It has taken several days for the full implications of Obama’s budget and message to sink in among conservatives and Republicans, but now the surprise has passed and the gloves are coming off.
The conservative hope that Obama might actually be the timid, dithering, “split the difference” centrist that some progressives feared he was has now evaporated. On the contrary, the scope of his ambition to be a solidly progressive Roosevelt-style president makes him appear as a genuine threat -- not just for committed Republicans, but to a substantial group beyond. For many, this threat is so grave that insuring the defeat of Obama’s political program now takes priority over what might be best for the economy.
The larger group beyond the usual Republican base that finds Obama’s program threatening is essentially comprised of the substantial number of relatively un-ideological Middle Americans – small businesspeople, managers and office park voters among others -- who –deep down – simply don’t accept a Keynesian view of economics or understand the need for significant, ongoing government intervention in the economy. On survey questions they will often support certain specific and appealing government programs but then will simultaneously reject “deficit spending”, “big government” and “regulations” as unambiguous evils. If you asked many of these Americans to choose between, on the one hand, a “lost decade of growth” like Japan suffered as well as continuing crises in health care, energy and the environment and, on the other hand, the unknown long-term political consequences of a wildly successful and deeply progressive Democratic Presidency, many will hem and haw for a moment but finally opt for “the devil they know” – recession and stagnation – rather than the uncharted waters of an energetically progressive future.
The result is that Democrats can’t rely on Obama’s tremendous advantage in personal popularity right now to keep the Republicans on the defensive. On the contrary, Democrats must begin preparing to defend themselves against a massive, well-financed and coordinated, three pronged offensive.
Prong Number 1 -- The Official Party Line – The most familiar and visible of the three prongs of this offensive is the official Republican Party -- represented by the Congressional Republicans and the Republican National Committee. By now virtually every politically involved American has heard the official Republican position. The battle against Obama is a direct clash between socialism and the free market, between liberalism gone completely berserk and the traditional American Way. Buried in the byzantine twists and turns of Rush Limbaugh’s epic , Fidel Castro- length,
pronunciamento to the Conservative Political Action Conference last week lie a collection of virtually every one of his “oldies but goodies” and “greatest hits” drawn from his radio show.
By itself, however, this official Republican message will not be sufficient. It needs to be reinforced by two additional forces to successfully challenge Obama’s coalition. It needs (1) “responsible” apologists to give it intellectual cover with more moderate voters and (2) “Black Ops’ boys” to do the political “wet work” – the stuff too ugly to display in public.
Prong Number 2 -- The “Responsible” Apologists -- David Brooks’ retreat into the boilerplate anti-Obama rhetoric of the Republican National Committee in his recent New York Times column (misleadingly titled “a
Moderate Manifesto”) signals the groveling surrender of the “responsible” and “sophisticated” conservatives to the Republican Party base. As Ed Kilgore has noted, for Brooks,’ "moderation is defined as compromise, any kind of compromise, and "moderates" are invariably urged to pursue a course of action that coincides with the immediate political needs of the Republican Party… you will note that (Brooks’) column
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Prong Number 3. The “Black Ops’ boys” -- The final weeks of the 2008 campaign showed that the “sub-rosa” smear campaigns describing Obama as a secret Moslem, a Black militant and left-wing terrorist were not sufficient to sink his campaign. But careful observers were quick to note that the biggest multi-million dollar independent conservative propaganda organizations like Freedom Watch had held back for various reasons, including their profoundly ambivalent feelings toward John McCain. But now, faced with what they perceive as a vastly more terrifying threat than Bill Clinton ever was, they are going to come roaring back like the proverbial bat out of hell.
The new “Black Ops’ attacks” will be of three basic kinds:
First, they will organize and subsidize phony grass roots movements and protests. The most dramatic recent example of this is CNBC newscaster Rick Santelli’s “tea party” diatribe.
As several sources cited by Paul Rosenberg in Open Left noted:
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Second, the Black Ops forces will underwrite campaigns that are known to be false but which provide particularly provocative and inflammatory issues for grass-roots consumption. The most significant current example of this is the lawsuits over Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
As an article in Politico noted:
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Finally, there is the vast range of utterly false but easily circulated rumors designed to create a general climate of doubt and suspicion. Here is one typical recent e-mail campaign:
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The people in each of the three prongs of this coming offensive will sanctimoniously insist that they have absolutely nothing in common with each other. The “responsible” conservatives, for example, will insist they are entirely appalled by the tactics of the Black Op’s boys.
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