Fox News' rhetoric echoes Ailes' long history of race-baiting

SUMMARY: Under its president, Roger Ailes, Fox News routinely employs racially charged appeals to foment opposition to the Obama administration and other progressive figures, such as Glenn Beck's comments that President Obama is a "racist" and "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Before launching the Fox News Channel, Ailes worked as a media consultant for several Republican campaigns where evidence shows he similarly appealed to racial fears and biases for political gain, and as executive producer for Rush Limbaugh's television show, during which Limbaugh made several controversial statements.

Ailes' political and media history is littered with race-based appeals

As Nixon campaign consultant, Ailes reportedly looked for a "Wallaceite cab-driver" to bring up race at televised town hall meetings. As media consultant for Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign, Ailes directed televised town hall meetings in which Nixon answered questions from a supportive audience. According to Rick Pearlstein, Ailes suggested Nixon take a question from "A good, mean, Wallaceite cab-driver. Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?" Pearlstein wrote, "Nixon then could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a 'moderate' version of the opinion. Ailes walked up and down a nearby taxi stand until he found a cabbie who fit the bill."

From Nixonland by Rick Pearlstein:

The panel questioners were unrehearsed. But they were also an effect of stagecraft. They were like those heterogeneous World War II-picture platoons: here a Jewish physician; there the president of an immigrant advocacy group; an outnumbered newsman or two to show the man in the arena wasn't ducking them; a surburban housewife; a businessman. In Philadelphia they hit a snag with the Jewish physician turned out to be a psychiatrist. "You should have heard Len on the phone when I told him I had one on the panel," one staffer related. "If I've ever heard a guy's voice turn white, that was it." (Garment had remembered his evening with Nixon in Elmer Bobst's Florida pool house: "anything except see a shrink.")

Ailes hit upon an idea for a substitute: "A good, mean, Wallaceite cab-driver. Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'" Nixon then could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a "moderate" version of the opinion. Ailes walked up and down a nearby taxi stand until he found a cabbie who fit the bill. [Nixonland, p. 331]

Ailes on 1988 strategy against Dukakis: "The only question is whether we depict Wille Horton with a knife in his hand or without it." Ailes was credited, along with Lee Atwater, with helping George H.W. Bush come from behind to beat Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election. Part of that winning strategy included portraying Dukakis as "soft on crime" and connecting him with convicted felon Willie Horton. Horton committed assault, armed robbery, and rape in Maryland during a weekend furlough -- a program granting temporary release to prisoners that Dukakis supported but was created under the previous governor. While the Bush campaign did not produce the Horton ad that was widely criticized as "racist," Ailes did produce the "Revolving Door" ad that similarly attacked Dukakis for the furlough program. The campaign also created "The Risk," a negative ad that referenced "a furlough escapee" who "terrorized a Maryland couple." Ailes has been quoted as saying, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."

Ailes' 1989 attacks on Dinkins for Giuliani "prey[ed] upon the fears of the Jewish community." As media consultant for Rudy Giuliani's first mayoral campaign, Ailes placed an ad in a prominent Yiddish Newspaper, The Algemeiner Journal, that featured an image of Guiliani's opponent David Dinkins -- who would become New York City's first African-American mayor -- alongside Jesse Jackson. The ad also displayed a photo of Giuliani with President George H.W. Bush, and the headline stated, ''Let the people of New York choose their own destiny" [New York Times, 9/30/1989]. Howard Kurtz reported that "Ira Silverman, vice president of the American Jewish Committee, said the Giuliani ad seemed a 'legitimate campaign tactic,' but said that he found it 'troubling' because it 'preys upon the fears of the Jewish community' " [Washington Post, 9/29/1989]. National Public Radio has further reported: "Giuliani also tagged Dinkins as a 'Jesse Jackson Democrat.' That was an appeal to the city's large contingent of Jewish voters, who had despised Jackson ever since he used an anti-Semitic epithet to describe New York City. In this context, Giuliani's signature issue of crime took on racial overtones, says political consultant Norman Adler." One of Giuliani's ads featured a New Yorker stating, "I'm tired of living in New York and being scared." From a November 4, 1989, New York Times article:

