Monday, February 13, 2006
Barone
The Politics of Negation by Michael Barone: "American politics today is not just about winning elections or prevailing on issues. It's about delegitimizing, or preventing the delegitimization of, our presidents. This thought sprang into my head as I was reading the angry and sometimes obscene Democratic Web logs and noted the preoccupation of some bloggers with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, now seven years in the past."
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3 comments:
. . . an impeachment that was then precisely part of the process he now decries.
dcat
I agree with Barone but this did not begin with Bush II. I remember reading letters to the editors literally calling for a coup to topple the Clinton administration (this was in southern Missouri). The blogs and bloggers Barone refers to have their counterparts on the right. I just find it convenient that Barone can decry a phenomena when it is happening to his guy. Both parties/wings have their loony fringes and short-sighted activists. The hysterical Bush hatred is nothing new to me---I/we saw it for 8 years during the Clinton administration---anyone remember Falwell's Clinton Chronicles? This doesn't make anti-Bush screeds right--but Barone needs to recongnize the larger picture
I think you guys need to read the article again. He is talking about the process of legitimizing or delegitmizing presidential administrations.
He goes back to FDR to describe the issue. His point was that Democrats have been preoccupied with Republican efforts to delegitimize the Clinton administration because they are upset that Clinton's vision did not supplant Reagan's, even though the Republicn attacks on Clinton were not the reason Clinton's vision did not supplant Reagan's.
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