There is a new Conventional Wisdom hardening the already hard intellectual arteries of the mainstream media, and it is revealed, nicely if unwittingly, by the John F. Harris & Jonathan Martin Politico article today.
They begin:
This summer marked the fifth anniversary of the Democratic Party’s swoon for Barack Obama, who thrilled millions of people hearing the young state senator for the first time with words that set his image as a dazzling unifier in an age of mean and divisive politics:
“Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.”
Five years later — amid declining approval ratings and an increasingly polarized debate over health care — President Obama is losing his argument. Far from taming the forces of accusation, personal malice and ideological fervor, Obama and his signature health care agenda this summer became their target — and at least partly their victim.
What’s more, as he prepares to address Congress in a nationally televised speech Wednesday, one of the main pillars of Obama’s reputation — that his gift for healing words would combine with the power of his biography to transcend the rancor of modern politics — has never looked more wobbly.
The question, of course, is why, or perhaps how, did this happen? How did the black knight in shining armor whose intelligence, calm good judgment, silver-tongued oratory, and quintessentially American biography who held out the tantalizing promise of ending partisan rancor suddenly find himself confronting an America whose partisans are more frenzied than perhaps at any time since the outbreak of our one actual, violent Civil War?
Harris and Martin begin their explanation by pointing to the clever use by the “right wing” of new Internet-based communication technologies, quoting “longtime Democratic pollster Paul Maslin.”
Maslin, who resides in Madison, Wis., said he’s seen the power of the right wing even in his liberal college town, where there have been conservative tea parties to rail against Obama’s plans to increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for his expansive agenda.
“They’re not the majority, but they’re vocal,” Maslin said. “And they’ve used guerrilla tactics to dominate the debate.”
Thus, write Harris and Martin, the striking thing about the summer “has been the degree to which angry ‘town halls’ filled with opponents of health care reform has driven the political narrative….” And, they continue (and this is their main point),
what’s been lost in the furor — perhaps irretrievably — is the idea that Obama might represent a transformational brand of politics of the sort he envisioned five years ago in Boston.
And what did Obama, and his acolytes in the press, learn from what Harris and Martin call the “summer storms”?
… Obama is learning that its most ardent foes are in some ways impervious to the usual tools at a president’s disposal — not susceptible to persuasion or reasoned argument and only too happy for the attention that comes from being attacked head-on.
As evidence that Obama’s critics are “not susceptible to persuasion or reasoned argument” — this is priceless! — Harris and Martin refer to
an August Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that showed half or more of those surveyed believed health care reform would offer benefits for illegal immigrants and use taxpayer dollars for abortions, and even 45 percent thought the government would make decisions about when to stop paying for care for the elderly.
I haven’t followed the abortion issue in any detail, and the “death panel” issue has been debated to, well, death (my take on it is here), but, as I’ve also noted, the House Democrats voted down two separate attempts to introduce measures that would have required proof of citizenship to benefit from new health care measures, virtually ensuring (or would that be insuring?) that illegals in large numbers would in fact benefit.
In short, the message of this article is that Obama no longer “represent[s] a transformational brand of politics” not because of anything he’s done in office but because he’s been attacked by radical, irrational, right-wingers impervious to reasoned argument, presumably the sort of argument that’s been offered by Obama and the Democrats. What they’re saying, in effect, is that the Obamacare critics, i.e., the Town-Hallers, the Tea Partyers, and the Republican Party, have not been engaging in debate but have in fact exercised a heckler’s veto against reasoned free speech.
Even when something like the above is pointed out, they still don’t get it. Thus they quote the ever perceptive Mary Matalin — “Obama … is “getting through loud and clear, it’s just that the dogs won’t eat the dog food” — but then respond: “But it also may be that a potent opposition is getting through louder and more clearly.” They thus lay full responsibility for the rancor and divisiveness of our current overheated partisan politics exclusively at the feet (or in the mouths) of Obama’s critics.
Earlier I argued in passing that our current bitter divisiveness is probably greater than at any time since our actual shooting civil war of 1861 –1865. And in fact the emerging Conventional Wisdom on who is responsible for our current unpleasantness is strikingly reminiscent of the historiographical debate on the causes of the Civil War. Consider: it was established wisdom in the historical profession for a generation or so that the abolitionists bore primary responsibility for the coming of war because of their extreme, sometimes fanatical (think John Brown) opposition to slavery, preventing cooler and more rational moderates from avoiding war through compromise, etc.
Those historians were displaced in the 1960s and beyond by a new generation of historians who turned that argument on its head, arguing instead that the institution of slavery itself was the primary cause of the war, in large part because heated and even violent opposition to it was reasonable, moral, and in fact inevitable. Or take an analogous question: was The War caused by the South’s secession or by the North’s refusal to allow a peaceful secession?
“What caused the Civil War?” thus turns out to be not really a question of fact at all. It requires a judgment over how people should have reacted to the conditions and circumstances they faced. To argue that the abolitionists bear heavy responsibility is to assume that their response to slavery was somehow “over the top,” in today’s language, that they should have stayed away from their equivalents of our town halls.
You will have guessed by now where I’m (or where I’ve already arrived) with my Civil War analogy. We’re facing something like a civil war now — although for the moment it’s only political and ideological — and when journalists, talking heads, and pontificators at large place all the blame on the unreasonable mobs reacting to Obamacare, Obama debt, Obama deficits, etc., all they are doing is revealing their own Obamian sympathies. Whether they admit it or not, what they’re really saying is that the policies and programs Obama has introduced bear none of the responsibility for the nature of the opposition they’ve provoked, that if Obama’s critics were “susceptible to persuasion or reasoned argument” they wouldn’t be so critical.
As it happens, there are a lot of us dogs who won’t eat that dog food.
Now, lest you think the above is simply an exercise in historical analogizing for fun, let me close by noting that my analysis here is grounded — indeed, provoked — by my view of what Obama was up to in his Joint Session Health Care speech. As I argued here, I think Obama intendes to ride to a version of the Harris & Martin Conventional Wisdom for all its worth, insisting that his critics can’t be reasoned with and so he must ram through a purely Democratic bill. Others seem to have the same (Karl Rove: “[Obama’s] false charges do not reveal a spirit of bipartisanship nor do they create a foundation for dialogue. It is more like what you’d say if you are planning to jam through a bill without compromise. Which is exactly what Mr. Obama is about to attempt idea (Fred Barnes: “he’s decided to push a partisan bill through Congress with Democratic votes alone”).
