How Obama Would Unite

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer asks how Barack Obama can be a "uniter" if he hadn't supported "bi-partisan" legislation like warrantless wiretapping, immigration reform, and the "gang of 14" deal to end Democratic filibusters on Bush judicial appointments.

The answer is simple.

Obama's premise is that an Obama victory would mean that the Republican right-wing would no longer exist as a meaningful force in American politics. It's not that Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Ann Coulter, Tom Coburn and the rest of the right-wing would disappear, or be disappeared. It's just that so few people would be listening to them that they wouldn't matter anymore.

Divisions of race, gender, sexual orientation, rich and poor, and young and old can be transcended only if the right-wing politics of hate no longer has the ability to exploit those divisions. For Obama, the politics of the future is one in which the Gingrich/Limbaugh right is magicked back to its pre-Ronald Reagan irrelevance and people on the left no longer have to be so aggressive in fighting them.

In this sense, the decline of the activist right means that the left can get back to the business of governing for the common good and working out the compromises with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans needed to get things done.

In Obama's world, the decline of the right liberates the left from the politics of opposition as well. No Limbaugh means that MoveOn.org and Kos aren't needed either.

Hillary's idea is that the next Democratic president is going to have to fight with right-wing figures like Charles Krauthamer from Day One. Obama's idea is that people like Krauthammer are slated to disappear from the political scene as surely as last of the big dinosaurs were going to disappear after the giant meteor hit in the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm more in agreement with Hillary. But I'd worry a lot about Obama if I were Charles Krauthammer. That's because an Obama victory might mean that millions of people are getting ready to tune out the Charles Krauthammers of the world.