Aren't we lucky that candidate (and then President) Obama was so determined not to get the electorate all worked up?

"This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms."

-- Matt Taibbi (see below)

by Ken

In my attempt yesterday to ruthlessly distill the essence of Matt Taibbi's terrific Rolling Stone investigation of the latter-day teabaggers -- who they are, what they're about, and what it means in the grand scheme of things -- I passed over a lovely riff that was necessary for his purposes but off topic for your ruthless distiller.

Of course, the fact that we're even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party's incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.

I know we've talked about it a bunch of times, but it was a strategic decision made back at the dawn of the Obama campaign not to confront the Republicans with What They Wrought. If ever there was a time to try to mount a campaign to educate the electorate -- in this case to the ills and outright evil of conservative governance -- that was it. It would have been a hard job, requiring both eloquence and persistence. As it happens, these are both qualities that Barack Obama possesses in large quantity, which he uses ever so occasionally. (If he's afraid that you can't go to the well too often, he has a point, but you really have to pick your fights and fight the ones that matter, the ones that hold the promise of the most important gains.)

And candidate Obama chose to give the Right a pass. By that time, of course, all those people who for six or seven years had frothed with instead-of-sexual joy for old President What's-His-Name couldn't even remember his name, even though he was still in the White House. But the policies, the principles of right-wing destruction, the cause of the economic meltdown that was the background and probably the foreground of the campaign -- that needed to be demolished, and there was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do it. But the candidate and the advisers he listened to apparently thought all that negativity would turn voters off, and so he confined himself to vague allusions to past, er, difficulties, domestic and foreign, and soothed those would-be voters with promises of (let's say it all together) Hope and Change.

Isn't that a kick in the head? He didn't want to get the folks all worked up! And in the process he gave the now-entirely-lie-and-delusion-based Republican Campaign Slime Machine license to spew all that filth into the body politic for all those months. So instead of attempting to bring the electorate up to what we liked to hope was his level, he stood by and watched the level of discourse sink into a swamp of toxic sludge.

Then as president, faced with historic opportunities to reverse the course of American governance, even while dealing with an economic crisis of near-unprecedented proportion, which called for a massive campaign of economic education, he whiffed. Whether it was the economy, the financial-sector mess, the environmental crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for that matter the health care crisis he put at the top of his priority pile, all complex matters -- our most eloquent president was almost continuously MIA.

When it came to uncovering and documenting the Constitution- and law-shredding activities of the Bush regime, the only ghost of a chance we have for preventing a recurrence of that flagrant behavior, gosh, no, we have to look forward, not backward. Just the way we couldn't upset the folks out there by saying bad things about the opposition candidates. How well has all that worked out? Just ask the teabaggers.

There is, of course, a different explanation for candidate and President Obama's disinclination to take down the philosophy of government that the Bush regime worked so hard to discredit. It may just be that his disagreements with those policies are superficial, and he wanted to preserve the option to do the same damned thing, as his administration as done on so many issues.

Either way, this sudden onset of presidential denunciations of the ancien régime seems kind of too little, too late. is it really surprising, though, that mainstream America isn't interested in hearing that now? There was a time for that; it doesn't seem as if now is it. We already know that surly Americans aren't much enamored of the Republicans either. It's a pity there's nobody to talk blunt truth to them about how we got where we are and how we might get out of here.

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