A new Giuliani television advertisement, aimed largely at wavering Democrats, features six apparently ordinary New Yorkers, who describe Mr. Dinkins as ''a follower.'' They complain, among other things, about ''the crowd'' around Mr. Dinkins, including Robert (Sonny) Carson, a former campaign functionary who later proclaimed himself to be anti-white. Another person in the commercial says, ''I'm tired of living in New York and being scared.''

Ailes produced Limbaugh's television show. Ailes served as executive producer for Limbaugh's syndicated late-night television show, which ran from 1992 to 1996. Limbaugh made several controversial statements on air, many of them documented by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, including his assertion in response to Spike Lee's recommendation that African-American children be permitted to skip school to view Malcolm X: "Spike, if you're going to do that, let's complete the education experience. You should tell them that they should loot the theater and then blow it up on their way out" [Nexis transcript of Limbaugh's show on October 29, 1992]. And after Sen. Strom Thurmond -- who in 1948 ran for president on a States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) platform that advocated racial segregation -- told a gay service member during a 1993 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on gays in the military, "Your lifestyle is not normal," and asked if he had every sought psychiatric help, Limbaugh stated of Thurmond: "He is not encumbered by trying to be politically correct. He's not encumbered by all of the -- the so-called new niceties and proprieties. He just says it, and if you want to know what America used to be -- and a lot of people wish it still were -- then you listen to Strom Thurmond." Limbaugh added, "He got a standing ovation. Now people -- people applauded that. People applaud -- because -- you know, Strom Thurmond can say it because he's 90 years old and people say, Ah, he's just an old coot. He's from the old days,' and so forth. But that's what most people think. They just don't have the guts to say it. That's why they applaud when somebody does say it that directly and that simply" [Nexis transcript of Limbaugh's show, May 11, 1993].

Fox News under Ailes routinely engages in race-baiting

Beck caps off week of race-baiting by calling Obama a "racist." During the week of July 23, Glenn Beck put forth a steady stream of race-baiting and race-based fearmongering on his television show and radio program. Beck's comments culminated in his remarks that President Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" and "is, I believe, a racist," a statement he subsequently claimed to stand by, in spite of growing criticism.

Hannity just can't "get over" his Rev. Wright obsession. Sean Hannity -- who claimed he "broke the story" about Obama's controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, during the 2008 campaign -- mentioned Wright on at least 45 different episodes of his Fox News show between Obama's inauguration and July 31. Indeed, his repeated references to Wright -- most recently in discussions about Obama and race relations in America -- have prompted his own guests to comment, "You always want to bring up Reverend Wright," and "Sean, you need to get over it."

Rev. Wright redux: Media use Jones controversy to revive Wright smear. Conservative media figures used the controversy over former White House adviser Van Jones' past statements as an excuse to again link Obama to Wright. On Fox News, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Charles Krauthammer all invoked Wright while discussing Jones in order to question Obama's associations.

Guest-hosting O'Reilly, Ingraham claims Obama "channeled his best Jeremiah Wright accent" in NAACP speech. While guest-hosting Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, radio host Laura Ingraham stated, "Last night President Obama spoke to the NAACP and channeled his best Jeremiah Wright accent." After airing a clip of Obama's remarks, Ingraham added, "Now, why does the first African-American feel the need to affect an accent that he clearly does not possess? Or is that the way people speak in Honolulu? It's a cheap attempt to pander to an audience that already supports him" [The O'Reilly Factor, 7/17/09].

