Diminishing The Resistance Against President Obama
Mark Tapscott at DCExaminer declares that Obama is in trouble. The meat of what he is saying:
* Since the first of the year, Rush Limbaugh’s audience has exploded , according to Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, even as his daily assaults on Obama have intensified. The conservative Talk Radio maestro has become quite possibly the most listened-to radio personality in America since before Paul Harvey (God rest his soul).
Demand for his air time hs suddenly become so intense, Limbaugh told The Examiner’s Byron York earlier today, that his network sold 80 percent as much advertising in January 2009 as it did in all of 2008, and expects to sell-out the year by the end of March. That was before Obama and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel launched an explicit counter-attack against Limbaugh that seems only to be making him bigger.
* Glenn Beck’s eminently forgettable presence on CNN has been transformed, according to The Los Angeles Times, by his move to Fox News where his main theme has been variations on this question – Wake Up! Wake UP! What in Heaven’s name does Barack Obama think he is doing to America? Beck has a tough time slot from which to win big ratings because he’s in the middle of evening drive-time. Even so, in a very short period of time at Fox, his audience has grown to the point that it is now exceeded only by those of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
* Obama remains personally popular with the public, but worries and even outright opposition to some of his cornerstone proposals are growing. Democrats in Congress are even beginning to express in public print their worries that Obama has reached too far with the $787 billion economic stimulus package, the $410 billion omnibus spending bill and the $3.6 trillion budget proposal (and the trillions more senior aides whisper are coming in further bailouts, loan guarantees, “tax cuts” that are really just grants, and other spending accountrements of Leviathan Unleashed.)
* Paralleling these developments, a potentially devastatng conservative case against Obama is coming together rapidly. Two influential columns this week tell the tale: On Thursday, Daniel Henninger offers this crucial observation in a WSJ piece otherwise devoted to asking why Republicans aren’t more eagerly and quickly taking advantage of the fact the Obama Democrats have all but declared war on the 75 percent of the U.S. economy that is private and therefore productive of the nation’s wealth:
“Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone. There isn’t much in his plan to stir the national soul. It’s about ‘sacrifice’ now so that we can live for a future of small electric cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party’s faith communities, but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it’s a downer.”
And:
Now, though, the mask is off and the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is emerging as the dominant driver of the Obama narrative. The contrast is no longer between the young, personable, historic candidate Obama and a creaky, cranky old Republican White Guy, it’s between what America thought it was getting in a President Obama (cool, reasonable and beyond partisanship) and what it now sees as the reality of a President Obama (government spending out of control, an uncertain hand on foreign policy, broken promises, more bureaucrats, etc. etc.).
Please read the entire article for full effect. President Obama has been at the helm for about six and a half weeks. In that time period, there has been resistance to his plans in the forms of “Going Galt” via Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, the coming Chicago Tea Party, many calls of socialism and facism (with dollops of history’s boogeymen comparisons), Obama “The Wealth Destroyer” (courtesy of Jim Cramer), Conservative Overlord Rush Limbaugh and skyrocketing ratings, general nastiness (the way it is these days), and other “grand” odds and ends.
Six and a half weeks and already calls of impeachment, cabinet resignations/firing/step downs, and “America is over”. My fellow Americans, I respect our right to resist. By all means, continue to do so and NEVER let anyone tell you not to when you believe in a cause or issue. But I’m wondering: when we resist so hard, so quickly, so violent rhetorically, and where the only solution (in that resistance) is for a President to basically quit without a chance, WHILE simultaneously trashing those who voted for that President, do we diminish the very resistance? And in doing that, America itself?
Now let me be very clear, I have issues with the Obama Administration’s direction in areas. I have expressed those issues here as well as with conservatives and liberals I know personally. But one thing that all my friends and associates agree on is that this entire financial situation is wracked with big unknowns. Will big spending help or hurt? Would tax cuts help or hurt? More or less infrastructure investment? Banks let to fail or not? Higher or lower taxes on the wealthy? How do we save the middle class? How much or how little health care reform? Save more or save less? So on and so forth. So many persuasive arguments from every corner and such a massive problem to deal with. Yet we have an elected leader and elected Congress (with a Democratic majority) in the role of The Decider. And they have decided (for the most part).
Our Presidents are elected to four year terms to maintain some consistency at the highest level of government. If this is the level of resistance at six and a half weeks, what will it be in 13 weeks? 26 weeks? 39 weeks? Will it just escalate regardless if President Obama is more successful than not? Will it turn even more volcanic (resistance) if President Obama is less successful than not? How far will it go and at what costs?
My biggest fear these days is that if we don’t check our “resistance” in some ways, we will never allow Presidents time to try anything. Presidents will be on the defensive from Day One and be boxed in. And when a person is boxed in, the reaction can be disastrous.
The Left launched a fusillade at former President Bush that is still echoing to this day. The Right will not be outdone. Resistance is an American right. But can we diminish it when we attack SO hard, SO furious, and SO soon? Or am I just a hand-wringer worrying over nothing? Or are we in the infant stages of a revolution against government in general no matter who is POTUS (this financial crisis and other issues fueling the perfect storm)?
