This victory seems different somehow. More "once and for all" than anything I’ve experienced before.
I anticipated this, of course, but the moment itself is incredibly delicious.
It’s the reaction on both sides which has me feeling this way.
Start with the Democrats. Liberals want revenge on Joe Lieberman, but President-elect Obama refuses to give them the satisfaction. He wants Lieberman in his caucus as a bridge to the "moderate" Republicans left in the Senate who can help him beat routine filibusters — Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Arlen Spector — people who watch to see which way the wind blows and don’t go knee-jerk into their own party’s column.
Barack Obama really is trying to make the Internet Thesis of Consensus happen. He’s dead serious about this. Liberals, like those at DailyKos and Firedoglake, may see Lieberman as a snake, but Obama thinks he can grab him by the head and bring him on-board, most of the time.
It’s risky business. The President-elect has a pre-approval rating of 70, much higher than any Democrat since LBJ, and he wants to use that to get consensus on a coherent program involving the economy, foreign policy, health care, and the War Against Oil. It’s a deep game, for historical stakes, and no one has played such a game since Nixon. (Reagan just played the hand Nixon fed him.)
But far more important has been the reaction on the right. It has been angry, incoherent, sometimes irrational. Mostly it has been backward-looking. Sarah Palin is really trying to make herself into the new century’s George McGovern, someone who inspires a disjointed base of tribes but repels everyone else. May God bless her work with success.
What we’re seeing, in short, is a division of the Republican coalition into warring tribes, all blaming others within the shrinking tent for what has gone on, all capable of acting-out in Ayres-like
ways. While this is technically dangerous, it is electorally
delicious. The extremism of the right’s fools give Vice President Biden
and his speechwriters a rich field on which to heap abuse. And this was
the key to the Nixon Thesis’ turning its 1968 win into a
generation-long crusade.
Conservatives will regret how they gave unitary power to the
executive, how they passed the Patriot Act, how they used the full
powers of the government to spy on citizens. In the hands of fools, and
the Bush people were in the end fools, these powers are the source of
parody. In the hands of wise men, and the people around Barack Obama
are quite wise in the judicious use of power, these are things which
will protect us from the worst the dead-enders can dish out.
I started this post with a reference to Lord of the Rings, and it’s fair that I finish with one. In the movie our heroes returned to a happy village. In the book
they returned to enormous turmoil, a revolt led by Sauron’s followers,
an attack on the Shire itself. In the book they beat this, a miniature
version of those struggles that had come before.
That’s what we
face in this country over the next few years, a rear-guard uprising by
forces who will do damage, who may well kill me, or you, but who in the
end will be defeated. Because America doesn’t put up with that shit.
