GOP House speaker John Boehner is making a strained
effort to check House Republicans in their hell bent charge against President
Obama on the budget, continued government funding, and their pet loathing, the
Affordable Care Act. His effort is fruitless for one simple reason. Tea Party
backed House Republicans loudly, and the GOP establishment quietly, will never
shed their obsessive dream of making the Obama presidency a failed presidency.
GOP leaders in and out of Congress have been
relentlessly hectored, harangued, badgered and even politically threatened by
GOP ultra-conservatives to not give an inch on any issue that Obama proposes.
This applies to issues that in years past they would have lead the charge to
approve. This was plainly evident in the noisy GOP protests over Obama's threat
to attack Syria. Who, in their wildest fantasies, would have thought that Sarah
Palin, of all people, would pithily say "let Allah sort it all out" in opposing
a Syrian attack.
This was no aberration or accident. Palin spoke for
the hard right faction in the GOP that controls the House and a big chunk of
the GOP's base. If it had been President Bush making the identical attack proposal,
with the exception of possibly a handful of libertarian leaning GOP backers,
they almost certainly would have cheered the prospect of a strike. But it
wasn't Bush. It was Obama. There is undoubtedly a racial edge to much of their
fury against Obama. From time to time, a GOP official, top backer, or anti-Obama
protestors will show their hand by regaling Obama with border line racially
insulting name calling, and depictions of him. But even if they did not race
bait, and confined themselves solely to hitting Obama on political issues, it
wouldn't change another fact.
The GOP has read the political tea leaves and knows
that for now there is little chance of taking back the White House in 2016. And
though the likelihood is good they'll retain their majority rule in the House,
the Senate is no sure bet to take back in 2014. The one possible game changer
is to continue to paint Obama as inept, indecisive, and ineffectual. The hope
is that this relentless negative typecasting will fire up GOP supporters, dispirit
enough Democrats, and anger enough voters to sow doubts about Democrats. The
GOP got some traction out of the Syria crisis, when the overwhelming majority
of Americans voiced strong opposition to an attack. A recent Wall
Street Journal/NBC News poll even found that the GOP had gained some ground
with the public at the expense of Democrats
on the public's perennial worry about America's direction. They even had
an edge over the Democrats on foreign policy handling, and of all things the
economy and health care.
The
GOP will ride this gust of more favorable public opinion to dither, delay and
obstruct even more intensely the implementation and funding of health care
reforms, tax and budget proposals, and regulatory reforms that still need
bipartisan cooperation to pass. This is crucial since Obama needs to strike
deals and make compromises with the GOP to get anything done in Congress. That
necessity is even more compelling given the coming, potentially rancorous
battle over the debt ceiling, immigration reform, spending cuts, and reforms of
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A prolonged war with the GOP that
results in the White House getting little or none of its legislative agenda
through Congress runs the risk of souring public opinion not just on the GOP
but the White House. This has been the bane of other presidents during their
second term and has marred their legacy.
Then there's the power of money. The GOP still has
plenty of it. Its Super Pacs and mega funders have bankrolled ads on the Fox
Network blasting the Affordable Care Act. No other issue is intimately tied in
the public mind to Obama as closely as is his health care act. Though the GOP
stands almost no chance of defunding the Act, its ferocious targeting of it
drives home the point that this is a measure that many want to see scrapped,
and that the only thing supposedly standing in the way of that is Senate Democrats
and Obama. In any case, it's another fail safe ploy to tar the administration.
The GOP's greatest weapon is the frozen political
divide in the country. Nearly 50 percent of the nation's voters not only did
not support Obama in 2012, but expressed total contempt for his policies and
his administration. The GOP banks that it can swivel this divisiveness into
sustained opposition to those policies, and that it can buy enough time with
that until the 2014 midterm elections and further boost its numbers in the
House and especially the Senate.
The notion that the GOP was well on its way to
becoming a non-entity in national politics is delusional thinking. Its cynical
mix of money, political one-upmanship, set-in-stone ideology, and racial
bigotry toward an African-American president, insures that the GOP will continue
to come at Obama with its political guns blazing. The aim never changes and
that's to make Obama's presidency a failed presidency.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He
is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America
Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio
Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio
Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network. His latest ebook '47 Percent Negro': A Chronicle of the
Wackiest Racial Assaults on President Obama is now available (Amazon).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
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