Category: Barack Obama

The far right does its stuff. Among the links they want to send soaring up Google’s charts:

* Guess whose mentor is a Communist? Obama, that’s who!

* Why isn’t Obama patriotic enough to hold his hand over his heart for the Star Spangled banner?

* What has Obama got against flag pins?

At some point it will dawn on them that their kind of politics is no longer very viable. I can’t wait for the moment that the right finally understands it needs positive arguments to defeat Obama, not smears. Ross is right:

Going down the race-card path wouldn’t be some brilliant machiavellian move on the part of the McCain camp, as Halperin suggests, but the purest sort of folly.

Obama’s appeal to the upper middle classes is powerful. But it remains a fact that the impact of an Obama presidency would be very tough for anyone earning over $160,000 a year. Removing the cap on the payroll tax, in particular, will clobber the successful:

Betsy’s marginal tax rate goes up from an already ridiculous 42.5% to 51.4%—not including the new 6.2% marginal tax on your employer. Subject to how she structures her withholding, Betsy’s take home pay drops an average of $515 a paycheck—less in the early months of the year, but much more in the later months of the year. Add in the effects on her bonus, and Betsy loses nearly $20,000/year in take-home pay.

I added a third column: how big a pay cut would you have to take to receive the same take-home income? The answer is that Obama’s tax increases have a bigger effect on your income than a law firm cutting New York salaries by $34,000.

NRO linked to this unhinged rant. It packs in so many paranoid stereotypes that its hard to know where to start. Is he a closet communist? Is he controlled by his angry wife? Was his father a drunk? Did his mother hate America? It goes on and on. It should be said that strong criticism of Obama’s views, policies, and even a skeptical view of his past are perfectly legitimate. Stories like this one in the Times of London should be appearing in the US press more often. But the primal toxin of reactionary fear that one sees circling the drain of American conservatism says more about Obama’s enemies than about him. One new hope one feels in this election cycle is that Obama might be a poultice that brings more of this bile to the surface and help us get past it. It will be a good thing for the American right if we do.

Just a quick note about an Obama line that has drawn a lot of derision. I can see why. There’s an element of messianic self-regard about the sentence. And I sure hope Obama doesn’t get too cocky or begins to get carried away by the wave of support he has inspired.

But I think some have missed a nuance. The phrase is actually a self-indictment as well as a self-congratulation. The point is surely that we shouldn’t wait for someone else to save us, or lift us up, or fix our problems or address our fate. We are the only ones who can do this. And we’re responsible for our own failure. The sentence is actually a criticism of Obama’s own supporters.

What makes Obama’s liberalism different from both the technocratic meliorism of the Clintons and the 1970s big government liberalism that preceded it is that it is an inclusive, self-help kind of liberalism. It is participatory, not passive. It is not about government saving us; it is about us saving the government.

Now, I don’t share a lot of what Obama favors in domestic policy (but then I’m pretty disgusted by Bush’s policies as well). I’d prefer to see self-empowerment work outside the channels of government. But he defuses my libertarian impulses by his emphasis on participation and self-help. If I’m going to have to tolerate big spending liberalism, I’d rather have Obama’s version than Bush’s. And that has been the choice. At least Obama will pay for his redistributionism by taxing Americans rather than borrowing it indefinitely from the Chinese. And if you want to blame anyone for making America safe again for liberalism, the current White House is where you should direct your ire. Once a Republican has said that government’s purpose is to help people who hurt, who can blame a Democrat for following through? In fact, Obama’s left-liberalism is not quite as paternalist as Bush’s. And it comes with fewer theological strings attached.

It’s good to see some conservatives being a little smarter than the Clintons. I recall last spring after an Obama rally in DC where I met Philip Klein, a young conservative writer for the American Spectator. As we left the scene, he told me he thought conservatives were in denial about the guy, didn’t yet see his potential, or his threat. Maybe some are getting it now. But they need to get a lot smarter than digs about dressing up like Osama. Obama represents a very smart and rational liberalism. I fear conservatives have gotten intellectually lazy. It may be we need an Obama presidency to force the right to get serious again.

[I fixed the Osama-Obama typo. Jeez. I wonder where that came from? I don’t think I have ever made that typo before despite writing the name Obama countless times. And I just did it twice in one post. Maybe it was because I used the word Osama in the same sentence. But weird.]

Not his finest hour. Watching both Clinton and Obama pander to the union left before Texas and Ohio is not a pleasant experience.

Noam Scheiber on the post-ideological policy-shop in Obamaland.

From Mojo:

Man 1: Did you see any of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars?

Man 2: Nah.

Man 1: Yeah. There wasn’t an Obama movie, one that everybody could like.

I’ve been watching more TV than usual. I’m struck at how many of my fellow pundits still haven’t grasped what is going on out there. They keep using their old devices and tropes to describe something actually new. Last night, I watched Hannity say the word "black" pejoratively about half a dozen times in expressing his fear and loathing of the Obama phenomenon. It was like listening to Lou Dobbs talk about Hispanics. You could see he thinks this is going to work. When Kristol is reduced to actually saying "the politics of fear" rather than simply exploiting it, you realize that the Obama campaign has not just discombobulated Clinton. It has discombobulated the pundit class. You even hear long-time defenders of the Bush Republicans talk darkly about big government if Obama gets in – as if they didn’t love it for the past seven years, as if they give a shit about the size of government outside election campaigns.

They didn’t see it coming. They still have no clue what they’re grappling with. By the time they do, it may well be over.
 

I’ve been struck by the lack of love in many quarters. A reader writes:

Obama’s getting swift boated by Jews – both pro-Clinton liberals and Republicans. A few Clinton supporters sent me emails and Jerusalem Post editorials about how pro-Palestinian Obama is, not based on anything he said, but based on (1) his alleged foreign policy advisers (he has some list of alleged foreign policy advisers – really people who have endorsed him, I suspect – with pro-Arab sympathies. Brezhinski’s name keeps popping up on these emails, as well as some guy named Malley I never heard of) and (2) his crazy pastor who gave some kind of award to Farrakhan.  I argued about the latter with my mom; she said that "those blacks all obey their pastors."

I think Obama will be lucky to get more than half the Jewish vote if he’s nominated; because of the history of black anti Semitism and ethnic cleansing, any black candidate has to be purer than Caesar’s wife to avoid accusations of anti-Zionism. Obama is probably reasonably OK from a pro-Israel perspective, but he isn’t THAT pure – he’ll get clobbered on guilt by association issues.

The pattern is familiar:

With 8 days to go before Ohio and Texas, get ready to see more of Obama in tribal dress, more about his being a Muslim, more about his advisers not liking Israel and Jews, more about Farrakhan and Jackson. And more about Michelle’s "edge."

Another innovative website from Obama supporters: just move your mouse over the moving images.