The Joy of Republican Hysteria

By the time Barack Obama's first term has expired, he'll either be as hammeringly partisan as Tom DeLay or as nonchalantly partisan as a pussycat. But one way or the other, this wistful business (or gossamer dream) about an authentic, mature and thoughtful bipartisanship with modern Republicans will be as doornail dead as Jacob Marley.

It all depends, of course, on the 2010 Congressional elections.

Republicans are banking on the fact, if not praying for it, that Obama's efforts to turn the economy around will have failed miserably by then -- and there they'll be, those hyperpartisan luminaries, propagandizing the desperate throngs that if they had been in charge our streets would be paved with nothing but economic upticks.

That's Scenario A, in which the GOP will either enlarge its Congressional minority status or even regain control. Either way it would shove Obama into an increasingly partisan -- and deafening -- arena.

Scenario B -- the far more likely one, in my opinion -- is that dark Republican prayers to the economic gods will go unanswered and the economy indeed will have lifted by late 2010. In this scenario, at the rate they're going and given the spectacled manner in which they're doing it, Republicans will have effectively extinguished themselves as a national party of serious opposition.

Like the Northern Whigs, in time they could even be primed for either wholesale extinction or gradual absorption, probably into an upstart and genuinely conservative party; because these Southern Republicans -- already the virtual GOP -- will have demonstrated perhaps for a final, unnerving time that they're the ideal party of philosophically outmoded antiquity and pointless brawling, but little else.

All they will have accomplished is the rubbing out of the few GOP moderates remaining today. Consequently Obama will be free to pat the surviving radicals on the head and wish them a nice day. Partisanship? Knock yourselves out, guys.

For Republicans it's a helluva gamble, yet both outcomes rest on the same beginning premise: to act unconscionably hostile to the unmistakable thrust of the 2008 elections -- a determined adoption of pragmatic Keynesian economics and the abandonment of Hayek, Friedman and Greenspan.

There is also a Third Way for Republicans -- Scenario C -- one warmly embraced by an internal handful but resoundingly rejected by most. And that of course is to behave as a responsible minority party of tweaking -- to get what they can, when they can, in the adult absent of high drama and exotic histrionics and above all to return to honest debate.

Their present and quite loud distinction between government spending and stimuli, for instance, is such a nakedly disingenuous one that it even has the customarily respectful Barack Obama laughing about it before audiences, the latter of whom enthusiastically join in.

In short, Republican arguments are swiftly becoming a laughingstock. Why it took so long for the White House to engage those arguments and enforce some semblance of message discipline -- uh, folks, a spent dollar is a stimulating dollar -- can, in part perhaps, be written off to election battle fatigue, but Obama & Co. now seems to be shaking off any besieged stupor.

The president is finally toughening up, and I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that his toughening process is taking the same calculated trajectory as it did in previous battles against Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

First came Obama's exhortations for reasoned debate and civilized behavior, then came the inevitable unreasonable and uncivilized assaults in retort, and finally came a reinvigorated candidate, giving as much -- and then more -- as he got.

Obama is something of a robust self-contradiction, if not a living oxymoron: He is, it seems, a kind of delicate but thunderingly hardass Illinois pol.

Hey, it worked for Lincoln, and there were many who misunderestimated that man throughout his inexorable marches to triumph, too.

Hence I take a rather long-term delight in the current Republican spectacles of temper tantrums and mindless obstructionism and logic-defying arguments. Because odds are, I'd wager, they're only doing long-term damage to themselves.