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OBAMA DOESN'T NEED GLASSES--WE DO, PART III
This entry was posted on 8/31/2010 8:26 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
When it comes
to the junk-yard dogs of the GOP, barking ferociously over shadows and
dominating media coverage with wild accusations designed to
disenfranchise a Democratic administration, well, we've been here
before, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his recent piece for the New York Times, "It's Witch-Hunt Season." (I'm having trouble downloading the link, so you'll have to take it the old-fashioned way)--
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30krugman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print />
As Krugman says:
"The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop
witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right
accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to
murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected
the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point
taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White
House had misused its Christmas card list.
"Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s
turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently
declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever
had.”
"To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk
like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within
the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes
the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house
of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly."
As Krugman astutely explains, there is a significant portion of Americans who simply do not consider any Democratic administration--even a moderate one--to be a legitimate governing body for our country. And they don't just set out to DEFEAT that party and its chief representative so they can take over in the next elections--they set out to DESTROY it.
They do it by putting shit in a beautiful Tiffany box and dressing the pretty blue paper up with a big red, white, and blue bow--and handing it to the American people on a silver platter.
For instance, for all the claims of "grassroots populism" put forth by the Tea Baggers, the truth is that their movement is stoutly funded by the billionaire Koch brothers--libertarians who, if they had their druthers, would dismantle government entirely. (As bestselling author Jane Mayer points out in her piece for the New Yorker, "Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama." )
And most of the Tea Baggers themselves are upper middle class or otherwise rich enough to travel around and go to yet another one of their endless staged rallies, dressed up in expensive star-spangled banner costumes and professionally prepared signs.
Most of them, in fact, take plenty of benefits from the government till they criticize--from Medicare to Social Security to veteran's benefits. Others work for businesses that benefit from plenty of generous tax breaks and pork-barrel earmark grant money. If, in fact, they got their way and elected to the Senate and House and Presidency all the Tea Baggers their little ole hearts desired, they would soon find themselves losing those very benefits as they were dismantled and destroyed in the name of "fiscal responsibility" by the corporate whoremongers who are leaving bills on the nightstands of their GOP allies in congress.
With flags waving, of course.
Although there are responsible Republican leaders who abhor all of this nastiness, but not a single one of them has the balls to say so--not without soon dropping to their knees and begging forgiveness from whatever Limbaugh/Beck/Palin Holy Trinity they offended by daring to be honest.
What has been most maddening about this whole process is the eagerness with which the media rushes to provide a gleaming platform for all the rumors, misinformation, and downright lies put forth by that triumvirate and their sycophants in congress.
And I'm not just talking the Faux-News network, here.
I'm talking about journalists who should know better...but then, maybe they DON'T know better, simply because they are too young to realize when they are being played for a fake headline and 15 minutes of glory.
As Scott S. Purdam points out in his piece for Vanity Fair, "Washington, We Have a Problem," the White House briefing room is filled with correspondents for whom the White House is their first big assignment:
"The life experiences—and thus the sense of perspective, history,and balance—of today’s Washington reporters are qualitatively different from those of their predecessors. An entire generation of Beltway journalists has come of age being taught that the way to succeed is to be a smart—if not smart-alecky—young thing.
"Journalists who should know better ask the damnedest questions, simply to get a rise, as when The New York Times’s otherwise estimable Peter Baker last year asked Obama,with a straight face, if he was a socialist—only to get the obvious denial, plus a follow-up phone call from the president, saying he couldn’t believe the question was “entirely serious.” Or when George Stephanopoulos, who knows more than most journalists about the trivialities and realities of politics, asked Obama to respond to Sarah Palin’s critique of his nuclear-policy review as a “Go ahead, punch me in the face!” posture,only to have Obama say, “Last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues.”
