Taking It To The Next Level

As I've mentioned yesterday the attacks on President Obama's policies have graduated to personal attacks on the President himself and his qualifications for even being in office are under assault from conservatives (and once again, Digby's take on the matter is a must-read.) They're no longer going after his policies. They are going after Obama personally, and they're not even trying to hide it anymore.

Case in point: Fred Barnes's odious broadside on Obama as an "economic illiterate."

Is President Obama an economic illiterate? Harsh as that sounds, there's growing evidence he understands little about economics and even less about economic growth or job creation. Yet, as we saw at last week's presidential press conference, he's undeterred from holding forth, with seeming confidence, on economic issues.

Obama professes to believe in free market economics. But no one expects his policies to reflect the unfettered capitalism of a Milton Friedman. That's too much to ask. Demonstrating a passing acquaintance with free market ideas and how they might be used to fight the recession--that's not too much to ask.

But the president talks as if free market solutions are nonexistent, and in his mind they may be. Three weeks after taking office, he said only government "has the resources to jolt our economy back into life." He hasn't retreated, in words or policies, from that view.

At his press conference, Obama endorsed a surtax on families earning more than $1 million a year to pay for his health care initiative. This is no way to get the country out of a recession. Like them or not, millionaires are the folks whose investments create growth and jobs--which are, after all, exactly what the president is hoping for.

Another tax hike--especially on top of the increased taxes on individual income, capital gains, dividends, and inheritances that Obama intends to go into effect in 2011--is sure to impede investment. It's an anti-growth measure, as those with even a sketchy grasp of economics know. But Obama doesn't appear to.

First, Fred Barnes and the TAXEN CUTTEN UBER ALLES brigade had their time. They had a President that implemented the policies that Barnes wanted to see: tax cuts for the wealthy, blank-check spending on the Defense Department, massive deregulation (and refusal to enforce existing regulations), and the belief that only the private sector has real solutions.

The result of eight years of the economic policies that Fred Barnes and other conservatives shamelessly continue to advocate even now was the financial crisis and 18 month long Great Recession we're in today. John McCain, the candidate that wanted to continue these same disastrous policies, went before the American people and infamously declared the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" the morning before the economy nearly self-destructed. At the very minimum, the American people rejected these policies as gross incompetence bordering on dereliction of duty, and Fred Barnes is accusing Obama of economic illiteracy? Really? Where is Barnes's credibility to make that decision, exactly?

After trillions of dollars of wealth were wiped out globally and millions of jobs lost and lives ruined, thousands of businesses forced to slash production and hours and personnel, hundreds of local governments facing financial ruin and dozens of states having to cut the most basic services just to survive as a direct result of conservative economic policies of the Bush administration, how can Fred Barnes accuse anyone other than himself of not understanding basic economics?

It's ludicrous to the point of absurdity.

Second, as I've mentioned above, we're to the point of personal attacks on the intelligence and knowledge of a man handed the worst economy in several generations, who has had an entire six months to try to fix it. If this was a only a policy dispute, then that's legitimate, healthy, and in fact the purpose of the opposing political viewpoint in America. What Barnes is doing however is going after the President personally, challenging his intellectual fitness to lead this nation at a time of financial turmoil. After years of advocating Bush's avowed lack of curiosity and repeated blunders in front of the media and the world, that's just idiotic on its face.

Finally, this attack represents the latest depths to which the forces arrayed against the President have shown they will resort to. Obama in the White House has driven a good portion of the Pretty Hate Machine into full attack mode. In addition to being an illegal alien, a racist cop-hater and a closet Manchurian Candidate jihadi, he's apparently just not that bright, too.

Never mind the lovely racial connotations of the history of illiteracy in this country, not to mention those of a white man attacking an African-American's intelligence. I actually don't think Barnes meant anything overtly racial about it. Those attacks I imagine will come from others.

And soon. Ask yourself where we were just a few weeks ago, and ask yourselves just how quickly the Village punditry has turned on Obama.

It will get worse. As Steve Benen concludes:

Obama raised concerns about changing the behavior and practices of banks, because the president would like to avoid things going to back to the way they were -- conditions that led to the collapse of the economy in the first place. He objected to health insurance companies making "record profits," because American families are struggling badly with rising health care costs. If Barnes disagrees, fine, but the president's concern is hardly evidence of ignorance.

In Fred Barnes's world it is, however. And that's a pretty ugly world to be in, as we're all about to soon discover.