The unhinged rhetoric of present day Republicans and conservative public figures generally may represent a fairly simple misunderstanding on their part. The last couple of elections have seen the convincing rebuke of Republicans and conservative ideas and rhetoric. I suspect the present conservative rhetorical offensive against the Obama Administration and Democratic congressional leaders is based on the assumption that the electoral decline of Republicans was the result of overheated liberal and Democratic rhetoric during the Bush Administration, rather than the perception of voters that Republican policies have failed.By this logic, it is sensible to employ extremist attack rhetoric against the Democrats with the expectation that this will turn Americans against their candidates and their policies. There are some serious potential flaws in this approach, however.
What if the overheated attacks against Bush and Republicans merely coincided with the public’s rejection of Republican policies based on perceived failure? What if the political decline of Republicans would have happened (maybe more gradually) even if liberals had not employed crazy, over the top, rhetorical attacks? If this is the case, then the present administration will not be damaged by extremist rhetoric, at least until there is credible evidence that its policies are not succeeding. Staying with this assumption, the present conservative approach may only be succeeding in damaging the credibility of conservatives, who are not savaging a president with 30% approval ratings, but rather are savaging a president with approval ratings consistently in the 60s whose programs are not (at least not yet) perceived as failures.
I am reminded of a similar miscalculation by Republicans under the leadership of then House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In a budget showdown, Gingrich calculated that allowing a government shutdown would benefit Republicans because Americans would blame President Clinton for the impasse. The Speaker’s logic was based on the fact that a similar showdown between a Democratic Congress and President Reagan had redounded to the benefit of the congressional majority. Americans blamed President Reagan for the shutdown, not Democrats, forcing the White House to back down. Gingrich (a history professor) had made a common mistake in his use of historical analysis. He failed to adequately account for changed contexts and ultimately relied on what was an “apples and oranges” comparison. Republicans and conservatives in 2009 may be making the same type of miscalculation.
Conservatives trying to “give as good as they got” over the last eight years is understandable, but might me ill advised. President Obama is VERY unlike George W. Bush in some very important ways. Bush was easier to savage because of his ideological rigidity and his less than sterling communications skills, neither of which were made up for by his vice president, or Republican leaders on the Hill. Obama, on the other hand, is clearly not the radical liberal that Republicans paint him to be. His preference for moderation is everywhere on display. In fact, many conservatives have tried to use his moderation against him despite having campaigned against him with claims that he would radically liberalize federal policy. Hoping to score points on character attacks and with no apparent concern for consistency, Rush and company have tried to claim that his moderation on national security and even healthcare reform represent evidence that he’s a liar and a flip flopper, rather than an open minded moderate.
What if the Republicans are right about the role of extremist liberal rhetoric being a prime cause of their party’s decline? Would this justify their present assault? I don’t think so. In politics, when a party escalates its political attack operation, there tends to be a fairly limited window for the use of such escalation, a window made even shorter by the explosion of mass communications via the internet. Just four years after the (perceived) success of “swiftboating” the tactic, and even the term, became a highly unpredictable political strategy. In other words, even if Bush and Republican policies were successful and would be favored by most Americans in the absence of concerted liberal attacks, the employment of similar attacks against Obama may well be seen as more of the same negativity. It may be like the shoving match in a football or basketball game; the ref only sees the push back, not the one that started the conflict.