative that had proved so successful against Carter and Mondale and Dukakis. Times were pretty good for much of the country and interest in the election was low. And then along came Nader, telling us that there was no difference between the parties. Enough people believed him to swing the election, though certainly there were other weaknesses in his campaign.
The rest is too painfully recent to discuss, as we all know what happened during those GW Bush years.
Which brings us to the present, and after a very long intro, my reason for writing. I had, like many, become a regular visitor to political blogs. They helped give me information and a place to vent during Bush’s two terms. They gave me the most up-to-date news during the primaries and the general election.
But in the past year or so, I’ve noticed something strange happening. First it was a large minority, then a plurality, and now a majority murmuring and then shouting that Obama is weak. He’s beholden to special interests. Spineless. A coward. Doesn’t care about people like us. No different than a Republican. A sellout.
It gave me pause. For the life of me, I could not quite understand why so many liberal blogs were using all the decades-old talking points about Democrats. It just all sounded so familiar, the same arguments that were used against Carter and Dukakis, Mondale and Gore. The same personal attacks, the same tactics. Except instead of saying “Real Americans” they were using terms like “real progressives.”
I started doing some research. I was of course aware that Ariana Huffington once was a Republican. And then Cenk Uygur, from the Young Turks, started posting regular stories highly critical of Obama. And I found out he was a recently Republican.
I dug further. I found out that Markos Moulitsas, owner and founder of this site, was also a Republican.
And I just wondered. Why is it that so many of our most prominent liberal voices are self-proclaimed former Republicans? Why are the websites where we gather run by people who so very recently were died-in-the-wool supporters of the GOP?
Sure people change. People’s views develop over time. I get that. But when people who were verifiably Republicans use Republican talking points to criticize Democrats, it does make me pause. Perhaps it’s a personality thing. Perhaps it’s something else. My guess is that the styles picked up in a youth in the GOP carries over to today, shapes expectations and tactics, which is why they sound so harsh to my liberal ears. Or maybe they are not as liberal as they think and just got disillusioned with the GOP over the Iraq war. I can't pretend to know someone else's mind.
But maybe, just maybe, when I am reading things to inform my opinion, I want some more of it to come from someone who did not vote for GW Bush and Bob Dole, therefore twice voting against Bill Clinton.
And maybe I will take with a grain of salt the opinions of people who so recently sat on right-wing think tanks at the behest of Newt Gingrich.
And, with true respect to the energy it takes to run this site (I could never do it), perhaps I will think twice before taking as gospel truth the opinion of a self-titled liberal who was once a precinct captain for Henry Hyde and carried a framed picture of George H W Bush. Because no, Markos, it wasn’t a different Republican Party. I know. I was there. They wanted to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub. They were the party of tax cuts, the party of selling arms for hostages. The party of union-busting. The party of states’ rights and all that implies. I know you were young then, but I was too and I already stood against most of what the Republican Party represented.
Henry Hyde, for those who might not be familiar, is the father of the famous Hyde Amendment, prohibiting federal spending on abortions. He was a leader in the impeachment effort against Bill Clinton. While he did also support some noble measures, he was by no means a liberal Republican.
When self-declared former Republicans give constant criticism of a Democratic president that is identical to the type of criticism we have always seen from the right, I will continue to be a skeptic. I keep my own counsel. Obama is far from perfect. At times, he makes me angry. I can’t for the life of me undertand why Democrats on the Hill didn’t just bring to vote a middle class tax-cut in the middle of the summer so they could let the current one, including tax cuts for the wealthy, expire. I also was angry when Obama decided to expand off-shore drilling.
But I don’t think he’s weak, I don’t think he’s ineffective. Countless diaries have been written listing his accomplishments, and I am proud of so many of them. They get dismissed out of hand here by an increasingly vocal lot, but this is the internet remember and people can say they are whoever they want us to believe they are.
And when the owner of the site is using old-fashioned right-wing attacks against our own President, how are we to recognize the actual Republicans in our midsts? Without a filter, we risk being overrun with them.
Then again, I think perhaps we already have been.