Peggy Noonan gets most things right, with verve and wit, and even when she’s wrong her writing is often impressive enough to pull along even disagreeing readers. She usually hits the slow pitches of idiocy and offensiveness thrown by our politics out of the park, but today she strikes out on Obama’s Fox war.
The president doesn’t seem to like this moment. Who would? He and his men and women have returned to referring to what they “inherited.” And what they inherited was, truly, terrible: again, a severe economic crisis and two wars. But their recent return to this theme is unbecoming. Worse, it is politically unpersuasive. It sounds defensive, like a dodge.
The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he’s busy with a “mop,” “cleaning up somebody else’s mess,” and he doesn’t enjoy “somebody sitting back and saying, ‘You’re not holding the mop the right way.’” Later, in New Orleans, he groused that reporters are always asking “Why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?” His surrogates and aides, in appearances and talk shows, have taken to remembering, sometimes at great length, the dire straits we were in when the presidency began.
This is not a sign of confidence. Nor were the president’s comments to a New York fund-raiser this week. Democrats, he said to the Democratic audience, are “an opinionated bunch.” They always have a lot of thoughts and views. Republicans, on the other hand—”the other side” — aren’t really big on independent thinking. “They just kinda sometimes do what they’re told. Democrats, ya’ll thinkin’ for yourselves.” It is never a good sign when the president gets folksy, dropping his g’s, because he is by nature not a folksy g-dropper but a coolly calibrating intellectual who is always trying to guess, as most politicians do, what normal people think. When Mr. Obama gets folksy he isn’t narrowing his distance from his audience but underlining it. He shouldn’t do this.
But the statement that Republicans just do what they’re told was like his famous explanation of unhappy voters are people who “cling to guns or religion.” (What comes over him at fund-raisers?) Both statements speaks of a political misjudgment of his opponents and his situation. They show a misdiagnosis of the opposition that is politically tin-eared. Politicians looking to win don’t patronize those they’re trying to win over.
But here it is Noonan herself who succumbs to “misdiagnosis of the opposition.” Obama is not trying to “win over” his opposition; he is trying to marginalize and delegitimize it, to scare off those who support it (by votes or advertising) and those (journalists) who treat its arguments as worthy of reporting.
To understand Obama’s war on Fox and friends, don’t look only to Nixon and his enemies liest but also, even especially, to Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. What Obama is trying to do to the Chamber of Commerce, the Insurance Industry, Fox News, and talk radio is exactly what McCarthy and HUAC did — not to communists but to their “fellow travelers” and those like, say, subscribers to The New Republic or The Nation, who were in “sympathetic association” with them: intimidate them, ostracize them, shut them up.
