From Nobel laureate Paul Krugman:
“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
As Jules Crittenden notes,
Ha ha. Obviously this is just more distorted partisan claptrap from Krugman, whose big problem with Obama is that he isn’t socialist enough. What’s great is how well it works if you sub in “Bush,” ”1999,” ”Republican” and “enraged left” for “Obama,” ”2007,” ”Democrat” and “enraged right.” The difference is Bush actually did engage in extensive bipartisanship and didn’t attempt to ice out the opposition, right up to the end.
President Bush's experience with the Texas legislature had given him hope that he could bring bipartisanship to Washington, because he had seen it work firsthand. But Democrats in Congress knew that they would be in town long after Bush had gone back to Texas, and so vilifying him became first priority. Despite GWB's attempts to reach across the aisle (such as with No Child Left Behind), Democrats were determined to fight him and lie about him as long as they possibly could. And they still do it.
But they expect Republicans to shut up and allow Democrats to blame them for every problem in the universe, and not criticize the disasters the D's have planned for us? What's next? Gonna try to pull our sponsors if we keep announcing the emperor has no clothes?
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