The Bully Party

When bipartisan debate fails, Dems fall back on a knuckle-sandwich approach to politics

The omens are everywhere. Iran is close to obtaining nuclear weapons. The eurozone is in crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is near 10 percent. America’s social insurance programs threaten to bankrupt the country. And—most unusual—the Washington Nationals are above .500.

But rest easy. None of this is distracting the Obama administration and congressional Democrats from their full-time occupation: demonizing the political opposition.

Consider the debate over financial reform. This is a complex issue where both parties share the same (perhaps unachievable) goal: preventing another systemic financial crisis that requires massive taxpayer bailouts. And free-market conservatives have real concerns about Senator Chris Dodd’s legislation. Take, for example, the proposed resolution authority’s credit guarantees for large, complex financial institutions on the brink of failure. The worry is that the market will interpret these loopholes as signs the government will never allow such firms to go under. If that’s the case, Too Big to Fail lives on.

Rather than engage with these objections, however, the president has decided to slime the Republicans as defenders of the status quo. He’s deployed the same army of straw men, the same Manichean oratory, that he used during the health care fight. In his April 22 speech at Cooper Union, for instance, President Obama divided the world into those who “join me,” and those who support the “battalions of financial industry lobbyists descending on Capitol Hill.” For the president, the only middle ground is where he’s standing. Reasonable alternatives to his policies simply do not exist. It is Obama alone who determines which arguments are “legitimate” and which are “misleading.” It’s rhetorical blackmail: Agree with me, the president is saying, or I’ll call you a liar and a hack.

The Democratic response to dissent is a lot like their governing style: partisan, arrogant, and self-righteous. In recent weeks, various Democratic factotums have lectured the public about “extreme” rhetoric, insinuating that the Tea Party takes its cues from The Turner Diaries. Some liberals suffer from a pathological inability to refer to the Tea Party by its name, preferring a crude and infantile sexual epithet. The folks waving signs and holding peaceful rallies have been insulted as fakes, wackos, ignoramuses, racists, nihilists, and hicks suffering from status anxiety. But when a poll revealed the Tea Party movement is better educated and wealthier than the electorate at large, a prominent Washington Post columnist summarily dismissed the movement as the “populism of the privileged.” The lines of attack change, but the message is always the same: Go home. Shut up. Let us do what we want.

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