As a liberal, just the thought of a Gingrich presidency keeps me staring into my iPad browser for hours, waiting for the next Republican outrage to counterattack. At his core, Gingrich is an extremist/opportunist at a time of uncertainty, when Americans of all political stripes are adopting or considering extreme positions, including Gingrich's, in response to perceived threats and unmitigated fear.
Whether broached from the right or left, I believe extremism and over-simplified solutions are a cancer on our nation, threatening to spread throughout the body politic and undermining any reasonable dialogue at a time when we are in need of rational debate and cooperation now more than ever.
We are faced, on the one hand, with a Republican Party whose need to command center stage in Washington is so relentless that the party risks self-immolation on a set of distorted governing principles that a majority of Americans disavow. This conclusion is particularly evident in polls on the direction of the country that show more than two-thirds disapprove and even more so in the 80 percent disapproval ratings for the Republican-dominated do-nothing Congress. The most pertinent question facing the electorate in the upcoming general elections will be which party is to be held to accounts.
I blame Republicans, whose efforts, from Nixon onward, to divide our country along partisan, racial, ethnic, geographic, and economic status lines for political gain are unparalleled and of epic proportions in our nation's history. With each passing month, Republican tactics and intentions become more brazen.
Their ability — with the help of 2010 Congress freshmen who won with Tea Party support — to bring progress at the federal level to a grinding halt has cost several million middle class Americans from rejoining the workforce. Their attacks on President Obama for bank bailouts, high unemployment, The national debt, and federal regulatory strangulation of the economy would be laughable, except that so many ill-informed Americans buy into their slick, deceptive media campaigns. Mainstream media twist into pretzels when avoiding calling those campaign attacks what they are: boldfaced lies.
Beyond their unbridled support for the 1% of wealthiest Americans, though, is the G.O.P.'s pernicious intent to tear down the legitimacy of government itself and thereby commandeer an even more abusive grip on authority. Perhaps no one has stated the intentions of the modern Republican Party better than Newt Gingrich in a statement to a conservative audience and recalled by Richard Darman, President George H.W. Bush's Budget Director, who witnessed it. He wrote:
“In his cheerful, confident, radical professorial way, Gingrich explained that to do what he wanted, government first had to be completely discredited — ethically, programmatically, managerially, philosophically…. Once Washington-based government was totally discredited, hard-right conservatives could then sweep to power.”Meanwhile, we have those on the far left who, having won some of their cherished goals under a transformational Obama administration, risk aborting the victories inherent in a second term by selfishly denigrating the president when he logically holds back on progressive ideas that have zero chance of passage in today's highly divisive political environment, or calling him weak when he correctly and courageously seeks consensus even in the face of the right's stated aim to make him a one-term president.
Just as the right wants to "take back America" through phony anti-elitist rhetoric, the left too often wants to tilt a windmills, pursuing causes that will never come to pass, unless and until Democrats have obliterated the right's propaganda successes over the past 30 years in tearing down the credibility of government's legitimate role in our lives. If we are going to beat back a nightmare Gingrich or Romney administration, progressives will need every ounce of unity behind President Obama that we can muster in the months ahead.
Our best hope resides in President Obama's ability to tap into a groundswell of pragmatic problem-solving sympathies within the electorate. With his State of the Union address, the president made a good start Tuesday night. He knows that a majority of Americans favor policies with a decidedly liberal consensus (though most don't want to label it as such). That agenda includes:
• a strong middle class with good-paying jobs
• generous financial support taken from our national wealth to care for our neediest citizens
• a private sector that respects the rule of law and restraints on its avaricious tendencies
• a government that listens to citizens' concerns whose members work together to comply
• a political system devoid of corporate cronyism, lobbyist corruption, and voter-suppression laws
• programs that prioritize spending for America by America, rebuilding America's neglected infrastructure, supporting scientific research, and promoting cultural enrichment to reach more citizens
• a fairer, simpler, progressive tax system in which those who can afford to pay a higher rate
• a significant reduction in long-term federal spending for our outmoded military-industrial complex
• elected leaders willing to work together to find common ground for the greater good of us all
The ultimate goal in 2012 will be to elect progressive leaders committed to joining President Obama during his second term in rebuilding America's greatness through consensus, cooperation, and common sense. Only then can we awaken from the far-right fright nights of recent years.
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