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.
