That Same Old Song

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

Barack Obama is deeply concerned for the institutional health of the Republican Party. Indeed, whatever the current iteration of the GOP happens to be, it is, in the 44th president’s estimation, an ailing version of what preceded it.

 

Obama expressed his profound disquiet over the GOP’s constitution in a recent interview with outgoing CBS host Stephen Colbert. “When I was president, people would ask me, ‘What change would you like to see in Washington? ‘” Obama’s answer reflected his belief that the only problems in the nation’s capital were his political opponents. “I’d say, ‘I’d love a loyal opposition,” he said of the presumably disloyal Republican Party.

 

“I’d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, you know, didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law, judicial independence,” and “empirical evidence, and science, and wasn’t constantly tapping into our worst impulses,” he drawled. “And there has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return because I think you have to have two healthy parties.”

 

Obama always excelled at flattering himself and his allies in a manner that sounds like he’s merely offering objective analysis. But Obama merely perfected this tactic. For Democrats, the last version of the GOP, the Republican president out of power, or the late conservative lawmaker are forever better than what they have to deal with now. Take former Senator Mitt Romney.

 

“He’s the modern voice Republicans need,” said onetime Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prior to his death in 2021. “I like him.” That’s quite the turnaround from when Reid baselessly accused Romney of felony tax evasion, later explaining the lie away as an instrument of political utility. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reid later said of his own mendacity.

 

Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a change of heart when it came to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now? Oh my God,” she mused in 2019 as Romney contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were president of the United States?” How odd. Either the man she accused of being “kind of sexist,” a liar, and a racially hostile bigot somehow managed to burnish his reputation with the former speaker in a relatively short period, or she never meant a word of her criticisms in the first place.

 

Even Obama got in on the act. When the acute political imperative was to attack Trump, Romney served as a useful foil. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he told one interviewer in 2016. Trump, by contrast, was “unfit” for the office. That’s quite the reversal from four years earlier, when Obama had cast Romney as a “bullsh***er.” Obama’s running mate had said that Romney wanted to bring slavery back, and his campaign accused the GOP nominee of being guilty of negligent homicide.

 

For Democrats, the Republicans who are dead and gone are always somehow better than whatever we have today. It’s a trite political tactic that reflects less on its subjects and more on those who deploy it.