"The Permanent (Smear) Campaign
        
Conservatives realize that a successful Obama presidency could remake American politics. If Obama wins the election, they will try to destroy his presidency with lies, just as they sought to do to Bill Clinton.
        
PAUL WALDMAN | October 14, 2008 | web only
        

Throughout his nearly two-year-long campaign for the White House, Barack Obama has talked about Americans' hunger for unity -- their ache for a government that will get past the petty divisions of recent decades, put aside partisanship, and come together to solve problems. From what we can tell, Obama's desire to provide that kind of presidency is sincere and stems from his own personality and history. Throughout his life, people have remarked on his ability to make those who disagree with him feel as though he has listened to their perspective and approached them with an open mind, even if he hasn't brought them around to agreeing with him.

But as we finally approach the end of this campaign, one has to wonder whether Obama knows quite what he's in for. Not what will happen over the next three weeks but what he'll face if he actually wins. Because for all his talk of bringing Americans together, a President Obama could face an opposition so consumed with disgust and anger and outright hate that it would make the 1990s look like a tea party.

That, of course, was what was supposed to happen if Hillary Clinton were the nominee. In fact, one of the arguments Obama supporters made early in the primary process was that if Clinton prevailed, the vast right-wing conspiracy would kick into high gear, besieging the woman they had hated so much for so long with an assault of unimagined viciousness. But now there is little doubt that that machinery of obsessive hostility was easily retrofitted for a new target.

Obama's apparently genuine desire for civility and inclusiveness shouldn't be mistaken for naiveté; as his opponents have discovered, he knows how to wield a shiv when necessary. In this race he has had to deal not only with the institutional efforts against him from his opponent and the Republican National Committee, but with a widely distributed campaign of smears and lies spread through viral e-mails and extremist Web sites. Unlike the McCain campaign, this broader effort will not fold up operations on Nov. 4. If Obama wins, the people now devoting their energies to seeing that he doesn't get elected will simply devote their energies to seeing that his presidency goes down in flames.

And the urgency of their cause (if not the despicable tactics they will no doubt use to advance it) will be thoroughly justified. Conservatives will quickly realize that the extraordinary challenges facing the government provide the opportunity for Obama to be either a spectacular failure or one of America's greatest presidents.

No president accomplishes all of his goals, but consider what Obama has before him. No matter what else he does, there are four large tasks on which his term in office will likely be judged. If he sees the country through the current economic crisis, brings the war in Iraq to an end, passes health-care reform that actually achieves something close to universal coverage, and sets the country on a course away from a reliance on fossil fuels, Obama would be considered the most important president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. If he succeeds, his presidency would be a mirror image of George W. Bush's, with accomplishments equal in grandeur to Bush's failures.

And that, of course, would be an unmitigated disaster for the GOP. It took 24 years after the death of the greatest Democratic president for an actual conservative (Richard Nixon) to win the White House, and Roosevelt's legacy was such that even Ronald Reagan's assaults on the New Deal and the Great Society were more rhetorical than substantive. Reagan may have hated Social Security and Medicare, but he wasn't going to risk his presidency in a futile attempt to dismantle them.

The danger for the GOP is that Obama's potential accomplishments could be just as lasting. If he does usher in a new energy paradigm, Republicans won't get anywhere advocating a return to the old one (and no matter what, it seems unlikely that we'll be hearing those weirdly gleeful chants of "Drill, baby drill!" after this election is over). If he guides us out of Iraq with a minimum of ensuing chaos, their foreign-policy and national security proposals will continue to be stained by the memory of conservative support for Bush's disastrous escapades. If Obama actually passes health-care reform, Americans will be grateful to Democrats for at least mitigating one of our most anxiety-provoking public-policy problems. And Republicans are already denying that they were ever really serious about the free-market fundamentalism that they championed for so long and that has proven so calamitous to the economy. If Obama sees us through to an economic revival, it will be almost impossible for them to explain why their ideas about the economy ought not be dismissed out of hand...."