I am willing to give Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner points for trying, but there actually is no point to trying to talk sensibly to the conservative base. Quoting James Madison and Aristotle (that heathen!) isn’t going to convince the mouth-breathers of anything.
Ryan Cooper explains why:
In a sense, this is the damage done by the combination of President Obama’s moderation and instinct for compromise, and Republicans’ preposterous imaginary version of same. In an effort to reach moderate Republicans and obtain a Grand Bargain, Obama has reached ever-further right on policy. But since Republican beliefs about the president are based in reactionary, deep-seated cultural anxiety, all he has succeeded in doing is accidentally claiming nearly the entire sane policy spectrum for the Democrats.
I’m not sure that Obama’s actions were as accidental as Mr. Cooper suggests. If you go back and look at his campaign and then his initial staffing decisions, it’s pretty clear that he wanted to build a coalition that extended from the far left wing to the the edge of the center-right. Among his early supporters were moderate Republicans like Colin Powell and the children of Dwight D. Eisenhower and William F. Buckley. He kept lifelong Republican Robert Gates on as his Defense Secretary and picked Ray LaHood to be his Secretary of Transportation.
You can look at this uncharitably if you happen to be a progressive Democrat who wants an emphasis on progressive policies. You can look at it as largely an accident of President Bush’s epic fuck-ups, which made “reasonable” Republicans gettable for the Obama campaign. But I view it as a sign than Obama understood that he needed a huge coalition to get things done, and that’s what he accomplished in his first two years.
However, with most reasonable Republicans already in his coalition, the president discovered that he had unleashed in his opposition an unrestrainable strain of Goddamned Crazy that could be not put back in the box or the bottle or wherever the hell it came from. Wasilla, probably.