Add to that the "hyperkinetic" atmosphere of cable, Internet, Twitter, and Facebook and there is no longer anything LIKE a 24-hour news cycle, "only one endless, undifferentiated full-color stream of fact, opinion,and attitudinizing, where lies and misinformation flourish equally with truth. It used to be that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day’s events. The pace of events has picked up,sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite,and subject to little responsible control."
Throw in viral e-mails filled with breathless conspiracy theories, photo-shopped images of the president and his family, and rumor-mongering, and you wind up with 20 percent of the American people--and a MAJORITY of Republicans--believing most of them.
There are even exhaustive, hand-wringing over-hyped periods of intense scrutiny on the president's personality and whether he is "too cool" or"not emotive enough"--as is pointed out hilariously in James Woolcott's column for Vanity Fair, "One Cool Cat."
The most fascinating thing about this piece is Woolcott's listing of media criticisms at the beginning of the article, culminating with the revelation that those quotes came from the early 1960's and referred,not to Barack Obama, but to President John F. Kennedy, who was also considered to be too aloof, too cerebral, and too "cool" for regular Americans. (Here is where maturity and context can really go along way toward addressing the latest media feeding frenzy.)
After suffering through eight years of a presidency in which the titular figure distinguished himself amidst his massive policy failures only by his knack for coming up with bumper sticker slogans, Woolcott seems to think we're in a bit of addiction withdrawal:
"I think it’s something else that the press corps can’t cup in the palms of their minds, which is: Obama as president has given them no offhand quotable goodies to play badminton with. He’s stiffed them in the catchy-sound-bite department...The second President Bush and his neologisms “strategery” and“misunderestimated,” the verbal back pat“ Heckuva job, Brownie,” and the classic question “Is our children learning?” And Sarah Palin, a godsend to Leno and Letterman, is a gumball machine of goofball quotes, many of them in her special patois. Obama:nothing. Reporters, op-ed writers,cable-news pundits, and bloggers have had to make do with his campaign inspirationals “hope” and “change,” but once you’re sitting at the computer typing out sentences such as“Candidate Obama promised hope and change, but the change he’s brought to Washington isn’t what many Americans hoped for,” it becomes so hard to go on living."
It has been the strategy of the White House all along to connect quick early successes to long-term victories, as Jonathan Alter points out in his book, THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One. And in order to accomplish that, it becomes necessary to tune out all the crazy distractions demanded by an insistent cable media and blogging atmosphere, much the same way I once had to tune out my squabbling children in the next room when I was working on a book. (I had a rule: Don't interrupt me unless you are bleeding or unconscious. They broke that rule a hundred times a day.)
Consequently they have been able to accomplish a breathtaking amount--and to have the satisfaction of seeing what goes around comes around, when dozens of Republican congress critters raced home on break and campaigned on all the marvelous things the Stimulus package was doing in their districts or states--the same package they had vehemently opposed and vigorously voted against.
(Who can forget Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal passing out giant checks, signed by him, to areas in his state for this improvement or that jobs-creation package--all made possible by Stimulus funds. Or all the Red States who refused to identify the thousands of highway and infrastructure projects underway in their states as having been funded by Stimulus funds--they literally would not put up the signs provided for that identification, leading locals to think it was just routine.)
So far, all but $80 billion of the $700 billion TARP program has been paid back to the government with interest. The American automakers who were near collapse before being rescued by this president are now showing strong profits and are paying back their bail-outs with interest, as well, and hiring back many of the workers laid off during the crises. The Stimulus bill has created or saved millions of jobs nationwide, and health care reforms are beginning to kick in. Wall Street has been reined in with careful regulations and reform, and school systems nationwide are improving as they compete for rewards from the education reform programs put in place by this administration. More than two million acres of wilderness has been preserved, period--by Executive Order. The Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act has been passed.
I don't even have room to list all the accomplishments and legislative achievements that have taken place under an administration not yet two years old.
But perfectionism and complacency can conspire to keep Democrats home in November, thus running the very real risk of turning over Congress, the Senate, and many states to Republica--and Tea Party--control.
