New Strategery Same As The Old Strategery
by digby
Why anyone would listen to the Prince of Mayberry after he led the little would-be machiavellis over the cliff I don’t know, but he’s out there yammering away, giving advice, most of which sounds like pretty thin gruel. The Republicans are trying valiantly to pretend that the Chambliss runoff win means something positive when the fact is that Chambliss being in a runoff at all was a shocker. And apparently they are trying to convince themselves that winning a low turnout special election against a man who was caught with $90,000 dollars worth of ill gotten gains in his freezer is an accomplishment. Whatever.
Rove has lot of good advice about state houses and web 2.0 and the like. But there are others in the party are being a little bit more obvious about their strategy. Last night you had Arlen Specter saying he needs to get to the bottom of a Clinton era scandal by holding up the Eric Holder nomination. And now it looks like the Republicans are threatening to turn the Clinton hearings into a side show. (It would be a bad idea — they forget that Bill always kicks their asses in those venues.)
But I would guess that the noise machine is where they are putting their best hopes:
Time magazine foolishly gave Chicago politics its clean government seal of approval last month. Celebrating Barack Obama’s election, the magazine said John McCain’s attempts to tie Obama to corruption in the Windy City failed because they were “based on an outdated caricature.” The left-leaning magazine went on to note that Obama was bringing the Chicago trio of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta to the White House and insisted that these days, “Chicago Democrat appears to be a winning label.” Oops. File that one under things you wish you’d never written, especially since the gushing article never mentioned Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, also a Democrat. It was no secret he was under investigation and, as the stunning criminal complaint filed against him Tuesday charges, Blagojevich spent much of November trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder. Time isn’t the only news organization that turned a blind eye to the Chicago way of doing things. The swamp of the city’s machine politics has never been drained, but the national media chose not to look too closely at Obama’s connections, including to Blagojevich. Now it will have to because of the breathtaking scams charged in the case. And with the money-hungry Blagojevich heard on secret wiretaps talking brazenly about his willingness to make a corrupt deal with the President-elect, Obama will have to explain what, if anything, he and his staff knew. Obama’s quickie statement Tuesday that he had “no contact” with Blagojevich isn’t enough. Nor is his claim that it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment. It is not only appropriate – it is absolutely necessary that he clear the air on the explosive issue. Carrying any taint of Chicago corruption to the White House is the last thing Obama should want for his new administration. As it stands, the taint is already there, laid out in detail over 20 pages of the 75-page federal complaint.
The 76 page indictment certainly doesn’t “taint” the Obama people, as Fitzgerald said quite clearly. No matter. The article goes on to lay out some of the “questions” which allegedly taint the Obama team, all of which are complete bullshit. But at the end is a threat I think we can be assured they will carry out:
Fitzgerald can presumably rest now, but some of us won’t until we know how much the next President knew about the crime spree in his own backyard.
Remember, there is no way that Obama can ever answer those questions sufficiently. There will always be more, it will never be enough. The question is whether or not the right can successfully feed the MSM the kind of juicy tidbits that will keep their small minds interested. The right understands how to appeal to the puerile sensibilities of the kewl kidz in ways the left never mastered. (All that boring talk about torture and unitary executives and bankrupt ideology is so booooring. ) What they want is something with a little tabloid zing — easy to understand tales of individual bad behavior that allow them to cluck and gossip and revel in their own superiority. (For instance, the story today about the “modern day Lady Macbeth,” Mrs Blogojevich, is giving the press simultaneous orgasms all over town.)
It is the ultimate expression of the village mentality — small bore social disapprobation over personal failings as some sort of proxy for public morality. And it is completely inadequate, as we can see by the fact that Bush, even today, is given plaudits by the whole establishment for not having an affair in the white house, while he is not tarred at all by the fact that top members of his staff watched torture techniques acted out and approved them in the same place.
It is telling that of the mountains of books written about politics over the past two decades, there have been very few that addressed this problem and those
*Lapdogs, Fools For Scandal, The Hunting of the President