Daily Archives: Tuesday, December 9, 2008

If you haven’t bumped into this one yet, you will.  The claim is that “the left” of the party (particularly as represented in the blogosphere) is now rising up in a strident chorus against Obama’s cabinet picks and apparent policy plans because they aren’t liberal/progressive enough. 

It’s interesting that this is being repeated because it isn’t so.  Some are disappointed, some anxious, some impatient, some waiting, and some (like Greenwald) have expressed the cynical view that Washington, being Washington, will behave within limited institutional constraints.  But there is no strident, howling chorus or anything like it.  For example, Markos Moulitsas at the right’s blogosphere bete noir Daily Kos…  

“Some people may be nit-picky about his choices but at the end of the day, he’s going to make better choices than John McCain would have made,” Mr. Moulitsas said by telephone. “There will be a time to push him, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to wait to see what it means on a policy basis, not on personalities.”

So, what’s going on?  Two things.  First, the propensity of the modern news media to augment/exaggerate a potential ‘news’ story with the intention of making the news show a bit more spicy so as to pull in viewers/readers.  Example, Chris Matthews recent claim that Obama’s troubles will come from “the angry left”, a claim that arrived on his lips without any actual instances noted or described.  Second, this meme is coming from rightwing sources (NY Post, Fox, talk radio) as a simple and expected propaganda move to attempt to fashion a narrative (the Dems aren’t united; the Dems are definable as a group with a large and powerful component of extremists; and, Obama can’t be trusted to keep his word or to be a loyal person). 

And here’s another interesting aspect in all of this.  As this NY Times piece mentions  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/us/politics/09obama.html?pagewanted=1  Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh have praised Obama’s picks.  These two gentlemen aren’t in the business of forwarding or improving Democratic office-holders’ reputations.  The benevolent reading here is that they are merely being fair or demonstrating integrity to certain ideological positions they hold.  That’s a reading with scant prior precedent.  The rather more likely interpretation here is that these gents are trying to set up a narrative where “the left” or “liberals” can continue to be portrayed as angry extremists through contrast with Obama’s “reasonable” choices/stances.  It may seem a bit of a tightrope strategy (praising Obama when what you wish to do is discredit him) but it becomes a very simple thing, propaganda-wise, to do a flip two weeks or two months up the road…”now, the real Obama is showing himself, my friends, just like I warned you…it was pretense, it was stealth, it was deceit, it was lies…Obama the socialist…oh yes, he’s worse than a liberal and I warned you about this didn’t I…he made these appointments of reasonable men but then he drags them with his Leninist claws into the extremes of William Ayers and the death of American democracy…I warned you it would happen and here it is.”

An easy trick for these guys.  And it is likely exactly how they’ll play it.

update:  Michael Tomasky at The Guardian UK does his typical smarts on this one too…

If it’s true that nature abhors a vacuum, then that rather unnatural state of man known as cable television is positively repulsed by one. And so, during this lugubrious interregnum in which millions of us are still coming down from the months-long high of checking Nate Silver and Real Clear Politics nine times a day and dying inside because the polls out of Ohio contradict one another, the political class needs something to chatter about.

It has chosen, for more days running than I’d imagined necessary, the story of the liberal activists who already feel betrayed by Barack Obama. The Politico weighed in Monday with a piece noting that some liberals (actually, it didn’t even qualify it with “some”; it just said “liberals”) “are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices.”

Well, they didn’t call me, and you can place me well outside the magic circle. I’m not nervous or flat-out angry or even concerned. I’m excited. And by the way, the vast majority of the people I know are excited, too… 

 continue reading here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2008/dec/09/obama-white-house