Obliviousness is NOT a Strategy

Carpetbagger's got a post about CNN's Rick Sanchez questioning Senator DeMint (R-Loonball) about the shrinking Republican Party, with Sanchez literally laughing at DeMint for suggesting that Republicans are the "Tent of Freedom." And it's sad that Republican rhetoric has become so far removed from reality that even brainless talkingheads on CNN are laughing at them.



And this mainly comes down to their immediate rejection of Obama as President, a move that I predicted would be a losing strategy. Because there just is no reasonable way to spin away Obama's popularity or their own unpopularity. It's simply impossible. But one decent way of dealing with this would be to say that America is in crisis and people are flocking to the president, not because they agree with him, but because they want to give him a chance. And this, btw, is the exact strategy I said the Republicans themselves should have taken.

And there is precedent in this, as I definitely believe that Bush's post-9/11 popularity was based upon the same idea: People were supporting the office, not the man. But Republicans wrongly interpreted it as a personal mandate and royally screwed it up. Similarly, if people were only supporting Obama because of his office, then it would be reason to suggest that he's overstepping with his specific policies; just as Bush did. Moreover, the political landscape could be spun as a short-term situation which is likely to change the more Obama goes in the wrong direction.

But no, they can't do any of this now. They picked an extremist anti-Obama position and now they're having to lie in it. And so they have to continue to make claims that are so absurdly counter-factual that even they can't possibly believe them. And that just drives them further into absurdity and irrelvance. And as I said in the last post, this just feeds the base a sense of popular righteousness that only makes it that much harder for them to ever put the breaks on.

As I've said before, Republicans have put themselves in the exact position they tried to paint us into when they controlled the Whitehouse and Congress. I am baffled as to why they imagine this is a good strategy.