14 Responses to “Diminishing The Resistance Against President Obama”
So far it appears that only the villagers and faux news are pushing the anti Obama shtick for all its worth-and I believe going way overboard. Re the Rush listeners, the radio ratings are counted differently from TV ratings and it is suggested that if you are attempting to compare radio with TV that you divide the radio listeners by 10 to discover the number listening to the entire program. I know that back when I listened to Rush it was only while I was driving. The 12-3 hours might mean that lots are listening during lunch hours, but drop off after the 12-1 block. The numbers claimed by all on faux news do not add up to what is printed by the ratings service. I also think that as usual the republicians in congress are far more intrested in “winning” the days news stories than they are in actually having ideas to fix things. Obamas ratings are well over 70% while the cong reps are hovering in the 20% range and they are being called obstructionist by most in fly over country. As it happens the only place they are ahead is in the village and in the minds of the MSM. Real people on the other hand, just want someone to do something, and the reps are seen as blocking just to be against rather than for any principle.
Personally I think that if the elected leaders would actually try solutions that are not ideological, they wouldn't get so much pushback.
Obama campaigned in part on this- on 'finding the best ideas from both sides of the aisle' yet instead, he uses the economic crisis to push for an overaraching liberal agenda.
Of course his campaigning could also have predicted this, because really he's doing very little that he didn't promise on policy. But there was always cognitive dissonance between his policy statements and his political rhetoric about being postpartisan, and it looks so far as though I was right to assume that the policy statements reflected reality while the rhetoric was just the grease to get him elected and to get the policies passed quickly with as little resistance as possible.
Most of these “criticisms” are coming from far-right ideologues whose views have been discredited by the economic crisis. They represent a tiny segment of America and don't seem to be catching on in the real world very much.
This will change – eventually. By the end of 2009 people will start to see this as Obama's economy and not as the legacy of Bush's. People will look for real results. Is recovery in sight? Are the transformative elements gaining traction, both politically and substantively?
Remember, Ronald Reagan did much the same thing. He used an economic crisis to re-orient the nation on a conservative course. And he did so with reassuring and non-ideological language. There was nothing tricky about it, just as there is nothing tricky about Obama's liberalism. We just have cartoonish images of what a liberal should sound like and Obama didn't fit the bill.
The reason Reagan's reassurances worked but I don't think Obama's will (past the short term) is because Reagan tuned into the self reliant message that is really a core American value. Obama's trying to reorient to a value system that is fundamentally opposed to our historical values, IMO, and it's a much harder sell. That's why I believe there's more dishonestly in his salesmanship.
Reagan was able to be consistent in calling the economic crisis's severity and its cause, because the remedy was to get government out of the way.
Obama has to one day talk about how dire the situation is, and explain that government actions contributed to it, but then convince people that his government is different and can be trusted to work for our best interests. Reagan just had to remind us of the hazards of trusting big government at all, and asked us to be more reliant on our own individual strengths.
I certainly agree that he's copying Reagan's approach, but for these reasons, I don't believe it will work.
There are no solutions that are not ideological any more. The Republicans believe in nothing more than tax cuts and don't care if they work or not. Big whoop. Give the wealthy tax cuts so they can invest in new creative financial vehicles…like the ones that crashed and burned and caused most of this mess. The claims of how the government contributed to the problem are completely overblown by the Republicans. They've been disproven yet the Republicans make the same claims over and over again, pushing lies for the sake of ideology and the hell with the country. If you can't be honest about it you can't fix it. I have yet to hear a Republican be honest about it, instead trying to blame virtually all of it on a combination of government action and individual venality. The banks, mortgage brokers and others in the financial services sector had almost nothing to do with it in their version of events. Sorry, it just doesn't wash. But anyone who points this out is accused of being the person who is just being a liberal.
CS says that Obama wants us to do things that are opposed to our historical values. Well, I hope so. Because if there is one thing that expresses Republican values more than anything it's a desire to take shelter in the idea that nothing changes and that we can just do things the same old way we did them in the 18th Century now in the 21st Century and it'll be OK because everything that a conservative chooses to believe in is an eternal truth that will never change. Nothing has changed enough in this day of globalization, international corporations, post-industrial society and corporatized medicine enough to justify looking for any new solutions that might not fit in with that which is acceptable to a political philosophy that, as CS has agreed herself, views itself as tasked with the job of standing on the rails of historical change and saying to the train “STOP!”. Of course they never admit that they cause wrecks, either.
I have yet to hear a Republican be honest about it, instead trying to blame virtually all of it on a combination of government action and individual venality. The banks, mortgage brokers and others in the financial services sector had almost nothing to do with it in their version of events.
Who is this mythical 'they', Jim?
And if anyone agrees with you that it's dishonest to state that our current problems are the result of collective failures of government action and individual's poor decisions, then I'd like to hear them defend that position. Of course it was a collective failure- and people like you who wish to blame exclusively one party, ignoring the contributions of the other political party and ignoring the individual failures to act responsibly with their own finances, are the ones who are failing to accurately diagnose our problems.
