The guy who wanted to change the tone in Washington has wound up facing the same sort of irrational rage and plain lies that President Clinton did. The accusations and propaganda are different, but the underlying message -- that only Republicans have any right to live in the White House -- is the same. Conservatives seem to feel they've been cheated out of some kind of birthright and that Barack Obama, elected handily over his Republican opponent, is a usurper.For his part, the president seems to have just noticed this.
Politico:
President Barack Obama said in an interview to be aired Sunday night on “60 Minutes" that he sees “a coarsening of our political dialogue.”
“The truth of the matter is that there has been, I think, a coarsening of our political dialogue,” Obama told Steve Kroft in an interview taped at the White House on Friday evening.
“I will also say that in the era of 24-hour cable news cycles, that the loudest, shrillest voices get the most attention. And so one of the things that I’m trying to figure out is: How can we make sure that civility is interesting?”
He's right about that last part. TV news is about drama, not policy, and the governing of the nation is just a high-stakes soap opera. But this isn't anything new. Neither is the "coarsening of our political dialogue." You can probably trace that back to the rise of right wing talk radio back in the '80s, if not earlier. In fact, there's nothing new here. It's just shriller and louder, but it hasn't become any more or less rational. The birthers of today can find their ideological forebears in the Vince Foster murder conspiracy theorists of the Clinton era. When the right loses, the right gets insane. This isn't a smear or an attack, it's just a fact. When Republicans lose the White House, the Republican base loses their minds.
And, while Obama has pretended he can float above the craziness of the 24-hour news cycle, the 24-hour news cycles on. He put out his message and expected people to actually discuss it, hoping that it wouldn't get lost in the big pile of crazy that's the right wing media. He's the president, for chrissake, he doesn't need to float a message in a bottle. He can have it delivered. Floating a message only means that opponents will try to sink it.
Frank Rich, New York Times:
It’s not, as those on the right would have us believe, that Obama’s ideas are so “liberal” that the American public recoiled. It’s that much of the public didn’t know what his ideas were. Even now I’m not convinced that most Americans know what a “public option” really means or what Obama’s precise position on it is. But I’d bet that many more have a working definition of “death panels.” The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.
That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That’s why his poll numbers on “leadership” declined. The right-wing fringe has become so deranged that it will yank its kids out of school to protest the president and risk yanking more Americans off assembly lines by boycotting General Motors to protest the administration’s Detroit bailout. Even Laura Bush and Newt Gingrich stepped in last week to defend Obama’s classroom homily from the fusillades by some of their own party’s most prominent ideologues. The White House should have landed a punch before they did.
What President Obama needs to do, from this day forward, is recognize that the media is a huge, stumbling moron and that the right is a lunatic. His ideas won't survive the game of telephone he's playing with TV news and Republicans, where he whispers "affordable healthcare" into one person's ear and it gets turned into "death panels" down the line. He needs to straighten things out as soon as they get screwy and call bullshit on lies as soon as they gain ground. This August didn't need to be this August. And it wouldn't have been if the White House hadn't just let all that crazy go on for so long.
It'd be nice if we could treat the Washington establishment as grownups, but we can't. I think we have plenty of proof of that right now and the experiment wasn't worth the cost. When they start acting up, they should get a spanking on the Bully Pulpit.
