Crossposted on 43rd State Blues
I want to just take a moment to thank the Teabaggers. Thank you so much for helping us pass health care, for resurrecting the Obama presidency. I know they're saying, "Why are you thanking me? I was so against it, I marched on Washington with tea bags hanging off my Founding Fathers costume, with a gun on my hip and a picture of Obama dressed as Hitler, screaming about his birth certificate."
... And America saw that and said, "I think I'll go with the calm black man." — Bill Maher
In this video, two of Washington's top political reporters John Harris of Politico and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post spoke with Bob Schiffer on the ironic state of Washington with President Obama having trouble with liberals while Republicans are dealing with their conservative wing.
Stranger than fiction: there is a very real chance that these ironies could play into Obama's favor.
Tea Party firebrand Michele Bachmann is soaring in the polls — alarming the GOP establishment, and greatly aiding the president's campaign, according to an article in The Week.
Showing that it's not only Democrats who can be "swiftboated," The Daily Caller, the conservative alternative to The Huffington Post, launched an anonymity-fuelled hit piece on Michele Bachmann's migraine headaches this week. Now, there are plenty of reasons to doubt Bachmann's fitness to be president; however, they don't involve her headaches, but a head filled with fantasies about economics, history, homosexuality, the biology of evolution, and the science of climate change. Of course, this isn't the first recent campaign smear by Republicans against Republicans — for example, the Rove-orchestrated personal assault against John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary.
McCain stood between the establishment favorite and the nomination. Bachmann's position is different. There's no single establishment ordinand this time; as one party operative puts it, "Mitt Romney's the weakest frontrunner in decades." But establishment Republicans suddenly fear that while Bachmann can never win a general election, she can prevail in the primaries. She has to be taken down — and you can't do it by assailing her wifty views, because that would only strengthen her with the angry hardliners likely to dominate the GOP contest. Memo to Rove, who promptly flacked The Daily Caller piece in a Fox interview (Video, via GOP12.com): You reap what you sow, and Bachmann's rise is the unhappy harvest of a 2004 strategy that was base in both meanings of that word.
The article by Robert Shrum, How Obama could win the GOP primaries, goes on to offer a detailed analysis of a reality that the GOP establishment is aware of: how the "achievement-free firebrand from Minnesota: Bachmann, who would crash and burn in November 2012, could seize the nomination next winter and spring."
The ironies have the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy, for the Republicans, at least:
Player Queen:
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,
If once I be a widow, ever I be a wife!
Player King:
'Tis deeply sworn. Sweet, leave me here a while,
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile
The tedious day with sleep.
Player Queen:
Sleep rock thy brain,
And never come mischance between us twain!
Hamlet:
Madam, how like you this play?
Queen:
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 222–230