Republican Self-Hate

Crooks & Liars links to Bobo Brooks informing Chris Matthews that Republicans hate Matthews’ man-crush, President Bush.

BROOKS: Bush…you gotta remember though…a lot ofRepublicans hate Bush. I mean, we look..we talk about the Democrats,how they hate Bush, in private…

MATTHEWS: What do you mean, “hate Bush?”

BROOKS: They think Bush is incompetent and destroying their party.

Having just taped a Sunday show of my own (this one may be good–I’ll actually provide a link, but it’ll air ten days from now), I gotta say, Bobo is right–and Democrats really need to start hammering on it.

The two Republicans on the show with me were pushing against Democratic health care proposals, saying, "well you don’t want our health care to run like Katrina or Iraq…" To which I said, "Okay, we’ll make sure Bush isn’t in charge of our health care program. We’re in agreement." This got them nodding enthusiastically, until I continued, "But if we can only aspire to be as competent as the French, we should have working health care." Which shut them up. (Of course, I’m sure it wasn’t really as cool as I remember, so assume I’m just self-promoting here.)

At the same time, these republicans were no more willing to speak enthusiastically about any of their Presidential candidates. I kept hammering them about how Obama is running third, among Republicans, in Iowa.

Perhaps most surprising of all,Obama actually finished third as the preferred general electioncandidate of registered Republicans, at 6.7 percent, behind Romney(21.8 percent), and Giuliani (10 percent), but ahead of Thompson (5.2percent) and McCain (1.8 percent).

And how the leading Republican candidates fail either 2004’s standard of flipfloppery or Republican standards of the last 12 years on social conservatism. Which again brought some embarrassed admissions that there wasn’t much exciting in the Republican field. We’re about a week and a half late piling on top of this self-hate–though the DNC has a new website out to join in the fun. But this should be the main point of every Democrat out there–the Republicans, as a party, have failed so badly even Republicans hate them.

Republicans are just barely containing their disgust for the leaders of their party. At this point, we’d do really well to unleash that sentiment.