Surprise

by digby

Mark Karlin writes:

In two telling interviews yesterday, White House staffers acted is if Republicans never acted like brown shirts and propagandists without scruples before.

A threesome of WH anonymous WH aides -- who might be identified as Curly, Larry and Moe -- told the Huffington Post:

In a sit down with online reporters on Monday, the three Obama aides, who spoke only on condition that they not be identified by name, stressed that they were still committed to crafting health care with Republican input and would continue to work with conservative media outlets despite the harsh reception they have received.

While some angst was directed toward the opposition of Republican lawmakers who, the administration claims, have distorted the president's position -- particularly on end of life consultations -- the majority of their ire was directed at the conservative commentariat.

"The so-called Obama health care logo? What is the Obama health care logo?" one aide asked, with some incredulity. "We don't have [one] but Rush Limbaugh thinks it looks like a Swastika... These are the sort of things we are dealing with."

"I don't know where they are making this stuff up," the aide added. "The bill, I was just looking at the House bill... [T]he part of this that covers insurance market reforms and the things to extend coverage and the exchange and public plan is actually pretty spare. And yet they have managed to make that into a vast government bureaucracy and really tried to scare people about the whole thing, which is disappointing."

And a story in the NYT notes:

And Democratic Party officials enlisted in the fight by the White House acknowledged in interviews that the growing intensity of the opposition to the president’s health care plans — within the last week likened on talk radio to something out of Hitler’s Germany, lampooned by protesters at Congressional town-hall-style meetings and vilified in television commercials — had caught them off guard and forced them to begin an August counteroffensive.

Fire the lot of them.

As Karlin goes on to point out, most observers from afar are not surpised at this at all. In fact, I was surprised it took the right this long to find their footing.

But most of the Democratic establishment internalized all the demagogic bullshit and character assassination that was hurled at Clinton, Gore and others and believed that it was probably deserved. It was the Democrats who kept making the fatal mistake of giving the other side an opening and these people believed they were smarter and more disciplined than that. They always do.

I actually suspect that many in the Obama White House believed the hype about changing Washington, which was always patent nonsense. Perhaps the more cynical among them felt that his race actually protected him from the kind of low level character attacks that the right usually employs. But they didn't get it. The right doesn't need to resort to low level character attacks on Obama because he's black. It's baked in.

So they can just call him Hitler, even though it makes no sense, and gin up the most outlandish conspiracy theories and their crazies are on board without anything having to be said. The conservative base, and a good number of people whose committment to progress of any kind is pretty thin on a good day, can easily be prodded into providing the kind of entertaining sideshow the media just love. Et voila --- teabagging.

If these Democrats had spent less time gossiping about what Clinton really did with Monica or handwringing about Gore's "lies" and more time analyzing how those spectacles unfolded, they wouldn't be caught flat footed today. But they didn't because they blamed Clinton for being "weak" and Gore for being "inauthentic" as if those were the real problems. I'm sure it made them feel very confident that it couldn't happen to them.

But, of course, it can, because it's not a function of the individual Democrats who are the targets of these juhads but rather the nature of the opposition. Until they finally grok that --- and after impeachment, stolen elections and Cheney it's mind-boggling that they still haven't done that -- this will keep happening.

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