http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/forget_party_of_no_dems_need_to_run_against_extremism_20100822/Forget the ‘Party of No,’ Dems Need to Run Against Extremism
Posted on Aug 22, 2010
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.
In an election, a solid “no” usually beats an uneasy “yes, but.” That’s the heart of the problem Democrats and President Obama face this fall.
The advantage of saying “no” without equivocation is that a significant share of the electorate is usually ready to shout the word from the rooftops, especially when the economy is as bad as it is now. Both parties have regularly offered variations on the late George C. Wallace’s brilliant slogan, “Send them a message.” The catchphrase leaves voters free to define who “them” is, and to fill in the message themselves.
Democrats know this since the power of negative thinking won them back both houses of Congress in 2006. Their supporters swarmed the polling places to say no to George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.
That’s why identifying the GOP as “the party of no” won’t do the Democrats as much good as they’d like to think. With more than a third of conservative Republicans declaring that our Christian president is a Muslim, just saying no to him is a more than adequate motivation to spend a few minutes with a ballot.
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But
there is something far more troubling at work: the rise of an angry, irrational extremism—the sort that says Obama is a Muslim socialist who wasn’t born in the U.S.—that was not part of Ronald Reagan’s buoyant conservative creed. Do Republican politicians believe in the elaborate conspiracy theories being spun by Glenn Beck and parts of the tea party movement? If not, why won’t they say so? Liberals who refused to break with the far left in the 1950s and ’60s were accused of being blinded by a view that saw “no enemies on the left.” Are conservatives who should know better now falling into a “no enemies on the right” trap?
When Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert warns, with absolutely no proof, of the dangers of “terror babies”—children whose mothers allegedly come to the United States to give birth so their offspring can have American passports for later use in terrorist activities—have we not crossed into never-never land? Where are the responsible conservatives who should be denouncing such crackpottery?
What the current right has on offer is far worse than anything Bush put forward, which means that this election isn’t even about whether we’ll go back into the ditch. It’s about whether a movement that’s gone over a cliff will be rewarded for doing so. A victory for this style of conservatism will be a defeat for the kind of conservatism the country needs. And that’s a worthy matter to put to the voters.
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