How Obama Enables Rush
Rick Perlstein writes:
We live in a mendocracy.
As in: rule by liars.
Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.
But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—"civil," just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.
And it was all too predictable.
Consider February 24, 2009, when, after four glowing weeks in office, Obama delivered his first, triumphant, address to a joint session of Congress. Two weeks earlier, he had signed the $700 billion stimulus bill. This was his speech defending it.
That was the one in which Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, looking like a cross between a deer in the headlights and a 10-year-old delivering a prize school report, delivered the Republican response. You remember! He singled out for excoriation the $140 million in stimulus spending "for something called 'volcano monitoring'"; this happened to be about a month before a volcano erupted, releasing a 60,000 foot cloud of ash near—dot dot dot—Wasilla, Alaska.
On CNN, David Brooks followed Jindal. He called the governor's "stale, government-is-the problem" rhetoric "a disaster for the Republican Party," and excoriated those who insisted on hugging tight to it as "insane." The people appeared to agree. In a snap poll, 92 percent of those surveyed had a positive reaction to Obama's speech—68 percent a very positive reaction. Only 8 percent had a negative reaction.
The next morning I tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. I was fascinated to see how the hell he might respond.
Like a deer in the headlights? Not quite. The first caller, though a self-professed ditto-head, took objection to Rush's argument that Obama had revealed himself in the speech as a tax-and-spend liberal. The caller quoted Obama's words: "Because of this plan, 95 percent of the working households in America will receive a tax cut –- a tax cut that you will see in your paychecks beginning on April 1." (Which was true: People did.)
Rush responded, fluidly and without a gram of doubt. "Pay no attention to what Obama says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant."
So the guy to whom all Republicans must kowtow on pain of political death had just laid down a marker that everything Obama said was a lie.
What if the White House had in those months in early 2009 put in the rhetorical forefront a story about Rush's tens of millions of listeners, and all politicians who refused to denounce Rush, were effectively saying anything the Chief Constitutional Officer of the United States said was a priori a diabolical lie?
