Mark Halperin's Myopic, Apocalyptic Irrationality

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Washington Examiner:


Mark Halperin’s myopic, apocalyptic irrationality
By: DAVID FREDDOSO
Online Opinion Editor
06/01/10 10:04 AM EDT

Tim Graham at NewsBusters highlights Mark Halperin’s column in Time. It is an embarrassing exercise in Obama cheerleading that has probably been published at just the wrong moment:

The late, longtime New Yorker critic Pauline Kael was said to have expressed confusion over Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972 — because no one she knew had actually voted for him. To borrow that notion, conservatives today imagine that everyone views the current occupant of the White House as they do: Barack Obama is the worst president ever. Conventional wisdom posits that such a potent right-wing, anti-Obama sentiment will diminish the President’s power — enough for Republicans to vanquish Democrats in November, regain control of Congress, and weaken the incumbent for 2012.

But this myopia has been created within an electronic cocoon of Fox News, talk radio, conservative websites, and prominent rhetoric from Republican leaders, all passionately reinforcing the message that the Obama Administration is disastrous on an historic scale….

In the run-up to the 2010 midterms we have already seen that the anti-Obama forces are expressing their disagreements with the administration in terms far more personal than political, tinged with an apocalyptic irrationality. The centrifugal force exerted on conservative leaders towards the extreme wing of their party is bound to lead to even more magnified rhetoric in the next few years. The contrast between those excessive attacks and Obama’s famous cool will serve him, and the Democrats, well…

It can’t be pleasant for Obama to be the subject of such attacks. And solving the country’s major problems in a bipartisan fashion will be difficult under these rancorous circumstances. But as long as those trying to beat him are blind to the fact that tens of millions of voting Americans actually think Obama is doing a fine job, this President has a great ally in his enemies.

Well, just because you wish it, Mark, won’t make it so in November.

The polls are quite clear that Obama’s problem is not and has never been the antipathy of the Right. Rather, it is the dramatic abandonment of his party by the independent voters who had supported it in 2006 and 2008. The Right was already panicking in January 2009. It took Obama only 10 months to spread that panic to independent voters in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts.

Despite a widespread perception (not just on the Right) of Obama as less competent, less high-minded, and more liberal than advertised, his own numbers — especially the personal approval numbers — continue to hold up relatively well under the circumstances. The problem is that voters have never really liked Obama’s policies, and voter anger has increased as they have been rolled out.

The anger is strongest not toward Obama, but toward the members of Congress who have been supporting those policies. How else do you explain an incumbent like Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., losing his primary over his health care vote and his (supposed) implicit support of cap and trade? Was that because of personal hatred toward Obama? How else do you explain longtime incumbent Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., trailing by double-digits after supporting a health care and student loan package that will devastate his district? How else do you explain the lousy numbers that longtime congressional fixtures like Reps. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., and Chet Edwards, D-Tex., are posting?

If there is an echo chamber here, it isn’t one created by conservatives.