Barack Obama hasn’t transformed the Democratic Party but he’s
making history by driving Republicans crazy.
For 40 years, Republicans worked brilliantly to sell the Republican
Party as more than assembly of rich white protestants who play electoral politics
to keep their lessers out.
The moderns in the Republican Party stopped trying to re-fight
the New Deal or market their own ideas about how to make the poor upper-middle
class, too. Essentially, they promised better times and found things to attack
that the average guy worries about as well—like other countries, run-away
government spending, street crime, foreign influences, and white-collar officials
and other snobs who don’t talk common sense.
In these hard times,
campaigning against Obama as an incompetent would be good enough for these
Republicans. Nevertheless, no-drama Obama has excited his opponent to go
extreme.
Thanks to Republican staging by 26 Republican states,
congressional votes, billionaire PACs, and dozens of primaries across the
country—Americans are now four months away from an election with a vivid choice.
Obama, temperamentally and visually a liberal, will defend a
conservative record and a half a dozen new universal rights and benefits for
individual Americans.
Romney, temperamentally and visually a conservative, will call
for radical change, promising to repeal new health consumer rights, and make
government poorer and business more profitable.
By going to the Supreme Court, Republicans declared that
what middle-class families in other successful democracies can claim as a right
as citizens—guaranteed nation-wide access to basic and preventative health services—is
impermissible in the United States.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court added “constitutional” to the
various selling points of Obamacare.
A strong, as well as smart, Republican presidential
candidate would stand back and think. He’d look at options, including amending
the legislation and claiming to have the necessary experience to make the
reforms truly affordable. Mitt Romney, however, doubled down simply promising
to repeal the legislation.
In effect, he’s asking for a filibuster-free sweep. In tax,
and social policy, he’s inviting individual Americans to break the government
rather than do anything more to make life more secure and more comfortable—beyond
what they can win for themselves in the market.
No doubt it will “galvanize” the Republican base. The Charge
of the Light Brigade was vehement as well.
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