It’s been a giggle this week watching Democrats paint Rush Limbaugh as the “bloated, drug-addled” head of the Republican Party, as Paul Begala put it the other day. It’s been even more of a giggle watching Republicans contort themselves into rhetorical knots as they try to deny Limbaugh’s stature without offending the man himself.
Democrats have been playing a lot of winning hands lately, and this is another one. They’ve learned the trick that Republicans used throughout the Bush years: When there’s a leadership vacuum in the opposing party, focus your attention on the person whom voters will find most unpalatable. Hillary, then Nancy Pelosi were the GOP’s bogeywomen. Now, since positively no one is afraid of Mitch McConnell or John Boehner, since no one has yet stopped laughing at Michael Steele or Sarah Palin, and since Bobby Jindal still needs to find a grown-up first name (if not a persona to match), Democrats smartly have anointed Rush as (to borrow a phrase) The One.
To the extent that the Dems can encourage Americans to equate Limbaugh with opposition to President Obama’s grand schemes – and to the extent that they can keep us more disgusted with Limbaugh’s oft-stated hope that “Obama fails” than we are concerned about the fiscal ramifications of Obama’s potential success – they will have played this game of misdirection brilliantly. But let’s not pretend that it’s anything more than a game. (more…)
One of the hoariest clichés out there is the notion that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” Both Obama and John McCain campaigned last fall with uplifting calls for bipartisanship – McCain because he needed to overcome the Republican brand, Obama because he wanted to run up the score and break through the “50-percent-plus-one” nightmare of the Bush years. But even now that Obama has achieved that breakthrough, he’s still governing (at least for the moment) in poetry, and Monday’s visit to the Hill was nothing if not poetic.