Ok, so the big thing on the blogs lately is Rush vs. Obama.
You guys probably know I don't like Rush much. I know lots of decent people who have been fans at some point, including an African American single mom I used to work with. But I have never been able to stand him. I think he's probably the worst thing to happen to American politics since Joe McCarthy.
Here's the thing: Rush Limbaugh has never gotten a single vote. He's never worked to solve a problem. He's never had to build a coalition. He's never had to answer to voters. He's never had to face a public crisis. All he's done for 30 years is sit on his oversize behind and spread hatred for people who don't think like him.
Not a role model, in my book.
But I'm not going to analyze the Rush vs. Obama thing. At least not right now. There are lots of smarter people than I doing that:
"Upcoming legislative fights are expected to be brutal, tougher than the stimulus bill. The votes of Specter, Snowe and Collins, critical for passage of the stimulus, are still considered the first gettable Republican votes. The spectacle of Limbaugh as Republican-in-Chief sucks all the oxygen from the room when these moderate Republican senators may want cover for any potential “no” vote – or “no” leverage in negotiations.
"Don’t think the White House doesn’t know that. Gibbs yesterday: “I think maybe the best question, though, is for you to ask individual Republicans whether they agree with what Rush Limbaugh said this weekend. Do they want to see the President's economic agenda fail?” (emphasis added). It’s not about Limbaugh. It’s about Specter, et. al. It’s about winning the budget fight, the health care fight.
"...Not everyone agrees. Today, veteran Democratic messaging strategist Peter Daou panned the Limbaugh strategy, arguing that while it may seem like a good idea today due to irrational Democratic exuberance in the afterglow of the election, in the long term elevating Limbaugh is a mistake because his toxic effect on political debate will ultimately hurt Democrats. Daou, who worked for Hillary Clinton, also mocks the idea of Obama’s powerful campaign as pure myth, instead suggesting that Obama beat Clinton because Limbaugh tore her down for 15 years.
Daou is completely wrong about why Obama won, but that’s incidental. He’s wrong about Limbaugh because Limbaugh is already a tested brand, and the verdict has been rendered. Muhammad Ali, he is not. Independents aren’t going to suddenly start listening to Rush somewhere down the road, just as they aren’t going to suddenly start appreciating Al Sharpton, who also has a brand. Limbaugh doesn’t have any new, dynamic ideas that will one day become ascendant if the Democrats aren’t careful. Limbaugh has precisely the same ideas, and proudly boasts he always will..."
-Sean Quinn- fivethirthyeight.com
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"But what about the rest of the party? Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:
On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.
And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.
Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined."
--David Frum - newmajority.com
Or let's just go to Jon Stewart, who also manages to skewer O'Reilly as well:
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