Republican Suicide Watch

It may now well be America's favorite pastime: Republican Suicide Watch.

Its season is longer, its ramifications more profound and Lord knows its principal players are at least as amusing as any Super Bowl commercial.

Take, for instance, yesterday's spectacle of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on CBS's "Face the Nation," in which Mitch said, yea, verily, he actually said: "I think it may be time ... for the president to kind of get ahold of these Democrats in the Senate and the House ... and shake them a little bit and say, look, let's do this the right way."

He was of course referencing a Democratic president who, in a national referendum that made all the papers, just crushed the living daylight out of Republican ideology as a public-policy vehicle, not to mention all those Senate and House Democrats who, district by district and state after state, did roughly the same.

But now, says Mitch, this Democratic president should grab his fellow Dems by their majority necks and coerce them to undo what democracy defines as the will of the people.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not romanticizing that will; sometimes its expression is the last thing this country needs, as evidenced by other 21st-century elections, which are better left unmentioned for now.

Even horrific outcomes, however, emphasize that elections do matter. Thus it seems only fair that if those elections counted as the proper and immutable will of the people, then perhaps this one should too?

Oh but sorry, say the Republicans. It doesn't -- indeed it shouldn't -- really work that way. According to our playbook it's heads we win, tails you lose. No matter how minor our minority position becomes, we should always have equal settings at the table.

Unquestionably the president brought some of this on himself. For months, even years, he tutored us on the boundless upsides of bipartisanship, promising a new kind of fuzzy-wuzzy politics in which Platonic love and Socratic methodology would rule Washington. Turns out, though, it might have been better had he been a trifle more precise.

For as the Washington Post reports this morning, those who have known Barack Obama best say that his mantra of "fixing 'broken politics' is less about making concessions just for the sake of finding common ground and more about elevating the debate -- replacing cynical gamesmanship and immature name-calling with intellectually honest arguments and respect for the other side's motives."

In short: polite political hegemony.

Which, as I said, is only fair, since elections, as the democratic expression of the people's shifting will, are supposed to matter.

As for Obama's expectations of "intellectually honest arguments" and the opposition's respectful "motives"?

Well now, there are two variables of unplumbable wretchedness.

From the Politico, let us quote: "Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, the chairman of the Republican Conference whose office organized [a just-completed] three-day [strategizing] retreat, kicked off the final dinner with a clip of George C. Scott as Gen. Patton imploring his troops, 'We’re going to kick the hell out of (the enemy) all the time, and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose.'"

And there was this from the intellectually honest Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip: "I know all of you are pumped about the [stimulus-package] vote the other day. We’ll have more to come."

Honest, no doubt. But intellectual?

To what extent this sort of unthinking, unbecoming obstructionism actually derails the people's will remains to be seen. But it does leave one perplexed, given that "it" appears to be the GOP's chosen path -- after a three-day strategy session, no less -- to a return to majority power.

As the Post's David Broder observed more than a month ago: "[C]ongressional Republicans ... shrunken ranks are increasingly dominated by right-wing Southerners who care not what their stance does to harm the party's national image."

Yep, that's what Broder wrote then and virtually every other prominent columnist with the exception of the now-underemployed Bill Kristol has written since. As conventional wisdom goes, it's profoundly wise, even if mammothly conventional.

So when the party's new chairman, Michael Steele, announced last week to his fellow Republicans that his first task would be to address their "image" problem, was he sufficiently aware of just who his fellow Republicans are, and, with respect to the 2010 election, what they're up to?

Because these jokers are becoming political jokes, real fast -- and there's nothing more politically suicidal than that.