After asking, "Do the Obamas have a race problem of their own?" Hannity continued to smear Barack and Michelle Obama. Hannity falsely asserted that Wright "honored [Louis] Farrakhan for lifetime achievement, saying, quote, 'He truly epitomized greatness.' " In fact, the managing editor of a magazine founded by the church wrote those words, not the minister. Hannity also stated that Michelle Obama "wrote in her [undergraduate] thesis that we see at Princeton, you know, the belief -- 'because of the belief that blacks must join in solidarity to combat a white oppressor.' " However, as the full context of the passage makes clear, she was discussing views that black students who attended Princeton in the 1970s may have held, not asserting her own views [Hannity's America, 3/5/08].

Ignoring Obama's statement on award, Hannity suggested that Obama "associated" himself with Farrakhan. Hannity suggested that Obama had "associated" himself with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who had received an award from a magazine founded by Obama's church. But Hannity, who described Farrakhan as "an anti-Semite racist," did not note that Obama issued a statement "condemn[ing]" Farrakhan's "anti-Semitic statements" and saying of the award: "[I]t is not a decision with which I agree" [Hannity & Colmes, 1/18/09].

Morris: McCain "doesn't have to" engage in Willie Horton-like campaign because O'Reilly is already doing so. After airing portions of a controversial sermon by Wright, Bill O'Reilly -- who described Wright's comments as "anti-American, to say the least" -- asked Dick Morris , "If you were [Sen. John] McCain, do you use this against Obama?" Morris replied, "He doesn't have to. You just did. And the talk radio people around the country" will. Morris continued: "[T]he other media, the other conservative media can make a big deal of it" [The O'Reilly Factor, 3/13/08].

Hannity smeared Gates as anti-white radical by distorting 1994 interview. Hannity repeatedly misrepresented Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes to suggest that Gates had recently said he agreed with Malcolm X that the "white man was the devil" and to smear Gates as "extreme" and a "radical." In fact, in that interview, Gates was talking about events in 1959, specifically his witnessing his mother's positive reaction to a documentary they watched together about Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam [Hannity, 7/28/09].

Conservative media figures falsely suggest that Reich proposed excluding white males from stimulus package. Michelle Malkin and Hannity have falsely asserted or suggested that Robert Reich, speaking at a congressional forum, proposed that jobs created by the economic stimulus package should exclude white males. In fact, Reich has repeatedly stated that he favors a stimulus plan that "includ[es] women and minorities, and the long-term unemployed" in addition to skilled professionals and white male construction workers, not one that is solely limited to them.

O'Reilly tease: "[S]hould white Americans be concerned about Judge Sotomayor?" O'Reilly stated, "Next on the rundown: Should white Americans be concerned about Judge Sotomayor? Later, far-left Hispanic group says if you oppose the judge, you could be racist" [The O'Reilly Factor, 7/13/09].

Fox News is just asking about Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remarks: "New Racism?" During On The Record, guest-host Martha MacCallum stated, "The battle over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination intensifies tonight. Some conservatives continue to hammer Sotomayor and they are focused on this comment, which we've seen a lot this week." MacCallum then aired text of Sotomayor's comments under a headline stating, "New Racism?" [On the Record, 5/31/09].

Beck: Sotomayor "sure sounds like a racist here." Beck said Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment "smacks of racism" and is "one of the most outrageous racist remarks I've heard." Beck later added: "I hate the charges and cries of racism. But when I hear this -- I mean, gee. She sure sounds like a racist here" [Glenn Beck, 5/26/09].

Reporting on Sotomayor, "identity politics," and "the immigration debate," Fox shows video of apparent immigrants in detention. Wendell Goler reported, "Many observers saw President Obama's election as a validation of a post-racial campaign, and they see identity politics in Sotomayor's nomination -- an appeal to Hispanic voters, many of whom turned against Republicans in the immigration debate. But [Linda] Chavez, whose group doesn't support Sotomayor, says the Hispanic community doesn't march in lock-step." As he spoke, Fox News showed footage of apparent immigrants in detention [Special Report, 5/29/09].

