At this very moment I’m listening to Rush Limbaugh vehemently argue that for the duration of his presidency, Barack Obama enjoyed the full cooperation of Congressional Republicans. Opposition to his agenda was impossible, according to Rush, because of his race. Republicans were afraid to fight him or criticize him, because they were afraid of the fate that would befall them at the hands of Black Lives Matter.
I’ll post the audio and relevant portions of the transcript later tonight, but for now I want to elaborate on one of yesterday’s posts. Here’s what I wrote:
In all the post-election analysis, naval gazing, blame-casting and caterwauling, there’s been much said about “fake news”.
As if this is a new thing.
As if “death panels” and “FEMA internment camps” and various signs of the apocalypse haven’t been slathered across Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report and your Aunt Abigail’s emails for the last two decades. The only difference between the fake news of 2008 and the fake news of 2016 is that the revenue stream has been democratized. It seems all the billions of dollars unleashed by Citizens United have overtopped the dam. You don’t have to be Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh anymore – there’s enough money in the pot for even the rankest of amateurs to publish their fever dreams (sincerely believed or not) and get paid.
I didn’t write enough about this whole “fake news” idea. Yes, there are new channels of distribution and new creative digital pulp writers filling them. But take a moment to reread (and later to hear) Rush Limbaugh’s argument at the top of this post. According to Rush, Obama’s race protected him from criticism. Moreover, Obama was able to accomplish his entire agenda because Republicans were afraid to oppose him – because of his race.
The truth?
That was September 9, 2009. (And Obama wasn’t lying, which means, of course, that Joe Wilson, the heckler Congressman, was.)
Anyway, there has been plenty written about Mitch McConnell’s unrelenting obstruction strategy in political magazines and deep within 40 paragraph analysis articles in a few of America’s newspapers. Politically active liberals know the lengths the GOP went to hamstring Obama throughout both of his terms.*
But most Democrats do not. They may be aware that things haven’t progressed under Obama the way they’d like, but they don’t know why. They chalk it up to politics and Washington D.C. and how it doesn’t really matter who you vote for because nothing really changes but, you know, Democrats are for the working class, Republicans are for the rich, so if I vote I’ll vote for the Democrats, but it’s probably not worth it to take the time off work to go stand in the lines because it won’t affect my life anyway…
On the other hand, your conservative Uncle Hermann is adamant that Barack Obama controlled the federal government for 8 years and used his power to “fundamentally transform America” for the worst. He’s convinced Obama did that with the assistance of a bunch of feckless Republicans in congress who were so afraid to criticize Obama because of his race that they cooperated with the President’s agenda every step of the way.
The point I’m making is that talk radio plays a crucial role in establishing powerful narratives in the minds of the GOP base. The Democratic base has nothing equivalent.
I’m not sure what Democrats could build to engage their base more fully. I think probably unions are key. But that’s not my expertise.
On the other hand, the only thing I know to do about the Republican hold on talk radio is to fight it. For me that begins with paying attention, evangelizing among other politically engaged liberals, and highlighting the truly absurd and offensive content that most of middle America isn’t exposed to (Like Rush Limbaugh with Sandra Fluke**, or Chris Plante with Ellen Degeneres).
* this was one of many true failures of the national press. The American political system is set up with two great centers of power – the Presidency and the Congress. Either one can check the other, almost at will. When the two are in opposition and nothing is moving, that’s the political story of the era. There should have been a running tally of filibusters (and Obama vetoes), with the most important stalled legislation explained. Instead, filibusters became some for of anti-news and were ignored by the press. In reality, their strategy made the obstructing Senators at least as powerful as the President, at least in terms of law-making.
** After Donald Trump, Limbaugh’s Fluke comments sound relatively anodyne, don’t they? That’s another reason I think right wing talk is about to get a lot more coarse. There’s both hazard and opportunity there. Opportunity in that they are bound to overreach and 2018 elections may surprise a lot of people. The hazard is in that a lot of right-wing news consumers occupy a grey area between sane and not. The nasty rhetoric will, I fear, often become one too many straws on the camel’s back.
[UPDATE 12-8-2016 14:22]
I just hit publish and Rush just went on a rant saying that you can fit the number of American white supremacists in a phone booth – they simply don’t exist. On the other hand, this country is overflowing with black supremacists. Check back later and I’ll have the audio for you.