..."right-wing frothers conjured sicko fantasies"... Wm Greider

[kentuck]

(This may have been posted already but this part bears repeating, I think?)

http://www.thenation.com/article/156384/obama-without-tears?rel=emailNation

<snip>
Perhaps because he was young and relatively inexperienced, Obama surrounded himself with savvy veterans of Washington's inside baseball. He inherited his economic advisers from Robert Rubin, his political team from former Senate leader Tom Daschle and center-right Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel. Together with old friends from the academy, the administration was overstaffed with intellectual abstraction and short on street-smart politicians, especially any harboring liberal instincts. That pretty much ruled out the "change" many voters had expected. It produced a tone-deaf seminar of policy thinkers in which Obama assumed he was hearing all sides.

Republicans, who are masters of deceptive marketing, seized on Obama's most appealing qualities and turned them upside down. Their propaganda cast him not as soft but as a power-mad (black) leftist, destroying democracy with socialist schemes. The portrait was so ludicrous and mendacious, the president's party hardly bothered to respond. Egged on by the Republican Party and Fox News, right-wing frothers conjured sicko fantasies and extreme accusations: the president is not only a black man (bad enough for the party of the white South); he is not even American. The vindictive GOP strategy is racial McCarthyism, demonizing this honorable man as an alien threat, just as cold war Republicans depicted left-liberal Democrats as commie sympathizers.

Even Obama supporters began to ask, Where is the fight in the man? Some critics blame a lack of courage, but that neglects the extraordinary nerve Obama displayed in his rise to the White House—a young black man with an unusual name and limited experience who triumphed through his audacity. Obama's governing style is a function of his biography—a man who grew up always in the middle, both black and white. He succeeded by learning rare skills, the ability to bridge different worlds comfortably and draw people together across racial, political and intellectual divides. He learned to charm and disarm, not to smash and conquer.

For the first time in his life, those qualities seem to have failed him. Indeed, he may have been misled by his high regard for his own talents. This is really his first encounter with devastating political defeat. The question now is, What will he learn from his "shellacking"? Possibly not much, since it is always very hard to rethink and adjust in midstream. But remember, this man is an unusually observant politician with a great thirst for self-reflection. One can reasonably hope that as he absorbs the hard knocks, he will make calculated changes in how he governs.

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