Tucker Carlson claimed Sotomayor made "racist statement." Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson claimed that Sotomayor had said that "because of your race or gender, you're a better or worse judge, that female Latina judges are likely to render wiser decisions than white male judges." Carlson continued, "That's a racist statement, by any calculation" [The Live Desk, 5/26/09].

Krauthammer declares Sotomayor "a believer in the racial spoils system." Krauthammer stated on Special Report that Sotomayor's dismissal of the Ricci case "tells us that she really is a believer in the racial spoils system" [Special Report, 5/26/09].

Rev. Peterson: Obama was elected "mostly by black racists and white guilty people." Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson said, "I think we all agree that Barack Obama was elected by, mostly by black racists and white guilty people" [Hannity, 2/3/09]. Peterson also asserted that Obama is "no different than" Rev. Wright and the NAACP, who he claimed "hate white Americans, and they especially hate the white man" [Glenn Beck, 6/24/09].

&mdash J.K.F & E.S.

Copyright © 2009 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.

22 Percent And Out Of Ideas

By Harold Meyerson
Friday, May 22, 2009

The dizzying downward spiral of the Republican Party continues apace. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who answer to the name Republican is down to 22 percent -- about as low as a party can go in a two-party system.

Also yesterday, former vice president Dick Cheney delivered a prolonged defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques" even as President Obama, speaking alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution at the National Archives, repudiated torture and spelled out the toll that the torture tactics used by the Bush-Cheney administration inflicted on America's standing in the world.

Cheney has become the GOP's Banquo's ghost -- a constant reminder (and, unlike poor Banquo, defender) of past crimes who just won't leave the dinner party.

But even when Republicans speak of the future these days, they sound like the voice of the past. They turn for new ideas to Newt Gingrich, whose biggest idea was to close down the federal government to force Bill Clinton to slash Medicare payments. They turn to Cheney for guidance on national defense and to Rush Limbaugh to set the standards for party orthodoxy.

They hold anti-tax rallies to protest an administration that has cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans. They see a bill that would rein in credit card companies as an opportunity to slip in an amendment that would allow Americans to bring concealed and loaded guns into national parks. Their national committee considers a resolution expressing the sense of the body that the Democrats should rename themselves the "Democrat Socialist Party."

They offer no solutions for the nation's problems but are chock-full of solutions for issues (such as the lack of concealed weapons in Yellowstone) that aren't problems. They play with renaming the Democrats while they're the ones with the identity crisis.

But there's a reason they enumerate old themes and gravitate to the most peripheral ones imaginable -- a reason that's neither old nor peripheral. The economic crisis has plunged their worldview into crisis, if not negated it altogether. What's more, several leading conservative economists and thinkers have acknowledged as much, though none has really suggested a plausible alternative course.

Some of this rethinking has taken the form of mea culpas from key economic figures of the Reagan age. Alan Greenspan confessed to a congressional committee late last year that his basic assumptions about the self-corrective tendencies and fundamental rationality of both the economic system and its leading players (the banks) were wrong. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, whose elevation of shareholder value over other corporate goals has been hugely influential since he began preaching that gospel in the early 1980s, has now said that shareholder value is just one of many goals that a business should pursue.

The most comprehensive repudiation by a conservative thinker of the tenets of laissez-faire has come from federal judge (and prolific off-bench author) Richard Posner, who has been a seminal influence on the conservative law-and-economics movement that has moved judges to consider economic efficiency in their rulings. In his new book, "A Failure of Capitalism," Posner argues that the current downturn, unlike any since the Great Depression, reveals that capitalism is not self-correcting, that market forces cannot in themselves produce a recovery for a crisis this systemic, and that what we are experiencing is, well, a failure of capitalism.

