The
Republicans tried to sink Obama. Instead, the party imploded
Richard Wolffe
Tuesday 9 August
2016 16.05 BST
If
your political priorities are the total defeat of a single politician
– not the advancement of your own policies – it fans the flames
of extremism
It may seem too
early to call, but we already have a winner in the 2016 election.
He’s someone the
pundits wrote off long ago. An improbable outsider who rode an
insurgent wave to snatch the nomination from the establishment. An
unconventional politician whose raucous rallies underscored his
appeal to voters far outside his party base.
His name is Barack
Obama. And he can thank the freak show that is Donald Trump’s
Republican party for restoring his stature as a unifying, national
leader with a moderated and mature approach to a complex and unstable
world.
Eight years ago,
Obama represented an existential threat to the Republican party, and
not just because he was going to lead the Democratic party to win the
White House and Congress by large margins.
No, Obama’s
biggest threat was that he could realign American politics, shifting
it fundamentally towards progressives for a generation. He and his
campaign aides talked privately of being the Reagan of the left: a
transformative figure who would leave an indelible legislative mark
at home and restore America’s position on the world stage.
With his appeal to
independents and moderate Republicans, Obama could break the
Republican party as a national force. With his appeal to minority
voters – a rapidly emerging majority across the country – he
could lock in the fastest growing demographics that could turn red
states blue.
So the GOP
leadership chose to make Obama unacceptable, unpalatable and
un-American. On the night of his first inauguration, House Republican
leaders met at a Washington steakhouse to plot their path back to
power. They would not reform their policies or consider the root
cause of their defeat. Instead, they would oppose Obama on
everything, well before he tried to pass a giant stimulus bill or
healthcare reform.
They needed to deny
him a reputation for bipartisanship and mainstream politics, and they
succeeded. He wasn’t reasonable; he was an ideologue. His vision of
healthcare reform wasn’t a free-market system based on Republican
plans; it was a socialist takeover that would destroy the American
way of life. He was inviting terrorist attacks on the homeland, not
hunting down Osama bin Laden. He was acting in unconstitutional ways
because he wasn’t really American at all.
The party of Sarah
Palin, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Roger Ailes had turned him
into their own kind of freak.
Before he finished
his second year in office, Obama was such an object of Republican
loathing that the Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell could say –
with impunity – that “the single most important thing we want to
achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If your political
priorities are the total defeat of a single politician – not the
advancement of your own policies through debate or legislation –
then you are already in pretty desperate shape. You render it
impossible to compromise with your opponents, and you fan the flames
of extremism that will burn anyone in the center.
You also look weak
and foolish when you lose, surrendering the stage to someone who can
vilify his opponents better than you. So don’t look dazed and
confused at Donald Trump when he runs your playbook more convincingly
than your own team. It’s too late to fret about endorsing his kooky
positions – like deporting millions of undocumented immigrants,
treating all Muslims as enemies and blowing up the deficit – when
they are only logical extensions of your own.
After eight years of
conservative caricature, you may be forgiven for thinking that Obama
is a Kenyan Muslim socialist with terrorist sympathies and
job-destroying policies on healthcare and bank regulation.
Of course, if you
live inside the echo chamber of Fox News and rightwing talk radio,
you have to ignore the pesky fact that unemployment now stands at
4.9%. That’s lower than when Reagan left office in 1988, and it’s
lower than when Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996.
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The rate stood at
8.3% in Obama’s first full month in office, and not much below that
when he won re-election. For a president with a job-killing economic
plan, that’s not a shabby performance.
Sure enough, Obama’s
approval ratings (52%) are almost identical to Reagan’s in August
1988 (53%) and a dramatic contrast to those of George W Bush (32%) in
2008. One of these Republican presidents was succeeded by his own
vice-president; the other was succeeded by Barack Obama.
This should lead to
some serious soul-searching inside the Republican party. Not a
post-mortem about how to reach out to Latino voters, but a
dismantling of the politics of personal destruction, and the creation
of a new, hopeful agenda that can appeal to the mainstream.
Instead, the only
point of unity inside the GOP is its gleeful hatred of Hillary
Clinton, and its thinly veiled disdain for a nominee who has yet to
find a politician he can’t insult.
The Republican party
did not entirely fail to destroy Barack Obama. For a few years, aided
by the great recession, they almost succeeded. But then they
contrived to revive him by nominating a man who would destroy
everything Obama stood for, along with much of the free world as we
know it.
The rise of Trump
has led, perversely, to the revival of Obama. Republican candidates
are saying they will not vote for their presidential nominee, and the
party’s national security officials are lining up to condemn Trump
as a reckless danger to the Republic. How could the incumbent not
look like a statesman compared to a man who apparently can’t be
trusted with the elevator button, never mind a nuclear one?
Inside the White
House, Obama’s aides talk about a president liberated from previous
constraint. On the trail, and at the podium, he seems to love
campaigning against his orange nemesis. His party’s candidates
can’t get enough of him, and his potential successor – instead of
putting distance between them – believes Obama doesn’t get enough
credit for his economic achievements.
This one-term
president is having an unusually successful end to his second term,
and for that he can thank the Republicans who were so determined to
destroy him.
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