|
With all the dissecting, commenting and ranting, too much blame is being put on Obama and his team in regard to the massive reversal of fortune the Dems experienced in the mid-term elections. Sure the job of the president and his people is to understand the problems of the country and have a deep sense of what needs to be done to respond to the needs of the voting public, but there is much more at play right now in America than Obama losing his way.
We have seen the emergence of a new type of endless campaign in America. It has, literally, been developed since the age of propaganda all the way back to world war one The techniques are old, the tactics are new. We might never know how much has been spent, but it appears that several hundred million dollars have been spent to defeat this president while in office, and that doesn't even count the propaganda machines like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh attacking day by day, hour by hour, raising doubts, questions and fears in the mind of the public.
The money spent, however much it was, in the anti-Obama campaign was over and above what was poured directly into political campaigns and includes outside campaign groups, Tea Party related efforts and underground expenditures. The purpose of all of this was to “poison the well” for Obama and it is working, still. Next stop, 2012.
Propaganda does not have to be fully accepted to be damaging. It is often enough to develop doubts in the minds of the willing. Then, those doubts can be confirmed and expanded over time. This is what we are seeing with the anti-Obama campaign.
At present, we have seen only the tip of the iceberg about this campaign. We know that cameras were sent around to harass incumbent Dems in Congress with embarrassing questions and that one of those harassment events turned into a shouting event with a Congressman. The "cameraman", it turned out, was a hired college student loyal to the Republican cause. There were many other Republican cameramen as well. In the past, this sort of thing would have been labeled a political dirty trick and reported widely as such. Now, it is considered more or less business as usual.
We also know that the Tea Party groups came up too fast and too strong to be entirely self generated. They have every appearance of being a Republican planned and planted operation, including the active involvement of Republicans like former Congressman Dick Armey and former White House operative Karl Rove. (Which is not to say that all of the Tea Party people are insincere. Most however, do appear to be politically inexperienced and downright naive.)
In short, neither the Dems nor the general public really know the full scope of what hit Obama. He is being out maneuvered on every front and his response is to talk about compromise and cooperation, which are about as likely as Elvis showing up for a concert at the Kennedy Center. We need the cold, hard facts about the Republican campaign to destroy this presidency. Fighting, hard, to win an election is one thing. People accept rough tactics. Fighting to destroy the viability of a president elected by the nation is something far different. More than three decades ago, Richard Nixon plotted to continue and increase his power by using illegal and un-Constitutional tactics. He probably would have gotten away with most of it, had he not turned to actual, crude violations of the law like break-ins and bribery.
The major media had not been able to uncover and report the full story of the anti-Obama campaign. In part, this is because they do not see the scope of the development as part of a process of destruction by Obama’s opponents. The media have simply not been able to pull together the parts of this story into a coherent picture, but that doesn’t means it doesn’t exist.
This is a new phenomenon, one which was given birth back in 1992 by the election of Bill Clinton as president. When the effort to stop Clinton by undercutting him failed, the campaign moved on to actual impeachment of the president, even though it was clearly known that the votes were not available to remove him from office. One former US Senator was quoted recently as saying the impeachment of Clinton “worked” because the Republicans got back the presidency in 2000. That was the major goal all along: undermine him, cast doubt about his party and take back power for themselves.
While the exact, confirming details of the anit-Obama campaign are not fully known, we should make no mistake in understanding it. The overall effort is out in public for all to see. The goal is known: defeat the ability of a Democratic president to carry out change and reform, on any level. This is a new event in American political life, one that means “the rules”, such as they are, have changed dramatically. Until we know the full picture of the effort to destroy Obama, we should reserve some of our more harsh judgments about him as a president.
Doug Terry, 11.16.10
|
