Legacy media swings and misses in this newsitorial: As Right Jabs Continue, White House Debates a Counterpunching Strategy
The title alone advocates for the President, with it’s implication that government care advocates are standing there helplessly, passively, being punched, instead of sucking up valuable air time on nearly every network and with a massive astroturf movement run from the White House consisting of HCAN and Obama’s formidable campaign apparatus.
Facing a near-daily barrage of attacks from conservative opponents, White House officials are engaged in an internal debate over how hard to hit back, even as they have grown increasingly aggressive in countering allegations they deem to be absurd.
Absurd allegations are easily countered by a straightforward, simple answer, as in: You claim that this legislation will make taxpayers pay for abortion, but section ____ clearly shows it does not. The trouble is, it will make taxpayers pay for abortion, as even liberal fact-checkers have been forced to admit.
After brushing aside criticism during the presidential campaign that they tried to keep candidate Barack Obama too far above the fray — and with memories of the abundance of media coverage during the Clinton years — administration officials are accelerating their efforts to anticipate and respond to the most sharp-edged charges.
He’s never been “above the fray,” he’s just been the beneficiary of hagiographic media coverage as he engages in typical Chicago political thuggery. Look at the Inspector General scandal, look at how the White House is trying to take over the Census, look at dozens of unaccountable “czars” with control of multi-million dollar taxpayer-funded budgets.
The White House officials are eager to avoid the perception that the president is directly engaging critics who appear to speak only for a vocal minority, and part of their strategy involves pushing material to liberal and progressive media outlets to steer the coverage in their direction, senior advisers said.
That “vocal minority” has been polling at more that 50% against all summer.
When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.
The controversy escalated, but by the time it was over, White House advisers thought they had emerged with the upper hand. The speech, they said, was the most-viewed live video on any government Web site in history, and they were pleased with the media coverage of the event.
Critics were quite right to criticize the speech, because in the beginning he refused to release what he was going to say, but we were treated to a preview of a highly politicized lesson plan. As to the media coverage… I bet they were pleased. Again, hagiographic coverage.
In private, Obama has developed what his advisers say is becoming a familiar response to new allegations, rolling his eyes in disbelief and asking how his staff plans to counter them. Several senior advisers said in interviews that they are more focused on getting legislation passed than trying to manage the “right-wing noise machine,” convinced that voters will react most positively to measurable improvements in their lives.
In other words, we’re going to ram it down your throat and make you like it, because we know best. It’s certainly better to do that than, say, convince voters you’re right!!
But at a tactical level, administration officials are taking seriously the potential for damage and are attempting to respond forcefully. In early August, officials stepped up their efforts to link the “birther” movement — with its contention that Obama was not born in the United States and is thus not a legitimate president — to Republican leaders.
This birther nonsense is encouraged by Obama, who could easily stop it by making more records available. He is a United States citizen. Period. But he wants and benefits from this controversy, and it is subtly encouraged by Democrats – and remember, it was started by Democrats; the first guy to file suit over it was a long-time Democratic operative. The ability to dismiss his opponents by lumping us all together as conspiracy theorists, nut jobs and of course, racists, is too precious for him to give up.
Later in the month, Obama advisers began pushing back against allegations that he would establish “death panels” in his health-care overhaul, calling out former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin for posting that charge on her Facebook page. Obama publicly rejected the charge that he is maintaining an “enemies list,” raising the issue to dismiss it at a town hall meeting.
Points off to either the reading comprehension or honesty of every liberal who pushes the ‘Sarah Palin is an idiot for thinking there are “death panels”‘ meme, most of whom never read the original Facebook post and rely on what Maddow and Olbermann said about it. Her response is comprehensive and compelling.
Officials who were interviewed said the goal is to anticipate the conservative attacks and be ready to respond the moment they threaten to balloon into a major story. They acknowledge, however, having limited success so far.
Poor widdle babies, being attacked by conservatives! As it happens, they’re doing some attacking of their own – just ask Kenneth Gladney and the numerous other people injured by Obamabots at tea parties and town hall meetings. Not to mention the fact that we are regularly referred to by a disgusting sexual slur. If conservatives suddenly started referring to homosexuals as “teabaggers” (and face it, they are a far more likely group to practice that act than conservatives) we’d be called bigots and yes, bizarrely, racists. But it’s perfectly acceptable for politicians and the legacy media to use that kind of language about us.
“In a world with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report and everything else that makes up the right-wing noise machine, nothing is clean and nothing is simple,” a senior administration official said. “You don’t stomp a story out. You ride the wave and try to steer it to safe water.”
