Frank Rich: Who's Afraid of Barack Obama?
Sun Dec 02, 2007 at 06:31:54 AM PDT
Frank Rich asks the question "Who's Afraid of Barack Obama?" in his Sunday New York Times column today, and the answer he presents is a broad one, encompassing not just his rivals in both parties for the presidency, but the Washington media as well. For Rich, the established narratives of the 2008 campaign are falling apart, as Obama's ascendance forces re-evaluation.
Election year isn’t even here yet, and already most of the first drafts penned by the political press have proved instantly disposable, from Fred Thompson’s irresistible Reaganesque star power to the Family Research Council’s ability to abort the rise of Rudy Giuliani....
The Washington wisdom about Mr. Obama has often been just as wrong as that about Mrs. Clinton. We kept being told he was making rookie mistakes and offering voters wispy idealistic sentiments rather than the real beef of policy. But what the Beltway mistook for gaffes often was the policy.
Frank Rich starts out claiming that Bill Clinton's disclosure this week that we was against the Iraq War from the beginning was a "panic move" brought about by Obama's candidacy and is indicative of both worry in the Clinton camp and proof that the media's pushing Hillary Clinton as inevitable was misguided. You can read the column for the details of this critique; I want to focus instead on what Frank says about why Republicans are afraid of Barack Obama. That discussion gets beyond the breathless daily horserace coverage of the primaries and speaks to ways in which Obama exploits the growing weaknesses in the Republican Party of the 21st century.
But much like the Clinton campaign itself, the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama. The repeated attempts to fan "rumors" that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim — whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously on the front page on Thursday — are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.
Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.) But the G.O.P., by its own doing, is nonetheless saddled with a history that most recently includes "macaca" and Katrina, Mr. Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in 2000 and the nonexistent black population of its Congressional delegation.
Rich goes on to critique the many ways that the Republican Party has failed America with its racial divisiveness, and how that is coming back to bite the elephant in the ass.
But there’s another, even more fascinating hidden story line in the 2008 campaign that speaks to the potential prowess of an Obama candidacy. Despite the thuggish name-calling of a few right-wing die-hards (e.g., Rush Limbaugh mocking "Barack Hussein Odumbo"), the dirty secret of a number of conservatives is that they are disarmed by Mr. Obama even though they know his record is more liberal than Mrs. Clinton’s.
Rich names several of those conservatives and how they have spoken warmly of Obama despite the policy divide, and concludes:
Should Mr. Obama upend the Beltway story line by taking Iowa, the Republicans will have every reason to be as fearful as the Clinton camp is now.
We'll know more in nine weeks if the Clinton camp's fear is justified. I suspect, should Obama prevail in the early states, that he will have the RNC playing defense throughout the summer and fall.
