Keep Fighting

At No More Mister Nice Blog, two posts show us the height of the mountain we have to climb to save the Obama Maladministration from self-destruction, and why we should bother.

First, Aimai on the lack of a long game:

I know the Obama team has a lot on its plate. I don't fault Obama at all for what happened while he was busy actually running the country. But this was really not a surprise event. The right wing has been gunning for every prominent African American they can find from Van Jones to ACORN to Holder himself to Sherrod. They don't care how they get them. They don't care about the individual person, or what they have or have not actually done. One's as good as the other. They are place holders, almost figures in a distant landscape. The right wing is building a narrative, the kind that their followers like: vague, juicy, filled with anger, built on the notion that Obama brought the angry blacks into power and that its going to be reparations all the way down. Fighting it may be hard, but the Obama Administration has to fight it or its going to go down under it. Ressentiment, especially when aimed carefully at outsiders and other races, is a very powerful force in people's lives. It is a marvellous tool for right wing demagogues and for corporatists because it moves people to anger, despair, and lashing out but it hardly ever moves them to question authority or the monied. In otherwords, its a perfect electoral strategy for a do-nothing party focused on returning to the status quo ante. Get people riled up, beg for money, get your voters out, and then see them subside into quiesence right after the mid terms.

Right now, and no thanks to the White House's clever team, Breitbart looks like he might be flailing for a moment. But Breitbart is just a symptom of a larger problem. If Breitbart goes down does anyone seriously think the right wing doesn't have a bottomless pit of these guys waiting to take over? What were the Young Republicans for, after all? And given the propensity of the Obama people to fire staff (Van Jones) or refuse to nominate people at all for fear of what the right wing is going to throw at them this is a winning proposition. You have to expect that a certain number of attacks are going to fail. If the attack on Obama through Sherrod fails there will be another one, in a week or two. We will never get to the end of the gullibility of the mainstream media, and the viciousness of the right wing attack machine. And why should we? It works: long term it works as long as the Obama administration is discredited in some way either by the unchecked assertion that it is a blackety black black administration or that it is weak and easily pushed around.

We, and the Obama administration, have to be aware that the main target is always the President, his presidency, and the very idea of government. Ultimately this is just a variant on Reagan's old chestnut that the scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you." The goal is to delegitimize the government and government workers by dragging them into the right's race war. This is a war that they, and they alone, are fighting. The rest of the country is getting on with its life and getting past race as the primary lens through which political and economic issues are seen. The right has nothing left but racism, mixed cleverly with classism, as a goad. These attacks will be ceaseless, throughout the summer, culminating in Right Wing attacks on the legitimacy of the midterm elections. After all the whole point is to bring every instance of the government and the administration under suspicion in order to bring out the angry voters, and to explain away as illegitimate every Democratic victory.

We talk a lot about Obama and his long game. I'm not seeing the Administration's long game here as a very successful one. They need to be thinking a few steps down the road and they seem to be in a purely reactive mode. My advice to the White House is set up a war room that takes the racial component of these attacks as a given and is prepared and authorized to handle them, wherever they spring up, throughout the administration. Because there are going to be a lot more of these attacks.

Then, anti-Pollyanna Steve M. reviews the anti-Muslin hysteria among the wingers and concludes:

If you wonder why I refuse to give up entirely on the Democratic Party, this is why. You can say that things are no better under Obama than they were under Bush, and in some areas that's true. But they're still better than they will be in the next Republican regime. Bush, for all his warmongering, continued to offer words and gestures of respect to Islam and its peaceful practitioners. The next Republican president is highly unlikely to do the same. In the next Republican regime, we will be at war not with individual countries, not with Islamicists, but with Islam itself.

As always, there is this: