Charles P Pierce- Tactical Redeployment

The president's retreat on immigration reform, as tactical a retreat as it may be, and I'm not entirely sure that saving Mark Pryor's seat for the Democratic party is worth draining some of the fervor out of the Hispanic base that proved so valuable two years ago and that Democratic strategists have been looking at as a demographic gold mine for the foreseeable future, is a good indicator of bad times ahead. (And anyone who explains this retreat to Hispanic voters and, especially to the people most directly affected by it, as a move of eleventy-level chess, needs to be made to lie down until that feeling passes.) If the Democrats lose their Senate majority, and the president acts, the Republicans are going to scream until their ears turn blue. If the Democrats maintain that majority, and the president acts, the Republicans are going to scream until their ears turn blue. If the president had announced his executive orders on immigration to my man Chuck Todd yesterday, the Republicans would have screamed until their ears turned blue. Instead, the president put his decision on hold, for reasons so transparently political that I decline even for a second to take his announced motivation seriously. The Republicans have responded by screaming until their ears turn blue.

We have reached the point now where the Republican plan to cripple yet another Democratic presidency has achieved its goal. Nothing much is going to get accomplished in the next two years -- except, perhaps, another war in the Middle East - because, as a minority or as a majority, the Republican party in Congress has determined that no Democratic president will be able to govern as a Democratic president, no matter how many votes he gets, how many times he gets elected, or how dire the state of the country is. Bob Dole announced on the day after Bill Clinton was elected that Dole's job was to represent the people who didn't vote for Clinton. This time around, there was the famous Inauguration night dinner in 2009 when Republican satraps got together for the purpose of sabotaging the new president, and the hopes of the people who had elected him.

I fault the president for only one thing in this regard - his painful delay in realizing the true nature of what he was up against. It should have been his issue from the first day in office. Americans understand the concept of poor losers. They understand the concept of lushly funded vandalism. They just have to be reminded, constantly, of the source of that vandalism, or else the (occasionally laudable) distrust of government curdles into cynicism that enables the kind of both-siderism that seems now to be the resting pulse of our politics. The system has been sabotaged. Both sides are not equally guilty. Both sides have not done the same things. The Democratic opposition to George W. Bush didn't truly begin until after he'd been re-elected, and his war had gone sour, and he made a clumsy attempt to privatize Social Security. Before that, Democrats had helped him get his lunatic tax-cut passed - Hi there, John Breaux! - and, later, they helped him get his lunatic war started. Hell, they even treated the dubious way that C-Plus Augustus had come into office as more legitimate than the Republicans have treated either of the elections of Barack Obama. Al Gore even presided over the certification of his own questionable demise. It is unimaginable that Dick Cheney, or Mitch McConnell, or any of the wild children of the House majority, would have done the same thing in the same circumstances.

(It is also important to note that, having paralyzed the national government because they don't like who's running it, the Republicans have been able to get most of what they want done out in the states. The best the Democratic politicians can hope for in those states where the Republican governors and Republican legislatures have been running amok is the occasional triumph in the courts that overturn egregious laws. This, of course, brings howls from the Republicans about how Democrats are trying to win at the bar what they couldn't win at the polls. This, of course, coming from the party of Bush v. Gore and of the permanent filibuster, is pretty damned hilarious.)

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