Paul Krugman on the "unreasoning, unappeasable opposition"

As usual, Paul Krugman hits the nail right on the head, this time with regard to Barack Obama's dream that "he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past." Krugman asks, "how's it going?", and the answer isn't pretty.

...President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

I couldn't agree more; the Republicans are determined to oppose President Obama and the Democrats on everything. Sometimes I think if Democrats proposed giving people a huge tax cut, the Republicans would even oppose that. Oh wait, they did (opposing the economic recovery package which contained $282 billion in "tax relief"). It's the same here in Virginia, by the way, with the flat-earth Republican House of Delegates having opposed everything Tim Kaine has tried to do, and pretty much everything Mark Warner tried to do. Which is exactly why Democrats need to take control of the House of Delegates, but that's a subject for another diary. Meanwhile, Krugman asks, "[the] question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream." Again, the answer isn't pretty.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

[...]

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, this "nonsense" is not going to "just go away," at least not anytime soon. The dream of transcending the nasty partisan battles of the 1990s and 2000's - whether in a vision of "no red America or blue America, just red white and blue America," in the fuzzy concept of "radical centrism," in the concept that the "old labels of liberal and conservative no longer apply," or whatever - is simply not going to become a reality anytime soon (if ever). Given that fact - and it is a fact, like it or not - Democrats need to start playing serious hardball. Look, I'm not saying this is the preferable outcome, but it's the way it goes: Democrats won elections in 2006 and 2008, taking back the Congress and White House. Now, it's time to push through the agenda that: a) they campaigned on (not hiding anything, by the way); and b) were elected to carry out.

Perhaps if Democrats need a role model for this, they can examine the post-2000-election Bush White House and Republican Congress, when Republicans managed to push through their agenda without even having received a plurality of the popular vote in the presidential election, and with only the slimmest of majorities in the U.S. Senate. To the contrary, today Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate and 256 seats in the House of Representatives, far more than the majority needed to pass health care reform, climate change and energy legislation, etc. So...what on earth are we waiting for? Let's stop wasting time, stop listening to the "birthers," the "deathers" and the "screamers," and get the job done for the American people!