All this leaves Posner in a bit of a bind, since he remains hesitant to recommend the full range of governmental activism that, by his own lights, is all that's left to rebuild the economy because the markets cannot do it themselves. His writing, like that of other conservative intellectuals such as the New York Times' David Brooks, has a kind of Emily Litella "never mind" quality to it now: repudiating many of the conservative verities that they themselves advanced over the past several decades while refraining from actually embracing the kinds of remedies that the Obama administration is advancing.

Since the end of World War II, American conservatism defined itself above all by its anti-communism and, since the late '70s, by its support of a radical, laissez-faire capitalism. Win one, lose one, but the cumulative consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in more attenuated fashion, of the Wall Street banks is that the Republican Party isn't left with much of a defining doctrine. Packing heat in Yosemite and waterboarding in Guantanamo are not only stunningly dumb ideas, they're also no way to build a party.

Rogue Diva of Doom - Dick Cheney

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution.

The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramping up to his war against Saddam, Al Gore made a speech trying to slow down that war resolution, pointing out that pivoting from Osama to Saddam for no reason, initiating “pre-emptive” war, and blowing off our allies would undermine the war on terror.

Charles Krauthammer called Gore’s speech “a disgrace.” Michael Kelly, his fellow Washington Post columnist, called it “vile” and “contemptible.” Newt Gingrich said that the former vice president asserting that W. was making America less safe was “well outside the mark of an appropriate debate.”

“I think the president should be doing what he thinks is best as commander in chief,” Gingrich said flatly. Now, however, Gingrich backs Dick Cheney when he asserts that President Obama has made America less safe.

Asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals, Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president.

“Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America,” Doomsday Dick said.

Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public.

Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.”

Cheney unleashed, egged on by the combative Lynne and Liz, is pretty much the same as Cheney underground: He’s batty, and he thinks he was the president.

W. admired Cheney’s brass (he used another word) but grew increasingly skeptical of him, the more he learned about foreign policy himself, and the more he got pulled into a diplomatic mode by Condi in the second term. There were even reports of W. doing a funny Cheney imitation and that it dawned on him that Cheney and Rummy represented a scofflaw, paranoid Nixon cell within his White House.

“Toward the end, 43 was just as confused as anybody about what makes Cheney tick,” said a Bush family loyalist.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.

When Cheney was in the first Bush administration, he was odd man out. Poppy, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell corralled Cheney’s “Genghis Khan” side, as it was known, and his “rough streak.” Cheney didn’t care for Powell even then.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

They Sure Showed That Obama

By FRANK RICH
AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

Herbert Hoover Lives

By FRANK RICH

HERE’S a bottom line to keep you up at night: The economy is falling faster than Washington can get moving. President Obama says his stimulus plan will save or create four million jobs in two years. In the last four months of 2008 alone, employment fell by 1.9 million. Do the math.

The abyss is widening. Of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial index, 22 have announced job cuts since October. Unemployment is up in all 50 states, with layoffs at both high-tech companies (Microsoft) and low (Caterpillar). The December job loss in retailing is the worst since at least 1939. The new-home sales rate has fallen to its all-time low since record-keeping began in 1963.

What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell’s soup, Hershey’s chocolate and Spam — the four food groups of the apocalypse.

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?

The House stimulus bill is an inevitably imperfect hodgepodge-in-progress. Obama’s next move, a new plan to prevent the collapse of America’s banks, may prove more problematic still, especially given the subpar record of the new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in warding off calamity while at the New York Fed. No one should expect the Republicans to give the new president carte blanche, fall blindly into lock step or be “post-partisan.” (Though that’s exactly what the G.O.P. demanded of Democrats with Bush: You were either with him or with the terrorists.)

But you might think that a loyal opposition would want to pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril. Not by singing “Kumbaya” but by collaborating on possible solutions and advancing a policy debate that many Americans’ lives depend on. As Raymond Moley, of F.D.R.’s brain trust, said of the cross-party effort at the harrowing start of that presidency in March 1933, Hoover and Roosevelt acolytes “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats” as they urgently tried to rescue their country.

