The transcendent nature of the era of Obama has been brought forth by way of a approach to legislative politicking that seems almost pathological in its cageyness. And it's been to the detriment of conservative economic and cultural values as some significant conservative cultural sacred cows have gone, or seem set to go the way of the 8-track tape. And perhaps the greatest milestone is that he did it while black.

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President Obama's Apparent "Fiscal Cliff" strategy is the latest example of how clever political tactics are pushing conservative principles over the edge.  

  "I honestly believe that God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes" -- the late Robert Novak, conservative syndicated columnist.

I once had a good friend named Cliff.   He's gone now, having passed away a few years ago.   So, with all the talk of late about a fiscal cliff, quite naturally my old friend has been on my mind a bit more than usual over the past week or so.   One of the things I recall about him was how often he would express the notion that "game recognizes game."  It implies that anyone who's got "it" -- an unusually high level of musical skill, for example -- would, on sight, instantly recognize others who share the same skill level.

Today, I'm wondering how Cliff would have felt about a condition which defines the flip side of this notion:   the " Dunning-Kruger Effect ."   It describes those who are incapable of recognizing mastery and technique in others because of an inability to recognize the magnitude of what they themselves don't know.

Knowing Cliff, he perhaps would have simply called it the "Goober Effect."   But whatever it may be called, it's a condition that seems to have gripped President Obama's legislative opponents over the past four years.   After all, in politics deft demonstrations of political savvy are nothing new.   But the way Obama has been legislatively pimp-slapping his GOP opponents over the past four years is nothing nice.   We're told that politics is a science.   If that's so, then where have the GOP's political atom-splitters been holed up during Obama's first term?   How many more ways can the president politically outfox his adversaries?   And how many more times will his opponents consent to chump themselves by playing Charlie Brown as the president plays "Lucy" with the political football?

Now, in any mix of varied sorts, I'm neither the most keen-eyed nor sharpest wit; but I'm smart enough to recognize ignorance when I see it.   And from where I see it, the GOP has suffered greatly from its inability to "recognize game" in the context of the president's political savvy and therefore refused to accept the possibility that a "community organizer" might be capable of repeatedly outsmarting their Party's seasoned politicos.   And the outcome of this has been a domino effect of conservative cultural setbacks being bowled over in tandem with a changing American social/cultural landscape.

Without a doubt, backlash against GOP extremism played a significant role in the president's legislative successes.     It was part of the public's response to a discernible form of extremism that resurfaced like a recurrence of cancer during Obama's presidency.   An extremism fueled in large part, by a familiar obsession linked to a well-known character disorder common among the stiff-necked Archie Bunker types, closeted MILF-wannabees and other assorted " Akinites " who -- during the Republican presidential debates and convention -- either cheered or booed at precisely the moment when the opposite reaction was more appropriate.

And certainly, despite Obama's successes, all's not rosy.   Gitmo is still up and running; efforts to address global warming have been paltry; the "crackdown" on Wall Street depressingly light-handed; efforts to regulate gun ownership non-existent and the Bush tax cuts for the rich have managed to survive this president's first term.   Moreover, any saintly aura enshrouding Obama's milestone accomplishments would be considerably dulled if the president agrees to the kind of Medicare and Social Security changes Republicans have been demanding.  

Nevertheless, the transcendent nature of the era of Obama can neither be reasonably understated or adequately embellished.   In both political and social terms, it's been an era of genuinely tangible historical milestones brought forth in large part by way of an approach to legislative politicking that seems almost pathological in its cageyness  Since elected in 2008, the cultural impact of Obama's successful legislative maneuvering is visible writ large in American society as some significant conservative cultural sacred cows have gone, or seem set to go the way of the 8-track tape.  

The enactment of "Obamacare," for example, toppled 40 years of stonewalled GOP resistance to government run health care.   On immigration, a clear path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants has been established.   The creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may usher in an era of consumer protection that is contemporary to a post-Wall-Street-meltdown market, and, an historic expansion of civil rights relating to gender appears on the way to fruition.  

Moreover, not only has Obama appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court, thus increasing the odds against Roe v Wade being overturned, his re-election is likely to bring an end to the conservative dream of a lasting Supreme Court majority should one or more Justices retire before the next election.

And perhaps the greatest milestone is that he did it while black.

Be that as it may, Obama hardly seems content to stand pat on a transformative agenda and just float on through the next four years as a lame duck.   Indeed as both Parties edge nearer to the fiscal cliff, Obama appears on the verge of completing yet another act of shrewd political maneuvering that enables the president to address deficit recovery largely on his own terms.    And through this maneuvering the president -- at the time of this writing -- is perhaps only days away from crumbling another pillar of conservative philosophy:   the ideological barrier that surrounds a near quarter century prohibition against raising taxes by the GOP.  

"Raising rates is sort of a partisan political trophy for Obama," admitted Sen. Lindsay Graham during a December 10 interview on Fox News.

It is; but rightly so.   That's because it would be yet another truly remarkable milestone.   Forget Reagan's "thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican" canard.   For more than a generation "NO NEW TAXES!" has been the GOP's true "11^th Commandment."   Not since the George H.W. era has a Republican president or member of Congress voted to raise taxes.  It's a pre-Grover Norquist orthodoxy that for many years has helped the GOP win election after election both locally and nationally and which they used to run on in 2012.  

