We are living witnesses to the splintering of the Republican Party.

[seafan]

David Michael Green writes:

The Republican party in America faces two grave problems today.

One is Barack Obama, probably the most skilled and era-appropriate politician in a generation or more. And that, after he’s already through all of one whole month in office.

The other problem threatening the very life of the Republican Party today is the Republican Party.

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..... the two great, tectonic, political questions of the moment remain unanswered, only slowly coming into focus, perhaps in part because they are moving targets, actually evolving over time toward some new equilibrium. Those questions are, Who will the Democrats (and especially Obama) be?; and, Who will the Republicans be? ..... I think Democrats can reasonably comfortably become either the party of the center or the center-left, and can, looking ahead, forge a popular consensus-based governing regime that lasts at least a generation, and more likely two.

I doubt Republicans can survive what is happening to their party as anything other than some sort of rump, stump, latter-day Whig Party, with a solid electoral grip on the whole of the Old Confederacy, as they continue to insist on maintaining in the twenty-first century every ounce of the poverty, ignorance, prejudice and class apartheid that marked the eighteenth. The only change that would represent from the last several decades is that such sick regressiveness will no longer be quite so nationalized, courtesy of the likes of Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Trent Lott or Mitch McConnell, but rather will remain confined to their Bible Belt, just as Jesus intended.

Key ideological mysteries remain, but what is starkly clear, and all the more so after Tuesday night, is the stature gap between these two parties. It’s not that the Democrats stand tall. They don’t – though Obama sometimes does, so far – and the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi seem at least astute enough to get out of the way of their party’s champion as he rises precipitously in public esteem. No, it’s not that Democrats stand tall, but that, more than anything, how pathetically small now stands – or crawls – the Republican Party, the same one Karl Rove promised just a few years ago to turn into a permanent majority in America.

You could see this in the jaw-dropping sight of the Republican members of Congress stuck in their seats as the rest of the room cheered for the concept of guaranteed healthcare for children. What a notion, eh? “Hey”, you could just hear them thinking, “how can we use tax giveaways to turn mere multi-millionaires into full-on billionaires if we’re spending that money instead on keeping a nation’s youth healthy? Screw that!”
You could see it, during the same speech, as they sheepishly looked around the room, trying to decide whether to rise in applause or not, as the rest of the room cheered the concept of limiting pay to utterly failed CEOs now being rescued by taxpayers whose government they’ve spent a lifetime deriding. “Hey”, you could hear them thinking, “those are our homies you’re talking about!”

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But the party is even more pathetic when it wanly tries to mimic inclusiveness than when it just admits to its multifarious toxic ‘isms’. The plain fact is that Barack Obama – the leader of the Democratic Party – is a president who happens to be black, while Bobby Jindal – the spokesperson this week for the Republican Party – got the gig because of his color. One party not only gets it, but has already largely transcended these juvenile tribal divides in our society. The other party is only inches away from its history of the Southern Strategy, Willie Horton, Reagan talking states’ rights at Philadelphia, Mississippi, gay marriage ballot initiatives, and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of black voters by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris. And even those one or two inches are measured in tokenism, not real changes in attitude or policy.

What’s most striking of all, however, is the difference in maturity between the two parties. Or at least between Obama and the GOP. Or at least between Obama’s rhetoric and the GOP. This is true in two respects. First, Obama is the most mature American politician we’ve seen in decades, at least since Jimmy Carter. That not only puts him light years beyond other politicians, it puts him galaxies ahead of any Republican anywhere in sight. He’s truly not perfect in this regard, and he’s worrisome in his vagueness and willingness to let all comers project onto him whatever they each want to see. But, even still, in his race speech in Philadelphia and in his address to the nation this week, you could see on display something so long absent from American political discourse: adulthood. This is the first major politician in my lifetime who talks to us in living color, in three dimensions, and without a subtle but sickening constant pandering of built-in contempt. I doubt we can underestimate the effect this alone will have in raising permanently the quality of our discourse. There will be no going back after this, and for a party like the GOP – which depends for its very existence on appealing to stupid, selfish and frightened voters with bumper-sticker slogans, phony wars abroad and, at home, chump change middle class tax cuts based on payments due later – nothing could be more existentially threatening.

