Paul Ryan had (notice the tense?) a Beltway reputation for being a straight shooter. After his fact-challenged convention speech and performance on the campaign trail, that reputation has taken a hit, perhaps an unrecoverable one.
The latest campaign statement that seems to emanate from an alternate sphere of reality is his insistence that Obama has been weak on foreign policy in a way that invites attacks, such as the recent attack on the consulate in Benghazi.
We should, perhaps, ask Mr. Ryan if George Bush projected weakness in his first 10 months in office in hope of explaining a domestic terrorist attack that claimed 3,000 American lives. We might also inquire as to the weakness projected by Ronald Reagan in months preceding the 1983 attack on the barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. Finally, we might ask the jihadis--what is left of them--operating in the tribal regions of Pakistan if they think that Obama has been weak on foreign policy.
Quite apart from these delusional speeches by Mr. Ryan, I have begun to wonder if for some reason conservatives are inherently more partisan than liberals. Is there something about the conservative soul that lends itself to a myopic partisan worldview? I think back to the period after the election of G.W. Bush, an election that, if any election ever was, ideal for stoking partisan resentment from the losing party. He won after a contested vote in a state controlled by his brother and a disgraceful ruling by Republican judges on the Supreme Court. Despite this, Democrats were willing to work with the new president when they found common ground. Ted Kennedy helped shepherd Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative through Congress. Compare this to the almost unanimous rejectionist attitude Republicans in Congress adopted regarding Obama's legislative agenda, including opposing policies that they had recently championed.
Perhaps it is the fact that the GOP is a more ideologically uniform party than the Democrats. Perhaps it is that the conservative disdain for government leads them to have less interest in public policy than Democrats. Absent an legitimate interest in policy, its costs and effectiveness, they are left with little more than a desire for power. I honestly don't know.
Inherently? I've lived through a lot of Democratic Presidents and I don't remember anything like what's going on these days. As for the specific hatred of Obama, I have a general theory. Pick a %, adding to 100:
ReplyDelete1)Sore losers (Rove had these guys convince that a conservative dynasty had begun) - X%
2)Payback's a bitch (Bush took an incredible amount of flack from the left, and compounding the bittterness is the right's knowledge that it was mostly deserved) - X%
3)The texture of Obama's hair (since we know that racism is finally dead now that we have a blackish President) - X%
4) Genuine policy disagreements - x%
5) The internet's megaphone capacity to amplify the squealing of the disaffected - X%
I personally think that #5 is a lot of it - generally speaking, there's nothing the folks on the right like more than having their beliefs reinforced. They are like hobbits, they love books full of things they already know. The echo chamber of the internet has raised ignorant bitching to a powerful cultural force, and those on the right are more in its thrall. It'll be interesting to see how the left responds when the pendulum swings the other way.