While wrestling with the most daunting foreign and domestic challenges ever inherited by a modern president, the White House has been having some fun this week baiting an already dysfunctional Republican party into crowning Rush Limbaugh the party’s Head Honcho. On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel declared Limbaugh the “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party” and suggested that “whenever a Republican criticizes him, they have to run back and apologize to him and say they were misunderstood.”
Right on cue, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was forced to apologize to Limbaugh on Tuesday after stating that Limbaugh’s material was “incendiary” and “ugly.” Then White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made sure to remind the press corps of this sequence during his Tuesday briefing. Finally, Politico reported today that the already-transparent plan to make Limbaugh the official symbol of White House opposition was hatched back in the fall of 2008 by a cadre of Democratic operatives that included Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Paul Begala, who noticed in polling data that Limbaugh was wildly unpopular with American voters. (This aversion to Rush does not, of course, extend to Limbaugh’s own adoring horde of self-decribed “dittoheads” that presumably represents the same sliver of the electorate that was dazzled by Sarah Palin’s capacities.)
In any event, one assumes that Obama and his team are happy to reinforce the notion among Americans that the opposition to the White House comes in only one form: a cigar-chewing, drug-addicted, thrice-married, private-jet-owning, overfed millionaire who doesn’t seem to have a track record of actually solving any problems.
Obama is flush with political capital right now, but perhaps he feels he needs even more as he begins a battle with Congress over his ambitious legislative agenda. What better way to stockpile even more political capital than to define your opponent as a wildly unpopular symbol of the self-indulgence and divisiveness that was rejected in November?
A word of advice to the President and his team: you can stop pushing this one now. Rush needs you more than you need him (remember, his loyalty is to ratings – not the GOP), and if ever there was a person who can be defeated with coolness and discipline, it’s this guy. Sure, its poetic justice to see the Party of Rove get a dose of its own medicine. But the “permanent campaign” and the politics of false choices are what you ran against in the campaign. The good of the country and your long-term political success ultimately depend on good governance and how your ideas stack up against credible opposition. The short-term political gain generated by this flap may be helpful at present, but going forward, your supporters are expecting you to pick on someone your own size.
- MN
