Link: Frank Rich - They Sure Showed That Obama - NYTimes.com.
Rich gloats a little, perhaps presumes too much schadenfreude over what was neither a major fail whale NOR a big victory, but in the first month of a new administration, everything tends to get blown out of proportion.
Sort of like how the first year's grades for college freshmen cause such large swings and swoons in the old GPA.
But I enjoyed reading this too much not to pull out my favorite and most pithy bits. Rich surely does have a nice turn of the phrase. My most fav bits are in bold, emphasis mine.
Op-Ed Columnist
They Sure Showed That Obama
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 14, 2009
AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency
pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the
agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”
Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how
he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly
garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and
opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a
rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served
as Hank Paulson’s first mate.
But we do know this much. Just as
in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the
punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a
wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was
played for fools again.
[Yeah, there's that schadenfreude dance... naaaah nah-nah boo-boo. Nothing like a little taunting between friends.]
[...]
“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” [campaign manager David Axelrod]
said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer
of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his
campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus
on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national
polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept
repeating itself.
[...]
The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself
and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are
completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says.
Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed
support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV,
you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost
like living in a parallel universe.”
For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but
that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington
think.”
[After living steeped in a world bent on underestimating and condescending to the broader audience of American people-- TV's cable news lowest common denominator programming-- can I just say the fact that someone would actually SAY this out loud is such a wonderful breath of fresh air, I almost don't know what to say! I mean, I tried to say such things to editorial managers and in editorial meetings, and was almost universally dismissed out of hand as someone whose credibility and expertise was in question for even suggesting such a thing. The conventional wisdom was that no one ever lost ratings or got fired for UNDER-estimating the intelligence and discernment of broader audiences.
What does it mean, if, at the highest levels of this president's administration, they are NOT assuming Americans are stupid "Joe Six-Paks," or even "Joe the Plumbers"? Wow. This is a massively radical shift on so many levels. If it is more than lip service (and we have also seen the first prime time presidential news conference where the first question asked gets a 7-minute response, a response that not only consisted of complete sentences, complex sentences, but also PARAGRAPHS. Hey, I've been an English teacher, so I can go a step further. They were well-developed and crafted paragraphs! I wrote about it in a previous post on this blog: BRAINS ARE BACK!) then the American people are being "called into" (think Louis Althusser) higher engagement and intellectual processing, right at the time when we need their smart engagement most.
Somebody needs to be noticing what a radical change this is, a change in faith, in belief, not just in democracy (small-d), but in ordinary people. Rachel Maddow has been going around talking about not talking down to audiences too, in interviews. It goes against mass comm theory, against programming wisdom, against years of Nielsen Ratings, and yet, they are saying it. Must be nice to be a big enough 800-pound gorilla that you don't get snarked out of editorial meetings for saying and believing something that goes against decades of conventional lowest common denominator programming wisdom. YO! Let's change these damn theories! Let's prove those wags WRONG! Let's actually RESPECT audiences!]
Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because
Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the
noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as
the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa.
The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle
even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the
president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last
week’s.
[...]
The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about
Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV
advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress
reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats
as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three
days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started
pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus
package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount
to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.
[The guffaws should have been widespread with that last number. It is the most bizarre kind of historical revisionism of the non-reality-based universe to even attempt to bring off such a claim, let alone to fan out and spread the word to the freepers and astro-turfers with a straight face. I'm not one to trust the American school system quite that much (having taught writing to college students, and knowing what they can readily pull out of their heads and what they can't), to assume that FDR's New Deal turnaround is common wisdom and an authoritative trope. I believe in Americans and their brains, I most certainly do, but I also know school systems at all levels have failed them, and badly, as well as universities where I have worked.
Obi Wan Kenobi may be our only hope, but it is the brains of ordinary people which will have to bring us back from this brink.
So the black-is-white, up-is-down crowd is out chattering on teevee as if the rules of the game had not changed, as if talking points revisionism could change reality just like in the old days, so why the hell not try to spin out the con job that the New Deal CAUSED the Great Depression?! Yeah, there's the ticket!
What was it Hitler's (whoops, stumbling on Godwin's Law) propaganda minister said? That little lies can't be counted on to get the job done. What you needed was the "Big Lie." Yeah, I'd say claiming FDR's New Deal CAUSED the Great Depression certainly qualifies as a "Big Lie."
Funniest thing to come out this past week, while the Stimulus was passing despite the GOP obliviousness was a web site called the GOP Problem Solver. Go type your problems in there! Try it. Too much fun.
The other bizarre thing to come out this week, tucked away in an obscure CSPAN Congressional interview, a legislator revealed while talking about something else that the U.S. had been just 3 hours from total economic collapse on September 15, 2008, when the shit was hitting the fan. Somehow, these two things go together. Go bookmark both of them, and ponder deeply during your yoga or meditation session or whatever.]
[...]
Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of
Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out
that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that
Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits.
Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New
Deal.
[...]
At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating
“victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra
about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is
summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that
“the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus
‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s
political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.”
[...]
Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him.
Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite
dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland
lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.”
[That was one of the most HILARIOUS TV clips of the week, I have to say. Steele may well turn out to be another one of those gifts to late night comedians.
I gotta add my own shot here, at the peculiar drama with Sen. Judd Greg (R-NH) pulling out on Commerce Secretary, even as the Obama administration claims he was the one who threw his hat in the ring. What was up with that?! SOMETHING was going on behind the scenes, I feel certain of it. He surely didn't think he'd be allowed to gerrymander the Census to lock up Republican districts or something, did he? I mean, eight years of stupid doesn't mean you assume stupid is the rule, and Obama was not born yesterday and clearly his grandmomma didn't raise no fools.
What was up with Greg? My guess? The GOP goose-step organizers shifted hard obstructionist in the past two weeks, even since Greg put his hat in, and they had something on him and forced him, not only to back out, but to promise not to run again in New Hampshire (a friend in NH tells me he had already been making those noises, tho). So Crist wouldn't cave to the top-down GOP organization, nor would those three GOP senators willing to vote for the stimulus, but Sen. Arlen Spector (R-PA) admitted that more senators would have come over, but that some HARD orders appear to have come down from on GOP high. I'm thinking those hard orders reached Greg too.
The scorched earth Republicans, the K-Street whips, the our-way-or-the-highway types, are stepping up party discipline, to their own clueless detriment, as Rich so eloquently points out. But what are they using for leverage? They don't have the patronage goodies to pass out anymore. Their pay-to-play system is unhinged with a new sheriff. All they have are their banker cronies, and those folks WANT the bailouts, so long as they are as crooked and full of loopholes as they can keep them.
I'll have to revisit these questions again, as they are worth pondering, as it all plays out. Rich meanwhile is taking his own shots below, and they hit the target bull's eye, so I'll let him play us out. This is really one of his best editorials.]
[...]
This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points
instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike
those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too
much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets.
[...]
But, as he [Pres. Obama] said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd,
then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first
step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be
too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and
health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the
stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to
pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.
Republicans will
also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster
while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their
bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took
over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in
Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House.
The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well
have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen
either.
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