Thanks, Obama! It's All Your Fault

"The Democrats made us do it" is the latest conservative explanation for the Republican Party's descent into authoritarianism

PHOTO: ibtimes.co.uk |AFP

As you probably know by now, last month, former U.S. Senator and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole passed away. While I disagreed with him politically, Dole was a legendary political figure and one of the last old-school Republicans alive. Overlooked in the effusive praise of Dole was this comment on Twitter:

Matt Lewis @mattklewis

You're going to hear a lot of talk about the heroism and decency of men like Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush—and I agree with all that. But we should also note the American people rejected these heroic and decent men—twice—in favor of *Bill Clinton*...

For the unfamiliar, Matt K. Lewis is a conservative politics writer for The Daily Beast. He also has a podcast and an online show where he and his liberal co-host Bill Scher purportedly “discuss politics like civil human beings.” Of note — at least to me — is Lewis’s previous employment at The Daily Caller, an online news site founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. Knowing this factoid, my Spidey Sense flares up whenever I see him on television or his tweets invade my timeline. 

That said, I still found this Twitter analysis stunning, even for Lewis. Here’s the rest of his theory (emphasis added):

Now, I’m not going to suggest there is a perfectly straight line from Clinton to Donald Trump. But perhaps when the public rejected good men like Dole and HW [George H.W. Bush](and later Romney and McCain), it sent a message to Republicans? It turns out, character doesn’t win elections.

Clinton mocked Bob Dole’s “bridge to the past,” and talked about building a “bridge to the future.” Well, that bridge helped lead us to where we are.

With an assessment more befitting of an abusive partner than a political commentator, Lewis’s “Look what Democrats made us do” political analysis implies that the reelection of Bill Clinton led, not just to the ascension of Trump but to the Republican Party’s current embrace of authoritarianism. 

But Clinton’s criticism of Dole’s “bridge to the past” comment wasn't unique. Here’s what opinion writers for The New York Times had to say about the words back in 1996:

Mr. Dole’s biggest rhetorical mistake, however, was his clumsy offer to serve as ‘’a bridge’’ to an America that he said was better in the 1920's and 1930's. It was an odd line coming from the party of Ronald Reagan, the arch-evangel of American optimism, and Mr. Clinton served notice that Mr. Dole would not be allowed to forget his blunder. ‘’We do not need to build a bridge to the past, we need to build a bridge to the future,’’ Mr. Clinton said in elaborating his theme that he and the Democrats are the best leaders for the next century. 

It would’ve been political malpractice for Clinton to ignore Dole’s miscue. But according to Lewis, it was the catalyst that drove us towards our current political plight, albeit not in a straight line.

Don’t get me wrong. Bill Clinton was hardly a perfect president. But the Lewinsky scandal and the crime bill notwithstanding, he turned the sluggish economy around, created twenty million jobs, and left Republicans a balanced budget. 

And not to speak ill of the departed, but Bob Dole supported Donald Trump not once, but twice. Evidently, Trump’s racism and dishonesty, not to mention his abject incompetence, weren’t dealbreakers for Dole. 

Only after the former president attempted to overthrow our democracy did Dole decide enough was enough. According to an interview with USA Today shortly after his death, he still considered himself “a Trumper” even after the January 6 insurrection:

[Dole] was one of the few elders of the traditional Republican establishment to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 and the only former presidential nominee to attend the convention that nominated Trump. In a split with the 45th president, Dole said there’s no question that Trump lost his reelection race in 2020 — narrowly perhaps but fair and square.

“He lost the election, and I regret that he did, but they did,” Dole said. “He had Rudy Giuliani running all over the country, claiming fraud. He never had one bit of fraud in all those lawsuits he filed and statements he made.”

“I’m a Trumper,” Dole said at one point during the conversation. But he added at another, “I’m sort of Trumped out, though.” 

Although he goes unmentioned, Lewis’s Twitter theory is a low-key slap in the face to former president Barack Obama. When Lewis says the public “rejected good men” like Romney and McCain, both of whom lost to Obama, and that “character doesn’t win elections,” Lewis’s unspoken sentiment is at best that their character is somehow better than Obama’s. At worst, the implication is that Obama has no character. 

Despite his scandal-free presidency, not to mention his spotless character, Obama doesn’t quite measure up, at least to Lewis. Something about the country’s first Black president bothers him. What on earth could it be?

If you think I’m reading too much into Lewis’s Twitter statement, rest easy because there’s more. Matt has a history of elevating Obama critics, even grifters like Dinesh D’Souza. And in 2016, here’s what Lewis had to say to MPR News host Kerri Miller vis a vis Obama’s legacy (emphasis mine):

When asked if he thought Obama had been a good president, Lewis said, “I think he’s been a very good politician. At this point, I think the country is really hurting. I think that in some ways, Barack Obama’s presidency has contributed to the rise even of Donald Trump. I don’t want to blame him entirely for Trump.”

 Lewis’s punditry is of a piece with the tone-deaf analysis we’re sure to see the closer we get to the midterm elections. On both the right and left, media pundits will twist themselves into pretzel shapes to have us believe Democrats share equal blame for America’s death spiral. 

Don’t let them get away with it.