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.

If anything, the Republican Congressional leadership seems to be emulating John McCain’s September stunt of “suspending” his campaign to “fix” the Wall Street meltdown. For all his bluster, McCain in the end had no fixes to offer and sat like a pet rock at the White House meeting on the crisis before capitulating to the bailout. His imitators likewise posture in public about their determination to take action, then do nothing while more and more Americans cry for help.

The problem is not that House Republicans gave the stimulus bill zero votes last week. That’s transitory political symbolism, and it had no effect on the outcome. Some of the naysayers will vote for the revised final bill anyway (and claim, Kerry-style, that they were against it before they were for it). The more disturbing problem is that the party has zero leaders and zero ideas. It is as AWOL in this disaster as the Bush administration was during Katrina.

If the country wasn’t suffering, the Republicans’ behavior would be a laugh riot. The House minority leader, John Boehner, from the economic wasteland of Ohio, declared on “Meet the Press” last Sunday that the G.O.P. didn’t want to be “the party of ‘No’ ” but “the party of better ideas, better solutions.” And what are those ideas, exactly? He said he’ll get back to us “over the coming months.”

His deputy, the Virginia congressman Eric Cantor, has followed the same script, claiming that the G.O.P. will not be “the party of ‘No’ ” but will someday offer unspecified “solutions and alternatives.” Not to be left out, the party’s great white hope, Sarah Palin, unveiled a new political action committee last week with a Web site also promising “fresh ideas.” But as the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga observed, the site invites visitors to make donations and read Palin hagiography while offering no links to any ideas, fresh or otherwise.

For its own contribution to this intellectual void, the Republican National Committee convened last week under a new banner, “Republican for a Reason.” Perhaps that unidentified reason will be determined by a panel of judges on a TV reality show. It had better be brilliant given that only five states (with 20 total electoral votes) now lean red in party affiliation, according to Gallup. At this rate the G.O.P. will be in Alf Landon territory by 2012.

The Republicans do have one idea, of course, but it’s hardly fresh: more and bigger tax cuts, particularly for business and the well-off. That’s the sum of their “alternative” stimulus plan. Obama has tried to accommodate this panacea, perhaps to a fault. Mainstream economists in both parties believe that tax cuts in the stimulus package will deliver far less bang for the buck than, say, infrastructure spending. The tax-cut stimulus embraced a year ago by the G.O.P. induced next-to-no consumer spending as Americans merely banked the savings or paid down debt.

We also now know conclusively that the larger Bush tax cuts, besides running up record deficits and exacerbating income inequality, were also at best a placebo on our road to ruin. In a January survey of economists, including former McCain advisers like Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Mark Zandi, The Washington Post determined that the job growth the Bush administration kept bragging about (“52 straight months!”) was a mirage inflated by the housing bubble. Job growth — about 2 percent — was in fact the most tepid of any eight-year period “since data collection began seven decades ago.” Gross domestic product grew at a slower pace than in any eight years since the Truman administration.

But even if tax cuts alone could jump-start a recovery, they couldn’t do the heavy lifting that Obama has promised and the country desperately needs: a down payment on a new economy to replace our dilapidated 20th-century model and bring back long-term growth. The Republicans don’t acknowledge the need for this transformation, or debate it in good conscience, preferring instead to hyperventilate over the contraceptives in a small family-planning program since removed from the stimulus bill. All it takes is the specter of condoms for the party of Vitter, Foley and Craig to go gaga.

The Republicans’ other preoccupation remains Rush Limbaugh, who is by default becoming their de facto leader. While most Americans are fearing fear itself, G.O.P. politicians are tripping over themselves in morbid terror of Rush.

These pratfalls commenced after Obama casually told some Republican congressmen (correctly) that they won’t “get things done” if they take their orders from Limbaugh. That’s all the stimulus the big man needed to go on a new bender of self-aggrandizement. He boasted that Obama is “more frightened” of him than he is of the Republican leaders in the House or Senate. He said of the new president, “I hope he fails.”

