Never On Sunday

At long, long last, Obama gets the clue the country so desperately needed him to get: speaking in San Francisco, he criticized Republicans, significantly admitting “The day has passed when I expected this to be a full partnership.”

You’d think this would have been obvious before he even took office, when conservative leaders cheerfully encouraged birther craziness and pointedly refused to denounce talk of assassination. Or when Obama first took office and no Congressional Republicans endorsed any of his appointments who were not carry-overs from the Bush administration. Or when Republicans vowed to vote against health care reform before the proposal was written, refused to be part of the conversation, and blamed Obama for refusing to listen to them simply because they refused to talk.

But finally, after inviting Republicans to another strategy session, only to be told he has a lot of nerve seeking consensus, Obama has given up. His San Francisco speech came the next day. It must have been hard for him, coming into office with expectations of finding the middle ground. But Republicans are still operating under the playbook whereby “bipartisanship” is defined as “agreeing with conservatives in every way,” and any genuine offer of compromise is taken as the new baseline of extremism.

Some day, we will again see Republicans willing to compromise, or at least to consider other opinions. Some day, we may even see Republicans more interested in good governance than in actively sabotaging those democratic institutions—that is, all of them—which prove pesky to authoritarian ideology. But that day is not today. Nor will that day come until Democrats put their collective foot down and rub the conservatives’ collective noses in the mud and teach them once again to engage in the civil, rational discourse upon which democracy depends. Obama’s reluctant recognition of this unfortunate fact has not come a day too soon.