The republican guerrilla war
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Like the armies of the South in the Civil War, the Republican Senate has parlayed weakness into strength. Under the leadership of the inscrutable Mitch McConnell, they mostly have managed to stymie the Democratic agenda through a series of tactical moves, despite large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
The GOP objective is clear, not only to destroy the Obama presidency but to make an object lesson of it. The Obama victory was not just another defeat for the Republicans. It was a debacle, a defeat for a certain ethnocentric conception of America.
The late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington wrote a book on American identity titled “Who We Are?” Huntington rejected the notion of the United States as a nation of immigrants. Essentially, “we” are the WASP settlers and their descendants. This is at the core of the belief system of the Tea Baggers and many in the base of the GOP. Barack Obama, along with nearly half of the population of this country, is most definitely not part of their club. How did they let this guy into the White House? We’ll show him. That is one reason his presidency must not just be defeated; it must be demolished.
Whether it can be done will ultimately come down to the economy. The Republicans handed down a ruined economy. Now they will do anything they can get away with to prevent a robust recovery under Obama. When what is needed to get the country back to work is a massive infrastructure program, the Republicans will fight tooth and nail against even the most modest of job proposals.
Current administration data forecast that unemployment will hover around 8 percent until 2012. That spells danger for Obama’s campaign. The Democrats must do everything possible to bring down the numbers and then control the narrative, showing how a Republican presidency would have meant 15 or 20 percent unemployment. It’s a hypothetical, and thus a hard case to make.
Given this, Obama needs a singular achievement going into 2012, which means that the health care battle must not be abandoned. Otherwise he could become the most celebrated of single term presidents.
