From an interesting essay:
It would be one thing if Republicans were negotiating in good faith, recognizing that reasonable minds can disagree on the matters at hand and that each will have to bend. But the GOP has become so extremist that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) made clear after the 2010 elections that his party’s agenda for the next two years was not governing but ensuring Obama’s defeat in 2012. Meanwhile, as they have for years, Republicans have openly shared their desire to shrink government so much that they can, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once promised, “drown it in a bathtub.” Democrats’ tolerance of such destructive positions is a sign not of nobility but of pathetic self-loathing.
I guess her thesis is that the president and, really, Democrats in general should show less tolerance for the Republicans’ nuttiness. I feel the same way a lot of the time. Certainly, I feel that the Republicans were given a free pass for actual criminal behavior during the Bush era, and that this was not rewarded in any way, but only served to erode the integrity and even the merit of our system of laws and government.
On the other hand, governing is about getting things done, and the Republicans are responsible for their own craziness. We can only punish them by beating them at the ballot box, but we can’t change them otherwise. They have sufficient power that they must be reckoned with, whether we pout about it or not. So, we might do a little better by adjusting our strategies to be more of a mirror-image of theirs (we ask for something nuts and don’t back down until the last second, if at all) but that’s just tinkering around the edges, and it’s not who we are.
It’s also not a win-win situation. When one party has the power to stop everything and has no apparent sense of self-preservation, you don’t necessarily gain anything by meeting their unreasonable demands with your own. I still think that we should focus on structural reforms that overturn Citizens United, make it easier to vote and harder to suppress the vote, campaign finance reform, building a media infrastructure that can compete, and things along these lines. Ratcheting up our unreasonableness to match theirs isn’t really a solution. Yelling louder about their intransigence and evil won’t eliminate their money and media advantage. And negotiating strategy is important but its importance is muted when the other side is happy to simply shut down the government if they don’t get what they want.
It’s almost like trying to negotiate with a suicide bomber. Sometimes you just have to move safely out of the way and let them explode. The current incarnation of the GOP won’t last forever. It can’t.