"But how can a GOP candidate invoke
this time-tested caricature when Obama has
embraced
the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war
against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive
secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs;
extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers
of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries;
engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war;
ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in
Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention
without trial for accused terrorists; and even
claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from
any battlefield and without due process?"
Vote Obama – if you want a
centrist Republican for US president
Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core
Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 December 2011 15.00 EST
American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from
the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are
vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the
winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more
tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates
one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its
most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into
the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in,
immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he
would not join the show.
The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be
the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next
November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has
devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with
the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free,
anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of
defeating the president.
In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to
mention
less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous
candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment
they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's
ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been
repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters
are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant,
supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable
hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their
party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a
radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking
to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because
Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are
able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the
right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the
cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy
pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a
"
moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he
wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were
engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president –
"once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely
accepted the conservative storyline".
Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point
to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare
plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health
insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the
nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative
ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney
implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich
once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real
contrasts with Obama).
How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed
his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign
funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and
presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation
suffered economically?
But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy
front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The
president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform"
package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds
with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent)
positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and
protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually
plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the
outcome of the 2012 election.
It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where
Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP
politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling
America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence,
and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing
conceptions of civil liberties.
But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama
has
embraced
the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war
against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive
secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs;
extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers
of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries;
engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war;
ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in
Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention
without trial for accused terrorists; and even
claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from
any battlefield and without due process?
Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush
officials, including
Dick Cheney,
have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his
predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP
foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing
recommendations on the most contentious
foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is
already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when
asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the
due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar
Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties
values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only
candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul,
who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without
oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties
assaults in the name of terrorism.
In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim
intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases
extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core
problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable
Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position
occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render
themselves inherently absurd.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/vote-obama-centrist-republican
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