Obama Set the Bar, But GOP Embraces Defense Mechanisms to Thwart His Efforts

One thing that I’ve noticed since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, but which comes as no surprise, is that, how, when you campaign on the idea of transparency, and you succeed a president whom people say they voted for because he was so folksy and you’d want to have a beer with him but that president then abused that folksiness image to let people who saw him as folksy trust him (because they’d have a beer with him) when they should not have (reasons for going to war in Iraq, shenanigans at the DOJ, Patriot Act, Real ID, CYA for using torture and so on), the burden – aka, the expectations of what transparency means, in comparison to an administration that conducted itself in line with the exact opposite of transparency – for the current holder of that elected office, of that context forces the reality of what people are going to want from that president to swing in the exact opposite direction from what people were used to.

To be clear, Obama set this up for himself in many ways – people wanted transparency, it’s what we deserve and should have been getting more of during the Bush administration.  But now we’re gorging on pursuing it because we’ve lacked it for eight years.  And conservatives are using this hunger for transparency to enhance their own predisposition to not work with or support Obama.

What do I mean?

Check out The Fix this morning:

Last Tuesday — March 10 — was when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner first heard about the bonuses. The next evening Geithner spoke with AIG CEO Edward Liddy to express his dismay over the situation and tasked his legal team with finding a way not to stop the bonuses. On Thursday, Geithner told “senior aides” at the White House about the AIG bonuses and later in the day President Obama was informed. Geithner spent the weekend trying to re-negotiate the bonuses with Liddy — to no apparent end.

The release of the details is aimed at answering the ever-present “who knew what and when did they know” questions that, until today, the administration had not yet addressed. For an administration built on transparency, answering that baseline question is critical.

But, it remains far from clear whether the release of AIG timeline by the White House will quell the burgeoning controversy.

…

Republicans are showing a willingness to use the AIG bonuses as a political cudgel against Obama and the Democrats.

I’d tell you to go check out the right-wing blogs to see more evidence of what I’m describing but honestly, with only a few exceptions, they are so proud of themselves every single time they think they’ve found a discrepancy with anything related to their current president or Congress or Democrats or left of center thinkers that frankly, like the chorus of no from the GOP members of Congress, you just can’t listen after a while.

There’s a name for their obsession with all discrepancies big and small; it’s called intellectualizing:

(psychiatry) a defense mechanism that uses reasoning to block out emotional stress and conflict

And people do this when they’ve been able to identify a legitimate problem or matter or issue, but they don’t want to deal with the stress and conflict that most likely will ensue in order to resolve that problem, matter or issue.  So instead, they obsess over some self-made threshold that they then convince themselves is the threshold that everyone should be using in order to view and understand the problem, matter or issue.

It’s a cousin to the habit of navel-gazing or loving the sound of your own voice (or look of your own words), with a similar effect: the problem, matter or issue remains untouched.  Just the blathering about the problem, matter or issue exists.

And that is what people on the right who feel that they haven’t gotten their way, don’t like what Obama or Democrats or left of center folks are doing, as they continue to disengage from the system known as democracy: they are intellectualizing every problem, matter and issue so they can avoid the stress and conflict of sitting down and hammering out satisfactory legislation that would serve their constituents. They’d rather just say no so that they don’t have to do any of that other icky problem-solving stuff. Yucky, huh?

If I were on the right, no doubt I would not hesitate to bring up every single time I thought I’d found a discrepancy.  Dissent is still one of the cornerstones of our democracy. But so is the offering up of realistic negotiations, which, if you’ve ever dealt with a toddler having a tantrum, you know cannot happen until they stop crying and calm down. When they have done that, then you can get to the next cornerstone – which is debate, and the next cornerstone, which is resolution.

Sadly, there seems to be no interest in the concept of next with the GOP right now. There is only no.  And so long as that’s their mantra, there won’t be any next for them in the foreseeable future either.

Cross-posted from Writes Like She Talks.