Wongblog Re Latest Republican Theory - "Is the Republican Party Obama’s fault?" [View all]

[TomCADem]

Ezra Klien quotes several conservative pundits who without a hint of irony complain that by acting reasonable, President Obama has forced Republicans to be unreasonable. For example, by saying that debt limit must be raised, Republicans are forced to oppose Obama and threaten default. Likewise, by pushing for fairly modest gun controls, President Obama is painting Republicans into a corner by forcing them to demand that teachers be armed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/18/is-the-republican-party-obamas-fault/

The logic here is weirdly impeccable. The Republican Party’s dilemma is that House Republicans keeps taking all kinds of unreasonable and unpopular positions. If Obama weren’t president, the House Republicans wouldn’t be taking so many unreasonable and unpopular positions. But since Obama is president, and since he does need to work with House Republicans, he is highlighting their unreasonable and unpopular opinions in a bid to make them change their minds, which is making House Republicans look even worse. And so it’s ultimately Obama’s fault that House Republicans are, say, threatening to breach the debt ceiling if they don’t get their way on spending cuts. After all, if Mitt Romney had won the election, the debt ceiling wouldn’t even be a question!

My colleague Michael Gerson wrote one of the earliest versions of this column. As he put it, Obama “knows that Republicans are forced by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he can easily demagogue.” So he has, in a bid to “break his opponents,” decided to “force the GOP to surrender on the debt limit, with nothing in return” and to “require Republicans to accept new taxes in exchange for any real spending reductions.”

So the White House’s plan, then, is to force Republicans to be unreasonable by being reasonable and taking the positions Obama has espoused all along, including in the 2012 campaign. Gerson argues that this is a devious win-win for the president: “If [Republicans] agree, their caucus is fractured (again). And if they refuse (which they are likely to do), Obama can paint them as obstructionists and extremists who are willing to destroy the economy/the nation’s credit rating/the military for their own ideological purposes.”
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So White House officials’ devious plan to destroy the Republican Party, in Brooks’s view, is that they will propose more moderate, popular policies than they did in their first term, thus making Republicans look terrible when they vote against everything.