Legal Commentary

GOP Ideas Revisited: Context

By Big Tent Democrat

Speaking for me only.

As I have seen the context of Barack Obama's infamous remarks regarding the GOP being the party of ideas, I believe I was unfair to both Barack Obama and TPM. While I do believe Barack Obama does too much unity schtick and is entirely too easy on Republicans and their ideas, the context of his remarks makes his statement much more defensible than I originally thought.

Below the fold is the relevant portions of the text:

I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I mean, I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into - he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we're in one of those times right now, where people feels like things as they are going right now aren't working, that we're bogged down in the same arguments that we've been having, and they're not useful.

And the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they're being debated among the presidential candidates, it's all tax cuts. Well, we know, we've done that; we've tried it. That's not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.

So some of its the times and some of it I do think, there is a, there's maybe a generational element to this partly in the sense that I didn't come of age the battles of the sixties. I'm not as invested in them. And so I think I talk differently about issues and I think I talk differently about values. And that's why I think we've been resonating with the American people. And by the way, when I say this sometimes it's interpreted as I don't think that anybody who is a baby boomer should be president. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that I think the average baby boomer has moved beyond a lot of the arguments of the sixties, but our politicians haven't, we're still having the same arguments. It's all around culture wars and it's all you know even when you discuss war you know the frame of reference is all Viet Nam. Well that's not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is what works. And even when I first apposed the war in Iraq my first line was "I don't oppose all wars." You know specifically to make clear this is not just a anti-military you know seventies love in kind of approach. It was rather that I thought strategically it was a mistake for us to go in.

Now this is STILL a terrible answer and Obama SHOULD catch a lot a flak for it. BUT, he certainly expressed some critique of Republican ideas. It was weak criticism and somewhat endorsing of the efficacy of those ideas PRIOR to the current time, but it was criticism.

My apologies to Barack Obama, his supporters and TPM.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).