Mild mannered Ron Brownstein writes today that Barack Obama faces a Republican Party more united, more right wing, and less compromising than at any time in the past:
In Washington, Obama is already colliding with a conservative GOP House majority determined to slash spending and regulation. But the president also faces multiplying conflicts with Republican governors. The breadth and intensity of these confrontations dwarfs the level of tension between Bill Clinton and a previous generation of conservative GOP governors in the 1990s.
Indeed, it’s difficult to think of another president who faced as much resistance on as many fronts from governors in the opposite party as Obama is encountering today.
….Republican governors came out swinging against many of Obama’s initiatives at the opening bell….2009 economic-stimulus package….high-speed rail….carbon emissions….health care. Twenty-seven states—all but two of them boasting Republican governors and all but four GOP attorneys general—are suing to dismantle the law’s foundation….Put it together and it’s fair to say, without drawing any moral equivalence, that health care reform is facing more-extensive resistance from conservative states than any federal initiative since Brown v. Board of Education.
….American politics increasingly resembles a kind of total war in which each party mobilizes every conceivable asset at its disposal against the other. Most governors were once conscientious objectors in that struggle. No more.
Even after writing about this for most of the past decade, it’s hard to fathom. When Ronald Reagan was elected, it seemed at the time like the ultimate triumph of hardcore right-wing politics. It was the Reagan Revolution! He was going to slash taxes, institute supply-side economics, bust the unions, appoint uncompromising judges, give the Christian right a seat at the table, and declare war on the welfare queens.
It couldn’t get any worse, could it? Well, yes, it could: in the 90s we got the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, and they made Reagan look like the jolly old man he’s since been mythologized as. Taxes? They wanted a blood oath against ever raising them for any reason whatsoever. Gingrich gleefully led an assault on a Democratic Speaker of the House that destroyed his career, something no previous leader of either party had ever tried to do. The GOP flatly refused to negotiate on healthcare reform, they shut down the government in 1995, and then did their best to impeach Bill Clinton over a blow job. This was a take-no-prisoners party like we’d never seen.
But the Newt Gingrich of 1995 was, as Clinton said, still somebody you could deal with. He may have been right wing, but he cared about policy and he cared about getting things done. Today even that’s gone. Obama got virtually zero support for a stimulus bill designed to help get us out of the worst recession since World War II, he got no support for rescuing GM and Chrysler, he got no support for healthcare reform, and he got no support for financial reform even after a decade in which big banks were so far out of control they nearly wrecked the entire global economy. He’s been attacked from Day 1 as non-American, non-Christian, and non-patriotic. The filibuster became not just a tool of intense opposition to big legislation, but an everyday tool of obstruction. Tea partiers and Glenn Beck accused him of being a socialist for sure, maybe a Muslim too, and quite possibly a fifth columnist as well. Rush Limbaugh mocks his wife and prominent GOP leaders make jokes about whether he was born in Kenya. A government shutdown isn’t just something that might happen if Obama and Congress can’t find a workable compromise on the budget, it’s actively viewed as a positive goal. And, as Brownstein says, governors are no longer on the sidelines, sometimes working with the president and sometimes not depending on what’s best for their state. They’re fully enrolled in the war against Obama.
I don’t know how this turns out. A parliamentary system of government can operate this way, but not a presidential system. Somewhere, somehow, this wave has to crest and then break. But when? And how?
