One of the things which really frustrated me during the Clinton years was the way the White House was successful in portraying anyone who disliked – AKA “hated” – Bill Clinton as being unreasonable. The moment you described Clinton as a terrible president or a terrible man – or both – you were effectively written-off as “irrational.” Indeed, the phrase “irrational Clinton hater” was bandied around with the clear implication that the “irrational” part was redundant. Opposing Clinton was irrational, period.

Now, one of the reasons this was such a brilliant political strategy was that it effectively bought a big slice of the apolitical middle of this country. I tend to think that big swaths of Americans are simply turned off by overly ideological rhetoric at all. In other words, I think a lot of people disliked Clinton hatred because they disliked hearing about politics in harsh or “extreme” terms, period. In general, I think this is a healthy attitude even though sometimes it’s misguided. But Clinton exploited it brilliantly by making his opponents seem illegitimate simply by virtue of the fact they were his opponents. Of a piece was this was the brilliantly cynical use of the word “partisan.” Bill Clinton pretended that everything he was doing was “working hard” for the American people, “doing the job” etc. Anyone who disagreed with him was being “partisan” as if A) partisanship is bad and B) that only one side was partisan. Also, the whole “move on” schtick – which we now know was a cynical partisan appeal made my hardcore leftwingers – took advantage of this attitude.

It’s not clear to me that Bush has tried hard enough to exploit a similar strategy. The Bush-haters – who are just as extreme and nasty as the Clinton-haters were, and in many ways more so – offer a real opportunity for Bush. I am sure that some of the people who booed Linda Ronstadt or the Dixie Chicks were die-hard Bush supporters. But some of them, I’m sure, were merely people who detested the rudeness and arrogance of performers who thought it was their place to bad-mouth Bush and inject politics into a situation where people had every right to expect a politics-free zone. Obviously this strategy is more difficult for Bush because Clinton had much of the media and almost all of Hollywood on his side. The premise of “The American President,” “West Wing,” and pretty much every political declaration made by the Barbra Streisand crowd popularized the notion that disliking Clinton was an indication you were a weirdo, a crank, an opponent of progress. Bush-haters include many of those same people. With the exception of Fox News there’s really no mainstream outlet available for the White House to get the message out that irrational Bush hatred is not only irrational but annoying. Bush needs a way to tell the Michael Moore fans to “move on.”