This victory seems different somehow. More "once and for all" than anything I've experienced before.
I anticipated this, of course, but the moment itself is incredibly delicious.
It's the reaction on both sides which has me feeling this way.
Start with the Democrats. Liberals want revenge on Joe Lieberman, but President-elect Obama refuses to give them the satisfaction. He wants Lieberman in his caucus as a bridge to the "moderate" Republicans left in the Senate who can help him beat routine filibusters -- Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Arlen Spector -- people who watch to see which way the wind blows and don't go knee-jerk into their own party's column.
Barack Obama really is trying to make the Internet Thesis of Consensus happen. He's dead serious about this. Liberals, like those at DailyKos and Firedoglake, may see Lieberman as a snake, but Obama thinks he can grab him by the head and bring him on-board, most of the time.
It's risky business. The President-elect has a pre-approval rating of 70, much higher than any Democrat since LBJ, and he wants to use that to get consensus on a coherent program involving the economy, foreign policy, health care, and the War Against Oil. It's a deep game, for historical stakes, and no one has played such a game since Nixon. (Reagan just played the hand Nixon fed him.)
But far more important has been the reaction on the right. It has been angry, incoherent, sometimes irrational. Mostly it has been backward-looking. Sarah Palin is really trying to make herself into the new century's George McGovern, someone who inspires a disjointed base of tribes but repels everyone else. May God bless her work with success.
What we're seeing, in short, is a division of the Republican coalition into warring tribes, all blaming others within the shrinking tent for what has gone on, all capable of acting-out in Ayres-like ways. While this is technically dangerous, it is electorally delicious. The extremism of the right's fools give Vice President Biden and his speechwriters a rich field on which to heap abuse. And this was the key to the Nixon Thesis' turning its 1968 win into a generation-long crusade.
Conservatives will regret how they gave unitary power to the executive, how they passed the Patriot Act, how they used the full powers of the government to spy on citizens. In the hands of fools, and the Bush people were in the end fools, these powers are the source of parody. In the hands of wise men, and the people around Barack Obama are quite wise in the judicious use of power, these are things which will protect us from the worst the dead-enders can dish out.
I started this post with a reference to Lord of the Rings, and it's fair that I finish with one. In the movie our heroes returned to a happy village. In the book they returned to enormous turmoil, a revolt led by Sauron's followers, an attack on the Shire itself. In the book they beat this, a miniature version of those struggles that had come before.
That's what we face in this country over the next few years, a rear-guard uprising by forces who will do damage, who may well kill me, or you, but who in the end will be defeated. Because America doesn't put up with that shit.
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