JONATHAN CHAIT AUGUST 10, 2010
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Walter Pincus reports that Republicans overwhelmingly favored the previous Start Treaty before changing their tune on the current one:
"This treaty is a masterstroke. . . . It is shorn of the tortured bench marks, sub-limits, arcane definitions and monitoring provisions that weighed down past arms control treaties," said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). "It assumes a degree of trust between nations that are no longer on the precipice of war."
Those were words from Kyl's floor speech on March 6, 2003, in support of ratification of the Moscow Treaty, signed nine months earlier by President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The resolution for ratification passed that day without opposition, 95 to 0 with five senators absent, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), today's minority leader. Twenty-four Republicans who voted for that treaty seven years ago are in the Senate today, but not one, save possibly Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), has indicated he or she will vote for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), negotiated by President Obama's team. New START has sub-limits, definitions and monitoring provisions.
In fact, Kyl and many of the 23 other senators are critical of elements of New START that they readily accepted or ignored in the agreement they embraced seven years ago.
Some of the GOP's opposition to President Obama reflects genuine ideological differences. Some of it reflects a deliberate strategy to deny him bipartisan accomplishments -- if Republicans refuse to support his agenda, then his agenda by definition will either fail or be partisan.
The political logic is unimpeachable. But there's also a path dependency issue for the GOP. There has been a mutually-reinforcing cycle in which Republican elected officials help convince the base that Obama represents a threat to the very core of American freedom, and the base in turns pushes Republicans to oppose Obama in these terms. But once the base is convinced of this, cooperation with Obama becomes almost impossible. You can't see, "He's a socialist tyrant hoping to enslave us all, but actually this treaty is a pretty reasonable idea." Once you have painted him in such hysterical terms, almost everything he does has to be monstrous. This isn't a "problem" for Republicans except to the extent that they'd like to cooperate with Obama on an issue here or there -- which, of course, is not in their interest to do.
10 comments
One little nitpick: It was actually the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) they were talking about. But your point stands.
- rozenson
August 10, 2010 at 11:30am
On this issue, the answer to "What would Reagan do?" is "Sign the damn treaty." It is a clear sign of the swift and dramatic rightward shift of the Republican Party that Reagan was too much of a bleeding-heart liberal for his example to be followed any longer.
- Fishpeddler
August 10, 2010 at 12:06pm
Wait...you mean that a monster, once enraged, may turn on its creator? You don't say...
- janus
August 10, 2010 at 12:09pm
This post reminds me of a piece I read the other day in - I think - the Conservative Chronicle. It was unintentionally hilarious. The author stated that in America, the left demonizes the right but the right merely disagrees with the left. I think he was forgetting about how the right has regarded Barack Obama. It is simply amazing what people can tell themselves is true contrary to all the available evidence.
- liberal reformer
August 10, 2010 at 1:10pm
Thing is, this strategy doesn't seem new to me. Rather it strikes me as fairly close to the way the right treated Clinton, when he was president. The volume is just turned up a bit.
- Curran1
August 10, 2010 at 1:36pm
If path dependency is determinative on this issue, why would we suppose that it is not determinative on, say, the right's Islamophobia? Having whipped half the electorate into a frenzy in favor of government mistreatment of Muslim citizens, how exactly is a future Republican president supposed to walk that one back to the pro-pluralist stance of George W. Bush?
- rhubarbs
August 10, 2010 at 2:08pm
"There has been a mutually-reinforcing cycle in which Republican elected officials help convince the base that Obama represents a threat to the very core of American freedom, and the base in turns pushes Republicans to oppose Obama in these terms. But once the base is convinced of this, cooperation with Obama becomes almost impossible." I've made a similar observation in that Republicans are now voting against ideas they themselves once promoted. The health care legislation wasn't so different from what they proposed as an alternative to Clinton-care, but now they oppose it. Cap-and-trade was advocated by McCain during his presidential run, now it's demonized. McConnell said we didn't need McCain-Feingold's limits on campaign financing, what we needed was more disclosure--but Republican senators wouldn't come forward to support the recent DISCLOSE Act. And some Republicans cosponsored a deficit commission until Obama thought it was a good idea; then some of those cosponsors voted against their own bill. Can changes in public sentiment explain the near-complete opposition by the Republican party to what were once their own proposals? The better explanation seems to me that they see oppositional positions as necessary to regain power. But I'd like to see Democrats ask Republicans how radical and freedom-threatening Obama can be if these ideas were advocated by Republicans just 16 or fewer years ago.
- dsimon
August 10, 2010 at 2:43pm
Ah, I knew I was right, contra mice (I think it was). It was postulated that the barb didn't mean what I said he meant by his post yesterday about a hypothetical Republican president in 2012 and intolerance toward Muslims, but he is clear here and I was correct.
- liberal reformer
August 10, 2010 at 7:17pm
dsimon, I think the key here is the benefits from opposition politics. The dream is a 1993-1994 repeat. Remember the opposing of all things Clinton certainly paid off. But you are also right to point out how almost Orwellian the change of positions is. As I have used the old trope from "1984:" Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
- MikeB.
August 10, 2010 at 10:15pm
MikeB.: I agree that Republicans are looking for a 1994 repeat, and since they reap nothing from cooperation it makes political sense for them to do what they're doing. It just makes little policy sense, and it's going to make it hard for them to actually solve problems if they regain power. If I were a Democrat, I'd just hammer away at how they can call Obama radical when all these ideas were promoted just a short time ago by Republicans. Yes, I know some people's minds won't be changed. But the best hope aside from getting the base out is trying to shift those who remain in the middle, and that means calling bs when warranted. But perhaps our politics are now too dumbbell-shaped to matter. And it's hard to battle against our notorious short-term political memory (I'd bet many people still think TARP was an Obama initiative). As Orwell also wrote in 1984, ignorance is strength.
- dsimon
August 11, 2010 at 1:01am