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Finally, the Republicans Are Afraid

Friday, 25 January 2013 11:04

By Robert Parry, Consortium News | News Analysis

For anyone who has lived through the past several decades of Republican bullying – from Richard Nixon’s anything-goes politics through Karl Rove’s dreams of a ‘permanent Republican majority’ – it had to be startling to hear House Speaker John Boehner complaining that President Barack Obama’s goal was ‘to annihilate’ the GOP.

During a private luncheon of the Republican Ripon Society on Tuesday, Boehner cited Obama’s progressive agenda as outlined in his Second Inaugural Address as representing an existential threat to the GOP.

‘It’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans,’ Boehner said. ‘So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.’ The Ohio Republican also claimed that it was Obama’s goal ‘to just shove us into the dustbin of history.’

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But 2005 instead turned out to be the GOP’s high-water mark, a time of premature celebration, the last moment of sunlight before the arrival of darkening clouds, or in this case, the American people’s realization that the Right’s anti-government extremism – mixed with the neocons’ imperialist wars – was a recipe for disaster.

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Yet, despite the extraordinary national crisis that Bush left behind – millions of Americans losing their jobs and their homes as well as two unfinished wars – the Republicans refused to play the role of ‘loyal opposition.’ They pulled out their successful playbook from the early Clinton years and confronted Obama with unrelenting hostility.

Once again, the obstructionist strategy worked at least in a narrow political sense. By mid-2009, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other loud voices from the muscular Right-Wing Machine had whipped up a passionate Tea Party opposition to Obama, including crypto-racist allegations that the President was born in Kenya, despite the evidence of birth records in Hawaii.

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During his Second Inaugural Address, Obama also made clear that he had finally forsaken the ‘inside game’ of trying to sweet talk the Republicans into cooperation or negotiating from positions of weakness. Instead, Obama delivered a strong defense of American progressivism. He tied that tradition to the ideals of the Framers who wrote the Constitution with the intent of creating a vibrant Republic, a government of, by and for the people.

Obama’s speech and its warm reception apparently unnerved Speaker Boehner who suddenly saw something akin to an existential threat to the GOP. There were the painful election results, the nation’s shifting demographics, the newly assertive President, and hundreds of thousands of Americans again packing the Mall to celebrate Obama’s victory.

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But Boehner seems to sense that something fundamental has changed. Perhaps he was playacting a bit when he warned fellow Republicans that Obama hoped to ‘annihilate’ the Republican Party. But – overdramatized or not – Boehner’s alarm suggests that finally it is the Republicans who are afraid.