White House ideologist Sidney Blumenthal flew up to Cambridge, Mass., two Thursdays ago to give a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We are living in history, he reminded his audience. We are witnessing the epic struggle of Bill and Hillary Clinton to fashion something called “one-nation politics” from the ashes of Reaganism. There are, to be sure, “hostile forces that seek to confound and destroy one-nation politics and all that it promises.” But civilization will out, and whether they realize it or not, the barbarian Republicans are defeated already. The president’s poll numbers prove it.
Now, Sidney Blumenthal is a famously annoying and obnoxious man. He sneers a lot, he quotes from his own books, and he has a brain that is more machine than organ of genuine thought — whirring away in overdrive to neutralize any fact or argument that might complicate his schoolboy crush on the First Family. Still, El Sid does have at least one endearing quality. Like certain varieties of venomous snake, he is kind enough to offer physical warning cues whenever he is about to spit and bite.
