I really, really like the idea of making Rush Limbaugh the head of the Republican Party, largely because it’s true.
So, when Peter Daou writes an insanely high-minded pooh-poohing of the tactic, it really rubs me the wrong way. The idea that governing is nothing more than principled leadership with an eschewing of political considerations until such point as our greater angels must sully their robes with the filth of the political earth upon which they are forced to trod every few years is ridiculous. It was the great lie of the Bush years - every time he’d make a political move, it would be with the tacit admonition of Democrats for daring to be political in the face of his great conservative principles. I prefer not to be governed by sanctimonious bullshit.
What it ultimately comes down to for Daou is the fact that he was a Clinton staffer, and the Clintons never figured out Limbaugh:
The myth of a technological, grassroots revolution, of prodigious strategic and tactical brilliance, of a do-no-wrong campaign, perhaps the greatest ever run, that myth sounds good, but it’s not what happened. The reality was that the 2008 election was the age-old battle of character-building and character-destruction. Obama’s team won that battle against Hillary Clinton not just because of Obama’s abundant positive traits but because people like Rush Limbaugh gave him a 15-year head start against her. He won it against John McCain because McCain squandered years of character-building by enabling the excesses of George W. Bush and by running an erratic, unfocused campaign that served to highlight the best of Obama’s character and the worst of his. Character versus character.
This is a fundamental misread of the entirety of The Longest Election In Human History. Obama’s team won against Hillary Clinton because her team forgot to run a campaign in February. Yes, Clinton had firmly established negatives, but Obama’s victory had more to do with smart, coordinated tactics being employed with consistent messaging mixing strong positive and negative messages coherently. By the time Clinton went on the attack, it was too late - and lest we forget, the main reason she was considered viable well past her point of defeat was because she ran an increasingly negative campaign against Obama.
McCain’s problem was that he never had a message past Labor Day, and had everything thrown off by Saint Sarah’s insistence on speaking without thinking. The closest he and Obama ever were was when he was pushing the “celebrity” meme in the summer, and it fell apart when he decided that he would (but actually wouldn’t) call Obama a socialist, and then attack him for hating the country, and then attack him for taking the pudding from the lunch line…all in the same day.
The secret to the Limbaugh line is that it’s a consistent message that’s reinforced when the head of the Republican Party apologizes to Limbaugh for insulting him, and then tacitly agrees with Limbaugh’s statement that the head of the RNC isn’t the head of the party at all. It disrupts and destroys the entire Republican message, and forces everyone from the chair to contenders for 2012 to spend days, even weeks, debating over who’s actually in charge.
It’s incredibly smart politics. And it allows for smarter, more effective policy. Of course, we can always stop and whine about how it’s not fair when the next six weeks of news coverage is about whether or not Obama hates productive Americans, too. That was fun for the past two decades.
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Hmph. How quickly they change their tune. I seem to remember that at the time, Hillary’s “character assassination” from Rush was spun as a POSITIVE thing - there was nothing that could be said about her that hadn’t already been said! Vetted!