The GOP Implosion: Will the Republican Party Survive?

By David Michael Green, AlterNet. Posted March 3, 2009.

But, of course, it is also possible that he will not be a progressive at all, or that he will only lean that way on a few random (and relatively safe) issues. That would be tremendously disappointing and arguably strategically stupid, for regressives will continue to pitch their nihilism at every opportunity, and we know from the ugliest first-hand experience that the public is capable of drinking that Kool-Aid when it suits their selfish and lazy fantasies to do so.

Part of me thinks that Obama gets this, and he's more clever than all of us, just carefully laying the necessary foundation for incrementally bringing change to hopelessly brainwashed Americans.

But then another part of me thinks that he'll be buried by the failures of his own half-measures and naive accommodations to the predatory party.

Part of me thinks he smart enough to prioritize, and realizes that restoring actual human rights to our human rights policies would leave his entire agenda open to savaging by the right, especially if some bomb goes off somewhere at any time during the next four years.

But then another part of me thinks that Benjamin Netanyahu was given more honest insight into the politics of Barack Obama than this entire country of 300 million people who watched him campaign for two years and entrusted him with their leadership.

Part of me thinks that we should be grateful enough just to not have Bobby Jindal in the White House.

But then another part of me thinks that simply accepting that as enough opens the very door to Bobby Jindal being in the White House sometime soon.

None of my vacillation and oscillation should be hugely surprising. We're one whole month into the presidency of a former candidate who succeeded in part by being highly opaque in his presentation of himself, and is only now having to reveal who he is by virtue of decisions he can no longer just discuss in the abstract, but has to actually make, one way or the other.

We're also talking about a manifestly bright and clever guy, who is clearly capable of playing four-dimensional chess, thus making each of his moves subject to multiple and multi-dimensional interpretation and speculation. In other words, he's still a puzzle, and possibly because it suits him to be. For decades, people thought Eisenhower had been asleep at the wheel during his quiet presidency. Turns out that all along Ike saw strategic benefit in allowing people to perceive him that way. They thought were playing two-dimensional checkers with the old man. He had another game entirely going on, and his adversaries never even knew they were playing it.

Is that Obama's ploy? We'll just have to wait to see what is revealed over time.

But we may also be able to be more than passive observers.

It might very well be the case that this presidency will be almost precisely as progressive as progressives demand that it be.

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at www.regressiveantidote.net.

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