Rex's Fragile Grip on Reality

Rex Murphy's first column of the new year is a near-perfect illustration of his increasingly fragile grip on reality. The subject is Barack Obama, and Rex's tone is inimitable as he smugly dismisses Mr. Obama as a failing figure, with declining popularity, no substantial accomplishments, a rhetorical style that has lost its charm and a hold on the American public that depended more on hostility to George W. Bush than any real substance in Mr. Obama.

(Oddly, Rex himself continued to defend Mr. Bush to the bitter end, labeling Bush-critics as deranged by 'Bush-hatred', while Mr. Bush declined from approval ratings in the 90's following the 9/11 attacks to record lows that persisted to his departure. Mr. Bush used lies and propaganda to trigger a ruinous and failed war on a country that had no tie to those attacks, and left the American economy in ruins while failing to implement the signature 'reform' he sought for his second term: the conversion of Social Security to private investment funds. Of course, had Mr. Bush succeeded in that project, the market losses of the recent recession would have destroyed the Social Security system. So perhaps that failure should be counted as a left-handed kind of success.)

Along the way Rex comes completely unglued: first, he declares that the press gave Mr. Obama a free ride during the presidential campaign of 2008 while saving its 'ferocity' for attacks on Sarah Palin. Really? Is Rex talking about the press that repeatedly interviewed Mr. Obama's (now former) minister, whose 'God damn America' rhetoric was played over and over again (and not just on Fox News)? The press that, before and after the election, continued to cover the 'Birther' movement's paranoid claims that Mr. Obama was not even a citizen of the United States? The press that proclaimed Mr. Obama's campaign dead in the water after Sarah Palin's introductory speech at the Republican convention? The press that hung on every word Joe the (not) Plumber had to say despite the fact that the Obama 'tax increase' Joe claimed to fear would never have applied to Joe's (modest) income? The press that played and re-played, without context or question, charges from the McCain/Palin campaign that Mr. Obama had 'palled around with terrorists'?

Of course it is true that Ms. Palin encountered some trouble with the press during the campaign. When asked, in an interview that the McCain campaign had tried to defer, what magazines she read, Ms. Palin happily declared she read many, but couldn't name a single one. When asked to explain how her political career in Alaska had prepared her to deal with foreign policy issues, her response was to repeatedly insist on Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia. When she declared her opposition to wasteful government spending, and then used the famous 'bridge to nowhere' as an example of her principled stance, it turned out that she had been a big supporter of that bridge project, and the press noted this (though only briefly, and Ms. Palin continued to use it as an illustration of her principled stand on government waste). But it's hard to see the press's treatment of these incidents as in any way unfair to Ms. Palin, when so many of her statements were plainly self-serving distortions of the truth.

The more important question is, how has Mr. Obama done, after a year of tea-parties, death-panels, Glenn Beck's repeated on-air sobbing, unprecedented and grossly distorted attacks by the ex-vice-President (widely disseminated by the media Rex imagines are so strongly in Mr. Obama's corner)? Well, on the positive side, there is a health-care bill finally on the verge of passing that will raise the number of Americans with good coverage from around 60% to somewhere around 90% and guarantee access even to those with 'pre-existing conditions'-- despite the 'death panel' panic (endorsed by Sarah Palin, among others). On the other hand, the bill does little to actually cut the exorbitant overheads that make the American health care patchwork system the most expensive in the world, and Mr. Obama has continued all the wars Mr. Murphy loved so dearly to defend when they were Mr. Bush's wars, not to mention the detention of hundreds without charges or trial in Afghanistan and Guantanamo--all insufficiently hard-line for today's Republicans, who seem to be demanding the public torture of suspected terrorists while accusing Mr. Obama and the Democratic party of being both "Communists" and "Fascists".

And the final issue: what are we to make of Mr. Obama's declining popularity, from which Rex draws so much comfort? Mr. Obama's moderation, his continued coolness in the face of provocation, may be a weakness. It may make it easier for his opponents to blame him for the economic conditions that have made the 2000's a lost decade for the American economy. A more combative style, a few more words of blame for Mr. Bush and a stronger attack on Republican obstructionism (unprecedented in the current Senate, which now seems to require a 60% majority to do anything at all) might help Mr. Obama weather the storm. But hyperpartisanism and blaming the other side for everything that goes wrong is a disease of current politics, not the way forward. The Republican party may have succeeded in tarnishing Mr. Obama's brand (and high unemployment is certainly not helping), but Republican popularity continues far below Mr. Obama's, and the Republican's turn to paranoia and fear-mongering has solidified their base at the cost of undermining any broader appeal they might have. If Stephen Harper were now enjoying polls as strong as Mr. Obama's, Rex would be the first to trumpet them as a triumph for the Conservative Party. So let's wait and see: my bet is that Rex will be eating his words come 2012 (not that I expect him to ever look back, as Jeffrey Simpson explicitly does every year, to recognize his mistakes).