But Obama was equally unequivocal in his pledge to raise taxes and won another four year term.   Thus, it was a fairly significant moment recently when House Speaker John Boehner conceded that "revenues" -- i.e., tax increases -- will be part of deficit reduction negotiations.   And since Boehner's concession, a number of other influential Republicans have indicated their willingness to cave.

"I actually think it has merit, where you go ahead and give the president his 2 percent increase " the rate increase on the top 2 percent," stated Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee on the December 9 broadcast of ABC News' "This Week".

On that same show, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn asked of himself : ""will I accept tax increases as part of a deal to actually solve our problem?"    Coburn's answer: "Yes."

A sense of inevitability also exists among those who reside in the deepest recesses of the conservative movement's counter-reality funhouse.  

"I don't think there's a Republican alive who could stop what's gonna happen," admitted Rush Limbaugh during one of his early December broadcasts.

Even Ann Coulter (aka, Satan's b*tch-kitty) is prepared to throw in the towel.    Asked by Sean Hannity -- who on his own volition remains entrenched in the fun bubble -- whether Republicans should "give in" to Obama on the tax rate, she replied , "Well, yeah, I guess I am."

Indeed, the times, they are a-changin' and with it has emerged the politically chancy concept that will play a significant role in that change -- the fiscal cliff.     It extends back to the off-putting debt ceiling fandango of 2011, which now appears to be another case of the president's adversaries coming to a political chess match armed with a rigged checker board, a brand new box of checkers, and nary a hint of a strategy.

Naturally, not everyone saw it that way back then.   Shortly after Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 which resulted from the debt ceiling deal, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote several articles critical of the president's strategy in reaching that agreement.  

"Was he thinking eight steps ahead of the oppositon, playing multi-dimensional chess while they were playing tic-tac-toe?" Fallows wrote.  "Or, was he a fatal step or two behind, playing patty-cake while they were playing Mixed Martial Arts? Chess master? or pawn?"

Mixed martial arts or chess?   Take your pick.   Obama was either Jon "Bones" Jones or Bobby Fischer, but whichever role he chose, it's pretty clear now that it's the Republicans who kinda got Tonka toyed with.   That seemingly out-of-whack "all cuts no taxes" debt crisis agreement accepted by Obama in 2011 now turns out -- as some had then surmised -- to have been a calculated bit of short term capitulation.    Just part of a shrewd, albeit dangerously hubristic political strategy: risky because for all practical purposes, it could only bear fruit if Obama was reelected.    

Like the president, the Republicans also made a huge gamble since the upper hand on the fiscal cliff is held by the Party that holds the White House.  It's reasonable to theorize that latent euphoria from their smashing successes in the 2010 mid-terms and convinced that their Party-wide crusade to "deny the president a second term" would bear fruit, provided the GOP enough assurance to expect that by the time the fiscal cliff became an issue the GOP would control the White House.

In hindsight it's obvious that they were falsely assured.    And as we now have seen regarding the fiscal cliff showdown, the GOP is forced to again engage in what has become its modus operandi for moving legislation under Obama: stage a bewildering act of political Kabuki Theatre for a while, then gussy themselves up for the eventual Kumbaya Festival after Obama gets his way.

Apparently they have little choice. A recent Bloomberg poll shows that two-thirds of Americans and 45 percent of Republicans favor raising taxes on the rich.   Other polls show that the public will blame Republicans if no agreement is reached before the fiscal cliff deadline.   But what's easier to conclude however, is that Obama's mastery of the art (or science) of politics has forced the GOP into a period of reflection and deep soul-searching.  

Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio have taken to sputtering half-baked mea culpas -- on behalf of themselves and their Party -- about compassion.   Meanwhile, neo-con Bill Kristol has inferred that conservatism has devolved from a movement to a "racket," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus announced that the GOP would perform an "autopsy" in hopes of figuring out how it can win upcoming elections and Newt Gingrich has flat out stated that the GOP is " incapable " of competing against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Meanwhile, Boehner has purged Tea Partiers from their congressional committees and another Tea Party heavyweight, Jim DeMint, once called "the biggest douche bag in the douche bag capital of the world," hightailed it to a similar hangout popular among folks like him: the Heritage Foundation.

But hardly lost in the midst of all this disarray is the significance of the fact that Republicans are now poised -- for the first time in a generation -- to tell Norquist that the time has come to keister that "anti-tax pledge" of his; to say, in essence:   "It was a nice run, Grover; but revenues are on the table."  

"We've all been inveigled in a distinctly Republican psychodrama that is not even particularly fascinating," writes the New Yorker's Amy Davidson, "unless one genuinely feels " that some age of chivalry will be over if Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge has to be abandoned."

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Although my departed friend Cliff was never overtly political, I'm sure all this "fiscal cliff" business is something that may have captured his attention, if only for the "Cliff" part.   And while he passed on before he got the opportunity to vote for or against Obama in 2008, it seems logical to assume that the president --then just a few years beyond his days as a community organizer -- would have earned Cliff's vote.    After all, being a man who often boasted of being able to "recognize game," Cliff is certain to have recognized it in President Obama.

But the question is, when will the GOP?

Authors Bio:

Anthony Barnes, of Boston, Massachusetts, is a left-handed leftist.

"When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world." - Unknown Monk (1100 AD)