There are more and more articles being written about the intense animus toward president Bush among Democratic partisans. (I believe David Brooks got the meme rolling a month or two back.) I don’t think there’s much doubt that many are pushing this idea to discredit or marginalize the more intense opposition to the president. At the same time, there’s simply no doubt that there is some real truth to it.
Here’s what’s weird about this, though: no one seems to mention how deeply this parallels the situation which prevailed through most of the 1990s between core Republicans and President Clinton. It wasn’t simply that hardcore partisans then and now despised the president. But there was perhaps a third of the electorate that believed deeply in the president’s illegitimacy (then Clinton, now Bush) and were driven further into that belief by the fact that they could not manage to get the rest of the electorate (say 60% or so) to see the man in the way they did. The difficulty of unmasking him became a sign of his political sins.
This was certainly the case with Bill Clinton. And there are at least hints of that now with Bush. If anything the depth of the enmity against Clinton was far more in-grown and aggrieved. But the parallel is so strong, the dynamics so similar, that the fact that it’s gone so little mentioned really points to a blindspot among the folks who think up these ideas in the Washington press corps and commentariat.
Not that such a blind-spot would be so surprising, but still.
The reason we don’t hear more about it, I suspect, is that Clinton-hating wasn’t as jarring to most of these folks as enmity toward President Bush is, in that it wasn’t that separated from their own passions and opinions and leanings through the 1990s.
Both phenomena — Clinton-hating and now Bush-hating — are signs of a deeper volatility, instability and acrimony in our current politics.
