Frank Rich op-ed
Goldmine.
The piece expresses numerous thoughts of my own, all but ignored by the oddball talking heads on the boobtube. Ladies and gentlemen, this is
the article to forward on to your crazed aunt who sends you Obama Mooslim chain mails and the like. Hitting upon a gauntlet of subjects, Rich leaves no prisoners, past, present, nor future.
The most important point?
Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.
There's a reason why Rahm Emanuel is crowing to the
Wall Street Journal. The first paragraph is the giveaway:
Emanuel conceded that the White House "lost" four days of the clash, but said it was because Obama focused too much on bipartisanship at the expense of talking up the benefits of the still-emerging proposal.
Thank you for unanimously opposing popular legislation!
No traps here, no siree.
Clinton's 1993 budget passed the House without any Republican votes,
219-213 in the House, and Gore had to break the tie in the Senate, eight months into the Clinton presidency. His failed sixteen billion dollar stimulus,
from the April before, was due to a similar Republican glut. That Obama
passed his stimulus twice as fast, and nearly fifty times as large, only further emboldens the words of Axelrod in the Rich piece, and
David Plouffe's off - the - record comments:"What we were focused on... was really not what was coming out of the coverage every day, and our candidate was very good about it. ... The McCain campaign was much more focused on putting ads out to dominate cable chatter for a few hours. ... That was never what we thought was important."
"You put out a snarky TV ad or something controversial, that's all NBC, CNN and Fox are talking about, but that's not how you win elections. I think that discipline paid off."
The audience for these 24/7 news stations are only so large, and only so persuasive. When a populace is facing (non-ignorable) difficulties day after day, the effectiveness of doublethink deteriorates exponentially.