The GOP's payoff for years of hard, gruesome, careless toil

Earlier this evening I heard Chris Matthews remark on "Hardball" that President Obama is winning this race "in spite" of all the contemptible Republican tactics: charges of unAmericanism, a "food-stamp" presidency, come-and-get-it welfare dispensations, the president's through-and-through Otherness ... you are all too familiar with the filth.

My instant reaction to Matthews' observation was that the antithesis is likely true (or truer); that President Obama is winning this race because of Republican contemptibility, not in spite of it (none of which is to deny, it should go without saying, Obama's enormous political skills). If Republicans remain the undisputed champions of only one thing in this political universe, it is that they can always be counted on to blunderingly overreach, to patently overplay their hand, to make complete and absolute asses of themselves.

This attribute became strikingly clear under Gingrich's House regime--adolescent tantrums and government shutdowns, anyone?--and they've only become better at it. They have since disgracefully overplayed their hand in the ideological denial of climate change, in exploiting older religious conservatives at the cost of younger (and more conscientious) evangelicals, in "shrinking" government by brazenly bloating plutocratic wallets as well as deficits, in huckstering patriotic wars of vast national-security injury, in catering to ever-whiter and narrower slices of the nation's immensely diversifying demographics--in short, for the sake of that very next "win," they have played themselves straight into ethical bankruptcy.

They've nothing left. They squandered years of potentially competitive cooperation and thoughtful partisanship; they cornered themselves into wilder- and wilder-eyed extremism; they bet the farm on ... what? In heaven's name what?

So I put the rather loaded question to you: Are they now really losing in spite of all that? 

Comments

[Robinswing]

Well said.

[Suzanne Holland]

I would only add, beautifully stated.

[Ted Frier]

It's the South. Republicans made a pact with the devil. Whites oppose Obama by 42%! That's not a survey result. It's another country. The South, or rather Southern conservatism, has destroyed every party it's ever been a part of -- Whigs, Democrats, Know-nothing, and now Republican. It has never matured politically to the extent it's been able to live cooperatively with others who are different from them, and so the South must destroy what it cannot control and maintain solidarity by attacking "empaty" itself.

[AnneJ]

PM, I can always count on you to be the silver lining when the dark republican storm clouds gather. I remember you predicted this on 11/22/04 after Bush the Lesser was reelected. You said the republicans would overreach and sure enough, in 2005 Bush dropped the social security privatization bomb. Of course that wasn't the only thing but it was the earliest sign I could recall. And I believe there was a certain republican boy wonder who was all for it who now is the republican veep choice. But again, plenty more happened to damage the republican brand as 2005 dragged on and in to the 2006 mid-terms where you predicted a democratic win and sure enough you were right. And I've been a loyal fan ever since.