Jaquandor wrote something insightful over at Byzantium’s Shores this morning:
…a blogger I read recently wrote that President Obama has brought all of his woes upon himself, and that the Tea Party only exists because of his excesses. “The Tea Party wouldn’t exist without him,” this fellow wrote.
But…of course the Tea Party would exist without him. The Tea Party would have happened to any Democrat elected President in 2008, because for all the grass-roots mythology the Tea Parties like to indulge, the fact is very simple: the Tea Party is nothing more than the same pissed-off Republicans who crawl out of the woodwork en masse every time a Democrat is in office. President Hillary Clinton would have faced a Tea Party. So would President Joseph Biden, President John Kerry, President…anyone at all from the Democratic Party.
This mirrors something I’ve thought off and on ever since Barack Obama’s election. It’s really not his policies or his personality that have got people on the right foaming at the mouth. I don’t even think it’s his Muslim-sounding name or his race (although I certainly don’t discount any of these things as contributing factors). When you get right down to brass tacks, the biggest problem is simply that a very sizable segment of the population cannot abide the thought of anyone other than a Republican sitting in the Oval Office. Conservatives like to gripe about the culture of entitlement that they think liberals promote, but what else could you call the obstinate conviction that the presidency belongs to their side alone except an overblown sense of entitlement?
We’ve seen this before, of course, during the Clinton years. The Big Dog may have eventually revealed some major (and exploitable) character flaws, but he had enemies searching for those weaknesses before he even took his oath of office, for no good reason that I’ve ever been able to determine other than his party affiliation. A lot of people, especially here in Utah, just couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that 12 years of Republican presidency were over. And I think the exact same reflexive denial took root the moment Barack Obama took the reins from G.W. Bush.
A lot of things from the Clinton era seem to be repeating themselves, actually. The Republicans are once again threatening to shut down the government if they don’t get their way. They’ve come up with a new Contract on, er, Pledge to America. Even Newt Gingrich has raised his beady-eyed, porcine head once again. And on the other side of the aisle, we’ve got a Democratic majority that is disorganized, disheartened, ineffectual, needlessly and inexplicably cowardly, utterly incapable of standing up for itself in the face of all the crazy bullshit, and very likely going to lose big in a few weeks.
The stench of deja vu is nauseating.
I think you’re being unfair for two reasons:
1) Not all Republicans (or even all conservatives) are Glenn Beck-worshiping, Democrat-hating, corporate greed-loving Bible thumpers. Some people (like me, for instance) are Republicans because we tend to agree with the core principles of Republican candidates more often than Democratic candidates, but still consider each issue on its merits, and occasionally agree with the Democrats. I am, for example, in favor of gay rights/marriage, abortion rights, gun control, stem-cell research, and building an Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero in New York. I don’t believe President Obama is a Muslim, nor would I care if he were a Muslim, so long as his ideas were good ones and he did right by the United States. I’d even go as far as to suggest to you that most likely, most Republicans are more like me than like Glenn Beck, but that Republicans like me are infinitely less interesting to the media (and, ironically, to Democrats who have a vested interest in painting Republicans as 100% on the fringe), so no one ever talks about the mainstream and instead, focuses on people who bring firearms to political rallies.
2) President Obama has legitimately spent a giant boat-load of money, and we still have many of the fundamental problems we had when he took office. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the solutions have simply not played out yet, or whether we’ve thrown trillions of dollars down a rabbit hole. But to suggest that there is no rational reason to dislike the President’s policies other than “he’s a Democrat, so we must all hate him” is to overlook a great deal of recently enacted legislation, regulatory policy and rhetoric.
If you’re angry at the folks out there who reflexively hate Barack Obama because he belongs to a certain group (the Democrats), be careful you don’t find yourself becoming a person who reflexively hates folks like the “beady-eyed, porcine” Newt Gingrich, simly because he belongs to a certain group (the Republicans). I don’t like a lot of what Newt Gingrich has said in the past either, but tomorrow morning, he may say something that I agree with 100%. I’ll have to wait and see….
Point taken, Brian, I should have more clearly specified I was talking about some people on the right as opposed to all of them.
In my own defense, however, I rarely encounter Republicans like yourself (i.e., reasonable, polite, and occasionally in favor of progressive ideas). Utah is overwhelmingly tilted toward the Glenn Beck/Tea Party end of the spectrum, and there is a constant drumbeat of hostility here toward President Obama, the Democrats, and liberalism (liberalism being defined in these parts as anything to the left of the John Birch Society, and often seen as literally evil, i.e., advancing the work of Satan). It’s difficult not to paint my frustration with a wide brush when I’m so thoroughly surrounded by extremists that they think nothing of spewing out their Obama-is-a-socialist-fascist-Muslim nonsense in settings where people from more cosmopolitan areas would naturally show better manners — during cash-register transactions, for example — because they have such a majority, they just assume that everyone here must agree with them. Feeling beleaguered all the time tends to skew one’s perspective a bit.
Likewise, I didn’t mean to suggest that people don’t have legitimate reasons to be unhappy with President Obama. I’m not real happy with him myself at the moment. But my point — which I still stand by — is that there are people who had a problem with him before he even set foot in the White House simply because he was a Democrat, just as there were people against Clinton from the beginning for the same reason. And I don’t mean they simply dislike the fact that a guy from the other team won; these folks seem to believe the country is doomed, literally, if the presidency passes out of Republican hands. Oftentimes (out here in Utah, anyhow), there’s even a religious component to this thinking — they believe a Democrat in the White House means the End of Days is upon us, and they’ll say as much in public. I’ll admit that it makes me unhappy when Republicans win the presidency and/or too many seats in Congress, because I don’t agree with conservative philosophies, but I’ve never thought the country was going to go to hell (literally!) simply because of their party affiliation. And certainly not from their first day in office. I disliked GW Bush from the beginning because I disliked him; his personality grated on me. The fact that he was Republican was secondary. I didn’t have the same problem with his father, though. I was willing to give GHW Bush the benefit of the doubt until he actually did something I disapproved of.
As for Newt, my dislike of him is entirely personal and visceral, and I suspect I’d feel the same way if he was a Democrat or a Libertarian, or a Tory or a Whig, for that matter. The guy’s a jerk. My mention of him in the entry was meant only to illustrate the parallels between now and the mid-90s, i.e., Gingrinch is back on the scene after being relatively obscure for a while.
The same can be said for both parties when the opposite holds office. There are the extreme and the not so extreme.
I’d feel the same way you do in a very liberal state, Jas.
Not planning to move to San Francisco anytime soon, eh, Mike? 🙂