Congressional Democrats and the White House are getting a lot of advice today. Almost all of it is self-serving. I might have some advice, but I mainly have a few observations.
As someone who spent 2005-2009 documenting the behavior of the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress, I can tell you that we’ve never suffered from such a period of sustained unethical and even criminal behavior in our nation’s history. That those characters were also almost comically inept and incompetent only made matters worse. They were so bad, in fact, that it didn’t require any kind of ideological battle to defeat them. People just wanted change.
We’ve had bad administrations before. We’ve even had failed administrations before. But we’ve never had quite the toxic brew that we experienced in the second term of the Bush administration. They left the country heavily indebted, with a cratering financial sector, escalating unemployment, a housing crisis, and internationally discredited while bogged down in two unpopular wars in Asia. But you know all this.
The problem, as I see it, is that the Obama administration attempted to treat the Bush administration the same way all other incoming administrations have treated an outgoing administration of the other party. That is to say, they treated them as members of the permanent Establishment in good standing. Their punishment was being stripped of the offices and accouterments of power, nothing more. Where possible, members of the Bush administration were retained in the interest of comity and continuity. Republican members of Congress were invited into the cabinet. Crimes were not investigated, or were put off to another day.
There were many fine reasons, both practical and political, for taking this road, but they ignored they magnitude of the rot at the heart of our country after eight years of Bush and Cheney in power. They ignored the very nature of the Republican Party that Bush and Cheney bequeathed upon the nation.
Obama wanted to rise above petty partisan bickering and rule by consensus. But the other side was so corrupted that this proved impossible. And, I think, this phenomenon goes beyond mere partisan politics to extend to Wall Street, and to our culture more generally after eight years of terrorization and regulatory neglect by our government. Our media is thoroughly corrupted, as well.
Above all, the political cost that Obama has paid has come from his failure to articulate the nature of the beast he defeated. And, I think, this is partly due to his failure to understand the depth and breadth of the cancer that is feeding on our Republic. To be sure, it has metastasized into the Democratic Party, too. But that wouldn’t be a problem if not for the complete rot in the other party.
A narrative needs to be told about the degree to which the Republicans screwed up this country, flouted the law, violated privacy and civil rights, and took the money and ran. Until the Obama administration is willing to tell the American people the truth about the biggest threat we face (which is not the threat of terrorism) and to behave like they are serious about defeating the Republicans and driving them into the ground, we are going to lose elections to lightweights like Scott Brown whenever our own candidates are less than satisfying.
