by Robert Schlesinger

If you want an example of how entrenched political habits remain in Washington, consider President Obama's visit recently to the House Republican Conference.

"I would just say that we have to think about tone," the president said, repeatedly picking up on a theme he had laid out in his State of the Union address. Politicians, he argued, need to "close the gap a little bit between rhetoric and reality" and treat each other civilly. How else can they hope to eventually agree? And his appearance nicely illustrated his point. Both sides were blunt and forceful but managed to avoid appearing angry or overly partisan.

Then almost as soon as the meeting was over, Washington returned to its regularly scheduled programming, with both sides tallying political point-scoring.

Americans United for Change, a liberal group allied with the Democrats, for example, quickly sent out an E-mail bragging that "Obama calls out GOP hypocrisy" in the meeting. "Rhetoric vs. Reality: President Obama Repeats Discredited Talking Points During Dialogue With House GOP," House Republican Leader John Boehner's office blared that afternoon.

Changing the tone of politics is fine. But in the meantime, the noise machine needs to be fed, and the base is hungry for its red meat. In fact, it's one of the ironies of contemporary politics that some of the groups that rail loudest and longest about changing Washington's political culture -- the activists and true believers who make up each party's base -- are a big part of that culture's intractability.

"We've got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes, because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together," Obama told the Republicans. Some voters "don't know sometimes this is just politics, what you guys -- or folks on my side -- do sometimes." Words matter, not least because activists have a tendency to believe them.

This is a particular (but not exclusive) problem for the GOP.

Listening to the Republican talking points about health reform, Obama noted, "you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot" and that the president "is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."

If you doubt that, consider the results of a recent poll of 2,000 Republicans, commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos but performed by the independent pollster Research 2000. Fully 63 percent of GOP-ers think that Obama is a socialist, while almost a quarter of Republicans think the president "wants the terrorists to win." (One third weren't sure whether or not he supports the terrorists.) A plurality of Republicans (39 percent) think Obama should be impeached (32 percent don't, and 29 percent are unsure).

Republicans are in a strong position.

They have a core of animated, angry, passionate supporters, which is what you especially need in a nonpresidential election year. But that core could become an albatross if the GOP can't bridge the gap between their impeach the terrorist-loving socialist base and the independent voters who have come to dominate American politics. You can sense an awareness of that gap in Obama's renewed push for bipartisan engagement. He is reaching out. But the effort has an edge, as expressed in his State of the Union admonition that Republicans now have a responsibility to govern as well and by his observation to Senate Democrats on Wednesday that they had cast more votes to end filibusters than had been cast in the 1950s and 1960s combined. "That's 20 years of obstruction packed into just one." It's the hard political-calculus side of Obama's observation to the House Republicans that "many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, your own party."

Republican incumbents could be damned by swing voters for implacable opposition and damned by their base for any appearance of cooperation. This is especially true at a time when the inchoate tea-party movement is letting Republicans know that its support must be earned.

And the problem is fed by the unshakable faith from base voters in both parties that they reside at the heart of the American mainstream. They are like Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic: someone who "does what he thinks the Lord would do if he knew the facts in the case." Substitute "the people" for "the Lord," and you get the idea. It's an inability to distinguish between political necessity and political sufficiency. A motivated base is necessary to win a congressional majority or the White House, but it is not sufficient.

After the 2008 elections, some conservatives argued that voters had elected Obama because they thought the GOP had been insufficiently conservative when in power. That made me chuckle, especially when it led to purity testing and the rise of trickle-down politics (narrow the party enough, and it will become a majority).

But I frown when liberals indulge in the same kind of fantasies. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, appearing on Hardball days after the Senate election in Massachusetts, argued very seriously that GOP-er Scott Brown's election was a message that Obama and the Congress had been insufficiently liberal.

"They vote for a conservative Republican who is totally against healthcare to tell the country they want a progressive healthcare program," the incredulous host, Chris Matthews, summarized. "Are voters crazy? Are voters crazy?"

Some surely are, especially those who see ideological affirmation in every election result. But crazier and more dangerous are the political leaders who cater to and nurse that particular delusion.

 

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Obama Can't Change Crazy Voters Or Crazy Politicians | Robert Schlesinger

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