Impeach Bush!

Yes, the left continues to harbor fantasies about impeaching Bush.

Perhaps we ought to encourage them.

Putting aside questions of right and wrong-- the impeachement of Bill Clinton was a political loser. It was the sort of political loser a party is compelled to embark upon (as the most vocal and passionate supporters of the party, like me, demanded it), but it alienated moderate voters and cost us, for a time at least (with Jeffords' defection) majority status in the Senate.

Those who follow politics closely can't help but get personal about them. Not only is there the childish impulse (which we all share, of course) to be proven right in some dramatic fashio, but there are petty grievances and hatreds that we carry in our hearts.

But most people don't follow politics closely, and so while most people aren't as informed as, say, you Wonderful Readers, neither are they succeptible to an overpersonalization of politics. Politics just doesn't mean enough to them to take it too personally. Being somewhat ignorant about the daily who's hot/who's not of partisan politics yields an accidental beneift-- perspective, which sometimes hardcore partisans (guilty) lose.

Bill Clinton was able to turn his ethical and legal problems into an actual positive by setting up a contrast. While Republicans were fixated on him, he projected the image (the image, mind you) of being fixated on "solving problems for the American people."

I have little doubt that George Bush and Karl Rove will do the same.

The right had one advantage over the left during the Clinton Impeachment Wars -- while moderate voters were turned off by what they considered and unnecessary and destabilizing and wasteful effort to turn Clinton out of office, more voters still apparently believed in the basics of the Republican platform than the Democratic platform.

The left had better watch it-- they're on the wrong side of many of the most important issues, in political terms. If they compound that by taking this impeachment crap a little too seriously-- then they'll be alienating moderate voters through their partisanship that are already pretty much aliented from them based upon the Democratic Party's beliefs.

posted by Ace at 01:38 PM

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