Jim,
Even the USA Today is admitting that the real estate crisis is limited to a few states that have very high levels of illegal immigrants and very high levels of foreclosures. The government failed to defend the border, the government failed to prevent identify theft, the government failed to keep banks responsible, and the government insisted that banks give more loans to minorities no matter what. The government also spent recklessly from 2000-2008 and spending even more recklessly now.
If the government had really defened the borders, if the government had insisted that banks be responsible, if the government was more interested in credit worthiness of borrowers instead of their ethnicity, then maybe banks like Washington Mutual would not have collapsed.
I guess blaming something Phil Gramm did a decade ago or blaming Bush makes more sense to Democrats but when the banking system in failing in Iceland and Spain, it is hard to blame Republicans.
CS, when I hear the government blamed for the housing crisis the focus inevitably is on the CRA. Yet even the Federal Reserve does not consider the CRA to have made the contribution claimed by conservatives who blame the government for a major part of the crisis. The pertinent part of the article I linked to is here.
As far as the conservatives who blame the government…here's the Manhattan Institute, Media Matters showing Fox News trying to help create the meme via Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer and their report on Sean Hannity also spreading the falsehood. Then there's the Mises Institute, Krauthammer in writing and the editors of the National Review Online. This doesn't even count the conservative blogs who bought into all of these right wing pundits' arguments.
I'd say the author is a delusional partisan hack.
* Polling shows that Limbaugh is less popular than REVEREND WRIGHT and BILL AYERS.
* Polling shows that more people are likely to oppose a candidate that is endorsed by Limbaugh than support him.
* Polling shows Congressional Democrats approval numbers in the 40's, with Repubs in the 20's.
* We've got Rush Limbaugh bouncing around like an idiot, the head of the RNC crawling on his hands and knees to apologize to him and talk of sacking him going on, and idiots like Michelle Bachman saying “you be da man.”
Anyone who ignore those things and say that the GOP has got its groove back needs to get off the oxycotton.
Jim, I didn't say that conservatives aren't including the government as one entity that is to blame. My point is that you are the one who is trying to deflect from that and put all the blame apparently on bankers and the investor class. We, on the other hand, are being more honest in saying that there's blame to go around.
Any conservative voices that focus exclusively on CRA or other Democratically fostered government interventions are being disingenuous, but liberals like yourself who won't see those components at all (you use one source who would obviously have a CYA motive to exonerate the govt policies as though this completely settles the question of whether or not CRA policies fed into the crisis) are similarly using tunnel vision..
CS, tell me again why a President of the Federal Reserve is CYA when it comes to the CRA. This opinion is also held by other Presidents of the Fed because they actually looked at the data. The entire point of the conservative attack on the CRA was to claim that the government forced the financial institutions into making bad loans, that they really had no fault in the matter. If you are going to say that it is still largely the fault of the government, point out exactly what policies were responsible. I'm completely serious. I'm perfectly willing to admit that there's probably blame to go around but I'd like to know which laws or government policies were the ones that contributed. If anything, I think a lack of government oversight was the worst sin the government had in this mess. For some more information…
A working paper from the Cleveland Federal Reserve
A working paper from The Bank for International Settlements
Myths and falsehoods about the purported link between affordable housing initiatives and the financial crisis (from Media Matters
Jim, I missed your last comment until now. I don't have a lot of time to respond but just wanted to quickly say that I see a confluence of factors like excessively loose money supply, deregulation of banks (which fueled a merger mania), and CRA/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/HUD policies as a perfect storm situation. So to me, the whole issue of CRA isn't one of comparing CRA loans to other risky mortgages, because that's not the point. I've never said that the loans made to poor people were the crux of the problem- instead, I think that the politicians who used the pretense of enabling those loans to also guide these other policies (keeping the flow of money going in that direction, while also providing profits for their friends in the banking industry) set up a Ponzi scheme and were in denial about what they were doing. The moral hazard introduced by all those policies was this absurd belief that it could all keep working into perpetuity because housing prices would always keep rising.
Even the securitization process, as far as I can see, was condoned by politicians from both parties because it was a way for banks to comply with the terms of CRA even when there really weren't many creditworthy customers left in the neighborhoods that they had to meet quotas in (that was one of the CRA policies made by Clinton- the ratings criteria changed so that they had to have quantifiable results rather than just prove that they were marketing to poor neighborhoods and not redlining customers) and to then pass off the risky loans to the investors who bundled them.
IOW, it looks to me like everyone involved decided it was OK to play this hot potato game because that kept the money flowing where they wanted it.
I don't exonerate the banks for also engaging in the other risky loans with higher income customers- not at all. I'm just of the belief that we wouldn't have gotten to that point if the politicians hadn't set up the system in the way that they did (and that the politicians' motivation for that included their desire to keep CRA policies going- along with, of course, the usual politicians' motive of providing fertile ground for their biggest donors to make profits.)
tell me again why a President of the Federal Reserve is CYA when it comes to the CRA.
Because the Fed didn't foresee where all of this was heading. They could have, at minimum, tightened the money supply if the political will wasn't there to intervene in other ways.
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