1 Boring Old Man

Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock
New York Times
By FRANK RICH
June 18, 2010

PRESIDENT Obama is not known for wild pronouncements, so it was startling to hear him liken the gulf oil spill to 9/11. Alas, this bold analogy, made in an interview with Roger Simon of Politico, proved a misleading trailer for the main event. In the president’s prime-time address a few days later, there was still talk of war, but the ammunition was sanded down to bullet points: “a clean energy future,” “a long-term gulf coast restoration plan” and, that most dreaded of perennials, “a national commission.” Such generic placeholders, unanimated by details or deadlines, are Washingtonese for “The buck stops elsewhere.”

That action could be a turning point for Obama if he builds on it. And he must. In this 9/11, it’s not just the future of the gulf coast, energy policy or his presidency that’s in jeopardy. What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. The current crisis in that faith predates this disaster. In the short history of the Obama White House, two of its most urgent projects, reducing unemployment and pacifying Afghanistan, have yet to yield persuasive results. The dividends on the third, health care reform, won’t be in the mail for years…

The president’s shake-up of his own governance can’t wait, as tradition often has it, until after the next election. The Tea Party is at the barricades. When Obama said yet again on Tuesday that he would be “happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party,” you wanted to shout back, Enough already! His energy would be far better spent calling out in no uncertain terms what the other party’s “ideas and approaches” are. The more the Fox-Palin right has strengthened its hold on the G.O.P. during primary season, the sharper and more risky its ideology has become.

When Rand Paul defended BP against Salazar’s [empty] threat to keep a boot on the company’s neck, he was not speaking as some oddball libertarian outlier. His views are mainstream in his conservative cohort. Traditional Republican calls for limited government have given way to radical cries for abolishing many of modern government’s essential tasks. Paul has called for the elimination of the Department of Education, the Federal Reserve and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The newest G.O.P. star — Sharron Angle, the victor in this month’s Republican senatorial primary in Nevada — has also marked the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Social Security and Medicare for either demolition or privatization…

When Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revived Rand Paul’s defense of BP last week by apologizing on camera to Hayward for the “tragedy” of the White House’s “$20 billion shakedown,” the G.O.P. establishment had to shut him down because he was revealing the party’s true loyalties, not because it disagreed with him. Barton was merely echoing Michele Bachmann, who labeled the $20 billion for gulf victims a “redistribution-of-wealth fund,” and the 100-plus other House members whose Republican Study Committee had labeled the $20 billion a “Chicago-style shakedown” only a day before Barton did.

These tribunes of the antigovernment right and their Tea Party auxiliaries are clamoring for a new revolution to “take back America” — after which, we now can see, they would hand over America to the likes of BP. Let Deepwater Horizon be ground zero for a 9/11 showdown over the role of government. There couldn’t be a riper moment for Obama, as a man once said, to bring it on…

Like Paul Krugman and a lot of the "Progressive" bloggers, Frank Rich periodically gives Obama advice on how to deal with the Sarcasticrats. Most of Rich’s advice is like this op-ed, "capture the moment" advice. Krugman and the "Progressive" bloggers, exhort Obama to stand up for "Progressive" principles. A lot of the Obama aimed advice is about how to act on the political stage.

When I read it [the advice], I always have the same reaction. While I agree with what they say [in that it fits with my own lefty politics], I think they’re missing something. They’re a bunch of Liberals who, to their credit, forget that Obama is black. They misunderstand that a lot of the targeting of Barack Obama is because of the color of his skin and its success is a testimonial to the amount of latent racism in the American Ethos. So the Sarcasticrats mock everything Obama does or says, and the sneer in the background is all too familiar in the South where we saw it on a daily basis growing up. I don’t much see it in the parts of the South I visit any more, but I hear it from this group of sickos – no matter how hard they try to disguise it. To many, Barack Obama is a "boy" in the way that term used to be used in the South, and I hate hearing it.

I think Obama knows this, and is determined not to let it get to him. I saw To Kill a Mockingbird recently, a book/movie that captured the issue as few others. Obama carries himself with a dignity that is reminiscent of Tom [a role played by Brock Peters]. The analogy of senselessly killing a Mockingbird referred to Bo Radley, a gentle, mentally challenged adult [played by a young Robert Duvall], but it could just as easily be applied to Tom Robinson, a good man targeted only for his race. So I say, let the racists howl. Obama is doing the best he can with the Augean Stables that’s in front of him. He’ll be running on his record in 2012, not on how he handles this pack of racist Sarcasticrats. If that’s not enough, there’s little he can really do about it…