Our political Quote of the Day comes from former Republican Congressman and MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough who had this to say:
In an appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Scarborough offered Ronald Reagan as a model of temperamental moderation, saying, “We need to be conservative, but like Reagan. … We can’t scare little kids.” On his own MSNBC program the next day, he emphasized again, “They’ve got to drop the hate.”
“If you know you’re right, then why be angry?” Scarborough asked calmly. “I do a radio show, and a lot of callers that call in expect me to scream and yell and say I hate President Obama. Being against his policies, for some reason with a lot of people in the base that’s not enough. They want you to hate the man.”
….“If you’re mature enough,” Scarborough continued,” you realize Barack Obama doesn’t hate America, I don’t hate America — we just have different views of how to make America a better place And if you look at history over 250 years, that’s worked out pretty well.”
Scarborough and his guests were unable to agree, however, on the source of the current extreme polarization. Scarborough noted that “politics has been war, a nasty, bloody war for a very long time,” but he also suggested that Republican hatred for Obama now is a reflection of Democratic hatred for George W. Bush.
“They say, ‘Look what they did to us!’” Scarborough commented. “A lot of Republicans saw a lot of really unfair, nasty things said about George W. Bush … and so now Republicans want to pay back.”
The problem is: a lot of people who are not Democrats are also concluding that much of this is payback, which undercuts any substantive message the GOP has and also limits effective coalition-building. It’s hard to win over moderate and/or independent swing voters when a policy message gets drowned in a throat filed with bile. And having Rush Limbaugh as your poster boy doesn’t help.
The GOP will likely change its tone if it loses an election or two and someone emerges from the GOP ranks who isn’t a tired, stale voice or face tied to the Vietnam-era-hubris-carrying baby boomer generation, or the first or second Bush administrations or Bush family. That lets Jeb out.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.