Well, in the past, the left wing noise machine had no opposition at all, as this story amply illustrates. That is how and why the “right wing noise machine” came to be in the first place. You created us. Deal with it.
The level of hostility toward Obama in recent months has been exceptionally high for a new president. Even before Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted “You lie!” during a presidential address to Congress last week, Obama had been accused of wanting to kill people’s grandparents (through health-care reform), expose their children to political re-education (through an expansion of community service programs) and use health care to make reparations for slavery (by expanding coverage).
Are you KIDDING? Bush couldn’t even get inaugurated without protesters trying to ruin the day. Democrats, elected officials, routinely called him a liar and killer. So quit whining. As to wanting to kill people’s grandparents, it was Obama himself who suggested grandma should go home with pain pills instead of getting that new pacemaker. It was Obama himself who demanded a national requirement for community service hours (since backtracked, but yes, he said it.) This is the first I’m hearing about the slavery reparations concept, but whatever the motive may be, it is certainly “spreading the wealth around’ as Obama himself admitted to Joe the Plumber.
How the Obama White House deals with the frenzy going forward will be a test of its talents, senior administration officials acknowledged.
Although Obama does not pore over the conservative attacks himself, he is not oblivious to them, advisers said. He does not watch cable television regularly, but he reads his news summary each morning, and he often follows up with staff members when he hears what he considers out-of-bounds allegations — sometimes after learning of them in e-mails from friends outside the White House, for example, or from ordinary voters at rallies. Little of it surprises him, aides said.
“In the fall of the campaign, you could find many similar sentiments at McCain-Palin rallies and certainly at Sarah Palin rallies,” communications director Anita Dunn said. “These aren’t new arguments. The level of vehemence, the emotional level of it, is at a campaign peak, which is unusual to find in a non-campaign year.”
Perhaps that might be related to the speed at which he is moving to radically change our government, and the fact that he’s still in campaign mode himself, hmmm?
Dunn played down the role that race could have in fueling the rancor. “I think that is less a part of it than some other people might think,” she said. “If you look at the history of this country, you see that in times of great stress and change, there are people who are concerned, who are threatened, there are people who are scared.”
But no remonstrations with every prominent liberal who keeps insisting it’s raaacism to oppose Obama. When you have attack dogs to do your dirty work, you can afford to “rise above” the fray, but that doesn’t make it less dishonest.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel echoed her point. “Father Coughlin called Roosevelt a socialist, the John Birch Society was created in reaction to Kennedy, Clinton had [Richard Mellon] Scaife and others who went after him,” he said. “And now they’ve come after Obama on Socialism and other things. This has always been a creed from those voices dealing with Democratic presidents. But yes, there’s an intensity, given the [rapid media] time frame we’re all under, that’s different.”
As Will Smith pointed out in Independence Day, “don’t start nothing, won’t BE nothing.” If Obama doesn’t want to be called a socialist, stop doing socialist things like taking over private industry.
During the Clinton administration, conservative opposition mounted to such a degree that the Clintons came to view it as a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” bankrolled by wealthy conservatives and airing damning claims, such as their alleged involvement in the death of their friend Vincent W. Foster Jr., whose death was ruled a suicide. Partisan warfare became blood sport, and while President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed at times to revel in it, it had a political price: Obama found success in the Democratic primaries in part by promising to move past the fighting.
Hey, you know when partisan warfare first became a blood sport in my generation? When Democrats threw 1.5 million Cambodians to the Communist wolves for political gain.
Now, the challenge for Obama will be to maintain that stance without ceding ground to his most extreme critics, whom administration officials believe are trying to mount an existential threat to the president.
“There’s a broader argument that is the underlying argument to all of these attacks, which is a very fundamental struggle about trying to tear this president down and delegitimize his presidency,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “That is really the war. And all of these are skirmishes — some of them flare up into battles — but the broader war is about the fate of this presidency and the other side’s attempts to delegitimize him and to make him into a failure.”
Wow, delegitimize a presidency? Where would conservatives have gotten such a crazy idea? To “make him into a failure” – you mean, like, a “miserable failure?” Wow, that’s a really bizarre idea, yet, strangely familiar. I wonder why…
If this article were a blog post at HuffPo or Dkos or on any liberal blog, there would be nothing more to say. Of course they’re advocating for their guy. That’s their job. But this is a Washington Post news article. And that’s the reason why the so-called legacy media IS legacy. We need nonpartisan fact checking and investigation, and we get this garbage. It’s a disgrace.
