Friday, September 7, 2012

The entertaining face of politics

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Once upon a time, according to right-wing spin, there was a good Democrat named Bill Clinton who was not at all like the evil Democrat Barack Obama.

Clinton had a good wife, Hillary. He never wasted America’s time pursuing national health insurance. His wife never imposed herself on the political arena. 

Clinton reached out across the aisle and never had a problem with the Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. No one ever shut down the government.

According to the authors of this fairy tale, if Americans could just have a president now whom we could trust like we trusted Clinton then, we would all get along. The whole nation would be living in peace and goodness and prosperity.

So what if in only for the second time in history, elected officials in Congress impeached President Clinton? Perhaps they were only kidding.

All campaigns engage in some political pretzel-like contortions, but Republicans have taken such contortions to new levels during this campaign. Their strategists perceive the President George W. Bush years to be toxic to their current message of reducing the deficit by cutting domestic spending and keeping taxes on the highest income brackets at historically low levels.

Without a past president of their own to tout, Republicans have been reinventing the Clinton years. Clinton was the good Democrat, as opposed to the bad President Obama with the socialist radical ideas and the foreign-sounding name.

In a classic Clinton speech at this week’s Democratic National Convention, the real Clinton showed up to describe the real Clinton years.

This kind of back and forth makes politics entertaining as well as important. Enjoy the next 64 days.

 

 

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