Flush with power from victory, his ego puffed by an adoring press and buoyed by a celebrity hype machine, President Obama has taken to caricaturing his opponents as malevolent enemies of the good. The good, of course, would be the president and his agenda.

One major enemy would be radio-talk-show-host Rush Limbaugh. In a January interview with Sean Hannity, and on his own show, Limbaugh said that he wants Obama to fail. The liberal-media demagogues who promptly pounced on this remark missed the rest of the thought, though.

Limbaugh said: “If I wanted Obama to succeed, I’d be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he’s talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the U.S. government as possible, from the banking business, the mortgage industry, to the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work.”

Limbaugh received heavy fire for his remarks. But what’s wrong with his comments? His saying otherwise would be surrender, capitulation in the battle to advance the ideas he’s spent the last 20 years of his life articulating and defending.

No one should be forced to throw out his principles just because he disagrees with a popular president. Limbaugh and all of us happy warriors must continue to work hard advocating our beliefs, no matter how fierce the tide against them.

As Limbaugh explained on his show, “Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem.”

But it wasn’t just Limbaugh the lightning rod who so angered the winning side. Two weeks into the Obama administration, reporters from the Politico sat down with former vice president Dick Cheney. “Cheney warns of new attacks,” the headline read, causing many Obama fans to condemn the man as a virulent scaremonger. Again, self-righteous fury has clouded the Left’s vision, blinding it to context.

Cheney said in the interview that keeping America secure is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.” He continued, “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Cheney speaks from experience here. And I believe the former vice president expects that the new administration will soon adopt a less hubristic tone, once it is sobered by the sort of intelligence reports that Cheney read for eight years.

Cheney is not a man looking to score a cheap partisan shot. This is a devoted public servant who saw the smoke from the Pentagon on 9/11. When he voices concern, it’s not that he’s hoping for an attack, or aiming to intimidate a rookie president and his team–he’s genuinely worried about his country.

President Obama might consider that Republicans, too, care about their country.

Americans are looking for leadership. And leadership does not consist of throwing away principles after every election cycle. President Obama and the Left need to understand that although they now govern in the majority, they are not the only party in town, and that the opposing party represents real people with viable viewpoints. The new administration should consider the principled criticisms of its Republican opponents, instead of unleashing polarizing rhetoric.

This will be especially important when it comes to the extremely controversial economic-stimulus plan, another radical reworking (the fruits of a paradigm shift that started under a Republican president?) of the free-market system that could change this country for generations. But pass it we simply must, the president has pronounced: “No plan is perfect, and we should work to make it stronger. But let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential.” House and Senate Republicans, and the folks they represent, are not the enemies; they are simply citizens with very reasonable, solid objections to many of the plan’s provisions, and America cannot afford to have the Democratic clique dismiss them out of hand. For a change, President Obama should stop demonizing his opponents, who love this country too.

–Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online. © 2009, Kathryn Jean Lopez

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