Echoes of the left’s failure in the right’s failure to defeat Obama
This McKay Coppins story in Buzzfeed is pretty interesting. Not so much because it unpacks the Obama hating wingnut craziness that we are all too familiar with, but because I couldn’t stop thinking about my own reaction to George W. Bush and the utter impossibility of his re-election when EVERYONE knew how terrible he was.
In this section it is easy for me to swap the names out and see an unflattering picture of myself in the mirror.
“I think the right media may have erred,” Dan Riehl, a contributor to Breitbart News and longtime proprietor of Riehl World News, told BuzzFeed a week after the election. “I think we let Obama get into our heads and we wound up campaigning against him, rather than for the things we believe in.”
I typically hate stories that try to draw comparisons between the left media and the right media because they are based on lazy desire of media types to try and make everything even-stephen. But there is something here.
Coppins story is pretty good. But I wonder if you could do a story like this for the left? For any election?
What interests me is just how entitled these wingnuts are to some attention. That just because they write it, it must be true and it must be in the public eye immediately. It ignores that these folks have a long and growing track record of just being bullshit artists AND in enticing the mainstream media down the rabbit hole with them just a few too many times. The MSM has its faults, but they really don’t like being embarrassed, which Breitbart, et al have done to them too many times.
And I wouldn’t worry so much about their efforts to campaign against Obama. They were going to get spun up like dervishes no matter who the Democrat was. What they are left with is looking like fools and a party that people trust less than they trust Democrats. Todd Akin sure nuff made sure that people knew what issues the right believed in.
Good point. You could almost sense the confusion in Wingnutistan when the media wouldn’t take up every nonsense “gaffe” they tried to spin into some game changer.
“Hold on a sec. This always worked in the past – why not this time?”
Part of the reason has to be that congressional Democrats didn’t buy into the bullshit and keep it alive this time.
Piggybacking off Cassandra’s, there was a similarity we all felt, I’m sure. However, our response in 2004 was different. I don’t think we went through Bush’s resume with such a ferocity as Conservatives delved into Obama’s, simply to search out “aha moments” where he was conservative.
We looked for where Bush was incompetent, dumb, gaffe proned, and inept. What is different between us and them, is that once they thought they found a connection with “liberalism” or any Kevin-Bacon–triced–removed connection to any radical, they could say, “aha.. look here”, and America would instantly forget that jobs finally got below 8%, that GM had been saved, that Bin Laden was dead, that job growth had consistently increased, that corporate profits had bounced back into record territory, … and that, for the first time since Harry Truman first wished it, we had Affordable Health Care headed our way…..
In 2000 we knew Bush was Conservative, and didn’t care. We didn’t care. That I think is the distinction. Our fight was against the ideas of Conservatism; not the man. These Conservatives live in a bubble so small, that if you aren’t conservative, you simply don’t exist. 2012 reinforced what 2008 tried to teach them. No matter how radical you tried to paint Obama, the majority of America hates conservatism. It it that against which we voted. If given the choice, we’d all prefer being liberal….