Here's an intriguing study in contrasts.First there's this syrupy article from Politico writers John Harris and Jonathan Martin about a knight in shining armor (Barack Obama) besieged by the nasty forces of the right. Am I exaggerating? Hardly. Let me cite a few examples:
* Harris and Martin explain how Obama's lofty goals are in danger from "the forces of accusation, personal malice and ideological fervor."
* The writers give plenty of quotes from Democratic pollster Paul Maslin slamming talk radio, the blogs and the tea parties. Among Maslin's claims about those attending tax protests and town hall meetings, "“They’re not the majority, but they’re vocal. And they’ve used guerrilla tactics to dominate the debate.” These quotes are given greater weight in the story because of the writer's obvious agreement with them.
* For instance, Harris and Martin themselves describe as "angry" those who are against ObamaCare. Except they refer them as "opponents of health care reform." This, of course, isn't even close to being accurate. For being against the sweeping socialism of the Democrat's proposals (proposals that have included such immoral schemes as paying for abortion and euthanasia) does not mean that one is against health care reform. It only means that reform must be genuinely helpful, affordable, respect freedom of conscience, and so on.
* Harris and Martin play the Sarah Palin card, always a delicious move by liberals writing for liberals. They describe her most condescendingly and insist that her worry about ObamCare's "death panels" has been "discredited." Simply reading the plan, however, shows that Palin had plenty of cause to be worried about the "checkbook euthanasia" inherent in the bill.
* "Palin’s right-wing media allies" are also mentioned by Harris and Martin for it is they who "drove White House environmental adviser Van Jones out of office."
* Obama is praised for his "skill at describing complex policies"...
* ...Whereas Obama's foes are "not susceptible to persuasion or reasoned argument."
* In addition to the above, there are several "statements of fact" in the article that are...well, anything but.
* Finally, the primary implication the article leads to is that these angry conservatives using their new media must be effectively countered by the White House if Progress is to be won. And failing that, the power of those conservative talk radio programs, blogs (even Sarah Palin's Facebook page) must be somehow muted.
Can you say "Fairness Doctrine?"
But now consider this view written by Obama voter and supporter Camille Paglia published over in Salon. You'll see it takes a refreshingly honest and certainly a more independent assessment of these matters.
When my last controversial column posted on Salon in the second week of August, most Democrats seemed frozen in suspended animation, not daring to criticize the Obama administration's bungling of healthcare reform lest it give aid and comfort to the GOP. Well, that ice dam sure broke with a roar. Dissident Democrats found their voices, and by late August even the liberal lemmings of the mainstream media, from CBS to CNN, had drastically altered their tone of reportage, from priggish disdain of the town hall insurgency to frank admission of serious problems in the healthcare bills as well as of Obama's declining national support.
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic missteps this year.I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have -- from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis...
This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster -- as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones last week -- but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights...
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?...
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled...