… Obama needs a serious counterweight in the political arena. But the former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamentalist core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds — as small as 20 percent of the populace in the latest polls. Its position on the American spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.
Arlen Specter’s defection is the least of the Republicans’ problems, a lagging indicator. Though many characterize his departure as a “wake-up call” for the party, it’s only the most recent of countless wake-up calls the party has slept through since 2006. That was the year that Specter’s Pennsylvania Republican colleague in the Senate, Rick Santorum, lost his seat by a margin of more than 17 percentage points. Despite that rout and many more like it of similar right-wing candidates throughout America, the party’s ideological litmus test is more rigid than ever. The G.O.P. chairman, Michael Steele, and enforcers of Republican political correctness like William Kristol and the blogger Michele Malkin jeered Specter and cheered his departure. A laughing Limbaugh seconded e-mail from listeners commanding Specter to “take McCain with you — and his daughter.”
You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” and held hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”
From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.
But this is funny only up to a point. It was in 1937 — the year after the Democratic landslide left the Republican national ticket with a total of eight electoral votes — that a hugely empowered F.D.R. made two of the biggest mistakes of his presidency. He tried to pack the Supreme Court with partisan allies and, overconfidently judging the economy recovered, retreated from the New Deal by instituting spending cuts that prompted a fresh economic tailspin.
In the current climate Obama mustn’t drink his own Kool-Aid. As the 100 Days rollout reminded us, he remains a master at promoting and controlling his and his family’s image for maximum effect, down to each picture of Bo. The Obama White House has been more adept and broad-based than any of its predecessors at working the media, whether “Access Hollywood” or ESPN, Leno or YouTube, Us Weekly or what remains of newspapers…
Much is made of the demise of the Newspapers these days. Back several years ago, the New York Times tried something called Times Select. You had to pay to read Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd. I didn’t do it. I thought about it, but something about it bothered me. It wasn’t the money. I’d readily pay to keep some version of these papers alive. I think now that it was something I hadn’t figured out back when it was happening. I was mad at the newspapers. I discovered the blogs around 2004, after the second Bush election. I was unexpectedly floored by that decision on the part of my countrymen, and I discovered the Huffington Post, Hullabaloo, Firedoglake, the Next Hurrah, ThinkProgress in the process of trying to refind America after that election. The newspapers were dead then. Although they were called "the Liberal Media" by the Bushies and the Limbati, I thought they had died, lost their integrity. As stories emerged that I thought were blockbusters, they were given short shrift in the media. The blogs referred to the papers as MSM – mainstream media – and the term was an epithet, derisive. I agreed. It was as if 9/11, the attempt to sell papers, or the Bush Administration’s criticism had put them to sleep. They weren’t the "Fourth Establishment" any more. That’s why I didn’t want Times Select.
Mickey, I don’t know if you were in Atlanta back in the days of Ralph McGill at the Atlanta Constitution (before the papers merged, it was the liberal one); and then he was followed by Eugene Patterson.
They wrote courageously about civil rights in the 60s when we were still fighting to keep the status quo. And they were leaders of public opinion, using their powerful daily soapbox to proclaim what was right. Same with Edward R. Murrow on early TV in the McCarthy era.
Some new voices like those need to emerge. Sticking with the locals, Cynthia Tucker tried, but she didn’t have the clout, and now she’s gone to DC. Jay Bookman writes some good columns and speaks truth; but again he doesn’t have the clout that McGill and Patterson did.
We need to be on the lookout for an emergent voice.