Why do we on the left insist on being rational, and believing, despite all the evidence, that our fellow creatures are rational. Given that those fellow creatures appear poised to give huge gains to the Republicans as a reward for preventing the enactment of an effective recovery plan, the idea that we will fail if our arguments are not logically precise seems rather absurd.
The immediate cause for this rant is this observation by Steve Benen, at the Washington Monthly:
The notion that Democrats would gain traction this year by tying Republican candidates to George W. Bush’s failed presidency has always seemed implausible to me. The GOP’s lack of popularity still stems from the previous administration’s catastrophes, but it seems challenging, at best, to keep connecting the party to Bush two years later.
As I observed at a recent Blumenthal event (I think it was a Blumenthal event), the Democrats, who were not constantly on their heels back then, were still running against Herbert Hoover well into the 50s, for I can remember his name being invoked by Democratic politicians when I was back there in Catholic school. Republicans were running against Jimmy Carter well into the nineties and they are still, in places, running against George McGovern. And we are to believe that we can’t run against the worst president in history a mere two years after he departed the stage? If we can’t, it’s because our above the fray president threw the opportunity away, opting instead for the fantasy of “bi-partisanship”, something only a deeply deluded person could believe in. I read today that many people confuse the Obama stimulus package with the Tarp plan. Only Democrats could have let that happen, what with the handily alliterative “Bush Bailout” ready at hand, a term we should have heard daily since November of 2008. The only way to remind people that we were brought to this pass by George Bush is to constantly rub their noses in it. It appears to have escaped the attention of the present day Democrats that the average American has the attention span of a gnat, but if you keep saying something, as the Republicans constantly prove, it will eventually sink in.
So it’s not implausible that the Democrats could successfully use George Bush against the Republicans. What’s implausible, yet apparently true, is that it does not have occurred to them to do so.
Post a Comment