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More to follow from this excellent essay...

[seafan]

1. "It’s over now, and it’s over for all the right reasons."

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The full force of this contrast was on display in the Obama-Jindal matchup this week. True, who wants to follow the Beatles on stage? But, that said, it was a pathetic display, and everyone knows it. The Republicans, in disarray, and increasingly seen by the public as wrecking the economy and then obstructing solutions to the damage they themselves have caused, sent out their Great Brown Hope, in an act of transparent desperation. If Jindal could have looked smaller or more panderingly counterfeit to his viewers, I really don’t know how. If his party’s rescue plan – “Let’s do nothing!” – could have smacked more of Herbert Hoover’s massively popular 1932 platform, I really can’t imagine it. Republicans, who were merely mortally wounded last week, are now in a full-on death spiral. Watch the knives come out big-time, as they accelerate the process with the sort of vicious acts of self-interest for which they are deservedly famous. It’s over now, and it’s over for all the right reasons. Americans have figured out that insanely destructive policy ideas are somewhat less than optimal, especially when you have other options. It took a while, and it took a war and an environment and an economy and a foreign policy and a natural disaster and a federal budget all going spectacularly south (pun fully intended), but, finally, dim-witted Americans have figured it out. “Oh, suicidal stupidity? No, but thank you very much. I don’t want that.”

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Clearly, Barack Obama is no progressive panacea.

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But, having said that, he clearly stomped the Republicans this last month. I thought he should have stopped accommodating them after they burned him on the stimulus bill, but he didn’t, and poll data are showing that he is riding high and they are seeking subterranean basement levels of public support with all the burrowing alacrity of a bunker buster bomb. It may also be that he knows his political maturity approach will set the stage incrementally, allowing him to produce bigger progressive changes later on.

But, of course, it is also possible that he will not be a progressive at all, or that he will only lean that way on a few random (and relatively safe) issues. That would be tremendously disappointing and arguably strategically stupid, for regressives will continue to pitch their nihilism at every opportunity, and we know from the ugliest first-hand experience that the public is capable of drinking that Kool-Aid when it suits their selfish and lazy fantasies to do so.

Part of me thinks that Obama gets this, and he’s more clever than all of us, just carefully laying the necessary foundation for incrementally bringing change to hopelessly brainwashed Americans.

But then another part of me thinks that he’ll be buried by the failures of his own half-measures and naive accommodations to the predatory party.

Part of me thinks he smart enough to prioritize, and realizes that restoring actual human rights to our human rights policies would leave his entire agenda open to savaging by the right, especially if some bomb goes off somewhere at any time during the next four years.

But then another part of me thinks that Benjamin Netanyahu was given more honest insight into the politics of Barack Obama than this entire country of 300 million people who watched him campaign for two years and entrusted him with their leadership.

Part of me thinks that we should be grateful enough just to not have Bobby Jindal in the White House.

But then another part of me thinks that simply accepting that as enough opens the very door to Bobby Jindal being in the White House sometime soon.

None of my vacillation and oscillation should be hugely surprising. We’re one whole month into the presidency of a former candidate who succeeded in part by being highly opaque in his presentation of himself, and is only now having to reveal who he is by virtue of decisions he can no longer just discuss in the abstract, but has to actually make, one way or the other.

We’re also talking about a manifestly bright and clever guy, who is clearly capable of playing four-dimensional chess, thus making each of his moves subject to multiple and multi-dimensional interpretation and speculation. In other words, he’s still a puzzle, and possibly because it suits him to be. For decades, people thought Eisenhower had been asleep at the wheel during his quiet presidency. Turns out that all along Ike saw strategic benefit in allowing people to perceive him that way. They thought were playing two-dimensional checkers with the old man. He had another game entirely going on, and his adversaries never even knew they were playing it.

Is that Obama’s ploy? We’ll just have to wait to see what is revealed over time.

But we may also be able to be more than passive observers.

It might very well be the case that this presidency will be almost precisely as progressive as progressives demand that it be.

Would that Green's last statement comes to pass.

[Jennicut]

2. The Repukes are all infighting now and Obama is being ambitious

and making plans to turn the country to the left or center left while gaining the trust of the American people. He IS an adult and its why we like him so much.