Thus, it will be Republican governors who will make the redistricting decisions that could throw even more districts to Republicans, as was done in Texas mid-decade by Tom DeLay and his cronies (which granted six more Republican congress critters from Texas alone). A Republican congress could jam up the White House with hundreds of bogus legal hearings and accusations of ethical or legal violations based on little more than Fox-News rumor-mongering.
(Never forget that Ken Starr wound up spending millions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of federal agents investigating whether Vince Foster was murdered, driven only by Rush Limbaugh and his paranoid, mean-spirited allies.)
And don't think they won't be licking their chops, looking for any excuse to begin impeachment proceedings, just as they did Bill Clinton, if for no other reason than to dominate network and cable news coverage.
It's a cinch that any other legislative initiatives--on climate change or whatever--will be blocked, stopped dead in their tracks, and we could look forward to years of gridlock followed by a nasty, hateful campaign to run Obama out of office.
IS THIS REALLY WHAT ANY OF US WANTS???
Obama is gambling that, when push comes to shove--it is NOT what any of us,liberals, progressives, and Independents--really wants. As Todd S.Purdam puts it, describing the night that health care reform passed:
“Near the end of the celebration,” Valerie Jarrett recalls, “it must have been, I don’t know, 1:30 in the morning—way past my bedtime. I said, ‘So what are you ... how do you feel tonight?’ I said, ‘How does this compare with Election Night?’”
They were outside on the balcony and the temperature was about the same as it had been on Election Night. “And he said, ‘Oh, there’s no comparison.’ He said, ‘This is so much more important to me.’ He said Election Night was just about—it was all about getting us to this night.We’re actually doing something now.”
Obama’s gamble is that, if you look after the doing of the presidency, the selling of the presidency will look after itself. The short-term price may come in stalled poll numbers, electoral setbacks,and endless contradictory advice from the kibitzers. The payoff, if there is one,lies out on some future horizon. Obama may be right about this strategy,or he may be wrong. But it is the strategy he is following nonetheless."
But the thing is, he can't do it alone. We may not agree with every single thing he does, but that does not mean that we should--as the old saying goes--throw the baby out with the bath water. This is, all things considered, the best shot progressives are going to have for years to come to see the things actually take place that they dreamed of and feared for during the long national nightmare of the Bush years.
This is it. We can't drop the ball now and let petty resentments and perfectionistic passions prevent us from celebrating the VERY REAL GOOD that is being accomplished during this administration.
We can't let the GOP's junk yard dogs and their howling at the moon derail and distract us, because if we do, then they will be unleashed for real, and coming after the things we have all worked so hard for. At a recent meeting of GOP faithfuls, Dick Morris stated that repealing health care reform and dismantling everything else Obama has done, as well as shutting down his progress on anything having to do with climate change--is their goal.
In fact, "There's going to be a government shutdown, just like in '95 and '96 but
we're going to win it this time and I'll be fightin' on your side,"
Morris said at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation Conference on
Friday in Washington."
If we don't vote in November, and all those Tea Baggers and Sarah Palin fawners DO, then this is what we can expect for the next two years, at least. Only this time, it won't just be an annoyance, because the times are different now, as Krugman says:
"It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a
time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular,
we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis
since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government
paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president
govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get."
It's important that we turn out to vote and to support candidates who we feel will be most likely to enable the administration to achieve those goals. Staying home in a bitter funk because we didn't get the public option in the health care reform package or a bigger Stimulus bill (like, say, the TWO TRILLION that critic Paul Krugman seemed to think was merely a finger-snap away) that we wanted.
What we've got right now are some pretty exciting bragging rights, and a pretty urgent call to keep the momentum going when we cast our votes in November.
Let's prove all those gray-haired pundits and all those scrub-faced White House correspondents WRONG.
Think how much fun the news would be the next day!
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