Barack Obama ran on a platform of post-partisanship, of healing and
uniting a divided nation. Yet it didn’t even take him a week to enter
into the partisan fray, taking on the Right’s biggest megaphone — and making it even bigger. Instead of marginalizing Rush Limbaugh, Obama managed to make him the most credible voice of opposition
One doesn’t make points at all about bipartisanship by explicitly
attacking another partisan voice, no matter how much one disagrees with
it. By naming Rush and attempting to sideline him, Obama lifted Rush’s
profile and practically anointed him his opposition. It demonstrates
that Obama still has no sense of his office, nor of
“post-partisanship”, regardless of his endlessly empty rhetoric on the
subject.
George Bush never attacked Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, or other
voices of the rabid Left by name. If he ever went on the attack
against the left-wing media, he kept the attack general and broad,
rather than specific. Bush may not have been the most media-savvy of
our modern presidents — in fact, he may have been the worst at it since
Nixon — but he knew enough about his office to understand that part of
its strength would keep him somewhat above the partisan-pundit fray.
Obama hasn’t figured that much out yet.
Thanks to this attack, Rush not only has his own megaphone, but he
gained everyone else’s for a brief time. He became a national story,
gained national coverage, and in general got a million dollars’ worth
of free publicity. And Rush knows how to use it to his advantage, as
he showed:
To make the argument about me instead of his plan makes
sense from his perspective. Obama’s plan would buy votes for the
Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority
power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously
seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority
of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward.
It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in
permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his
stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat
Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain
knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy. If I can be made to
serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the
merits of this TRILLION dollar debacle.
Not only could Rush underscore the fact that Obama got petty, Rush
also had an opportunity to blast away at Obama’s economic plans on a
larger platform than usual. Thanks to Obama, Rush just doubled his
effectiveness. And also thanks to Obama, Republican leaders on Capitol
Hill might do something that they haven’t done in years, whatever
Obama’s paranoia might tell him: they might take Rush’s advice.
Rush Limbaugh is the first target of Obama’s “new” politics