From Republikarma to Barackarma

He plugs one leak, and a bigger one develops. The President might want to conjure up the spirit of Nixon and call the plumbers.

One can never truly say whether the tide has turned, and whether the various conservative tendencies that used to pop up to bite Republicans in the ass has abated somewhat, and now the Democrats’ almost genetic propensity for political self-destruction will now assert itself in its truest form. The President, who was such a beneficiary of the Republican refusal to play by their own rules and the economic mess that resulted, now has created himself a dual quagmire, almost completely of his own volition.

The first irony involves BP. No one can blame him directly for the disaster, and the culture of deregulation and corner-cutting that led to it is a particularly conservative invention; but, Republicans will not be blamed for it, because even when the disaster reached the proportions that it did because they did not see the need to perform any mea culpa for it [it helps immensely that they were the minority power]. Instead, the President looked both impotent and hypocritical, because he couldn’t stop the leak faster and he was loath to actually punish BP too publicly, oil companies—even foreign ones—being not only too big but too important to fail. This despite the fact that he was considered to be a true environmentalist president.

The second irony involves the Afghanistan war and the leaks surrounding both this and the previous Administration’s conduct thereof, which seems to be reminiscent of the incidents surrounding the Pentagon Papers’ revelations of a Democratic administration’s prosecution of a war they believed to be unwinnable. If this the moment where the President has truly assumed ownership of this war, it was certainly not in the way he intended: he will be saddled with the responsibility of things he had no control over at the time [Bush’s policies] because the current leaks indicate he has no control over events now, if he ever did. Attempts to blame the previous administration—which even Nixon realized wouldn’t work in 1971, which was why he tried to quash the Papers—will not only backfire; it would remind the public that there was another war that everyone was making a fuss about that seems to have been forgotten about will continue to be forgotten about, and Obama will find out just how recursive karma is.

In short, Obama has succeeded in taking what might have been once been considered two major conservative-created failures and making them his own. At this point, Republicans might actually best be advised to rest on their laurels to a point, because if they don’t and they continue their infighting, they might remind the electorate of why they became the minority party in the first place. Instead, if they sit back and let the Democrats continue to fail the way Rush hoped they would, they might reap the greatest benefit come November 2010, and maybe 2012.