Obama no doubt finds Limbaugh’s grandiosity more amusing than frightening, but G.O.P. politicians are shaking like Jell-O. When asked by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Wednesday if he shared Limbaugh’s hope that Obama fails, Eric Cantor spun like a top before running off, as it happened, to appear on Limbaugh’s radio show. Mike Pence of Indiana, No. 3 in the Republican House leadership, similarly squirmed when asked if he agreed with Limbaugh. Though the Republicans’ official, poll-driven line is that they want Obama to succeed, they’d rather abandon that disingenuous nicety than cross Rush.

Most pathetic of all was Phil Gingrey, a right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia, who mildly criticized both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Politico because they “stand back and throw bricks” while lawmakers labor in the trenches. So many called Gingrey’s office to complain that the poor congressman begged Limbaugh to bring him on air to publicly recant on Wednesday. As Gingrey abjectly apologized to talk radio’s commandant for his “stupid comments” and “foot-in-mouth disease,” he sounded like the inmate in a B-prison-movie cowering before the warden after a failed jailbreak.

“It’s up to me to hijack the Obama honeymoon,” Limbaugh soon gloated, “and I’ve done it.” In his dreams. He has hijacked what’s left of the Republican Party; the Obama honeymoon remains intact. The nightmare is that we have so irrelevant, clownish and childish an opposition party at a moment when America is in an all-hands-on-deck emergency that’s as trying as war. To paraphrase a dictum that has been variously attributed to two of our most storied leaders in times of great challenge, Thomas Paine and George Patton, the Republicans should either lead, follow or get out of the grown-ups’ way.

Republican's Gift Held Racial Parody of Obama

FROM KEYSTONE: I missed this story.. both about Saltsman, The Republican Party and its chairmanship candidates, AND about Limbaugh.

Both should resign, just as David Duke was ostracized for such behavior. Anyone supporting it is no better than any other Klan member. Pehaps they just want to be able to feel it's OK to act like that even though they know it's wrong.

Sort of like kids when they were under 5.. . except they all have better inner compasses than these folks to begin with.So long Saltsman and Limbaugh. Your time has passed. And it was wrong in any time.

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 27, 2008; A05

Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members this month a holiday music CD that included "Barack the Magic Negro," a parody song first aired in 2007 by talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Created by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, the song puts new lyrics to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and it is performed as if black activist Al Sharpton were singing it. Limbaugh played it after the Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece with the same title.

"A guy from the LA paper said it made guilty whites feel good, they'll vote for him and not for me cuz he's not from the hood," the song goes. "Oh, Barack the magic negro lives in DC, the LA Times they called him that because he's black but not authentically."

The CD accompanied holiday greetings from Saltsman, a Tennessee resident who managed former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's campaign for president. Saltsman announced his bid to lead the Republican Party this month.

He did not return a call seeking comment last night. Saltsman had earlier told the Hill newspaper, which first reported the incident, that the song is meant as a joke. "Paul Shanklin is a longtime friend, and I think that RNC members have the good humor and good sense to recognize that his songs for 'The Rush Limbaugh Show' are light-hearted political parodies," he told the newspaper.

Another candidate to lead the GOP, South Carolina party chair Katon Dawson, drew headlines this fall by resigning his membership of 12 years in a whites-only country club, weeks before launching his run for the national job.

The incidents for both men come as Republicans are reeling from losing the presidency and dozens of House and Senate seats, and as many in the party are trying to improve relations with African Americans, who voted in record numbers for Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates last month.

Among the candidates for RNC chairman are two African Americans: Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland; and Ken Blackwell, a former secretary of state in Ohio. Neither could be reached last night for comment.

A spokesman for President-elect Obama also declined to comment.

The RNC is scheduled to vote for chairman at the end of January