It makes more sense as a work of fiction. Cue the ominous music:
We will get our vengeance. We will do whatever it takes to destroy you. We do not care about the consequences, to ourselves or anyone else. We do not care if our families get hurt. We do not care if our friends get hurt. We certainly don't care if strangers get hurt. We do not care if we get hurt or die in the process. Only one things matters, to destroy you. To wipe you off of the face of the earth, to leave you as a brief pause in history. We will devote all of our efforts to this goal until we have succeeded, and until then, nothing else will matter. Nothing. That is our pledge.
It doesn't matter what started the feud. It could be personal, political, or both. The Hatfield-McCoy feud started when a pro-Confederate Hatfield -- it's not sure which one -- killed a McCoy returning home with an injury from the Union Army. Sometimes a feud results from a killing, sometimes just a perceived insult. But when it gets out of hand, as is inevitable, collateral damage usually results.
In this case, though, the feud began with an event that had occurred many times before without precipitating one. It's not fiction. It's just the attitude that the Republican Party adopted when Barack Obama defeated the Republican candidate in the general election.
Shortly after President Obama took office, Senator Mitch McConnell admitted his priorities to the National Journal:
MCCONNELL: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
That set the tone for the Republican Party. Rather than take on the usual role of an opposition party, they turned it into a blood feud, a vendetta, against the president. Nothing mattered but defeating him. From that, all else followed.
This was demonstrated most clearly when President Obama tried to create a bipartisan consensus for health care reform. Of course it couldn't happen. When the best deal that he could get turned out to be a dead ringer for Mitt Romney's plan, which was itself based on an American Enterprise Institute (Republican) counterplan to the Clinton plan, the Republicans, who should have celebrated, turned against it. (They've never talked about their secret objection, that it included a 4% tax hike on incomes over $250k.) That has been Mitt Romney's achilles heel, of course, ironically no fault of his own. We can only enjoy the schadenfreude. But that's hardly consolation for the bigger problems resulting from the feud.
Bill Clinton's 1992 victory was punctuated by a famous motto, "It's the economy, stupid". The GHW Bush economy was a flop; Clinton promised, and delivered, growth. All sorts of conventional wisdom centers around the impact the economy has on re-election. One popular meme is that a president does not get re-elected if the unemployment rate is above 9%. This is the kind of simple truism that gets repeated often enough that people begin to believe it.
Hence the primary tool of the feud is the unemployment rate. The Republicans want to keep it above 9%, preferably above 10%, assuming that it will automatically cause President Obama to lose. The president takes the blame, no matter who does what. This has become the heart of their economic policy. They say that the ARRA stimulus "failed" and shouldn't be done again, even though economics including the CBO say that it was quite effective, just not big enough. It kept the unemployment rate from rising about 3% more.
Their second tool is the deficit. By focusing on it at exactly the wrong time, Congress prevents doing things that would actually help unemployment. Simple Keynsian economics, the kind that has worked very well both prescriptively (since the 1930s) and descriptively (when applied to historical study), says that a deficit is a good thing to have during a recession or depression. The additional aggregate demand it creates grows the economy and leads, over time, to lower deficits and a reduced debt. Even Nixon and Reagan were Keynsians. Only flat-earth politicians, and hardly any real economists, disagree. But Keynes is practically dead in Washington today. It's Gilded Age economics all over again, minus the industrial growth -- it's mercantilism writ large.
Most Republican leaders know what they're doing. They know that cutting spending is the wrong thing now. Some of the current candidates, and a lot of their freshmen, are so crazy that they assume that Keynes never was right in the 6000-year history of their flat world. But they're not the adults in the room. McConnell, Cantor, and Boehner are, and they know. They're simply doing what the feud dictates. They're sabotaging the economy hoping that it will be blamed on, and thus help destroy, President Obama. They don't care about us. They don't care about the fools who voted for them hoping that they'd focus on jobs. Actually, they did focus on jobs, to destroy American jobs and create jobs overseas. But that's not how they campaigned.
The Village press doesn't want to accept this reality. They refuse to accept that the Republicans are playing Hatfield to the real McCoy. They want to pretend that the current "GOP" (what a silly nickname they like to use) is the same as its predecessors. They want to assume that all members of Congress have the country's best interests at heart, and just disagree on how to get there. But they're wrong.
It's time for our side to wake up to what's going on, call it what it is, and fight back. Not by Marquess of Queensbury rules, but to win. That's why so many Democrats wish for President Obama to grow more spine, and for more of our members of Congress to be the kind of bold Democrat that Sen. Sanders (ironically an independent) really is. It's time for the party to look alive, and not be the one looking to compromise in order to please an imaginary mushy middle. The other side doesn't care about the consequences; we have to stop them.